The Guardian of London is reporting the violent death of one Eugene Terre’Blanche in Rustenberg, South Africa:
A notorious white supremacist who once threatened to wage war rather than allow black rule in South Africa was hacked to death at his farm yesterday following an argument with two employees. Eugene Terre’Blanche’s mutilated body was found on his bed along with a broad-blade knife and a wooden club, police said.
“He was hacked to death while he was taking a nap,” one family friend, who did not wish to be named, told Reuters.
Local media quoted a member of Terre’Blanche’s Afrikaner Weerstandsbeweging party (Afrikaner Resistance Movement, or AWB) as saying that the 69-year-old had been beaten with pipes and machetes. Police said two males, thought to be workers on the farm, have been arrested and will appear in court on Tuesday.
Terre’Blanche, with striking blue eyes and white beard, was the voice of hardline opposition to the end of racial apartheid in the early 1990s, and the AWB was infamous for its swastika-like symbols and neo-Nazi anthems. But he had been in relative obscurity since his release in 2004 after a prison sentence for beating a black man nearly to death.
Last year he attempted a comeback, announcing plans to rally far-right groups and to apply to the United Nations for a breakaway Afrikaner republic.
I made Mr. Terre’Blanche’s acquaintance in Rustenberg almost 16 years ago. That I barely survived that encounter was because a member of his group thought that if I had to die it should not be that day and not at their rally. So he saved me by pulling me out of the scrum of angry whites attacking me and expelling from their compound.
I don’t rejoice in his death, especially since it comes at a rather sad time for South Africa. Much of the hope and joy of that spring miracle 16 years ago have dissipated and South Africa is today suffering.
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