South African Farmers Fear for Their Lives

The Telegraph reports on a protest held in South Africa by white farmers about the government's failure to crack down on murders of farmers and family members. The protest is on the second anniversary of the murder of the Potgeiter family. The story explains:

Mr Potgieter, a farm caretaker, was stabbed and hacked 151 times with a garden fork, a knife and a machete near Lindley in the Free State - the agricultural heart of the country.

His wife, Wilna, and two-year-old daughter, Willemien, were both made to watch him die, before being shot in the head, execution style.

All for pocket money, and possessions of relatively little value – a too-common story in South Africa's rural areas, where mostly white Afrikaner farmers feel they are being targeted in gratuitously violent attacks on their remote farms and smallholdings. They accuse police and government of failing to make these crimes a priority. And as the horrifying murders continue, they are growing increasingly angry.

. . . South African police stopped releasing separate figures on farm attacks in 2007, and incorporated them into wider violent crime statistics.

But according to the Transvaal Agricultural Union of South Africa, there have been 2,863 farm attacks and 1,592 farm murders since 1990, and independent think-tanks put the true number of farmers murdered at closer to 3,000.

It is now twice as dangerous to be a farmer as it is to be a police officer in South Africa, according to Johan Burger, a senior researcher with the Pretoria-based Institute for Security Studies' crime and justice programme. Last year the country had a murder rate of 31.9 per 100,000 people, almost 30 times higher than Britain, according to police statistics. For police officers, this rate rises to 51 – and among farmers, a staggering 99 people killed per 100,000.

As the statistics indicate, isolation in a rural location is no guarantee of safety.