Hon Speaker, the UCDP is shocked at the news of the confession by Cornelia de Wet absolving the teenage boy accused of the Steenkamp farm murders that took place in Griquatown in the Northern Cape.
We are a troubled nation, any way you look at this. The fact that there are possibly many farm murders that remain unsolved, in which the Afrikaner Weerstandsbeweging hit squad and the security company, Boere Beskermings Forum, could have been involved, and perhaps many others in which innocents were framed or blamed, is a cause for concern.
The remnants of apartheid are evidenced in this, and political leaders across the board need to take steps to address it. It saddens us in the UCDP that there are Afrikaner groups intent, in fact hell-bent, on spreading such racial hatred as to murder their own in order to instil racial hatred. The surfacing of these claims harms the genuine cause and outcry against the killing of farmers.
We would like to assert further that our intelligence services are failing us in these matters. How can it be that we have such racially motivated terrorists in our midst, yet their actions are only revealed through a confession and not as a result of intelligence gathering? It boggles the mind to think that there have been racially influenced responses to farm killings - such as the recent October march - and yet there are cases like this.
Finally, the UCDP condemns the existence and actions of the AWB squad and the security company. We condemn the threats against Cornelia de Wet, who has taken the plunge to spill the beans on these despicable deeds. We hope the police will take these investigations seriously and shed more light on other crimes that could possibly have been committed by these parties. Ke a leboga. [I thank you.]