VIOLENCE IS WHAT WE DO!
The recent visit to South Africa of Dr. Gregory Stanton, Research Professor of Genocide Studies and Prevention at the US’s George Mason University shone a light on just how far down the track SA’s farm murders and assaults are moving towards being defined as genocide. According to Genocide Watch, there are eight stages that lead to genocide: South Africa has already reached the fourth stage and is currently approaching the fifth and sixth stages. “ANC Youth League leader Julius Malema sings “Kill the Boer” and Ronald Lamola calls for war against “white settlers”– this is pre-genocide”, said Stanton.
The ANC government has tolerated and promoted hate speech that constitutes “incitement to genocide”, says Genocide Watch. Despite the fact that Malema’s songs were declared hate speech and banned in September 2011 by a South African judge, he ignored the ruling and his followers continued to sing the forbidden songs 15 minutes after the court judgment. The ANC government appealed the ruling, and the appeal case has been postponed.
Since 1990 to date – 1990 is a significant year – 1580 farmers have been killed and nearly 3 000 farm assaults and attacks occurred. Most of these crimes were committed against white farmers. These farmers are being murdered at a rate four times the murder rate of other South Africans, including black farm owners. Farmer families are subjected to gratuitous violence – rape, mutilation and torture in many instances. Some murders are carried out by armed gangs: in some cases, the body mutilations are covered up either by the authorities or the media: generally, mutilation of a body in a crime or war situation indicates contempt and hate.
In Ladybrand in the Free State, American farm manager Mr. Allen Rodgers was shot during an attack on the farm Geluk in August. He was seriously injured after three terrorists first attacked him with machetes. In the North West, a 46 year old farmer’s wife was killed at her farm gate after she took her son to school, and in Jansenville, 70-year-old Mr. Charles Owen was murdered on his farm. These three attacks occurred within days of each other.
THE LEADERS WHO INCITE TO KILL
The savagery of the ANC’s “Path to Power” revolution in the seventies and eighties has been well documented. The excuse used for the intimidation and violence – which included the ANC’s benchmark method of terror, the necklace (a burning tyre is placed around a victims shoulders, petrol is poured into the tyre and it is set alight) – was that this was the only method which could destroy apartheid and promote a democratic South Africa.
The violence worked of course: the SA government capitulated to the street mobs and overseas pressure, the ANC was unbanned and Nelson Mandela released in February 1990. The revolutionary bloodletting would end, we were told. But the opposite happened. After 1990, violence escalated at an alarming rate. Unfortunately for South Africa, the ANC and Nelson Mandela refused to foreswear violence as a condition of the unbanning and release. Indeed, Mandela wasted no time in encouraging further bloodshed.
On 24 February 1990, just a few days after he was released, his supporters sang about killing their black political opponents – “if you oppose us you have a very good chance of dying”.
On June 3, 1990, Mandela, then deputy president of the ANC, told a press conference on leaving a private clinic where he underwent surgery that “the only type of violence we accept is organized violence in the form of armed action, which is properly controlled and where the targets have been carefully selected”. He referred to violence as a legitimate tool of political action. He talked of “armed” action. But armed with what? He declared there were “targets”.
Who were these targets? It didn’t take long to find out. In January 1990, 87 black policemen had been attacked – in February after the speech, this figure jumped to 194. In March it reached 317, in April 201. All in all, the figure for 1990 was 886, of which 27 resulted in deaths, while 232 homes were attacked and 651 vehicles were destroyed. Some of the attacks were extremely brutal: one policeman was stabbed more than 40 times after being sentenced to death by an ANC’s “people’s court”. Another was decapitated, while others were burnt to death. There was no public denunciation of these crimes by either the ANC or Mr. Mandela, despite the fact that the party’s demands of the previous government had been met.
Mandela’s targets were clearly his own people, the ones he was supposed to be saving from apartheid. Soweto Day June 16, 1990 saw hundreds of attacks throughout the country. Blacks in their hundreds waving ANC flags attacked police vehicles, police stations, and the homes of policemen. The list of victims is well documented and extensive. There appears to be no record of Mr. Mandela’s repudiation of this terrible violence directed against his party’s “targets”. Sixty two acts of terrorism occurred in the first four months of 1990 compared with 58 up to April 1989. Fifteen were directed against the police, six against the Defence Force, 16 against civilian targets, 14 against political targets, 14 against economic targets and two against judicial targets.
In June 1990 the state of emergency was lifted. Said The Citizen (June 9, 1990): “The lifting of the emergency is unlikely to reduce the killing. The reason is that the ANC and its affiliates do not intend to let the townships quieten down, since their plan is to take over the townships by violence and intimidation. The violence is likely to continue at its present or even worse level”.
In September 1992, a 10-minute YouTube video “The Songs They Sing” shows Nelson Mandela, fists clenched, standing with singers chanting a song in Xhosa whose words are “We have pledged ourselves to kill the whites (boers)”. It is called The Song of the Oath of Mkhonto we Sizwe (the armed wing of the ANC at the time). On the same video there is an “axe song” where ANC supporters talk about “chopping down” various politicians and policemen.
KEEP ON KILLING!
Violence became the ANC’s tool – indeed THE tool – in political power. Violence became generic to the ANC and the SA Communist Party, even after political power was in their hands. Now this modus operandi has been taken up by the masses – it has been legitimized by their leaders, so why not? It is now a way of life to attain whatever they want, to show displeasure at service delivery, education and transport; to try and influence court decisions, to press for higher wages, to be used even at funerals.
Even after an election was promulgated for April 27 1994, the ANC’s intimidation and murder continued unabated. Negotiations and violence were seen as two sides of the same coin by the ANC. The Shell House massacre is a good example of the contempt with which the ANC leadership considered the concessions made by the previous government to the ANC. No opposition to ANC future hegemony would be tolerated. In March 1994, IFP members marched through Johannesburg demanding recognition of the sovereignty of the Zulu king over KwaZulu/Natal. Eight Zulus were gunned down at Library Gardens, and scores more were shot at and killed by marksmen from the top of Shell House, headquarters of the ANC. 167 were injured. Despite having a warrant to search Shell House after the massacre, the police were denied entry on the alleged instructions of Nelson Mandela. A subsequent judicial enquiry by Mr. Justice Robert Nugent found that there had been “no justification at all for the shooting, that no warning had been given and that the ANC’s guards had continued firing into the crowd even after it had turned and ran”. (Nugent rejected the ANC’s version that the IFP marchers had attacked Shell House!). Mandela later announced that he had personally instructed security personnel to “defend Shell House if attacked, even if you have to kill people”. To date, no one has been held accountable for the IFP deaths.
THE PRESIDENT SAYS SHOOT THE BOER
During the ANC’s centenary celebrations in April and May of this year, none other than South Africa’s State President Jacob Zuma was filmed singing (in Zulu) “We will kill them with a machine gun. You are a Boer, we will kill you. You will be shot, you will flee. The Cabinet will shoot you. You will flee, we will shoot you”. (Overseas readers can see for themselves – YouTube videos and other references such as books and websites will be given at the end of this Bulletin).
The ANC declares that these songs are part of their “cultural heritage”. But a complainant’s attorney told a court that if this is the case, the ANC cannot have its cake and eat it too. If they want to sing cultural songs, then they must go back to their own culture and sing them, and eschew the Mercedes Benzes, the Armani suits, the lunches at smart hotels, the first class airplane trips overseas, the computers, the air conditioning, the supermarkets and the fashion shopping, because all these accoutrements belong to another culture!
Violence, intimidation, terror and thuggery are unfortunately endemic to South Africa. The savagery of the seventies and eighties was tacitly approved of by the world as legitimate violence “on the long walk to freedom”. Communist Mkhonto we Sizwe head Chris Hani told the Weekly Mail that “we are prepared to see a wasteland if that is the price”, while Siphiwe Nyanda declared in the same article that “Operation Vula was aimed at preparing a revolutionary army for an insurrection”.
The ANC’s National Executive Committee broadcasting in English over Radio Freedom from Addis Ababa on 6.5.85 called for the murders of Blacks cooperating with the SA government. In a September 1985 interview with Newsweek, erstwhile ANC president Oliver Tambo said that “ANC military activities were aimed at the SA economy to create a feeling of insecurity in the population. Avoiding civilian casualties will no longer be a factor in the ANC military actions”. Even the post-1994 xenophobic violence is strange – while white churches and charity groups open soup kitchens for African refugees, blacks kill them and destroy their businesses.
While there has been violence from all spheres of South Africa’s society over the years, there was supposed to be no need for violence after the ANC attained power. The facts tell a different story. Violence appears to be in the country’s DNA, and recent handwringing about the fighting and deaths that accompanied miners’ protests at Lonmin’s platinum mine at Marikana in Northwest will not erase the fact that what was sown by the ANC before and after they had attained power is now being reaped in their own backyard.
YouTube video with Nelson Mandela and MK supporters – 1992:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YT34ymDKMhQ – Blacks sing about killing whites.
YouTube video with Jacob Zuma at ANC centenary celebrations – 2012:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cHLTKZ05zM4&;feature=player_embedded – Jacob Zuma sings Kill whites with a machine gun.
Important website: www.genocidewatch.org
Read:
R.W.Johnson’s book “South Africa’s Brave New World – The Beloved Country since the end of Apartheid”, published by Penguin Books, 2009.
“The Liberal Slideaway” by Jill Wentzel, published by the SA Institute of Race Relations, Johannesburg, 1995.
“Chasing the Rainbow” by Anthea Jeffery, published by the SA Institute of Race Relations, Johannesburg, 2010.
“The Truth about the Truth Commission” by Anthea Jeffrey, published by the SA Institute of Race Relations, Johannesburg, 1999.
