South Africa / Violence against Whites

White Farmers "Being Wiped Out"
By Dan McDougall
The Sunday Times, March 28, 2010
"The gunmen walked silently through the orchard. Skirting a row of burnt-out tyres, set ablaze months earlier to keep the budding fruit from freezing, they drew their old .38 revolvers. Inside his farmhouse Pieter Cillier, 57, slept with his 14-year-old daughter Nikki at his side. His 12-year-old son JD was having a sleepover with two teenagers in an adjoining room. As the intruders broke in, the farmer woke. He rushed to stop them, only to be shot twice in the chest. In his death throes he would have seen his killers and then his children standing over him, screaming and crying. The attackers, who were drug addicts, simply disappeared into the night. Cillier's murder, at Christmas, was barely reported in the local press. It was, after all, everyday news. Death has stalked South Africa's white farmers for years. The number murdered since the end of apartheid in 1994 has passed 3,000. In neighbouring Zimbabwe, a campaign of intimidation that began in 2000 has driven more than 4,000 commercial farmers off their land, but has left fewer than two dozen dead. The vulnerability felt by South Africa's 40,000 remaining white farmers intensified earlier this month when Julius Malema, head of the African National Congress's (ANC’s) youth league, opened a public rally by singing Dubula Ibhunu, or Shoot the Boer, an apartheid-era anthem, that was banned by the high court last week. Malema's timing could hardly have been worse. Last weekend in the remote farming community of Colenso, in KwaZulu-Natal, Nigel Ralfe, 71, a dairy farmer, and his wife Lynette, 64, were gunned down as they milked their cows. He was critically injured; she died. That same day a 46-year-old Afrikaner was shot through his bedroom window as he slept at his farm near Potchefstroom. A few days later a 61-year-old was stabbed to death in his bed at a farm in Limpopo. The resurrection of Dubula Ibhunu, defended by senior ANC officials as little more then a sentimental old struggle song, has been greeted with alarm by Tom Stokes, of the opposition Democratic Alliance. He said the ANC's continued association with the call to kill Boers could not be justified. [...]"
[n.b. I discuss this disturbing phenomenon in my chapter, "'When the Rabbit's Got the Gun': Subaltern Genocide and the Genocidal Continuum," in Nicholas A. Robins and Adam Jones, eds., Genocides by the Oppressed: Subaltern Genocide in Theory and Practice (Indiana University Press, 2009).]