Report indicates correlation among politics, hate speech and rise in farm murders
16 March 2017
The civil rights organisation AfriForum has issued a report today in which the relationship among politics, hate speech and an increase in farm murders is set out. The report deals with five prominent cases where hatred and violence was fuelled by political leaders against white farmers. It was found that farm murders increased by an average of 74,8% in the months following directly on these incidents of hate speech.
Ernst Roets, deputy CEO of AfriForum, compiled the report, Kill the farmer: a brief study on the impact of politics and hate speech on the safety of South African farmers, and presented it during a press conference held at Forum Films. Roets said the allegation that farm murders in 90% of cases were motivated by robbery only is misleading. “In our study, the number of murders in each month that followed directly upon an incident of hate speech was compared with the average number of murders per month in that specific year. There has always been a sharp rise in murders during the months that followed directly on hate speech.”
Pertinent incidents of hate speech dealt with in the report include the following:
1. Peter Mokaba’s singing of the song ‘Kill the Boer, kill the farmer’ in April 1993