Afrikaner Group Demands a Whites-Only State

Several thousand supporters of South Africa’s neo-fascist Afrikaner Resistance Movement held a daylong rally Saturday, their largest yet, in Pretoria to demonstrate their total opposition to political power-sharing with the country’s black majority and to demand their own independent, whites-only state.

Eugene N. TerreBlanche, the group’s leader, warned that President Pieter W. Botha is betraying his own people, the country’s small Afrikaner minority, in slowly bringing blacks, Indians and mixed-race Coloreds into the government so that they have a voice in decisions that also affect whites.

“This government does not deserve to rule any longer,” TerreBlanche declared to the cheers of more than 5,000 whites, many of whom came to the rally in the capital wearing military-style khaki uniforms, waving flags with swastika-like symbols and carrying pistols and rifles. “They are taking the future of our children and selling it to our enemies. . . .

“The day is coming when this government will capitulate. The Afrikaner Resistance Movement must build up its strength now because that is the day, the day of capitulation, when we will take over.”

The only solution to South Africa’s crisis, TerreBlanche, a charismatic, almost messianic figure, asserted, would be a separate white nation based on the old Afrikaner republics of the 19th Century.

Few in Number

That Afrikaners number so few, perhaps only 2.9 million in a broader population of more than 36 million, does not matter, he argued, for it was the Afrikaners who built modern South Africa, and it belongs, first of all, to them.

“We will govern ourselves, just ourselves, without any interference, certainly without the intervention of the international money men,” TerreBlanche, who spoke for more than an hour, told a rapturous audience. “We don’t need the American Coca-Cola culture, we don’t need the international bankers, we don’t want the Jews. We will govern ourselves with our own white, superior genes.”

Most of those attending the rally accompanied TerreBlanche in a massive motorcade of hundreds of cars and trucks across Pretoria to the Union Buildings, the seat of government, where they presented a petition for a “white homeland.”

“We are hungry for our volkstad (national state) because we promised it to God,” TerreBlanche declared at the Union Buildings.

The Botha government is facing an important test of strength with the far right in two parliamentary by-elections Wednesday--contests that could greatly affect the ruling National Party’s willingness to pursue a program of gradual, step-by-step political, economic and social reforms.

The Nationalists had held one of the seats and the opposition Conservative Party the other, and the two hard-fought races will be closely watched for any shifts in voting patterns in rural areas since the whites-only parliamentary elections last May.

The Nationalists’ control of the government will not be affected by the results in any of these elections, but they are determined to win in order to avoid the image of losers and, if possible, to garner support for their reformist policies, particularly in rural areas where such backing is the weakest.

The Afrikaner Resistance Movement has formed an alliance with the Conservative Party, the official opposition in the white chamber of the tricameral Parliament, and has campaigned hard for Conservative candidates in the coming elections. The Afrikaner Resistance is more determined than the Conservatives to maintain white privileges, and its policies are considered more extreme.

“The government has chosen the easiest path of negotiation (with blacks), and the Communists are already embracing them,” TerreBlanche said. “Jews and Communists, there is no difference, no real difference. . . . That is not our path.”

Meanwhile, police and troops in Cape Town sealed off an outlying squatter camp, erecting a six-foot barbed wire fence around it at dawn. They then swept through the settlement in an effort to halt the feuding between rival black groups battling to control it.

More than a dozen people have been killed in two months of fighting, according to residents of the KTC Camp, which is named for a neighboring store in the Crossroads area outside Cape Town. Two died in clashes Friday.

“The police cannot allow this senseless killing and violence to continue,” said Brig. Roy During, the local police commander, pledging that the intensified police patrols would continue until the fighting stops, and suggesting that the fence would remain even longer to prevent those who fled the settlement from returning.

“With the winter very much under way, it is now necessary for the police to ensure that the people of KTC can live their normal lives in peace,” During said. “We have a duty to protect and to serve, and we will do so for as long as it is deemed necessary.”

Some KTC residents, however, have recently accused the police of trying to “thin out” the community, removing not only militants but anyone politically involved in opposition to the government and in simply reducing the number of residents to facilitate the area’s upgrading.