Murder of far-Right leader stokes tensions

Eugene Terreblanche's violent death on Saturday came amid growing racial tensions in the country and underscored controversy over African National Congress Youth Leader Julius Malema's performance last month of an apartheid-era song that advocates the killing of white farmers.

Mr Terreblanche, 69, was leader of the white supremacist Afrikaner Weerstandsbeweging movement, better known as the AWB, that wanted to create three all-white republics within South Africa in which black people would be allowed only as guest workers.

Andre Nienaber, a member of the group and a relative of Mr Terreblanche, said he believed his death was "as a result of Mr Malema's hate speech and direct orders in the media to 'shoot the Boers dead"'.

Boer means white farmers in Afrikaans, the language of descendants of Dutch settlers.

Mr Malema is often in the news for his fiery rhetoric. Last month, he led college students in a song that includes the lyrics "shoot the Boer".

The song has sparked a legal battle in which the ruling ANC party has challenged a high court which ruled the lyrics were unconstitutional. The ANC insists the song is a part of its cultural heritage and that the lyrics – which also refer to the farmers as thieves and rapists – are not intended literally and are therefore not hate speech.

An unknown number of white farmers – possibly scores – have been killed since 1994, many of them in land disputes. Some critics blame the government's badly-organised land reform programme and claim corruption is a problem.

A leading Afrikaner lobby group, AfriForum, claimed that since Mr Malema sang the song in public, there has been a rise in killings of white farmers, with four killed in the previous week. The group could not prove a connection between the song and the killings.

Police minister Nathi Mthethwa appealed for calm and asked the public not to make assumptions about the crime.

Mr Malema arrived in neighbouring Zimbabwe on Saturday and could not be reached for comment yesterday but on Saturday, at a youth rally in Zimbabwe's capital, Harare, he defended his decision to sing the song.

"We are not being allowed to sing liberation songs in South Africa, but we are not going to stop," he said. "We are prepared to go to jail and get arrested again. This is the court ruling of the white men in South Africa, but we are not going to obey it."

Relatives and friends of Mr Terreblanche gathered near his homestead yesterday morning to pay their respects. They gathered in front of a house with an ox wagon parked on the front lawn, a symbol of South Africa's white settlers.

Mr Terreblanche's family and the AWB invited journalists into one of their homes to hear a brief statement but later, as journalists outside the house tried to interview people, several AWB members carrying pistols in hip holsters threatened them and ordered them to leave.

The opposition Democratic Alliance party blamed increasing racial tensions for the killing.

Democratic Alliance constituency member Juanita Terblanche said racial tension in the province's rural farming community was being fuelled by "irresponsible racist utterances" by two members of the governing African National Congress.

Ms Terblanche, no relation to the far-Right leader, said her party did not share his political convictions but the attack on him could be seen as an attack on the diverse components of South Africa's democracy.

President Jacob Zuma appealed for calm following "this terrible deed". In a statement, he asked South Africans "not to allow agent provocateurs to take advantage of this situation by inciting or fuelling racial hatred".

The South African Press Association quoted police spokeswoman Adele Myburgh as saying that Mr Terreblanche was attacked by a 21-year-old man and a 15-year-old boy who worked for him on his farm outside Ventersdorp, about 68 miles north-west of Johannesburg.

Ms Myburgh said the pair were charged with murder. She said the two, whom she did not name, told the police that there had been a dispute because they were not paid for work they had done on the farm.

"Mr Terreblanche's body was found on the bed with facial and head injuries," she said.

Mr Terreblanche had threatened war on South Africa's white minority government in the 1980s when it began to make what he considered dangerous concessions to black people.

He had lived in relative obscurity in recent years but had not changed his views.

Mr Terreblanche was jailed in 1997, sentenced to six years for the attempted murder of a black security guard.

He became a born-again Christian in prison.

The killing comes 10 weeks before South Africa prepares to host the first World Cup football tournament on African soil.