SA Deputy Agriculture Minister Bheki Cele demands that media self-censor farm murders
-- White farmers are being murdered in South Africa at a shockingly high rate. The ANC and other parties openly encourage the murders with violent songs like “Kill the Boer.”
However the Deputy Agriculture Minister Bheki Cele, an ANC member, is demanding that the media not report the race of farm victims.
-- Bheki Cele is the former Police Commissioner of South Africa. In 2012, he was fired for corruption. He was the second person in a row to be fired from the job for corruption.
" Earlier this week, Deputy Agriculture Minister Bheki Cele said: “We are urging everybody, starting with the media and everybody – to take the race issue out of farm murders,” Cele said.
“The people that are being killed are farmers…and we treat it as such,” he said, adding that his department took the killings seriously.
On Thursday, Van Zyl of the transvaal agricultural union of South Africa said their analysis showed that the majority of murdered victims were white.
“We don’t want to racialise it. My figures indicate that farmers, black and white, are the single greatest group within the murdered victims’ environment,” he said.
“All we are saying is that the vast majority of murder victims in the country are farmers. If we analyse the demographics of the victims, the majority are white farmers.”
Cele said the agriculture department "had a limited role in combating the murders. Agriculture cannot say we will arrest those that kill the farmers. "We wish we could, but we can’t. We cannot say we will shoot them,” said the former police commissioner.
On Tuesday Agriculture Minister Senzeni Zokwana acknowledged that the farm attacks 'were a worrying trend". She suggested creating something which already exists,
namely a 'a forum of farmers, farm workers and farm communities "to harmonise relations."
http://www.news24.com/SouthAfrica/News/Farm-murders-of-the-rise-AfriForum-20150115![]()
![]()
![]()
![]()
![]()
![]()
![]()
![]()
![]()
![]()
![]()
![]()
↧