“Only 70 miles from a 2010 World Cup football stadium, a farmer’s wife and a boy aged 13 learn to defend themselves with lethal weapons. They say thousands of white landowners have been killed by Zimbabwe-style marauders; their black rulers accuse them of belligerence and right-wing tendencies. Aidan Hartley reports on the war of words you won’t read about in your World Cup holiday brochure.”
And only a handful of journalists have been willing to report on the fate of white, rural folks in Mandela’s South Africa. Aidan Hartley of the British Daily Mail joins a select few. Read his report:
“Bella wakes. She hears a strangled, gurgling sound. It’s the dog, she thinks.
‘Peter, there’s something wrong,’ she says to her husband. Noises emerge from the room of her mother-in-law, who’s 98 and confined to a wheelchair.
It’s 1am. Bella gets up and walks out of the bedroom. In the hall she sees a young man who at first she thinks is her son. Except he’s black, wears a balaclava and is pointing a gun at her.
‘He comes for me,’ says Bella, her hand before her tear-stained face.
‘He’s going to shoot me! I trip as I run back to the bedroom. Peter comes to the door but he has nothing in his hand, no pistol. I hear a gun go off. I hear my mother-in-law screaming. I lock the door and telephone my son. I tell him: “I think they shot Pa!”’
Two men are outside the bedroom window with a rifle. She loads the pistol Peter keeps by the bed.
‘I take the gun and say, “Come on! I’ll shoot you!”’
Back in the hall she finds Peter dead, a trail of blood across the kitchen floor. Her mother-in-law Gerda is bruised and beaten.
‘I can’t tell you how hopeless I felt,’ Bella says. ‘I will see it in front of me for weeks, months, years.’ …
Days after Peter is cremated, the attackers return. The survivors are sleeping elsewhere by now, so the gang finds only the dogs in the house. They torture the animals with boiling water before soaking them in petrol and setting them on fire. [A fate that is not reserved for dogs and would have befallen their owners had they been in residence.–IM]
I ask Bella for a motive and she says a group of black South Africans who are squatting on their farmland have repeatedly threatened them.
After the family find the dogs, Bella’s son Piet calls the police. Weeks later the attackers are still at large; police arrested one man in connection with the killing but he was later released.
I am in her home. The bullet holes are still clearly visible. I ask her what she is going to do.
‘If we stay here they will kill us. You can’t say this was a dream, or rewind what happened. They want our land.’ …
…. Driving around Mpumalanga Province, east of Johannesburg, in what used to be the Transvaal, I found myself called by the farmers to a string of grisly murder scenes. In some the blood was still drying on the furniture or the street. In others, witnesses gave me accounts of killings involving rituals of extreme brutality: of victims boiled alive, forced to kneel and shot execution style and tortured in ways so unimaginable they are too horrendous to print. The same goes for the many pictures I have been shown of the barely identifiable corpses and horrific crime scenes.” …
Read the rest of Hartley’s report.
Update: WHAT WOULD GLENN SAY? I wonder what Beck the Boer basher say, in his histrionics, about KK (Kommando Korps) “formed to provide self-defence training for Afrikaner communities who feel under threat in today’s South Africa. Most of them came from the capital, Pretoria, which the government wants to rename Tshwane to reflect its pre-colonial, African history: an example of what the Afrikaners regard as the dilution of their historic identity.” [Boers built the place, so of course it should be renamed for the Bantu.]
Glenn: “OMIGOD, KK is short for KKK.” (As if everything begins and ends with the American perspective.)
And what would Glenn Beck, who sees fascists where there are only desperation and a legitimate quest for separation from evil incarnate, say of “Franz Jooste, who likes to be referred to using the old Boer paramilitary rank of ‘Kommandant”’?
“The KK was set up 20 years ago but has struggled to bring in new blood or funding in recent years. It runs training camps across the country to provide a pool of potential combatants if a war is declared against the Afrikaner people. In the meantime, unpaid KK operatives in military-style uniforms defend vulnerable white communities against what they describe as ‘a guerilla war’ and ‘genocide.'”
Before the KK, “Boer farmers were organised into farm militias known as Commandos. These defended rural communities from assault and, just over a century ago, they formed the vanguard of the rebellion against the hated British Empire. … In recent years the government has moved to disband the Commando units as part of a security plan to improve policing nationwide.”
Update II (April 16): About the link provided by our South African readers to images of the killings. I have seen the pictures. In my heart I have hoped hard that what I saw has not been inflicted on humans (or animals) and that these were forgeries (it’s hard to come by sourcing). Sadly, I fear I am wrong. What I have seen in the mangled flesh is the handiwork of pure evil. Again, I have not used these images out of respect for the victims, but also, mainly, becasue they are not sourced. I will allow them on the blog.
Moreover, as readers of this space know, I keep three lead blog posts open at any given time for comment. Of the three that propagate to the IlanaMercer.com’s front page, I will try and make one about South Africa, my homeland and my homies. We will keep the topic alive.
Regular readers and visitors, I hope, will send others to Barely a Blog and to www.IlanaMercer.com (archived under “South Africa”). So that blog and main site become a repository for facts and analysis about what’s underway in the once glorious South Africa.