Eugene Terre'Blanche; white supremacist terrorist leader
Hyfler/Rosner
Notorious white supremacist leader, he founded the AWB, the
Afrikaner resistance movement
Dan van der Vat
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/apr/04/eugene-terreblanche-obituary
The Afrikaner white-supremacist terrorist leader Eugene
Terre'Blanche, who has been allegedly hacked to death at the
age of 69 by two young black South Africans for withholding
the wages of labourers on his farm, managed the remarkable
feat of making former South African prime minister John
Vorster look like a moderate.
When the imposing Terre'Blanche and six other diehard
Afrikaner racists conceived the Afrikaner Weerstandsbeweging
(AWB, Afrikaner resistance movement) in 1970, Vorster was at
the height of his power, while Terre'Blanche was a police
warrant officer and member of the elite bodyguard protecting
Vorster and other leading politicians.
As a correspondent in South Africa at the time, I met
Vorster at a parliamentary cocktail party. He had just
announced in the all-white parliament that he had broken off
talks with Kenneth Kaunda, then president of Zambia and a
leader of continental African opposition to apartheid.
The fact that he had been meeting Kaunda had only been
revealed as part of the announcement that contacts had
ceased, which made the revelation a double shock. Asked what
had gone wrong, Vorster complained of double-dealing by
Kaunda, and then turned to me to ask: "Are you on duty?" I
said nothing, but raised my glass as if to say, not while
having a social drink. He then said: "I could have killed
him." Any inclination to interpret this as a figure of
speech died when, after a short pause, he added: "But I
didn't." This seems an unusual form of liberalism.
Nonetheless Terre'Blanche saw Vorster's secret contacts with
such a leader of black African opinion as a liberal betrayal
of the Afrikaner volk.
Terre'Blanche was born at Ventersdorp, a joyless farming
town 100 miles west of Johannesburg in the Afrikaner
heartland of the old Transvaal province. His family, like
many other Afrikaners, was of French Huguenot origin.
Disillusioned by Vorster, he left the police, took up
farming and founded the AWB, which got off the ground in
1973 and adopted a swastika-like black, white and red motif.
The black symbol in the middle was made up of three sevens,
which he said was chosen as a counter to the 666 of the
satanic beast in the Book of Revelations. As his notoriety
grew, the AWB chief emerged as part murderous thug, part
buffoon.
The movement expanded, and the heavily bearded, blue-eyed
and bulky Terre'Blanche (the name means "white land") took
to wearing black or khaki uniforms and riding around on
horseback. He let himself be styled "die Leier" (Afrikaans
for leader, as in Duce or Führer) and looked like a cross
between Moses and Mussolini.
He was a formidable, sometimes frightening, public speaker.
The AWB may have achieved a peak membership of 70,000 as the
former government bodyguard surrounded himself with a
bodyguard of his own called the Iron Guard, all dressed in
black and armed. In buffoon mode, he once fell off his horse
in the middle of a parade.
He was allegedly seen in rather close contact with a South
African woman journalist at, inter alia, the Voortrekker
monument, of all places - an Afrikaner shrine outside
Pretoria. When the journalist sued Britain's Channel 4 for
libel over its report on the liaison, she lost, but the
South African media made the most of the emerging details,
which he steadfastly denied.
His political and criminal activities were less amusing. The
AWB came to fame in 1979 when members tarred and feathered a
relatively progressive Afrikaner theologian. The movement
linked up with political parties well to the right of the
ruling Afrikaner Nationalist party. When guns were found
hidden on his brother's farm, Terre'Blanche and three others
were convicted in 1983 under the Terrorism Act, designed as
an instrument for suppressing black opposition. He was
sentenced to two years, suspended for five.
The government of PW Botha, another Afrikaner, went so far
as to ban the AWB from carrying arms in public, prompting
Terre'Blanche's bon mot that "an unarmed white man is a dead
white man". In protests against negotiations between white
and black leaders, the AWB killed three people and injured
dozens more.
And in a campaign against the first South African election
by universal suffrage in 1994, which made Nelson Mandela
president, the AWB killed 21 people. Terre'Blanche carried
the can for this at Archbishop Desmond Tutu's post-apartheid
Truth and Reconciliation Commission in 1998, and was
forgiven.
However, as recently as 2004 the incorrigible Terre'Blanche
emerged from three years in prison for badly beating a
security guard in 1996, and in 2008 announced a revival of
the AWB, with secession in mind. He is survived by his wife,
Martie, and one daughter.
. Eugene Ney Terre'Blanche, white supremacist leader, born
31 January 1941; died 3 April 2010
Steve Hayes
>Eugene Terre'Blanche obituary
>Notorious white supremacist leader, he founded the AWB, the
>Afrikaner resistance movement
Varied reactions to the death of ET:
http://khanya.wordpress.com/2010/04/06/reactions-to-death-of-et/
--
Steve Hayes from Tshwane, South Africa
Web: http://hayesfam.bravehost.com/stevesig.htm
Blog: http://methodius.blogspot.com
E-mail - see web page, or parse: shayes at dunelm full stop org full stop uk