Having again demonstrated their prowess in battle, most recently against women working at Clicks and schoolchildren at Brackenfell High, Julius Malema’s Economic “Freedom Fighters” (EFF) are now threatening the families of policemen and women.
“We will treat them the same way we treated them in the 1980s,” he said on Sunday a week ago. “We will not only fight them in the picket lines, we will go to their homes and fight them in their houses with their own families.”
How exactly did “we” treat police and their families in the 1980s? Homes were plundered and burnt. Among the weapons used were petrol bombs and hand grenades thrown into their homes while police and their families were asleep. Apart from being targeted for murder in their homes, police officers were killed in conflict on the streets. According to Hernus Kriel, minister of law and order during part of that period, killings of police escalated from one a month in the 1970s, to two a month in the 1980s, to 13 a month in 1991, and to 19 a month in 1992.
Another tally showed that 953 police were killed in the decade between July 1983 and May 1993. Most of the victims were black municipal policemen, sometimes known as “kitskonstabels”, but all police, black and white, including police in the homelands, were targets of attack.
The murder of police was part of the strategy of People’s War launched in the 1980s with the key objective of making black townships “ungovernable”. In a broadcast from Addis Ababa in September 1985, for example, the African National Congress (ANC) declared that “police and soldiers must be killed even when they are at their homes, and irrespective of whether they are in uniform or not”.
Other targets of attacks were black local councillors and members of rival political organisations, while the ANC and Umkhonto we Sizwe also planted explosives that killed people in shopping centres, on city streets, in bars, and at other “soft” targets.