Johannesburg - Bernadette Arlain Hall had to watch helplessly as four men beat her husband David for what felt like hours.
The couple had barely started work on their North West farm’s dairy when the gang attacked, one of the five men restraining her as she heard her husband’s shouts of agony.
Eventually, her bruised and battered husband was on his knees. She then witnessed one of the men shoot David in the head.
This was just a tiny snippet from Hall’s horrifying ordeal, told through tears at the South African Human Rights Commission (SAHRC) offices in Braamfontein on Monday.
For Afrikaner civil rights organisation AfriForum, Hall’s story is the epitome of a crime that they insist needs to be made a police priority.
AfriForum pleaded its case to the commission to recommend that farm attacks, like rhino poaching and cable theft, be deemed a priority crime.
The organisation has escalated its efforts to raise awareness around the problem by taking it to the commission, which in the past has said that such attacks do constitute a violation of human rights.
AfriForum deputy chairman Ernst Roets told the SAHRC panel that the SAPS needed to be held accountable for failing to recognise the seriousness of such a crime, which was often accompanied by brutality, was frequent within the agricultural community and contributed to the shrinking number of commercial farmers.
Roets said it was, statistically speaking, more dangerous to be a farmer than a police officer.
He said the police had failed since 2007 to release publicly crime statistics on farm attacks and farm murders, and politicians had relied on the recently unveiled Rural Safety Strategy to explain what the government is doing to lower these statistics.
Roets insisted that while the strategy was a good piece of legislation, it was not being implemented in most rural areas.
He told the commission that in Elliot, Eastern Cape, there was a single rural safety vehicle patrolling an area of 1 600km2.
AfriForum said it believed that special units and resources needed to be placed in rural areas to ensure the safety of farm owners, workers and other residents.
On the panel of experts dealing with AfriForum’s application is Dr Leon Wessels, a former SAHRC commissioner, who believes that his previous recommendations to the police regarding farm killings were followed “unenthusiastically”.
“The solution cannot be an adversarial relationship between civil society and the public sector,” said Wessels, who also believes that farmworker unions should be brought in to weigh in on the debate.
Police officials were in attendance at the commission on Monday, but it is understood that the office of the national police commissioner, General Riah Phiyega, will make its own submissions in the next month.
Crime analyst and former SAPS commissioner until the 2012/2013 financial year, Dr Chris de Kock, told the panel that the reason why farm crime statistics were no longer released was because of a simplification of the entire statistics-recording process.
He said that having crimes logged in such specific terms meant more standalone databases that make recording accurate data much more difficult.
De Kock also warned that if farm murders, which make up only 0.5 percent of murders each year, were prioritised, other minorities would come forward and insist on their own priority units.
The Star