COLONEL Jan Breytenbach, one of the most respected soldiers ever produced by the old SADF, is a certified Afrikaner folk hero. The founder of 32 Battalion and commander of 44 Parachute Battalion, his name became legend in the days when the White-led SADF was acknowledged as one of the ten best fighting armies in the world. It is only fitting then that Jan, together with other distinguished former SADF top brass, should re-emerge in this crisis to help organise SA’s sadly beleaguered farmers, White and Black, into much-needed self-protection networks, armed and trained to face the terror that has descended upon them.

Like the others, he has no illusions about the multi-pronged problems bedevilling SA farmers today. Farming conditions in this country are far from ideal: by world standards, poor. The weather is harsh, killer droughts an ever-present threat. The soil mantle generally is thin, much of it acid. The old government understood the problems, but accepted agriculture as a vital strategic industry, helping agriculture achieve phenomenal growth. With government back-up and subsidisation of farm products, SA became not only self-sufficient in almost all important products, but in good seasons one of only seven major food exporters in the world.

The ANC/SACP regime, by contrast, has shown itself hostile to organised agriculture. All the old subsidies have fallen away. Under the impact of radicalised unions and inciteful statements from Cabinet ministers, the attitude of labour has changed. They want much higher wages for far less work. Farmers are further hampered by inimical labour legislation, which must eventually add to rural unemployment and a deterioration in the food supply. There is a campaign to assist squatters who steal their land.

Most of the farms effectively belong to the banks, with little hope of the farmers ever paying off their debt. To add to farm woes, commercial banks are now applying stricter loan criteria and no longer give preferential treatment to White commercial farmers. They have, and are, losing many thousands of head of cattle and sheep to increased and often virtually uncontrolled stock theft. All this puts them in a very difficult position. Significantly, the number of commercial farming units has decreased from 100 000 in 1970 to 40 000 today. To cap it all SA in general and farmers in particular have experienced more crime since 1994 than in the country’s entire history. Now over to Jan:

this in the belief that they could import food more cheaply than our farmers can produce it. Were we dealing just with the ANC, we might perhaps be able to knock some sense into their heads. But they are aligned with the hardline communists of the SACP and COSATU, whose philosophy is that the land must be in the hands of the state.

"So we do have a political factor: the hoary old argument that the Whites ‘stole the land from the Blacks,’ with a concomitant effort, by whomsoever directed, to make life on the farms untenable. The scale and pattern of the attacks indicates a deliberate campaign to destroy organised agriculture. According to what I hear from one intelligence source, the ANC/SACP plan to take full control of the rural areas in the next three years, for which reason the commercial farming community must be destroyed.

"If they can control the food supplies, together with all lines of communication - the road and rail networks, plus the electricity grid - then the entire industrial sector is under their control. That would also include the fuel supplies, both the oil pipeline and Sasol being situated in the rural areas, as are all the country’s major dams, including the Lesotho Highland scheme. You exercise control over all that: and you exercise total control. The commercial farmers present the only block to their push to one day controlling all Africa."

Jan has just returned from an extensive tour of the country towns and farming communities of the Eastern Cape. "Talk about security on the ground! While I was speaking to a farmers association at Klipdrift, a farmer was murdered at Paterson, another near Grahamstown, and two more in that immediate time frame. Investigation showed that the four murderers involved were outsiders who moved into a location at Cookhouse a fortnight before the attack. These four guys then set out finding out from members of the local Black community details of those farmers who would present as soft targets - candidates for murder.

"They had no specific murder victim in mind: Bokkie Human, one of the four killed, was just unlucky. Nobody had any grudge against him. His name just came up as an easy target."