Posted on 10/28/2003 5:18:25 PM PST by Tailgunner Joe
WHEN Nelson Mandela came to power in 1994 he declared South Africa would be a "rainbow nation" free from the hatred brought by years of apartheid.
But now a very different African leader’s influence threatens to shatter the dream of a racially-tolerant country with increasing numbers of white farmers being murdered by impoverished blacks inspired by Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe’s policy of taking away their land by force.
In South Africa, more than 1,500 white farmers have been killed since 1994, compared to 14 murdered by Mugabe’s supporters in three years of violence in neighbouring Zimbabwe.
Most have died during robberies, but, according to a devastating report commissioned by South African President Thabo Mbeki’s government, they are increasingly being killed by farm workers who want land of their own.
In Pretoria on November 4, a cross-section of that country’s top security officers, academics and lawyers will meet to discuss what is seen as a serious threat to national security and the future of organised agriculture in South Africa.
They plan to tell the deeply worried Mbeki that he must take immediate action to meet the aspirations of millions of landless black South Africans.
A decade after the African National Congress (ANC) came to power promising blacks an end to white political and economic rule, some 40,000 whites dominate almost all aspects of food production. Mbeki recently condemned what he called the "two societies" that still exist in post-apartheid South Africa.
But black activists like Supho Makhombothi, of the Mpoumalanga Labour Tenants’ Association (MLTA) which represents landless farm labourers in the impoverished Piet Retief and Wakkerstroom districts, are tired of rhetoric.
"We have waited long enough. Nothing has happened despite all the promises made by the African National Congress (ANC) about returning the land to us," he said.
"We are still living in slavery. We have therefore given the government an ultimatum to give us land or we will simply follow the example of our brothers in Zimbabwe and invade."
Leaders of the Pan Africanist Congress (PAC) - whose pre-independence slogan was ‘one settler, one bullet’ - are calling on Mugabe to tour the country’s rural areas and address landless blacks.
Makhombothi, who the South African Government calls a "lawless thug", said: "President Mugabe has supported what we believe is the best solution for returning land to black farmers. We want to hear him speak and learn from him."
Police are boosting local capacity after these threats by the MLTA. There have been reports, denied by police, that unemployed and criminal-minded blacks are paid almost £200 a time to ambush, slaughter and then kill white farmers, their wives and children.
Werner Weber, chairman of a pan-agricultural union pressure group called Action: Stop the Farm Attacks, said: "They’re shown how to kill by watching videos made by some anti-white organisation called Black Jack."
Confirming that the police and army are developing emergency contingency plans to prevent threatened Zimbabwe-style land invasions, South African National Defence Commander Colonel Anton Kritzinger confirmed that plans were underway for the mobilisation of a rapid response army unit. "We obviously hope it is not necessary but we are developing contingency plans to deploy troops if the situation is too big for the police to handle," he said.
On the eve of the next Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (CHOGM) in Abuja, Nigeria, sources close to the Commonwealth Secretariat in London told Scotland on Sunday that despite all the predictions that he would step down this December, Mugabe was becoming an increasingly influential figure.
"It’s not just landless Africans who admire him," the source said. "Aborigines, Maoris and even Mexicans think he is a fighter for economic justice in the Third World."
Baroness Amos, who has a long association with African developments since 1997, said that it was time Africa woke up to Mugabe.
A senior Commonwealth source said: "Mugabe is going to use the land ownership issue at CHOGM to rally support for the landless against white power in Africa and there’s still plenty of white economic power in South Africa.
"He is quite capable of appealing to the black masses over the head of Thabo Mbeki if he is ever seriously criticised by the South African Government.
"Hence Mbeki’s desire to pursue his largely ineffectual quiet diplomacy on the Zimbabwean issue."
One of the men who has the ear of Mbeki on the land issue and the growing fear of Zimbabwean-style invasions is Dr Edward Latiff, a prominent academic with the Programme for Land and Agrarian Studies at the University of Western Cape.
"Mugabe has raised the profile of land reform," he said." It was an issue that hardly existed on the political landscape in 1998. At the grassroots level, there has been an incredible increase in militancy with the formation of the Landless People’s Movement and a series of threatened land invasions."
Mbeki tries to play down the fears, telling would-be investors that the deaths of so many white farmers is not the start of an ethnic cleansing campaign, but part of the general breakdown of law and order.
There are over 25,000 murders every year in South Africa, a rape occurs every minute and break-ins are a fact of life in Johannesburg, Cape Town, Durban and other urban areas of a country where the contrast between the "haves" and "have nots" is terrifying
why is it always GIVE us?
Let me do a little math here. Let's see, 1500 in ten years, versus 250,000 total murders. The figures suggest that about .6% of all murders are of white settlers. The number of whites killed doesn't sound drastically disproportionate. Now, other whites may be killed as well, raising that figure, but it still does not sound like a genocide campaign.
Recent political tensions could ignite conflict in KwaZulu-Natal
03 - Dec - 2002
DURBAN, 3 December (IRIN) - KwaZulu-Natal (KZN) has historically been one of South Africa's more volatile provinces. With political tensions on the rise again, some analysts fear there may be potential for renewed conflict. Two issues have been responsible for raising tensions in the province: a proposed Communal Land Act, and floor-crossing legislation.
The land bill seeks to provide security of tenure for people occupying communal land. Traditional leaders say that would undermine their authority as they have traditionally parcelled out land according to their own whims.
The governments floor-crossing legislation allows for defectors to move from one party to another without losing their council or parliamentary seat.
While the Constitutional Court ruled that the floor-crossing laws were applicable to local government, the defection legislation for provincial and national government were found to be sound in principle but technically flawed. These have already been re-tabled and parliament will consider them again early next year. But the Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP) - the ruling party in KZN, which sees itself as a defender of Zulu tradition and the monarchy - has already hit back at the government by firing MPs who defected before the Constitutional Court rejected the floor-crossing laws for provincial and national parliament.
Provincial Premier Lionel Mtshali this week also fired two ruling African National Congress (ANC) MPs who had served in his cabinet and handed their portfolios over to smaller opposition party MPs.
Meanwhile, IFP leader Mangosuthu Buthelezi - an uncle of Zulu King Goodwill Zwelethini and a prince himself - has given notice that the IFP is against the draft Communal Land Rights Bill and the White Paper on Traditional Leadership. He was backed by belligerent comments from Zwelethini, who was quoted as saying that neither himself nor the amakhosi [chiefs] feared death and would fight for their rights.
President Thabo Mbeki hit back in his annual speech to the National Council of Provinces, calling for the matter to be decided through "an inclusive dialogue and not through one party threatening all others with violence".
Said Mbeki: "Apart from the fact that the law enforcement authorities will act vigorously to protect lives and property against anybody who decides to use force to advance his or her goals, it is time that all of us outgrow the period in our history when resorting to violence to attain political objectives resulted in the loss of thousands of innocent lives [a reference to the violent conflict between the IFP and ANC in KZN during the 1980's and 1990's]."
These comments have the potential to raise the political stakes in KZN, warned Mary de Haas of the KZN Violence Monitor. The Monitor is a University of Natal-based violence monitoring project, which has its roots in social science research on political violence carried out from the mid 1980s. It claims no allegiance to any political party or governmental organisation. Police in KZN told IRIN there had been no incidents of political violence reported in recent months. An assertion De Haas disputes.
The Monitor's report covering May to September 2002 said there had been attacks on ANC supporters in Mpembeni (in the north coast) "in which a number of people (at least 10, according to local sources) have died".
"It is alleged that a neighbouring traditional leader wants ANC supporters out of the area. ANC supporters have also been murdered in nearby Esikaleni near Port Durnford," the Monitor reported. "There are a lot of inexplicable incidents that the police dismiss as witchcraft or faction fighting ... the chiefs rule the rural areas with an iron fist, there's no freedom of political activity," said De Haas.
A project called Copwatch was being set up to monitor the performance of police "in some of these cases", she added.
Nhlanhla Ntaka, of the Institute for Democracy in South Africa (IDASA), was less convinced that KZN could be heading for further political violence. "I believe, as much as it's true that there are these challenges, it's very important to understand that the peace which prevails in KZN now is not because the ANC and IFP woke up and wanted peace, but because people forced them to do so ... there's a critical mass [of people] who will ensure they don't take the province back to the violent situation of the 1990's. Also, neither of the parties would like to be perceived as the ones with the keys to violence in the province," he told IRIN.
Indeed, IFP leader Buthelezi has gone to court to contest the final Truth and Reconciliation Commission report which sort to portray him as a chief perpetrator of apartheid era violence. "He does not want to be judged by history as the one who started violence," said Ntaka.
Although there was always a danger that "both sides could organise radicals", this was unlikely given the recent stability in the province and should politically motivated violence increase, it was unlikely to reach the levels of the late 1990's, Ntaka added. But according to De Haas' reports from the field, "the violence is still continuing but it's a lot more covert now [as opposed to the open hostilities of previous years]". Source: IRIN 3 December 2002
Give...???
Or we shall take...???
They're punching their own ticket for the third world. If not the fourth...
"It’s not just landless Africans who admire him," the source said. "Aborigines, Maoris and even Mexicans think he is a fighter for economic justice in the Third World."
It's not as if we haven't been predicting that South Africa would be the globo-communist model for the American Southwest. It would be interesting to investigate the channels whereby news of South Africa is processed and spun in the Hispanic part of the Western Hemisphere.
The history of global communism is one of tremendous coordination. It's a pattern that is hard not to recognize, and is now becoming obvious enough in Central America to be observed even by a Scottish newspaper! That similar observations are missing from American publications speaks volumes about their editorial intent in the virtual blackout of what is really going on in Mexico.
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