Dan Roodt se brief aan die Sunday Times

Dear sir,

Your report (For Volk's sake) portrays the 300 people attending a meeting at the Vegkop battle terrain as of one mind, being "Afrikaner right-wing dinosaurs" supporting AWB leader Eugene Terre'Blanche. However, nothing could be further from the truth.

I was invited to talk about the community safety programme I am involved in, for which I was labelled a "right-wing ideologue". I suppose if you are an AK 47-wielding militiaman barking orders in English to a septuagenarian Afrikaner granny you are about to rape and murder (as happens almost every day), the Sunday Times would call you a "left-wing angel".

While I do not subscribe to the more racially charged pronouncements made by some of the speakers, they must surely be considered mild in comparison to the likes of "Kill a Boer, kill a farmer" regularly sung by ANC office-bearers or even the presidential "Bring me my machine gun".

Whatever happened to freedom of speech or does it only apply to those who are antagonistic to Afrikaners and the Afrikaans language? The use of the term "dinosaur" in itself implies that all Afrikaners should by now be dead or extinct and their continued presence in this country is offensive to the majority.

However, it is also true that, regarding racial polarisation, South Africa finds itself in the slipstream of Zimbabwe and Namibia where Sam Nujoma recently said during an election campaign: "Being in the company of whites is like having a poisonous snake in your bedroom." Nujoma also castigated those whites who criticised Robert Mugabe, saying: "Whoever meets an Englishman, should beat him to death."

Given the extreme violence raging in our country - a race war or genocide by anyone's definition - victims or relatives of victims are bound to react emotionally or make disparaging statements about those belonging to the perpetrator group.

South Africa is fast turning into a lunatic asylum where it is a greater crime to offend a black person's dignity than to kill a white. Just compare the media response to the Reitz video where four black women merrily drank orange juice in a mock iniaitiation ceremony with white Afrikaner students to the case of the black taxi driver who deliberately ran down 16-year old Bernadine Kruger on a scooter, killing her in a clear act of anti-white racism.

In order to come clean on race, the ANC government should publish all statistics on interracial crimes, including murder, rape and robbery. We need to know the race of both perpetrators and victims.

Only the truth will heal us.

Dan Roodt