Introduction to Nightmares Without End

APN believes the only effective way to focus global attention on the astounding, near-genocidal numbers of SA farmers being slaughtered is to personalise and internationalise this monstrous scandal. What we recommend is regular publication of lists of the murdered - and the manner of their murder - in half-page ads in the quality UK/US media. While platitudes and promises about their "war on crime" flow thick and fast from Mandela & Co . . . a veritable tour de force of equivocation, now about as believable as a Mother Goose fairytale . . . what the platteland is presently experiencing is a very real terrorist war, a chilling echo of Peter Mokaba’s "Kill the Farmer, Kill the Boer."

Nor was Mokaba alone with his vicious incendiary chant. A decade ago certain SA priests were also exhorting death and destruction for our entire White farming community: a noble Christian message indeed. That vengeful attitude (with Afrikaans farmers the No 1 target) was also deliberately inculcated in the minds of the so-called "liberation forces" by many of their UK/US sponsors, ecclesiastical armchair terrorists again high among them. In a sense, it was a conclusion to the Boer War.

Nevertheless, what we have seen since the 1994 all-race election has been a long series of appalling atrocities, plunging the agricultural community into an abyss of fear, insecurity and growing rage about the Mandela regime’s startling failure to protect them. As far as we could ascertain, no fully annotated list of those murdered on the farms since 1994 as yet exists. Accordingly APN, working on press cuttings and reports from the SA Agricultural Union, has collated its own list of farm murders since January 1 this year. Our list, it must be emphasised, is far from complete. Farm murders are now so common that many don’t even rate a media mention.

But, incomplete as it is, this tally will serve to demonstrate the reign of terror SA farmers face today. Even a cursory examination reflects the high similarity in the methods used in the more brutal killings.