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 Genčve.

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