JOHANNESBURG, South Africa (AP) — A South African white supremacist leader was bludgeoned to death by two of his farm workers in an apparent wage dispute, police said, and his followers on Sunday blamed a fiery youth leader for spreading hate speech that led to his killing.
Eugene Terreblanche's violent death on Saturday came amid growing racial tensions in the once white-led country and underscores an ongoing controversy over African National Congress Youth Leader Julius Malema's performance last month of an apartheid-era song that advocates killing white farmers. Malema denied responsibility for Terreblanche's death.
Terreblanche, 69, was leader of the Afrikaner Weerstandsbeweging movement, better known as the AWB, that wanted to create three all-white republics within South Africa in which blacks would be allowed only as guest workers.
Group spokesman Andre Visagie vowed revenge but gave no details.
"They attacked him in such a way it was difficult to recognize the face of Eugene Terreblanche," he said. "We will avenge his death."
Andre Nienaber, a group member and a relative of Terreblanche, said he believed his death was "as a result of Julius 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 early Dutch settlers, or Afrikaners.
Malema is often in the news for his fiery rhetoric. Last month, he led college students in belting out a song that includes the lyrics "shoot the Boer." Malema did not mention Terreblanche or any other person in his performance.
The song has sparked a legal battle in which the ruling ANC party has challenged a high court that ruled the lyrics as unconstitutional. The ANC insists the song is a valuable 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.
Terreblanche's killing comes amid growing disenchantment among blacks for whom the right to vote has not translated into jobs and better housing and education.
Some consider themselves betrayed by leaders governing the richest country on the continent and pursuing a policy of black empowerment that has made millionaires of a tiny black elite while millions remain trapped in poverty, even as whites continue to enjoy a privileged lifestyle.
But an unknown number of white farmers have been killed since the end of apartheid in 1994, many of them in land disputes. Some critics blame the government's badly organized land reform program and allege that corruption is a problem. A leading Afrikaner lobby group, AfriForum, claimed that since Malema sang the song in public, there has been a spike 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.
Malema on Sunday denied responsibility, during an official visit to neighboring Zimbabwe.
"ANC will respond to that issue," he said "On a personal capacity, I'm not going to respond to what people are saying. I'm in Zimbabwe now, I'm not linked to this."
But on Saturday, at a youth rally in the capital of Harare, he defended 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 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."
Police Minister Nathi Mthethwa appealed for calm and asked the public to not make assumptions about the crime.
"We call on all South Africans, across whatever divide ... to desist from making any inflammatory statements which are not going to help in any way on the case we are dealing with," said Mthethwa, who visited the crime scene. "Nobody should obstruct us by what he or she says pertaining to this case. We want to get to the bottom of this case and we want nobody to obstruct the police in getting justice."
Relatives and friends of Terreblanche gathered near his homestead Sunday morning to pay their respects. Terreblanche's family and the AWB invited the press into one of their homes to hear a brief statement. But later, as journalists outside the house tried to interview people who came to commiserate with the family, several AWB members carrying pistols in hip holsters, threatened the press and ordered them to leave.
The opposition Democratic Alliance party blamed increasing racial tensions for the killing.
"This happened in a province where racial tension in the rural farming community is increasingly being fueled by irresponsible racist utterances" by two members of the governing African National Congress, said the Democratic Alliance legislator for that constituency, Juanita Terblanche.
Terblanche, no relative of the far-right leader, said her party did not share his political convictions but warned that 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 fueling racial hatred."
The killing comes 10 weeks before South Africa prepares to host the first World Cup soccer tournament on African soil, with massive expenditures on infrastructure being questioned as hundreds of thousands of tickets and hotel rooms remain unsold.
The South African Press Association quoted police spokeswoman Adele Myburgh as saying that 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 110 kilometers (68 miles) northwest of Johannesburg.
Myburgh said the alleged attackers have been arrested and charged with murder. She said the two, whom she did not identify by name, told the police 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 a machete was found on his body and a knobkerrie — a wooden staff with a rounded head — next to his bed.
Terreblanche's brother Andries Terreblanche urged reporters on Sunday to appear at the suspects' first court appearance, scheduled for Tuesday.
"Everyone must come to court to hear what is the truth," he said. "It isn't about wages."
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 blacks that endangered the survival of South Africa's white race.
A symbol of white resistance to democratic black majority rule, he had lived in relative obscurity in recent years but had not changed his views.
He revived the AWB in 2008 and had rallies that drew growing crowds whom he wooed with his declaration that white South Africans are entitled to create their own country, a fight he declared he would take to the International Court at The Hague.
An AWB member who said his name was Commandant Pieter Steyn noted the coincidence of Terreblanche's name, which in French translates to "white land." Steyn said the name is a common name among South African descendants of Dutch Huguenot settlers, and that Terreblanche was born with the name.
Steyn wore a khaki uniform which read "100 (percent) Boer." The uniform also had a patch of South Africa's apartheid-era flag.
Terreblanche launched his political career in 1973 amid growing opposition to the white minority government and its racist policies, forming the AWB with six other "patriots" of the Afrikaans-speaking whites descended from Dutch immigrants.
The AWB was a semisecret organization for years. When it "came out" in 1979, the movement displayed Nazi-like insignia and declared opposition to any parliamentary democracy.
Terreblanche would arrive at meetings on horseback flanked by masked bodyguards dressed in khaki or black and became a charismatic leader for a small minority that could not envision a South Africa under the democratic rule of a black majority.
At one rally his guards who terrorized blacks and were dubbed "storm troopers" after the Nazis, brandished guns, police batons and knives, prompting the government to announce it was "looking into" the actions and attitudes of the movement.
In 1983, Terreblanche was sentenced to a two-year suspended jail sentence for illegal arms possession, though he said the arms were planted by black opponents. The same year, two AWB militants were jailed for 15 years for conspiring to overthrow the government and assassinate black leaders.
Terreblanche finally was jailed in 1997, sentenced to six years for the attempted murder of a black security guard and assaulting a black gas station worker.
He became a born-again Christian in prison, and declared on his release in 2004 that his experience had convinced him that "the real hour to revive the resistance had arrived."
Terreblanche threatened to take the country by force if the white government capitulated to the ANC. After the white government conceded, the ANC overwhelmingly won 1994 elections and has won every election since with more than 60% of votes.
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