WAR AGAINST WHITES IN SA

A mother's hand on her daughter's coffin and a teenage boy crying out for his mom.

Overwhelmed by emotion, a family member faints at the graveside.

In just seven days South African farming communities have buried yet another three victims of murder.

Elsie Swart was killed shortly after her 50th birthday.

Elsie's parents: 'I feel bitter, she was severely tortured.'

Burned with an electric iron, beaten and then strangled to death.

A day earlier 73-year old James Twine was buried in another rural town. He was shot dead in cold blood while kneeling down in front of his killers in his farmhouse.

'My heart is sore, he was a good man,' says Gilbert Sehoene, a farm worker who has lived on the farm since childhood.

Members of the South African Police Service are also struggling to deal with the senseless killings.

Anton Crawford (Supt. SAPS): 'Most of these people are very old law abiding citizens, God fearing people murdered in cold blood. Sometimes I can see my own parents. My parents are also very old and I'm always glad it didn't happen to my parents.'

Superintendent Anton Crawford has been a forensic cop for 27 years, the last ten spent at the Criminal Record Centre in Witbank, about 100km east of Pretoria.

The cops here have long lost count of the murders they've attended on farms in this province. What awaits them on a call-out is usually a scene of indescribable brutality.

Like so many other victims, this elderly couple arrived back home from church on a Sunday morning. In a macabre display, the killers left their bibles displayed on the bodies.
In an outside room a third member of the family was tied up with wire, then tortured and killed.

Scenes like these are difficult to forget and, to deal with the trauma, even the most hardened policemen often needs psychiatric counselling.

Anton (policeman): 'Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't work. I normally get flashbacks every day ... and nightmares. You always dream about most of the stuff, you always re-live it. It's like a video on rewind. It always comes back. I'm coping - not 100% but I'm surviving.'

Another day and yet another farm murder to solve.

This man was killed for a bit of cash says the Superintendent. And for little else, it seems.

But what goes through one's mind seeing brutality like this day after day?

Anton: 'I would like to get this bastard. I would like to gather enough forensic evidence. I would like to take him to court because I want a successful conviction.'

But not all police are as dedicated.

Beatriz Freitas is the survivor of two farm attacks.

In neither case has anyone been brought to book.

Beatriz: 'No, these things just died.'

The Freitas family emigrated from Madeira to South Africa more than 40 years ago. They established a huge nursery on farmland near the Mozambican border, supplying trees and plants to outlets across Southern Africa.

Beatriz still tends the beautiful garden, but the house is empty now.

Six years ago she arrived home after sunset and was overpowered as she parked her car.

Beatriz: 'As I turned I just felt a hand on my neck, so when I looked there were four guys like this. So now you can't think. I wasn't scared. It's like my mind disappeared.'

Beatriz and her permanently disabled husband, Jos�, were tied up in the bathroom while the intruders ransacked the house.

Beatriz: 'Then after a while they got me out and they left my husband locked in there and they asked me where the iron was. I said, 'It's in the laundry'. So off we go to the laundry and they started taking my clothes off, and that's where two of them raped me.'

But the rape was only the start of her nightmare.

Beatriz: 'I happened to have two by 2 1/2 litres of oil and they took that and just poured it all over me. They connected the iron on the wall. All I remembered was lying there and screaming. It was a couple of kicks and a couple of irons. 25% of my body had third degree burns. Eventually they took a towel and they put it over my head and they were suffocating me and I ran out of breath. With my left hand I pulled one of their hands away and it was
certainly not my strength - that's where I say there were higher powers in charge.'

The robbers then fled the scene.

Beatriz: 'So I took a pair of shorts and a top and I just put it over this grease and I remember when I put the pants on there were all these pieces of skin hanging down. Still today, after so long, when I put pants on, you know, you have that feeling. I am a survivor - victims die. But with the Lord's strength I'm here.'

But three years later the couple was attacked for a second time. Jos� died in a hail of bullets.
Like the first time, no one was ever arrested.

Unsolved cases like these have forced many farmers to hire expensive private security companies. Some, like Mapogo Amatamaga, have an unconventional approach.

Hendrik Magongoanwe: 'We give criminals medicine. Sjambok, we give them sjambok. They do no more crime.'

But for this farmer protection from a security company came too late.

Daan Landsberg was shot dead arriving home with his wife in broad daylight.

Members of the community arrested the suspects soon after, but within hours they escaped from the local police cells. It was then that the family turned to the security company who'd offered to track down the killers.

And it wasn't an empty promise. Later that same day they reported back with evidence and photographs of the fugitives. They even had this statement from a previous employee exposing the murder plot.

But why had the police not gone to this much trouble?

William Mnyongani: 'That's the thing that worries me. What's taking place, because they got the information the same day when they finished killing this man.'

Criminologist, Prof. Neels Moolman, has published several papers on farm murders warning that South Africa's justice system is falling apart.

Prof Neels Moolman (University of the North): 'I have indicated that a person has a 90% chance to follow a criminal career without fearing the consequences in South Africa. I've proved that statistically.'

Moolman is a member of a government appointed committee that recently completed a report on farm attacks.

This police video footage formed part of the evidence before them.

An old man's hand resting on the arm of his wife of many years. She was raped, police say, probably while he was forced to watch. Finally, with their throats slit, they died next to each other.

But despite the obvious brutality and violence of these attacks, South African officials insist that nothing sinister should be read into the ongoing killings.

Asst Comm. Johan Burger is in charge of rural safety and security in the country.

Commissioner Johan Burger (SAPS): 'For a long time people have been saying that there are political motives behind these farm attacks and although there are many indicators which would support such a view, the fact doesn't support that. In none of those cases have we found any evidence of political motive.'

The primary motive is crime, says Prof Mark Welman, Director of the Crime Prevention Centre at Rhodes University in Grahamstown.

Prof Mark Welman, (Rhodes University): 'They believe farmers keep a large amount of cash in safes to pay workers etc. The second thing is they have weapons, and weapons are a valuable commodity for criminals and thirdly - not in all cases, but in some cases - they want the vehicles.'

Welman says the same levels of brutality can also be seen in other sorts of crime in South Africa.
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Mark: 'As horrifying as those images are - and they are, I mean we need to be shocked. As a society we need to say, 'My God what do we do about this?' But they're not only being played out on farms in South Africa, they're being played out in townships in SA, in suburbs in SA, in places of work in SA. You know even the graphic images of torture - you know, humiliation of the victim - these are things that detectives are coming across every day in their work and again it's not only on farms.'

Yet statistics paint a different picture.

Dr Gregory H. Stanton (Genocide Watch): 'It seems to me a very troubling statistic that the murder rate of the farmers, the Boer farmers, is about four times as high as is for the rest of the population'

Dr. Stanton is a retired American professor of law who heads Genocide Watch, the organisation that co-ordinates the international campaign to end genocide.

We met him in Berlin where he was attending a conference in remembrance of the Holocaust.

He believes that, apart from crime, there's also another motive.

Gregory: 'There's a motive of hatred, that these are hate crimes, that people are tortured, that they're murdered in ways that are de-humanising.'

Not only does Stanton believe farm murders are hate crimes, but he's also recently warned the world that the white farmers in South Africa could be facing genocide. Twenty years ago he witnessed the horrors of the Cambodian genocide.

Gregory: 'I realised, I think, from that point forward that I would spend the rest of my life working to stop genocide and to bring those who committed it to justice.'

Years later, that's exactly what he did. He was the person responsible for drafting the UN resolutions that created the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda.

Stanton has identified eight stages of genocide by comparing the history of genocides in the 20th century. He describes it as a process, rather than an act that could take many years to be effected.

Gregory: 'The third stage is really where you begin the downward spiral into genocide and that is the stage of de-humanisation. It is where you treat the other people as though they're less than human.'

A scene like this, he says, should have the alarm bells ringing.

This farmer was ambushed at his farm gate, shot in the back and left to die. His vehicle was burnt out and his body displayed with the lights and number plates.

Gregory: 'These are clearly hate crimes. It's such a symbolic expression of de-humanisation. They're so treating him like a thing.'

It's often thought that a whole group needs to be killed before it's defined as genocide, but that's not the case.

Stanton says the more than one thousand four hundred farmers killed in South Africa could be classified under the Genocide Convention.

Gregory: 'Even if it's a few hundred individuals who have been targeted, that is an act of genocide under the convention.'

But Welman says he strongly disagrees.

Prof Mark Welman: 'Another important component of that is that it has to be planned, deliberate, systematic - in other words, orchestrated by some authority, figure or agency in some way. Now there's absolutely no evidence whatsoever that it's happening in farm attacks in South Africa.'

However, Stanton warns that South Africa has already slipped into the fifth stage of the process, or what he refers to as polarisation.

Gregory: 'Extremists attempt to drive out the centre, they attempt to divide the world into just two camps; into us and them.'

And from there on, he says, it's a small step to the seventh stage when the actual genocide takes place and where the word genocide is used.

Gregory: 'People who commit this crime often think amazingly enough that they're purifying their society in some way or another, you know - they're getting rid of insects or some kind of less than human form of life.'

A civil war is potentially more likely, says Moolman.

Prof Neels Moolman: 'I don't think we are there yet, but I think that we are speeding to that point very fast if the radicals are not controlled properly.'

Gregory: 'They will say that the genocide was really just a civil war as though a civil war somehow was an opposite of genocide when in fact many genocides occurred during civil wars.'

These are the faces of members of the farming community who've been murdered in the past nine years ....

But exact figures of just how many have been killed are hard to find.

Asst. Comm. Johan Burger (SAPS): 'These statistics are reported to the Minister of Safety and Security and we have to wait for his approval before these statistics are officially released.'

When a local magazine recently published a request for names of murdered farmers, its offices were flooded with letters. But apart from that, the most complete information is published outside the country.

Adriana Stuijt: 'I thought that South Africa was a democratic country and this was like a red flag to me. And ever since then we started publishing these things more and more because nobody else was doing it or monitoring it so little, doing it so little that I thought somebody had to do it and that's why I did it. '

In a small Dutch town we met retired journalist, Adriana Stuijt, who spent most of her life in South Africa.

Now back in The Netherlands, she uses the internet to compile statistics on farm murders in South Africa, drawing from a variety of sources like policemen and journalists who would like to see their stories published.

Adriana: 'Parliamentary reports from parliamentary journalists, just a huge variety; policemen who really would like to see certain stories published because it would help in the public interest - they can't get them published. Other sources are undertakers, doctors, nurses, a great many 'dominees', people like that, just ordinary South Africans.'

The report that shocked her into action came from Interpol, saying South African farmers get killed at a rate of 313 per 100 000 of the population.

Adriana: 'They're the highest number at risk of murder in the world. The most dangerous job in the world now is to be a South African farmer.'

And just how dangerous that job is recently became clear to Attie Vermaak, a fifth generation cattle farmer in the far north of the country.

Attie's on the road to recovery here, but a month earlier he was still bed-ridden after being shot at point blank range on a road on his farm. He had stopped to check water levels in a dam when a car drew up alongside him.

Attie Vermaak: 'I greeted him and I said, 'Tobela'. When I said 'tobela', he pulled a gun on me. And I immediately realised that he really meant business. The guy just stuck the gun into the cab and shot me, point blank.'

The bullet went through his body taking away part of his liver, then in and out of the binocular case next to him, through the seat of his car. It was finally stopped by the floor of the vehicle.

The workers on the back witnessed the incident, but were not harmed by the attackers.

Levi, the worker on the right remembers hearing the attackers shouting, 'Shoot the dog, shoot the dog', referring to Attie.

Neels: 'There's a group of people who says that the revolution is not finished yet because the land has not been redistributed. The injustices of the past must be rectified but the question is how, and I don't think we should do that through violence and through land invasions. I think we should do it though an ordered process, but the process must go faster.'

The sheer beauty of the Limpopo landscape is misleading. Behind the fertile farmlands live families under severe stress and in fear.

Inspector Wimpie Knox is a detective who has investigated around 50 attacks on farms in this district.

His area stretches roughly over 50-thousand square kilometres of African bush and farmland.
It's an immense task, but he says he's continuing for the sake of the community.

Insp. Wimpie Knox (SAPS): 'My greatest fear is to arrive at a scene and to know the victims personally.'

And more than once this has happened. His elderly neighbour was ambushed and shot in cold blood. A woman on a nearby farm was killed as she was about to call for help on the radio.

In both cases no personal valuables were taken by the killers.

Wimpie: 'To say you don't develop hatred for the criminals would be lying because at each scene you tell yourself if you catch them you're going to shoot them. But ultimately you have to remind yourself that you're not allowed to do it; you have to pull yourself together and don't do something you'll regret.'

But just more than a year ago farm killers hit even closer to home - once again on a Sunday morning.

Inspector Knox's 72-year old aunt was thrown down an embankment after she had been clubbed to death with a hammer.

The murdered woman was Hettie Drake's mother. She clearly remembers the day.

Hettie Drake: 'It felt that my life went past me. I promised her that we would get them. They stole her life.'

A month earlier the family had celebrated their parents' 56th wedding anniversary. But even the photographs of that happy day were defaced by the killers.

Hettie: 'It was racism, it was racism through and through and through.'

Prof. Mark Welman: 'It's understandable that farmers feel they as a group are being targeted and I think one has to again deal with those concerns in a very sensitive way because probably if I were a farmer I'd also feel I'm really under threat and nobody's doing anything about it. I think where you encounter those cases where there's almost a kind of an element of, ' I am deliberately going to ventilate my anger on this person', I think that does come into it, but again that's not primary motive.'

The elderly John and Bina Cross arrived home from church on a Sunday morning to be tortured and killed in the most gruesome way.

The worst case that the young Inspector ever investigated was on this farm.

'The orgy of violence continued for seven hours', says their daughter, Lita Fourie.

Lita: 'They shot her through her knees, they burnt her with boiling water and then they shot her through the back with a large calibre rifle. She wasn't killed instantly. She died from blood loss. This house looked like a battlefield. There was blood everywhere. We picked it up with shovels.'

The killers tied Lita's father up in the bath, forced boiling hot water down his throat with a hand shower and then literally blasted away half of his head with a hunting rifle.

Wimpie: 'I sat down next to him. I didn't even know him, but for a moment I almost became emotionally involved. To see an old man in his seventies after he was tied up and you have taken what you wanted. Why must you do this? Why did they have to kill him and in such a way?'

Inspector Knox arrested the murderers within hours. Even so, in the weeks to follow several of the colleagues who'd witnessed the scene with him decided they had had enough and left the service.

Wimpie: 'I've also been to a psychologist. We are referred to them because they say we shouldn't bottle up. We have to talk to them. I think one should not be in a unit like this for too long.'

Research has shown that the typical farm attacker is between 17 and 28 years old and that they act in groups of between two and four people. Some are illiterate and they're usually unemployed.

Neels: 'They have grown up during the freedom struggle. They're therefore used to the fact that violence is sanctioned in many cases.'

Busi Kwinda is a counselling psychologist at the Centre for the Study of Violence and Reconciliation in Johannesburg. She believes that the cause of this violence is rooted in the experiences of the perpetrators.

Busi Kwinda, (Centre for the Study of Violence and Reconciliation): 'For you to solve an issue, maybe a violent act against you, you have to be violent yourself, so you find that they continue ... it's like a vicious circle.'

She says trauma, if left unattended, changes ones perceptions and distorts reality.

Busi: 'There's this terrible ways of killing people that shows that a person is sick. I mean you have boundaries within yourself where you know yes I cannot do this to another person, I cannot not do this to myself. They believe things have to be done their own way. It's my way or I'll be violent because maybe most of them internalised this negative coping violent ways of doing things.'

In a rural township far from the nearest city, we spoke to a teacher who doesn't want to be identified. He says he's often heard his pupils talk about attacking farmers who they believe have a lot of money.

Teacher: 'The type of crime they talk about - that one of the farm killing - it's part of their game.'

And that game he says is justified by poverty.

Teacher: 'People are jobless, this thing's got history, that we are where we are today because of oppression. It's a rare case where you find a black farm owner killed. A black owner can be robbed of his possessions but he cannot be killed. The deep hatred that thing can lead to a brutal killing, the rape of a wife.'

The polarisation finds expression not only in black youth. White farmers' children are also treading a dangerous line in the name of self-defence.

When asked if he could shoot someone. this young boy replied, 'Yes I think I could.'

This was the funeral in 2002 of Peter Mokaba, a popular ANC youth leader and deputy Minister. The crowd was chanting the slogan that had often made Mokaba headline news.

'Kill the farmer, kill the Boer', that was the chant while members of government watched.

Busi: 'They hear this slogan, 'Kill the boer, kill the farmer' and, to them, it's like you go and do it as it is telling you. Their understanding of some of these concepts is very limited and restricted. They were trying to create meaning for themselves.'

A day or two later the incident was denounced by President Thabo Mbeki.

Dr Gregory H Stanton (President, Genocide Watch and Director, The International Campaign to end Genocide): 'What was hopeful is that at least the President did denounce it later. But what worries me about the situation is that there evidently is popular sympathy with even those people who commit these crimes...It's the sort of pre-genocidal mentality that makes genocide possible later. If race riots developed of some sort or another, all of a sudden there is a very direct threat to a minority group and it can happen very fast.'

But it needn't.