Another Eight South African Farmers Massacred
Adriana Stuijt
June 4, 2001
JOHANNESBURG, South Africa -- Eight more farmers have been massacred on South African farms over the past three days, bring the total of people murdered in armed attacks on commercial farms since 1994 to a total of 1,108 people, primarily people of Boer-Voortrekker descent.
The latest eight victims all had been unarmed farmers of Boer-Voortrekker descent whose forebears arrived in South Africa from various European countries 400 years ago.
Investigating police officers on the scene all were struck by the similaries of these atacks, saying these couples had been ambushed with military precision - and all were massacred by heavily-armed young black males armed with AK-47 military carbines and other military weaponry.
The four massacred couples have left behind six orphans. None of the attackers stole anything, police said.
In the attack on one couple, the Schoonwinkels, their ten-year-old son also had been abducted, severely assaulted and left naked, tied up with barbed wire to a fence, his mouth tied up and stuffed with tall African grass. The Schoonwinkel child was found in severely traumatised condition by defence force and police trackers only hours later.
These latest South African farm massacres occured between May 31 and June 2 at four commercial farms in the South African provinces of Mpumalanga, Gauteng, the Western Cape and the Eastern Cape.
The police officers investigating these four massacres all said that these could not be classsified as armed robberies - as nothing had been stolen "These attacks have been carried out with military precision, as if attacking military targets," one policeman commented. "These were textbook military-style ambush operations, but these were all carried out against unarmed farmers instead of military targets."
Three months ago, the SA government ordered an independent expert investigation into the underlying causes of these organised armed massacres of South African farmers. South African agriculture has been plunged into a crisis, with farmers leaving their profession in droves which lead to massive unemployment in rural areas and a dramatic drop in food production.
Economists recently also noted that the worsening agricultural situation also caused South Africa's import of American farm equipment to dropped from the pre-1994 annual of Rand 20-billion to R12-billion in 2000. South Africa and Zimbabwe's beleagered commercial farmers import nearly all their farm equipment from the United States.
