Alex Newman, WND, April 1, 2017

Over a two-year time span, South African Claudine Van Wyk lost three beloved family members in a series of gruesome farm attacks in the troubled African nation.

Her story is hardly unique.

The horrendous violence that has become so common in South Africa is a terror that even cross-border violence or irrational violence against a religious minority doesn’t approach.

And the attacks are viewed by many experts as the signs of genocide, warning top government officials are inciting, if not participating directly in it.

The trigger for the latest murder and mayhem against whites is the land owned by descendants of Europeans who arrived generations ago and built up what is now becoming known as “Rainbow Nation.”

Among those ramping up the hatred is South African President Jacob Zuma, who sings a song about genocide and is now seeking to expropriate white-owned farms without even providing compensation.

Here’s Zuma singing the genocide song:

More than a few experts and political leaders have suggested there is a nexus between many of the barbaric farm murders and the political efforts to confiscate the farms and properties of white South Africans.

The hatred fomented by political leaders often turns bloody and brutal beyond belief.

Van Wyk’s tragedy

Van Wyk’s aunt and uncle, Johan and Gloudien Van Rensburg, were brutally murdered on their farm in northern Limpopo in June 2012.

The husband, 77 at the time, died from gunshot wounds.

His wife, though, did not die at the scene. She suffered torture at the hands of her captors and was burned repeatedly, probably using cigarettes, Claudine Van Wyk told WND. She was also shot four times.

“She was paralyzed because they shot her three times in the back,” Van Wyk said, adding that a subsequent shot in the head did not kill her.

Gloudien Van Rensburg, beaten to a pulp and left in a coma, died in the hospital two weeks later.

“I remember it so vividly,” Van Wyk said in an interview with WND. “It was terrible.”

The attack prompted her to get involved in campaigning against farm murders, which have claimed thousands of victims, often following some of the most horrific torture imaginable.

Two years after losing her aunt and uncle, the unthinkable happened: Van Wyk’s father, Sarel Janse Van Rensburg, was killed on his farm.

According to Van Wyk and news reports about the incident, the brutal attack happened while the 75-year-old farmer was taking a coffee break.

“The attackers came in, they tied him up, his hands and feet. I don’t know what exactly happened, but when we got there, the blood was everywhere,” she said. “At first we thought he was shot, but he wasn’t. They beat him with a pole, they broke his nose, and he passed away due to head injuries.”

In an unusual turn of events in South Africa, the police, with help from local farmers, caught the two criminals, who were sentenced to 25 years in prison.

But the pain will be with Van Wyk forever.

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“When we got there, people said to me, ‘Please Claudine, you cannot see your dad, he is in bad shape,’” she recalled.

She insisted, though, and was horrified to see the scene.

“I could see he fought with them, because it was blood all over,” she said.

“It’s quite shocking to realize that your beloved ones have gone through such a tragedy and had such torment before death,” she said.

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Two years after her father’s murder, “by the grace of God,” she is starting to put the pieces back together and move on with life.

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Farm murders explode

In South Africa, where political leaders routinely sing genocidal songs and demonize the white Christian Afrikaners as the source of all that ails the nation, Van Wyk’s story is common.

In fact, last month saw a new record of the number of farm attacks and farm murders, known as “plassmoorde” in Afrikaans, the language of Afrikaners who are descended from Dutch, French, German and other Christian Europeans.

According to Carte Blanche, an investigative news program on South African television, there were 16 recorded murders in 46 gruesome farm attacks across South Africa in February alone.

And even that may underestimate the total, as the government buries and conceal the data, often classifying the murders and tortures as “robberies.”

Others who have studied the issue, such as specialist investigator Mike Bolhuis of Project Farm Murders, say the numbers are as high as two to three farm murders per day.

The government also refuses to compile crime data based on race, further obscuring the truth about the extent of the problems.

Since the early 1990s, when white South Africans voted in a referendum to surrender power, the estimates of farm murders range between 2,000 and 4,000.

A monument to the victims features thousands of white crosses on a hill side.

Police figures show there have been some 15,000 farm attacks in that time period.

Some blacks have also been killed in farm attacks, though the torture and brutality appears to be largely absent.

There have been dozens of recorded farm murders so far in 2017, an average of one farm attack per day, according to South African media reports.

White South African farmers are between two and three times more likely to be murdered than even South African police officers.

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Ruling party: Bury them alive

Authorities in South Africa not only do not seem motivated to crack down on the savage crimes, they actually appear to be encouraging them.

During a discussion about the farm murders in Parliament on March 14, for example, Deputy Minister of Higher Education Mduduzi Manana, a member of the ruling African National Congress, shouted: “Bury them alive.”

Incitement to murder is a crime in South Africa, and multiple political figures have called for Manana to face charges and disciplinary measures.

“If Manana is a supporter of the brutal killing of fellow South African citizens, he does not belong in government, he belongs in jail,” said Front National spokesman Daniël Lötter. “Suspend him now!”

Eugene Brink, a political analyst at the Solidarity Research Institute, drew parallels with other genocides that have occurred in Africa.

“By his statements he concedes that the lives of farmers are worth nothing and that they do not have the constitutionally guaranteed right to life,” Brink said. “Statements such as his and those made by other politicians such as [Economic Freedom Fighters chief] Julius Malema, are inciting violence against white people in particular.

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But such remarks from leading members of the ANC, which rules South Africa in an alliance with the Communist Party, are hardly new.

In fact, even South African President Zuma, who leads the ANC and joined the Soviet-backed Communist Party when both parties were involved in terrorism against civilians, proudly sings genocidal songs calling for the extermination of whites – on national television.

Authorities also deliberately dismantled the “commando” self-defense units that once effectively provided security for rural areas.

Officials have also made it increasingly difficult for citizens to be armed for self-defense.

All of it points to a deliberate pattern, observers say.

Genocide watch

Even years ago, top experts on genocide warned that there was evidence linking authorities to the escalating atrocities against white farmers.

Genocide Watch chief Gregory Stanton, a former anti-apartheid activist, visited South Africa in 2012 on a fact-finding mission and warned that the nation was showing signs that precede genocide, WND reported at the time.

“Things of this sort are what I have seen before in other genocides,” he said of the murdered white farmers. “This is what has happened in Burundi, it’s what happened in Rwanda. It has happened in many other places in the world.”

Stanton also said there was “strong circumstantial evidence of government support for the campaign of forced displacement and atrocities against white farmers and their families.”

“There is direct evidence of government incitement to genocide,” he added, calling for President Zuma to be impeached for the crime of inciting genocide.

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As WND reported last month, even former South African President F.W. De Klerk, who shared a Nobel Peace Prize with Nelson Mandela for his role in dismantling the apartheid system, recently suggested that authorities were fomenting racial conflict and discrimination that threatens to eliminate the Afrikaner minority in South Africa.

“President Zuma is determined to accelerate our descent along the road to state capture, economic crisis and racial confrontation,” he said at a conference last month, adding that the current rulers were contributing to the nation “stumbling aimlessly down the road to societal collapse.”

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If current trends and government racism continue, he said, it will “lead to the disappearance of the white minority in South Africa within the next 50 to 60 years,” the widely respected former South African president warned.

His own late wife, former First Lady Mrs. Marike de Klerk, was murdered by a black security guard in Cape Town.

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Racist land grabs, murders

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Speaking in Parliament in early March, Zuma called for “black parties” to unite to change the Constitution so that white-owned farms could be taken without compensation to be redistributed.

“We need to take bold steps that will transform our economy, including land ownership, very fast,” Zuma said.

“We are busy amending [laws] to enable faster land reform, including land expropriation without compensation as provided for in the constitution,” he added.

Other major political forces agree, and some even go further.

Former ANC Youth Leader Julius Malema, who styles himself “commander in chief” of the racist and Marxist-Leninist Economic Freedom Fighters party, argued that “no white person is a rightful land owner” anywhere in South Africa or the entire continent.

He also publicly called on blacks to simply steal land if they want it.

“People of South Africa, where you see a beautiful land, take it, it belongs to you,” Malema said in Parliament.

Before that, he suggested that genocide of whites was coming, eventually.

“We are not calling for the slaughter of white people‚ at least for now,” he added after years of spreading genocidal sentiment.

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Growing amounts of evidence also suggest that Malema may be conspiring with others to carry out the farm murders.

According to a recently released prisoner whose statements were aired on South African television program “Carte Blanche,” Malema is providing guns, balaclavas and cash to the attackers.

“He says you only have to murder a few farmers on farms,” says the prisoner, whose face was not shown.

Malema refused to respond to the allegations and declined to be interviewed, with his racist communist party saying he did not have time due to his busy schedule.

Some Afrikaner groups said government efforts to steal white land would be considered a declaration of war.

Others are resisting in Parliament.

But the situation is spiraling out of control, analysts say.

Racists justify torture, murder

To some racist and Marxist political figures, stealing white farms with atrocities is perfectly justified – even if the farmers are brutally tortured and murdered in the process.

“We do understand that black people are upset and angry, and rightfully so, because land has been stolen historically, and it needs to be returned,” claimed Lindsay Maasdorp, national spokesperson for the Marxist-Leninist Black First Land First (BLF) revolutionary movement.

“If black people are responding to that violence with violence, then they are well in their rights to take back land by any means necessary,” he added, seemingly endorsing the brutal farm murders as a means of taking land.

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As the question of self-determination becomes increasingly prominent, one political party, the Freedom Front Plus, which represents mostly Afrikaners but also other minorities, is helping lead the way.

The FF+ or FF Plus, as the party is also known, is the sixth largest party in Parliament and the fourth largest in key provinces such as Gauteng.

Party leader Pieter Groenewald has been working within South Africa and outside it to pursue self-determination for his people and other minorities, a right enshrined in South Africa’s Constitution.

Speaking to WND, Groenewald said the future of Afrikaners in South Africa was at risk.

“Since 1994 there has been an alarming increase of brutal murders of farmers and farm workers, in the privacy of their farms,” he observed.

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The international average murder rate is 7 per 100,000, he noted. “In the case of mainly white farmers in South Africa, the figure is a staggering 133 per 100,000,” Groenewald said.

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Beyond the murders, though, are systematic efforts to discriminate against and destroy the minority community.

“In the last two decades, laws like Affirmative Action and Broad Based Black Economic Empowerment has forced the Afrikaner out of the workplace, denied him jobs and equal opportunities and drove him in huge numbers out of the country,” Groenewald said.

“Their language [Afrikaans] has also been a target, with Afrikaans being removed from schools, universities and the public sector,” he added.

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“It is common knowledge that more than a million white South Africans have emigrated mainly for these reasons,” Groenewald said.

“Combine this with hate-crimes like farm murders and it becomes quite clear that the future of Afrikaners in South Africa is at great risk,” he concluded.

Outside of Parliament, the FF Plus is working to bring attention to the situation to the U.N. through the Human Rights Council and the Unrepresented Nations and Peoples Organization (UNPO).

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Preparing for worse to come

As WND reported last month, with the hate and violence being inflamed daily among the populace by political leaders, and with economic conditions deteriorating, thousands of Christian Afrikaners have joined a non-violent Christian preparedness group known as the Suidlanders.

The idea is to escape from the cities to rural farms with the women and children and claim protection under international law in the event of a civil war or societal collapse – assuming their farms have not been seized by government and redistributed in the meantime.

Two leaders of the Christian “prepper” group are currently touring America hoping to raise awareness of their plight and funds to purchase supplies for civilian non-combatants.

Anyone interested in meeting the pair or in hosting a presentation, even for only a few people, should contact the group through its website at Suidlanders.org.

[Editor’s Note: For a conversation between Jared Taylor and a representative of the Suidlanders group, please click here.]