SOUTH AFRICAN police have so far been unable to establish a link between the singing of an inflammatory song at political rallies and the murder of white supremacist Eugene Terre’Blanche on Saturday, according to the ruling party.
The leader of the African National Congress Youth League, Julius Malema, has been accused by white interest groups of heightening ethnic tensions in recent weeks through his refusal to stop singing a liberation song that calls on blacks to kill white farmers.
Terre’Blanche, who was founder of the Afrikaner Weerstandsbeweging (AWB), an extreme right-wing white separatist group, was brutally murdered on Saturday evening on his farm, allegedly by two black employees aggrieved over unpaid wages.
White interest group AfriForum yesterday asked the police team investigating the murder to determine whether the suspects, who handed themselves in to the authorities, had any ties with the ANC Youth League.
The group insists that thousands of white farmers in South Africa have been murdered in recent years due to their ethnicity and that singing such songs incites violence.
However ANC spokesman Jackson Mthembu said the belief that singing the song Kill the Boer(Afrikaans for white farmer) was somehow linked to the murder was misplaced.
Mr Malema, who is in Zimbabwe until today as a guest of President Robert Mugabe’s Zanu- PF party, has denied any knowledge of the incident.
Despite the heightened ethnic tensions in South Africa, however, he has refused to back down over his right to sing the liberation song.
On Sunday he defiantly sang Kill the Boer during a Zanu-PF Youth rally north of Harare. “I am being blamed for the killing of Terre’Blanche because I sang a song. I’m going to be confronted when I get home. I will be accused of many other things.
“We sing the song to remember the fallen heroes of the country. We are children of freedom fighters, not children of cowards. We are not in the revolution to impress anybody,” he reportedly said before singing the song.
Meanwhile, the AWB has retracted a statement it made on Sunday that it was going to avenge its founder’s murder.