Racial provocation

South African white radical leader killed by farm workers

South African President Jacob Zuma yesterday called for calm and warned of possible "provocations" over the killing of far-right white leader Eugene Terblanche. “The President urges South Africans not to give in to the actions of provocateurs who are trying to take advantage of the situation to incite racial hatred,” the presidential office said in a statement.

The founder and leader of the right-wing Afrikaner Resistance Movement (ADM), 69-year-old Eugene Terblanche, was killed on Saturday evening on his own farm in the North-West province of South Africa. According to police, Terblanche was hit multiple times in the head with a machete and his body was found in his bed. The killers have been arrested; they are Terblanche farm workers. One of them is 15 years old, the other is 21 years old. According to them, they quarreled with the owner over wages.

The movement advocating the continuation of apartheid in the country was founded in the 1970s. As the country began to move toward multiracial democracy in the early 1990s, the ADF called for the formation of a separate state for Afrikaners, descendants of European settlers. Eugene Terblanche and his supporters, using symbols of Nazi Germany in their propaganda, aimed to recreate territories where the white population would live separately from the blacks. The model for them was the Boer republics that existed at the end of the 19th century - the Orange Free State and the Transvaal.

Terblanche interpreted the end of racial segregation in South Africa as “surrender to communism.” In August 1991, armed ADF activists resisted police during a speech by President Frederic Leclerc in the city of Ventersdorp. During the dispersal of a demonstration of right-wing radicals, the police used weapons, two white demonstrators were killed. Three years later, Terblanche's supporters tried to prevent the inclusion of the bantustan Bophuthatswana into South Africa, and dozens of people died. After the fall of apartheid in 1994 and Nelson Mandela's rise to power, ADF activity began to decline. However, Terblanche continued to be active in right-wing radical activities. He was convicted of attempting to kill a black police officer and was in prison from 2001 to 2004.

The opposition Democratic Alliance party said that the exacerbation of racial problems in South Africa was facilitated by “irresponsible racist statements” by the leader of the youth league of the ruling African National Congress (ANC) party, Julius Malema. In early March, he caused a scandal when he sang the liberation war song “Kill the Farmer, Kill the Boer.” It has already been banned by two South African courts as inciting hatred against the country's white citizens. However, the leaders of the ANC youth movement did not condemn the song.

Boris KAIMAKOV