By IANS,
Nairobi: Thousands of mourners Friday gathered for the funeral of South African white supremacist leader Eugene Terreblanche, who was laid to rest in his hometown of Ventersdorp in South Africa.
South Africa’s largest trade union called a meeting of the black farm workers and other poor blacks living in Ventersdorp to try and ensure there would be no racial confrontation, ABC News reported.
Despite the fears that violence could break out, the service to bury Terreblanche, a man who avowed racial separatism and served prison time for savagely beating a black security guard nearly to death, was peaceful.
Terreblanche’s funeral ended a week of turmoil in South Africa which threatened to turn into what some feared would be a “race war”. Much to the relief of the country’s leadership, the fallout from Terreblanche’s murder turned out to be more of a political brawl, than a physical one.
The South African government is working to paint a positive image of the country before it hosts the 2010 World Cup in June, something that would’ve been nearly impossible to do had racial warfare broken out less than 90 days before the World Cup play begins.
Still after Terreblanche was bludgeoned to death last Saturday by two black farm workers over an apparent labour dispute, leaders of his white separatist party, Afrikaner Weerstandsbeweging, also known as AWB, said that the act showed how racially divided the country still is.
“It is a pure political murder,” AWB spokesman Pieter Steyn told reporters this week outside the courtroom where the two suspects, aged 28 and 15 were being charged. Police were forced to intervene between blacks and whites, hurling racial insults at each other.
The AWB and other political opposition leaders blame Julius Malema, the African National Congress ruling party’s youth leader, for stoking racial hatred by singing an apartheid-era struggle song, “Kill the Boer (white farmer)” at the party’s rallies. While President Jacob Zuma condemned the murder as a “terrible deed” and called for calm in the country, critics say that’s not enough.