28 januar, 2007

1.700 dræbt i racistisk kriminalitet

Fra TV2 Nyhederne:

Den sydafrikanske historiker David Rat­tray, en nær ven af Storbritanniens prins Charles, er blevet dræbt for øjnene af sin hustru på sin farm i Syd­afrika, oplyser lokale aviser.

Der menes at være tale om en likvide­ring, idet de seks bevæbnede gernings­mænd ikke stjal noget i forbindelse med drabet, skriver avisen Sunday Independent.

TV2 Nyhederne fortæller det ikke - få danske medier har gidet røre historien - men mordet på David Rattray er blot endnu et i rækken på 1.700 racistiske mord på hvide landmænd i Sydafrika. Ofte er der tale om direkte angreb på personer, hvor ofrene overfaldes, torteres, voldtages og lemlæstes før de slås ihjel, og hvor intet stjæles. Andre gange kombineres mord of tortur med tyveri. Atter andre gange overlever ofrene, og slipper med at blive udsat for grov vold. Et par eksempler:

After some distance, a gate and a long rutted track mark the entrance to a farm set well back from the road.

It is owned by Ernest Breytenbach. He has 120 cattle on 5,700 acres, with a simple house built round an Aga brought in by wagon in the 1920s. His father, André, was killed when he got out of his “bakkie” (pick-up truck) at the gate in August 1998. It was a bad month on the farms: 66 people were murdered – four of them set on fire. In another attack, the farmer had been bound and beaten, but nothing was taken from the house and his firearm was still on the wardrobe.

“They were waiting for my dad to get back from dropping off his workers,” Breytenbach says. “He was shot in the stomach. They made off with his bakkie and dumped him. When we found him, they’d taken the spotlights off the bakkie. They put them by his face, like eyes, and they put the licence plates at his head and his feet. I don’t know why they did it. Maybe it was to say, ‘Look what we did,’ to get on the front page.” ..

His father was the first to be murdered at Louis Trichardt. Many attacks have followed. Werner and Brigitte Wiedeck live close by, in a pin-neat house with garden gnomes in the conservatory and doilies on the armchairs. They have been robbed eight times in three years. Twice they were beaten. The worst was last April.

“They put a gun to my husband’s head and tied him up, and gagged me with a scarf,” says Brigitte. “Then they started beating me with a steel pole. They already had all our money, but they kept demanding more. I was choking on my own blood. I feigned dead and they went.
“I got free and I cut Werner loose. I was very lucky. The doctors were fighting for three days for my life. I had serious skull fractures. I needed nine steel plates. I lost my right eye.” The police, she says, took two hours to drive the few miles from town. “No one checked for bullets, for fingerprints, for tracks in the bush. They did more or less nothing.”


Dolores de Agrella runs Adam’s Apple, a roadside inn on the way into town. “There was a whole spate of attacks in June 2004,” she says. “We were robbed twice: videos, TVs, even a pot of oxtail I was making for Father’s Day lunch. We were cleaned out, so I thought we were safe. One evening, the dog barked, and a figure appeared in my room. He pulled my jaw down and put a gun in my mouth, and pulled the trigger. Without a word. Just like that. But it didn’t go off. Then he started trying to pull me down. I started kicking and screaming and grappling with him. He was a puny little thing. As fast as he’d arrived, he was gone. I’m only alive because he had the wrong calibre bullet in the gun.” ..

Mimie du Toit runs a game farm that caters for hunters, mainly Scandinavian and Spanish. Her husband was killed when the steering column on his vehicle broke on a hunting trip. Her father, Ben Keyter, farmed cattle 30 miles away. He was murdered in January 2005.

“They asked my mom for water,” she says. “She opened the door and they pushed in. Two of them pulled my dad outside. They made my mom watch while they killed him with a spade. They said, ‘Look, you can’t help him.’ Then they hit my mom very bad. She had blood all on one side, and they threw the deepfreeze on top of her and left her for dead. Then she got a stroke. Now she’s in Pretoria for speech therapy.” Her father was 79. He was killed for his cell phone and his 780 rand (£70) monthly pension. Three arrests were made. “It was the farmers who got them,” she says. “The police did nothing.” ..

Billy Meyer, a small-scale farmer, was shot dead through the head at 7.30pm on a Saturday as he sat in his house with his baby. Farmers tracked his killers for 60 kilometres towards the border with Zimbabwe but did not catch them. His near neighbours Gillie and Sophia Fick have a prosperous spread of 17,000 acres. “It’s only God’s will that we’re still here,” they say. At 5.45am, Gillie got into his bakkie to drive out to the fields. There were four attackers. Two of them pointed guns at his head. They pulled him out of the truck and forced him to the ground.

Then they started breaking in the windows and burglar bars with a pickaxe.“I heard the glass go,” says Sophia. “I took my pistol and fired three shots out through the curtains. I wasn’t worried for my husband. I thought he was already dead. Then I pushed the panic alarm. The siren went off. They fired some shots and drove off in our bakkie. They dumped it at the tarmac road, where they had cars waiting.”

“The farmers put up a roadblock and caught some of them,” says Gillie. “We got a helicopter from friends and we spotted another in thick bush and caught him. The police were hopeless. They didn’t even take fingerprints from my bakkie, though the four of them were in it.”

En gennemgående detalje i historierne er, at politiet ikke gider efterforske mord på hvide, og at når de faktisk samler beviser, så forsvinder de. Måske er manglen på interesse ikke overraskende når man tager Sydafrikas (sorte) præsidents nedladende kommentar til de 1.700 mord i betragtning:

President Mbeki has said that whites have a “psychosis” of “fear about their survival in a sea of black savages”. He has said, remarkably, that they are “addicted” to their fear.

Den eneste sikkerhed de hvide landmænd i Sydafrika har er i egen styrke, en styrke myndighederne endda nogle gange er nødt til at appellere til om hjælp:

Makhado boasts a high-security prison too – the most modern in the country. It houses 3,800 hardened criminals. The prison choir performed with Jo’burg’s symphony orchestra in February. It says much for the new South Africa.

So, alas, does what followed last month. The wardens went on strike. The inmates rioted and set one of the blocks on fire. No police or troops were at hand to secure the perimeter. The prison authorities asked Farm Watch for help. As flames and smoke drifted across the night, every 20 yards a bakkie was drawn up at the wire, and a Boer, unmistakable in rugger shorts and a khaki shirt, stood guard until the army arrived.

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