NELSPRUIT – Farm attacks are criminally motivated but the violence is definitely racially driven. This is according to Johan Burger, senior researcher at the South African Institute for Security Studies.
Burger spoke to Lowvelder regarding this controversial problem of hate crimes which previously most people laughed off as extreme-right-wing political propaganda.
He said although the problem was also that the majority of farms and large houses were still owned by white families and then crime tended to look like black-on-white violence. “Most perpetrators are young black young men, but ironically these very same people are also the victims of murders.
“The crimes are definitely sad and worrying. They are criminally motivated but the sheer brutality of the acts of violence against the victims is being influenced by racial tension.”
Yet singer-turned-Afrikaner-activist Sunette Bridges said, “The government sits idly by while Julius Malema and his followers continue threatening white South Africans with more violence!
“I am convinced that allowing EFF to register as a political party is a violation of our human rights and I am convinced that it is nothing other than a militant wing of the ANC and a clever ploy to distance itself from the murders and attacks on white South Africans.”
Despite Bridges being cast aside as just another South African who couldn’t come to grips with a new country, many now feel it is whites who do bear the brunt of hate crimes. They represent the vast majority of the victims of violent, interracial hate crime in the country. Yet no true statistics on the problem of farm attacks or hate crimes regarding black-on-white violence can be established.
The Transvaal Agricultural Union claimed that 11 farmers were murdered in October alone – and 53 were murdered since that month in 2013, which included the murder on October 21 of Afrikaner x Friesian dairy farmer Willem Weites (78), on his Ngoje, Vryheid, KwaZulu-Natal farm.
Burger said although the police stopped keeping statistics on farm attacks in 2007 for no reason, the union had kept its own, and it vastly differed from the old statistics by law enforcement, plus, they did not cover the entire country and did not take smallholdings into account. “This is why factual and accurate statistics on farm attacks cannot be found.”
Last year, Genocide Watch, President Gregory Stanton shockingly claimed that South Africa was at level six with genocide/hate crimes. Stanton explained genocide was a process that developed in eight stages that were predictable but not inexorable.
Yet Burger claimed that he met Stanton last year at a press conference where he asked him to provide proof of these claims. “I was supposed to be part of an investigating team he was bringing to South Africa to establish proof of this and I made myself available for this, yet it never happened. These claims of genocide are emotionally driven but no facts can yet be established with them.”
But Burger said, “The brutality with which these murders is carried out makes us believe that there is racial hatred behind them.”
