South Africa Bans Rightist Group in Wake of 6 Killings

The government today banned an ultra-right-wing movement in its first crackdown on white extremists since the killing of six blacks and the wounding of 17 others by a self-confessed member of a white supremacist movement.

An announcement of the banning of the White Freedom Movement, or the BBB, was carried in today’s edition of the Government Gazette by Law and Order Minister Adriaan Vlok under sweeping 28-month-old state of emergency regulations.

The ban came the same day a self-proclaimed white supremacist charged with the Tuesday shooting spree against blacks appeared in court.

The BBB, the Blanke Bevrydingsbeweging, a small ultra-right-wing movement, was prohibited from “carrying out or performing any activities or acts whatsoever,” the gazette announcement said.

Bans on Black Groups

The banning is the first against white extremists vehemently opposed to the ruling National Party’s policy of limited racial reform and is similar to banning orders on more than 20 black dissident organizations.

The BBB, secretly formed in 1985, is headed by former Rand Afrikaans University biochemistry professor Johan Shabort who once boasted in an interview that his was the only organization to openly claim to be racist.

Like the far larger Afrikaner Weerstandsbeweging (Afrikaner Resistance Movement--AWB), the BBB uses a swastika-like symbol as its insignia and has borrowed other trappings of Adolf Hitler’s Nazis.

Court Appearance

The move will help defuse criticism that the government has been willing to act only against black opponents and has turned a blind eye to uniformed neo-Nazis parading with pistols through Pretoria demanding the racial partition of South Africa.

Vlok told a National Party Congress Tuesday that “without adequate means and the will to maintain law and order, radical forces to the left and the right will believe they have a free hand to terrorize and intimidate defenseless people.”