White mineworker torched to death

Set alight and killed for his cellphone and wallet.

Klopper's screams of "Kom help my (come help me)" had the high-security townhouse complex' neighbours in this platinum-mining town rushing from their homes at 1 am. The first one to reach the burning Klopper was Mrs Lizzelle Meyer, who said he was alive, begging for water, burning brightly, and struggling to speak. Neighbours rushed over with wet sheets to douse the flames, others called police and emergency services.

Since 1994, there have been an extraordinary number of white Afrikaners killed in South Africa through such inexplicable incidents of cruelty-driven violence. Often the victims are told that 'all you white dogs must die', and similar language while they are being attacked by armed, mostly young black men. Often, Afrikaners also are kidnapped from their homes, driven to remote spots and executed. see

Crime experts say that Afrikaners -- only 3-million out of an overwhelmingly black population of 47-million -- are being killed out of all proportion to their proportional presence in the country. One of the world's top experts in genocide, Dr Gregory Stanton of the UN-linked organisation Genocide Watch, has warned that this is a 'secret genocide'; secret because it is carried out against a small minority and hidden inside 'ordinary crime'. He has spoken up publicly in TV programmes about what he terms the 'growing genocide of Boer farmers' and warned that if the South African government did not provide Afrikaners with better security, and also stop the growing hate-speech targeting Afrikaners in the South African state-media, this genocide would eventually culminate in 'all-out genocide'. See his first public warning in 2002 here

To date, there have been 3,037 white Afrikaners killed on farms since 1994 in many tens of thousands of armed attacks by violent, armed gangs. These attacks on farm families and their workers is also causing a mass-exodus from the countryside -- where Afrikaners, always the mass-producers of the country's commercial farm products, have for centuries preferred to live and work. For previous stories on the murder attacks targeting white Afrikaners, see here and here and also here

Often Afrikaner victims of such attacks tell of vile racist language from their black attackers while they are being attacked, assaulted, raped, often tied up and then forced to watch their relatives being murdered. see

Particularly targeted are working-class Afrikaners in the capital city of Pretoria, who often also live on subsistence smallholdings surrounding the city of their forefathers. They describe these murderous attacks by large gangs as 'warfare'. Young Afrikaner families are leaving the country of their birth in the hundreds of thousands to escape this incredible violent crime epidemic. The country has the highest per capita murder rate in the world: official police records for last year registered 50 murders and 45 culpable homicides a day.

Afrikaans newspaper journalist Alta Snyman, writing in Beeld today, said Mr Klopper had whispered to his neighbour Mrs Meyer, who was the first to reach the burning man, that two 'large black men' had broken into his house and set him alight.

There seems to be no motive for this cruelty: police said only his cellphone and wallet are missing, all his other valuables inside the townhouse remained untouched. He asked for water, she said, but when she tried giving him some, he couldn't take the glass: the skin had peeled off his forearms and was draped across his finger tips. Another neighbour Mrs Theonilde de Klerk, said 'we put wet sheets across the uncle (Afrikaners traditionally refer to unrelated older people as 'aunts' or 'uncles') to douse the flames and cover his nudity.

The car and garage were gutted and things inside kept exploding, the neighbours said. Firemen managed to stop the fire from spreading through the rest of the high-security residential area. Klopper was rushed by trauma helicopter to Milpark Hospital where he died at 18:30 with 100% burn wounds, reports Beeld journalist Magdel Fourie.

Police captain Elsabe Augoustides said their investigation team found that the attackers had cut through a perimeter fence and the burglar bars to get into the townhouse from the rear.

Neighbours said Klopper worked as a miner for a mining-contracting company, and was a 'quiet, retiring' man who did not have many visitors. He was in the process of divorcing his wife. see

By Adriana Stuijt