Fear has South African farmers fleeing from land grab terror
https://www.theaustralian.com.au/nat...ec1cba1aa80e22
The Australian12:00AM March 16, 2018
South African farmer Gert du Plessis grew up on, farmed and inherited a 2000ha spread in Eastern Transvaal, and like most Afrikaners, he felt bound to the land and the black workers he employed to help him grow corn and raise cattle.
“I had been there all my life, I was on that farm for 50 years,” Mr du Plessis told The Australian yesterday.
What happened to fellow farmer and friend Thys Boshoff gave him second thoughts.
“The people just got into the place and got some money, and when he didn’t open the safe, they just shot him dead,” Mr du Plessis said. “Then they ordered his wife to open the safe, but she didn’t have a key, so they shot her hand off and left.”
Mr du Plessis and his family moved to Australia three years ago to avoid the fate of the Boshoffs — getting out ahead of the terror now being exacted on white farmers at an alarming rate. One or two are reportedly being murdered every week.
Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton said this week the *growing violence against white farmers, whom he described as persecuted, had impelled him to ask his department to see if it could come up with ways to receive more of them as migrants to Australia, including under the humanitarian “in-country persecution” visa category.
The South African government yesterday issued a reply denying it was persecuting anyone, and expressed “regret” that Australia had not raised the matter through diplomatic channels. “There is no reason for any government in the world to suspect that a section of South Africans is under danger from their own democratically elected government,” the foreign ministry said.
Mr du Plessis said the South African government was “politically correct in saying they don’t persecute the farmers in South Africa,” but that was just through a sleight of hand. “When there is a farm attacked, they don’t see it as a farm attack, they put it down as a robbery, and say ‘unfortunately there were people killed in the robbery’,” he said.
The problem, Mr du Plessis said, was that while the government did not approve of illegal takeovers of white land because it would produce anarchy, its policy of forcibly appropriating such land without compensation encouraged it.
“It is not safe for a white South African to farm in South Africa,” Mr du Plessis said.
In his case, a group of black men who worked for him camped outside on the lawn one morning. “They said they want the property,” Mr du Plessis said.
“I just told them the property is mine, and they must leave. So I called the police. They came only to protect them from me.”
He and his family felt persecuted, and decided to get out. In 2015 they moved to a farm they have leased near Uki in northeast NSW, where they run cattle. They came on a business visa *because they had the money and experience to start an enterprise, but since then, their fate in *obtaining permanent residency has varied among them.
Mr du Plessis’s two elder daughters, Cindie, who works as a teacher, and Karien, who is an *environmental officer, have become permanent residents on the basis they are skilled migrants.
Mr du Plessis, his wife Martie, and their youngest daughter *Anette have applied for permanent residence, but are still waiting for it to be granted. Their business visas have expired and they now are on bridging visas.
It’s a problem identified by South African-born immigration agent Letitia De Lima who runs the practice Visas-R-Us on the Gold Coast. While Afrikaners are highly skilled farmers, they may have more handed-down practical knowledge than formal education, and those are not skills that count much for Australian immigration purposes.
Ms De Lima said it was also hard for them to qualify as refugees from persecution, because they had to prove there was no authority to protect them. The South African police say they do, even though they don’t, in large part due to lack of resources.
The Australian spoke with several Afrikaners who had migrated to Australia and had lost family on farms, and some still in South Africa. They welcomed Mr Dutton’s initiative. It was heartening to see “Australia reaching out to our farmers,” said Sonja van *Niekerk from her dairy farm in Northwest Province.
Ms van Niekerk is the principal of a school with 800 black children, and said “we have very good relations” with the community. “We are peaceful people, we don’t carry guns,” she said,
But that didn’t stop a group of blacks a bit over a year ago from attacking her husband Johan with knives, leaving him among other serious injuries with damaged vocal chords so he has difficulty speaking.
“It is a miracle that he is still alive,” Ms van Niekerk said.
Asked what had happened in the way of arrest or prosecution of the suspects, Ms van Niekerk said: “Nothing.”
Originally Posted by Swordsmyth
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