Terre'blanche killed; Zuma asks for calm
Source: Agencies |
April 5, 2010, Monday
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SOUTH African President Jacob Zuma called for calm yesterday after the killing of white far-right leader Eugene Terre'blanche in a suspected pay dispute with black workers fanned fears of racial strains.
Police detained two farm workers and said they were investigating the quarrel they had with Terre'blanche, but his Afrikaner Resistance Movement (AWB) says he was battered and hacked to death in an attack with political overtones.
Zuma called it a "terrible deed" and urged South Africans "not to allow agent provocateurs to take advantage of this situation by inciting or fueling racial hatred."
Terre'blanche, 69, was the voice of hardline opposition to the end of apartheid in the early 1990s although his party has played a marginal role since then and does not have a big following among the 10 percent of white South Africans.
The AWB urged restraint while the funeral is prepared. In Ventersdorp, in rolling farmland over 100 kilometers west of Johannesburg, party followers in paramilitary khaki laid flowers at Terre'blanche's farm gate.
"We will decide upon the action we are going to take to avenge Mr Terre'blanche's death," said spokesman Andre Visagie.
Concerns over increasing racial polarization have been thrown into the open by a row over the singing of an apartheid-era song with the lyrics "Kill the Boer" by the youth leader of the ruling African National Congress, firebrand Julius Malema.
The ANC has defended the song as no more than a way to remember a history of oppression, but it has worried minority groups and particularly white farmers, 3,000 of whom have been killed since the end of apartheid.
"The killing of Terre'blanche will symbolically be seen as a strain of these relationships," said analyst Nic Borain of HBC Securities.
"But Terre'blanche is an old criminal and I don't think people would come to his defence or his killing somehow invigorate white people opposition to the new South Africa," Borain said.
The AWB did not hesitate to link the song to the murder of Terre'blanche, who described himself as a Boer.
"That's what this is all about," AWB spokesman Visagie said.
Police detained two farm workers and said they were investigating the quarrel they had with Terre'blanche, but his Afrikaner Resistance Movement (AWB) says he was battered and hacked to death in an attack with political overtones.
Zuma called it a "terrible deed" and urged South Africans "not to allow agent provocateurs to take advantage of this situation by inciting or fueling racial hatred."
Terre'blanche, 69, was the voice of hardline opposition to the end of apartheid in the early 1990s although his party has played a marginal role since then and does not have a big following among the 10 percent of white South Africans.
The AWB urged restraint while the funeral is prepared. In Ventersdorp, in rolling farmland over 100 kilometers west of Johannesburg, party followers in paramilitary khaki laid flowers at Terre'blanche's farm gate.
"We will decide upon the action we are going to take to avenge Mr Terre'blanche's death," said spokesman Andre Visagie.
Concerns over increasing racial polarization have been thrown into the open by a row over the singing of an apartheid-era song with the lyrics "Kill the Boer" by the youth leader of the ruling African National Congress, firebrand Julius Malema.
The ANC has defended the song as no more than a way to remember a history of oppression, but it has worried minority groups and particularly white farmers, 3,000 of whom have been killed since the end of apartheid.
"The killing of Terre'blanche will symbolically be seen as a strain of these relationships," said analyst Nic Borain of HBC Securities.
"But Terre'blanche is an old criminal and I don't think people would come to his defence or his killing somehow invigorate white people opposition to the new South Africa," Borain said.
The AWB did not hesitate to link the song to the murder of Terre'blanche, who described himself as a Boer.
"That's what this is all about," AWB spokesman Visagie said.
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