Right-winger Terreblanche murdered

South Africa’s president appealed for calm today after white supremacist leader Eugene Terreblanche was bludgeoned to death by two of his farm workers in an apparent dispute over wages.

Terreblanche, 69, was leader of the Afrikaner Weerstandsbeweging movement, better known as the AWB, that wanted to create three all-white republics within South Africa in which blacks would be allowed only as guest workers.

The opposition Democratic Alliance party blamed increasing racial tensions for last night’s killing.

“This happened in a province where racial tension in the rural farming community is increasingly being fuelled by irresponsible racist utterances”, said Juanita Terblanche, Democratic Alliance MP for that constituency.

Terblanche, no relative of the far-right leader, said her party did not share his political convictions but warned that the attack on him could be seen as an attack on the diverse components of South Africa’s democracy.

President Jacob Zuma appealed for calm following “this terrible deed”.

In a statement, he asked South Africans “not to allow agent provocateurs to take advantage of this situation by inciting or fuelling racial hatred”.

The killing comes 10 weeks before South Africa prepares to host the first World Cup on African soil, with massive expenditure on infrastructure being questioned as hundreds of thousands of tickets and hotel rooms remain unsold.

Police spokeswoman Adele Myburgh said Terreblanche was attacked by a 21-year-old man and a 15-year-old boy who worked for him on his farm outside Ventersdorp, about 68 miles north west of Johannesburg.

Ms Myburgh said the alleged attackers had been arrested and charged with murder. She said they told police that there had been a dispute because they were not paid for work they had done on the farm.

“Mr Terreblanche’s body was found on the bed with facial and head injuries,” Ms Myburgh said. She said a machete was found on his body and a knobkerrie – a wooden staff with a rounded head – next to his bed.

Terreblanche had threatened war on South Africa’s white minority government in the 1980s when it began to make what he considered dangerous concessions to blacks that endangered the survival of South Africa’s white race.

A symbol of white resistance to democratic black majority rule, he had lived in relative obscurity in recent years but had not changed his views.

He revived the AWB in 2008 and had rallies that drew growing crowds whom he wooed with his declaration that white South Africans are entitled to create their own country, a fight he declared he would take to the International Court at The Hague.

Terreblanche’s murder comes amid growing disenchantment among blacks for whom the right to vote has not translated into jobs and better housing and education.

Some consider themselves betrayed by leaders governing the richest country on the continent and pursuing a policy of black empowerment that has made millionaires of a tiny black elite while millions remain trapped in poverty, even as whites continue to enjoy a privileged lifestyle.

Terreblanche recently made statements highlighting the corruption that has ballooned under the black government.

“Our country is being run by criminals who murder and rob ... We are being oppressed again. We will rise again,” he said, referring to concentration-camp conditions that killed thousands during the Boer War fought by British colonisers.

Terreblanche launched his political career in 1973 amid growing opposition to the white minority government and its racist policies, forming the AWB with six other “patriots” of the Afrikaans-speaking whites descended from Dutch immigrants.

The AWB was a semi-secret organisation for years. When it “came out” in 1979, the movement displayed its Nazi-like insignia and declared opposition to any parliamentary democracy.

Terreblanche would arrive at meetings on horseback flanked by masked bodyguards dressed in khaki or black and became a charismatic leader for a small minority that could not envisage a South Africa under the democratic rule of a black majority.

In 1983 he was given a two-year suspended jail sentence for illegal arms possession, though he said the weapons were planted by black opponents. The same year, two AWB militants were jailed for 15 years for conspiring to overthrow the government and assassinate black leaders.

Terreblanche was finally jailed for six years in 1997 for the attempted murder of a black security guard and assaulting a black petrol station worker.

He became a born-again Christian in prison and declared on his release in 2004 that his experience had convinced him that “the real hour to revive the resistance had arrived”.