SOUTH AFRICAN president Jacob Zuma and the country’s opposition parties have appealed for citizens to be calm following the murder at the weekend of leading white supremacist Eugene Terre’Blanche.
The killing of the controversial AWB (Afrikaner Weerstandsbeweging) leader, who according to police was bludgeoned to death following a disagreement over unpaid wages, has increased racial tensions in South Africa at a time when emotions are already running high.
“The president appeals for calm following this terrible deed, and asks South Africans not to allow agents provocateurs to take advantage of this situation by inciting or fuelling racial hatred,” said the president in a statement. “In any dispute, especially in a country like South Africa where we uphold the rule of law, no one is allowed to take the law into his own hands.”
In an effort to show how seriously the ANC ruling party was taking the incident, police minister Nathi Mthwetwa visited Mr Terre’Blanche’s widow and daughter yesterday to assure them the authorities were giving the murder their full attention.
Members of South Africa’s white farming community have become increasingly concerned about their safety.Community leaders have said the ANC’s defence of its right to sing an apartheid-era liberation song that calls on blacks to kill whites was putting their lives in danger.
The high court recently banned controversial ANC Youth League leader Julius Malema from singing Shoot the Boer(white Afrikaans farmer) at political rallies, calling its lyrics hate speech. However, the leader has ignored the ruling.
Members of Afriforum, a pressure group for white interests, have repeatedly said the song was stoking ethnic tensions in rural communities, and warned that murders linked to its influence would occur sooner rather than later.
Terre’Blanche (69), a militant racist, was found hacked to death on his farm near Ventersdorp in the North West Province on Saturday evening.
A minor aged 16 and a 21-year-old man have reportedly handed themselves in to police and confessed to the murder. They will appear in court tomorrow.
The main opposition Democratic Alliance and right-wing Freedom Front Plus have warned that the murder has created an “explosive situation” in the country.
“The murder of Terre’Blanche will inevitably polarise and inflame passions in South Africa at a time when tensions are already running high,” said alliance leader Helen Zille. “We must resist racial polarisation, and continue to build the non-racial middle ground of people who want a peaceful and prosperous future for all.”
Senior AWB leaders said yesterday they would do their best to control party members, and called on them to remain peaceful. However, they also warned that they would avenge Terre'Blanche's murder, which they insisted was motivated by the song Shoot the Boer.
Mr Malema, who is in Zimbabwe as a guest of President Robert Mugabe’s Zanu-PF party, reportedly refused to comment on speculation that he might have influenced the murderers, saying he did not know anything about it.
Terre’Blanche and six others formed the AWB in 1973 as a militant right-wing group to violently oppose any concessions the government of the day might make to the black majority.
In 1983 he was one of four AWB members sentenced to two years in prison after weapons were found buried on his brother’s farm.
During the final days of apartheid, he repeatedly threatened violent resistance to an ANC takeover, but the party’s popularity began to wane once it became apparent to white South Africans that the ANC wanted to build an inclusive democracy.
His Fight To Preserve Apartheid The Life Of Eugene Terre’blanche
THE FORMER policeman and Afrikaner leader of the extreme right-wing revolt against the ending of apartheid was born on a farm in the conservative Transvaal town of Ventersdorp on January 31st, 1941.
He founded the right-wing Afrikaner Weerstandsbeweging (AWB-Afrikaner Resistance Movement) alongside six others in 1972 as a shadowy group seeking to protect the rights of the Boer descendants. White right-wing activity in South Africa died down after the end of white minority rule in 1994. But the AWB – whose flag resembles the Nazi Swastika – was revived in 2008.
In 1998, Terre’blanche accepted “political and moral responsibility” before South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission for a bombing campaign to disrupt the 1994 elections in which 21 people were killed and hundreds injured.
He was later jailed for assaulting a security guard, and released in 2004.
The Afrikaners are descendants of the Boers, the first whites who arrived in South Africa 300 years ago and trekked into the hinterland to avoid assimilation with English- speaking settlers. Their short-lived republics, in the Orange Free State, Transvaal and northern Natal, were broken up after the 1899-1902 Anglo-Boer War. Terre’blanche wanted to reconstitute them.
In January 1989, Terre’blanche faced a revolt within the AWB after he was found in the grounds of an Afrikaner monument late at night in the company of journalist and former model Jani Allan.
They denied a romance, but several key supporters angry over allegations of womanising and drinking urged Terre’blanche to quit. He refused and ousted four critics in his party. – (Reuters)