South Africa’s callous leaders put money before murder

Following on from my previous posts on the subject, here and here…

Of all the comments that have followed the murder of Eugene Terreblanche, one stands out above all others for its utter ignorance and callousness.  It was made in a statement by the ANC government’s ruling partner, the South African Communist Party (SACP).  The SACP has chosen to use the killing to highlight problems faced by farm workers:

“If the allegation that Terre’Blanche’s murder arose out of a wage dispute is true, it calls upon all of us, especially government, to strengthen the effective regulation and the labour inspectorate on farms.”

So for the SACP, the most serious issue here is the need for regulation of farms, not the slaughter of South Africans.  This is not even moral equivalence.  It is obscene, cold blooded, calculated indifference to the atrocity that is the taking of human life.  How can any sane person choose to turn a blind eye to the campaign of racially motivated violence that has resulted in the deaths of over 3,000 people?

As the death toll continues to rise, South Africa’s ANC government and its government partners in the South African Communist Party continue to ignore racist violence because the victims are white.  Were this any other country the international outcry would be deafening.  However the only thing that is deafening is the silence.

Terreblanche murder highlights South Africa race killings

Welcome to visitors from BBC Word Service’s ‘World Have Your Say’.

Following on from my previous posting…  The murder of Eugene Terreblanche by two of his farm hands yesterday has become global news.  Few will mourn the death of such a man.  After all, Terreblanche was a hateful figure who fought for racial separation and white supremacy in South Africa.  He engaged in racially motivated violence and unspeakable cruelty and led the racist Afrikaner Weerstandsbeweging party (AWB).  But he was still a human being.

The media saw Terreblanche as a curiosity, an extremist oddity, and treated him as such.  Accordingly many people will feel that he has now got his comeuppance.  But the murder of Terreblanche lifts the veil on a much bigger story that, until now, has been the preserve of South African bloggers and small publications, as it has failed to attract the attention of the mainstream media.  That story is the carefully planned systematic murder of white South Africans  since the end of apartheid – such as the man above.

To put the extent of this campaign of murder into context, around the same number of white South African farmers have been murdered in the last 15 years as the total number of people who died in nearly 40 years of violence in Northern Ireland – over 3,000.  Despite the horrific death toll continuing to rise, the media has painted South Africa as a tolerant post-apartheid society and bought into the ANC government’s spin of the country being a Rainbow nation.  Many in the media have turned a blind eye to this slaughter of white South Africans because of the history of apartheid.  Journalists from around the world rightly kept the brutality of apartheid, and plight of the black South African majority living under white rule, in the public consciousness.

But having spent decades presenting the black majority as oppressed people stripped of basic rights, many journalists are refusing to bring to the public consciousness the brutality being waged against the white minority they spent years demonising for wrongs of apartheid.  The BBC’s almost imperceptible nod towards the reality of life in South Africa for its white citizens tells us just how craven the media has become, as this line by Martin Plaut reveals:

It is a tragic fact that more than 3,000 white farmers have been murdered since the end of apartheid in 1994.

Tragic fact?  In any other theatre of conflict the BBC would be describing this as a genocide and producing documentaries and investigative programmes to shout the fact to the world.  But Plaut, like so many journalists, laments the exposure of the fraud of South Africa’s claim of being a racially tolerant post-apartheid society far more than the systematic murder of 3,000 human beings on the basis of their race.

Unsurprisingly the South African President, Jacob Zuma, has issued a call for calm, saying that South Africans must not allow anyone to take advantage of the “terrible deed” by inciting racial hatred.  But where was Zuma’s call for an end to the mass murder of people whose families have been South African for generations and who have tried to get on with their lives, producing food for the population on land bought centuries ago?

Why is it that the life of one South African is worth more than another?  Why is it that the media treats the murder of people from one racial group differently to that of another?  Why is it the international community, usually so swift to pontificate on human rights issues, stays quiet as a slow burn ethnic cleansing of southern Africa takes place?  When acts such as these were being perpetrated in Zimbabwe there was an international outcry.  So why is South Africa being treated any differently?  It is as if a large part of the international community is comfortable allowing this ethnic cleansing to be carried out because some of these people and their forebears are considered responsible for apartheid.

It is almost as if there is a tacit, unspoken sanctioning of retribution and collective punishment.  Small wonder Canada granted asylum to a white South African last year.  There was sufficient evidence to show his life would be at risk if he returned to South Africa, because of his race.  Nelson Mandela, Thabo Mbeki and now Jacob Zuma have failed to deal with this low level genocide and the result is white South Africans being forced out of the only home they have ever known.

I have never liked the idea that something good could come from the murder of a human being, however nasty they may have been.  But perhaps the murder of Eugene Terreblanche may result in a long overdue scrutiny of South Africa and the treatment of its white (and for that matter Asian) citizens, upon whom open season has been declared to drive them out of the country or wipe them out.  Regardless of the fine oratory of Archbishop Desmond Tutu and Nelson Mandela, South African is anything but a rainbow nation at peace with itself and the world.

Update: More here on the callousness displayed by members of the South African government.

ANC sang ‘Kill the Boer’ and Terreblanche is murdered

In South Africa there was controversy recently after the Youth League leader of the African National Congress (ANC), Julius Malema, sang a song that included the lyrics ‘kill the boer’ or ‘shoot the boer’ depending on which news report you read.  In any language such wording is incitement to violence or even murder, yet the ANC has fought tooth and nail to stop the courts banning such racially motivated hate speech.

Malema’s imploring has become a reality today, as the leader and figurehead of the white supremacist Afrikaner Weerstandsbeweging (Afrikaner Resistance Movement) AWB party, Eugene Terreblanche, has been found murdered on his farm near Ventersdorp. Police have stated that:

A 21-year-old man and 15-year-old boy were arrested and charged for his murder. The two told the police that the argument ensued because they were not paid for the work they did on the farm.

The media is being selective in its reporting at this time.  If the perpetrators were white, you would expect the police to be making that point loud and clear in an effort to head off any possible reaction from Terreblanche’s supporters.  All the more curious then that there has been a public call for calm in the North West area.  Given the racial overtones in South African politics the media has become complicit in controlling the story rather than simply reporting the facts.

I have no time for the politics of race or the violent white supremacist movement that Eugene Terreblanche led.  Make no mistake, this man and his friends have been guilty of unspeakable criminal acts.  But nevertheless, this murder is a disturbing development in the so called Rainbow nation.  Terreblanche and his supporters have made repeated claims that the ANC government in South Africa has been turning a blind eye to the murder of white farmers despite reports going back more than a decade.  There have also been claims that after the World Cup this year, the government plans to seize land owned by white farmers for redistribution, in the same manner as that in Zimbabwe.  But still the attacks continue.

South Africa’s claim to be the Rainbow nation that embraces all creeds and colours will ring hollow if the white minority South Africans suffer the kind of oppression and violence that was visited on white farmers in Zimbabwe.  The Terreblanche murder will, rightly or wrongly, add to the siege mentality among whites in South Africa.

It was utterly wrong, repugnant, for a minority white government to treat black South Africans as second class citizens and allow the terrible abuses that took place.  But it is also utterly wrong for a majority black government to turn a blind eye to the treatment of white South Africans today, who are themselves now treated as second class citizens and are suffering terrible abuses without adequate protection.  The moral relativism has to stop and the hypocrisy must end.

The problem will not be resolved all the while liberals in the west refuse to condemn the appalling actions of people they campaigned for, who once freed from apartheid have sought to exact revenge by attacking people on the basis of their race.  Nor will the media trying to play down the reality of what is happening help the situation.  It will not simply go away.

People who stood up against the terrible wrong of apartheid need to do the right thing again.  Although they might still see in their mind’s eye all black South Africans as victims beyond reproach, some are now the perpetrators committing appalling acts of their own.  South Africa has the capacity to explode like Zimbabwe, only on a much larger and more damaging scale, if it does not end.

Update: The suggestion is that the culprits were black South Africans, although not one major news organisation reporting the story has reported this.  It is as if the media is trying to sanitise the story.

Update II: A follow up to this posting can be found here.