Thread: South Africa farm attacks intensify

FARMERS IN South Africa are four times more likely to be murdered than the average South African, a new report finds.

South African farmers are suffering from a 'unique criminal phenomenon', the report finds, that is occurring with increased regularity and levels of brutality.

Afriforum, a civil rights organisation for minorities presented the report on farm attacks and farm murders in South Africa to the UN's Forum on Minority Issues in Genève.

The aim of the submission, supported by approximately 100,000 South Africans, was to bring this phenomenon of hundreds of highly brutal farm attacks and farm murders to the attention of the international public domain.

It is hoped that pressure will be exerted on the South African government to declare such attacks and murders priority crimes.

The report gives the example of Irene Vermaak, a 66-year-old widow, who was murdered on her farm outside Devon, South Africa on 24 November 2015.

The attackers cut her throat and left her body in a pool of blood.

The next day, on 25 November 2015, different attackers strangled and killed Cesar de Sousa Lopez, a 59-year-old Portuguese resident, on his rural property at Northam, South Africa.

In his address to the UN Forum on Minority Issues, Ernst Roets, Deputy CEO of AfriForum said the problem is not being addressed by the South African government:

"These unacceptable levels of violence have dramatic consequences for food security in the country as well, yet the South African government refuses to treat farm attacks as priority crimes or even to release

official statistics pertaining to these attacks.

"The last time that any figures had been released by the state, was in 2007. At that stage the statistics already indicated a 25% increase in the attacks," Roets said.

"Without proper data, it is impossible to address the problem significantly.

"According to AfriForum's research, a mere 23% of all attackers are ever sentenced," he said. "There are numerous examples of cases where the victims and the families of murdered farmers have had to look

on helplessly as perpetrators were released due to the shoddy work done by investigating officers or prosecutors."

The motivation behind the murders has been widely contested, however, the South African Human Rights Commission ruled that the farm attacks are not racially motivated, despite the majority of victims being white.

Deputy Agriculture Minister Bheki Cele has been reported saying, farm killings were not racially motivated.

"We are urging everybody, starting with the media and everybody - take the race issue out of farm murders," Cele said.

"The people that are being killed are farmers...Whether they are white, black, yellow, green or purple, we have seen farmers coming under attack and we treat it as such," he said, adding that his department

took the killings seriously.

South Africa farm attacks intensify | The Scottish Farmer

Zulu King: Blacks Destroy S. Africa

The official king of South Africa’s Zulu tribe has announced that that country was economically, militarily, and socially better under white Afrikaner rule—and that history will judge blacks as only having

destroyed everything that they had inherited from the white government.

King Goodwill Zwelithini, who has been Zulu king since December 1971, made the remarks during a speech at an official royal household event in Nongoma, located in the northeastern part of the eastern

seaboard province of KwaZulu-Natal, over the past weekend.

The event, held to mark his forty-fourth year on the Zulu throne, was reported on by the Natal Mercury newspaper.

King Zwelithini said the former white rulers of South Africa had “built a powerful government with the strongest economy and army on the continent.”

He went on to say that the white government had “a mighty army, and that the South African currency and economy had shot up” under the National Party government.

“But then,” he continued, “came this so-called democracy in which black people are destroying the gains of the past. The economy that we are now burning down.”

Addressing himself directly to black people, King Zwelethini said that “you do not want to build on what you had inherited. You are going to find yourselves on the wrong side of history.”

“History will judge black people harshly as they have failed to build on the successes of the Afrikaners,” he said, before continuing to explain that “black people loved to use matches to burn down infrastructure” built by the white government.

King Zwelithini said that “people on the ground did not appreciate the infrastructure” which they had inherited from the white rulers, even though the ANC leaders themselves governed from the very buildings which the whites had created.

Referring specifically to the Union Buildings in Pretoria and the South African Parliament in Cape Town, King Zwelithini said that he was “surprised that all presidents who have been elected in this so-called democracy, occupy apartheid buildings.”

“But you on the ground, are burning everything that you found here. . . you don’t want to use them (buildings), you say this is apartheid infrastructure,” he said.

Finally, he informed his audience that he “feels lucky that I was born the same year the National Party came to power, in 1948. The Afrikaners respected me. I don’t know how it happened that the Afrikaners respect me so much.”

He also mentioned that at one of his palaces in Nongoma, he still had all the medals which the white government had awarded to his “kingdom,” marking out historical events and achievements of the Zulu people.

King Zwelithini’s comments come after a falling out with the ANC government—which he previously supported—over the reorganization and funding of his royal household.

Zulu King: Blacks Destroy S. Africa - The New Observer

A Drive through Johannesburg, South Africa