SOUTH AFRICA/FILE: ANC calls for calm as members of the rightwing group AWB vow revenge for the murder of their leader Eugene Terre'blanche

Record ID: 455149

  • Title: SOUTH AFRICA/FILE: ANC calls for calm as members of the rightwing group AWB vow revenge for the murder of their leader Eugene Terre'blanche
  • Date: 5th April 2010
  • Summary: NEWSPAPER HEADLINES
  • Embargoed: 20th April 2010 13:00
  • Keywords:
  • Topics: Crime / Law Enforcement,Domestic Politics
  • Reuters ID: LVA9L99C9X07N4FZVH4OLLV0YU5A
  • Story Text: South African President Jacob Zuma called for calm on Sunday (April 4) after the killing of white far-right leader Eugene Terre'blanche in a suspected pay dispute with black workers fanned fears of racial strains.
    Police detained two farm workers and said they were investigating the quarrel they had with Terre'blanche, but his Afrikaner Resistance Movement (AWB) says he was battered and hacked to death in an attack with political overtones.
    Zuma, who has made it a priority to court white Afrikaners, called it a "terrible deed" and urged South Africans "not to allow agent provocateurs to take advantage of this situation by inciting or fuelling racial hatred".
    "Let us allow the law enforcement authorities to deal with these matters, let us not take the law into our own hands, it will not assist the country, it will not assist the continent but it will not assist the building of a cohesive South Africa," the spokesperson for the ruling ANC, Jackson Mthembu, told Reuters.
    Terre'blanche, 69, was the voice of hardline opposition to the end of apartheid in the early 1990s although his party has played a marginal role since then and does not have a big following among the 10 percent of white South Africans.
    The AWB urged restraint while the funeral is prepared and before the party decides next steps. In Ventersdorp, in rolling farmland over 100 km (60 miles) west of Johannesburg, party followers in paramilitary khaki laid flowers at the farm gate.
    Terre'blanche could be buried either on Thursday or Friday this week, Visagie said.
    Concerns over increasing racial polarisation have been thrown into the open by a row over the singing of an apartheid-era song with the lyrics "Kill the Boer" by the youth leader of the ruling African National Congress.
    "To the best of our knowledge, no evidence links the freedom songs with the death of Mr Terre'blanche. As far as we know there is no linkage between the two," Mthembu told Reuters.
    The ANC has defended the song as no more than a way to remember a history of oppression, but it has worried minority groups and particularly white farmers, some 3,000 of whom have been killed since the end of apartheid.
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