Acknowledgements
The research was funded by the Secretariat for Safety and Security and the Argi Securitas Trust Fund. The publication was funded by the Hanns Seidel Foundation. The South African Police Service and the South African National Defence Force provided in-kind support.
Hanns
Seidel Foundation
Foreword
he incidence of violent crime on farms and smallholdings in South Africa is a T cause of great concern to both the farming community and South Africans in general. The seriousness of continued attacks against the farming community in South Africa, and the urgency of confronting the issue, led former president Nelson Mandela to convene a rural safety summit in October 1998 to formulate a comprehensive strategy to deal with the problem.
The summit aimed at reaching consensus around a process to deal with the issue of attacks against farms and smallholdings, as well as more general issues of rural insecurity. The summit also aimed to strengthen existing strategies dealing with rural crime.
One of the resolutions passed during the summit was to conduct research on the probable causes and motives for attacks on the farming community, and the effectiveness of the rural protection plan. The rural safety task team requested the Institute for Security Studies (ISS) to conduct such research in the Wierdabrug, Piet Retief and KwaZulu-Natal Midlands areas.
The research was made possible by the secretariat for safety and security and the Agri Securitas trust fund that financed the research. The South African Police Service (SAPS) and the South African National Defence Force (SANDF) provided in-kind support. The rural safety task team is grateful to all involved for making the research project possible.
The results of the research project, as contained in this monograph, will assist the security forces, agricultural organisations and farmers and smallholders to understand the phenomenon of attacks on farms and smallholdings. The research results will also enable the security forces to improve weaknesses in the rural protection plan.
Further research is planned in other parts of the country where the incidence of attacks against farms and smallholdings is high. This will further inform the security 2– Attacks on farms and smallholdings forces’ strategic and operational response to this reprehensible form of crime ravaging the country’s rural communities.
The research results in the form of this monograph will be distributed to all relevant roleplayers involved in the rural protection plan, such as the SAPS, the SANDF, agricultural organisations, farmers, business people and academics.
Lt-Col H J Boshoff RURAL SAFETY TASK TEAM Executive summary
n the three years between January 1997 and December 1999, some 361 people I were murdered in more than 2 000 attacks on farms and smallholdings in South Africa. Most of the attacks and murders occurred in Gauteng, Mpumalanga and KwaZulu-Natal.
At the request of the former president, Nelson Mandela, a rural protection plan was put into operation late in 1997. The objective of the plan is to encourage all roleplayers concerned with rural safety to work together in a co-ordinated manner, and engage in joint planning, action and monitoring to combat crime in the country’s rural areas.
In late 1999, a research project was undertaken to evaluate the rural protection plan’s effectiveness, and to develop a better understanding of the nature of crime on farms and smallholdings. The research was conducted in selected parts of the three provinces worst affected by attacks on farms and smallholdings.
It was found that the rural protection plan’s effectiveness to combat attacks on farms and smallholdings varied from area to area. In the country’s rural areas, where farms are far removed from the nearest police station or army base, the plan’s success depends primarily on strong civilian participation.
In the event of a farm attack, it is normally only the victim’s neighbours who can respond rapidly enough to apprehend the culprits. By the time the security forces arrive at the scene of a farm attack, the culprits have usually fled.
Given that the police and the army do not have a rapid response capability in the country’s rural areas, it is crucial that farmers and smallholders themselves – through the organised structure of the South African National Defence Force’s commando system or the police’s reservist system – take greater responsibility for their, and their community’s safety. 4– Attacks on farms and smallholdings
The police’s primary contribution in combating farm and smallholding attacks is in its detective and intelligence functions. In some areas, the detective service functions well and many farm and smallholding attackers have been apprehended and convicted by the courts. There are, however, other areas where the police is performing poorly in this regard. This is frequently the case where the perpetrators of farm and smallholding attacks operate from outside of the area where the attack takes place, and local detectives have to co-operate with their colleagues in other parts of the country. Interregional co-operation in the detective service needs to be improved.
An important weakness of the rural protection plan is that the police – and the security forces generally – have weak intelligence gathering capabilities. This is especially so in rural informal settlements and squatter camps from where farm and smallholding attacks are often planned, and to where many culprits flee after an attack. The security forces need to improve their intelligence gathering capabilities to be in a stronger position to pre-empt attacks on farms and smallholdings.
The rural protection plan is a good mechanism to drive and co-ordinate safety initiatives for the country’s farms and smallholdings. There are, however, aspects of the plan which can be improved. Moreover, while the plan provides a sound framework for rural safety, the individual components of the plan must be adapted to local needs and capacities. Crucially, the plan needs to be accepted by local communities. Without their ongoing participation in the plan, its effectiveness is limited. Introduction
he increasing incidence of violent crime on farms and smallholdings in South TAfrica has become a cause for great concern. Between January 1997 and December 1999, some 361 people were murdered in 2 030 separate attacks on farms and smallholdings. The number of recorded incidents of attacks on farms and smallholdings increased substantially between 1997 and 1998 (from 433 to 767 attacks, respectively), and levelled off during 1999 (830 attacks).1 The problem remains serious in several provinces of the country, particularly in Gauteng, Mpumalanga and KwaZulu-Natal (for a provincial breakdown of the number of attacks on farms and smallholdings between 1997 and 1999, and the number of people murdered in the attacks, see chapter 1 on the extent of attacks on farms and smallholdings).
The rural safety summit, held in October 1998, recognised the extent and complexity of the problem of attacks on farms and smallholdings, and the challenges to find solutions. Two of the needs referred to in the ten-point summit declaration were for more detailed information and research on the nature of the problem and the development of a comprehensive policy framework to ensure a sustained focus on the problem (for background information on the summit and a summary of the declaration adopted at the summit, see chapter 3).
To promote the goals of the summit, a farm safety research project was initiated in the second half of 1999. The research project was based on primary research consisting of in-depth interviews with the people directly affected by and concerned with farm and smallholding attacks in selected parts of the country. This included, inter alia, farmers and smallholders (both victims and non-victims), farm and smallholding workers, members of the security forces, private security company personnel, representatives of organised agriculture and community leaders. (The research project’s findings and recommendations are presented in section B as part of the evaluation of the rural protection plan.)
The broad objectives of the research project were to: South Africa’s provincial
Zimbabwe
Northern Province
e Botswana Mpumalanga Gauteng Mozambiqu North-West Swaziland
Namibia
Free State KwaZulu-Natal
Northern Cape
Eastern Cape
Western Cape 9
• assess government and civil society initiatives to reduce attacks on farms and smallholdings; • develop a better understanding of the nature of crime on farms and smallholdings; and • make recommendations to inform policy on rural safety and in particular the rural protection plan (see chapter 2 for information on the plan and its operational structure).
Because of time and resource constraints, the research project focused on three geographic areas:
• Piet Retief in the Eastern Highveld police area (Mpumalanga); • Greytown and Ixopo in the Midlands police area (KwaZulu-Natal); and •Wierdabrug in the Vaalrand police area (Gauteng).
These areas were chosen by the research team in consultation with representatives from the secretariat for safety and security, the National Operational Co-ordinating Committee (NOCOC), and organised agriculture. All three areas had experienced a high and increasing number of attacks on farms and smallholdings in the year prior to the research project. In respect of the Piet Retief and the KwaZulu-Natal Midlands areas, the research team concentrated on attacks on farms, while attacks on smallholdings formed the basis of the research conducted in the Wierdabrug area.
The research project was undertaken in partnership with the secretariat for safety and security, the South African Agricultural Union (now Agri South Africa), the South African National Defence Force (SANDF), the South African Police Service (SAPS), and the Institute for Security Studies (ISS). The project was funded by the Agri Securitas trust fund and the secretariat for safety and security.
The fieldwork and research were conducted by Martin Schönteich, a senior researcher with the Institute for Security Studies, Jonny Steinberg, a senior researcher with the Centre for the Study of Violence and Reconciliation, and Paul Thulare, an analyst in the monitoring and analysis unit of the secretariat for safety and security. The fieldwork for the research was conducted during October and November 1999. (For a list of the interview questions used in the project, see Appendix I.)
Further research is to be conducted in 2000 in the farming areas surrounding Tzaneen (Northern Province) and Klerksdorp (North-West). Moreover, an offender- based study will be conducted to identify some of the motives for the attacks on farms and smallholdings. This will involve interviews with imprisoned persons convicted of crimes related to farm and smallholding attacks. 10 – Attacks on farms and smallholdings
Notes
1At the time of writing, the Crime Information Analysis Centre (CIAC) had not released figures for the number of farm and smallholding attacks (and the number of murders committed during the attacks) for the period July-December 1999. The figures for this period have been obtained from NOCOC. NOCOC’s figures are operational statistics which have not been independently verified. They may differ slightly, therefore, from the figures the CIAC will release in due course for the July-December 1999 period. Moreover, the CIAC figures for the first six months of 1999 had not been finally verified at the time of writing and could change slightly in future CIAC reports.
For statistical purposes, NOCOC uses the following definition for farm and smallholding attacks: “Attacks on farms and smallholdings are acts aimed against the person of residents on farms and smallholdings, whether with the intent to murder, rape, rob or inflict bodily harm.” Moreover, NOCOC includes in its definition “all actions aimed at farming activities as a commercial concern, whether for motives related to ideological, labour disputes, land issues, revenge, grievances or racist concerns, for example intimidation.” Crimes which NOCOC includes in its definition of farm and smallholding attacks are: murder, attempted murder, rape, assault with the intent to do grievous bodily harm, robbery and armed robbery, vehicle hijacking, malicious damage to property where the damage exceeds R10 000, and arson. Cases relating to domestic violence, drunkenness or the ‘normal’ social interaction between people are excluded from NOCOC’s definition of attacks on farms and smallholdings. Section I The problem and the state’s response
his section provides the backdrop against which the research, presented in T this monograph, was carried out. It focuses mainly on the period from 1997 to 1999. General trends in attacks on farms and smallholdings (chapter 1) point towards a substantial increase in the number of attacks, as well as the number of attacks which resulted in murder. However, these increases are not uniform throughout the country. Most attacks perpetrated in 1999 occurred in Gauteng, Mpumalanga and KwaZulu-Natal, while the greatest increases between 1997 and 1999 occurred in Gauteng, the Western Cape and Mpumalanga. Most murders as a result of attacks on farms and smallholdings in 1999 were committed in Gauteng, KwaZulu-Natal and Mpumalanga, but the greatest increases in comparison with 1997 were reported in the Western Cape, the Northern Cape and KwaZulu-Natal.
In 1997, the South African Agricultural Union (SAAU) requested that something had to be done to address the rise in violent crime on farms and smallholdings (chapter 2). As a result, a task team convened by the Joint Security Staff visited all the provinces to consult with roleplayers. This brought about the rural protection plan, which was implemented in October 1997 at the request of the former president, Nelson Mandela. The objective of the plan is to encourage co-operation and co-ordination with regard to planning, action and monitoring to combat crime in the country’s rural areas. It includes the South African Police Service (SAPS), the South African National Defence Force (SANDF), organised agriculture, provincial and local government, as well as any person, group or organisation which can play a role and assist in promoting rural safety.
A rural safety summit (chapter 3) was convened in October 1998 to reach consensus on the process to deal with attacks on farms and smallholdings, as well as other issues of rural insecurity. The summit formulated a rural safety summit declaration. Following the summit, the rural safety task team formed 12 – Attacks on farms and smallholdings
three working groups to deal with communication, information and research; operational interventions; and rural safety policy.
As part of the backdrop to the research results presented in section II, six government reports on farm and smallholding attacks, covering the period between 1997 and 1999, were reviewed (chapter 4). In general, these reports provide valuable input in terms of their focus on:
• provincial breakdowns of farm and smallholding attacks; • comparisons with previous years; • security measures in place on victimised farms and smallholdings; • robbery and theft as the main motive for attacks, and the types of items generally taken; • age of victims; • numbers and ages of assailants; • victims’ familiarity or not with assailants; • the use of firearms in attacks; and • methods employed by assailants to flee from properties after attacks. Chapter 1 Attacks on farms and smallholdings
he police’s Crime Information Analysis Centre (CIAC) has collected statistics on T farm and smallholding attacks since January 1997. Over the three-year period between 1997 and 1999, the number of attacks have increased substantially. During 1997, some 433 attacks were recorded. This increased to 809 attacks in 1999.1 The number of people murdered as a result of the attacks also increased significantly from 84 in 1997, to 136 in 1999.2 The increase in the number of attacks between 1998 and 1999 (5.5%), however, was considerably lower than the increase in the number of attacks between 1997 and 1998 (77%). Moreover, the number of murders committed during the attacks in 1999 was slightly lower than the number of murders committed in 1998. Nevertheless, the murder rate in relation to the number of attacks on farms and smallholdings is high. In 1999, almost 17% of the attacks on farms and smallholdings resulted in a murder (figure 1).
Between 1997 and 1999, the number of attacks perpetrated monthly on farms and smallholdings varied considerably. Through the use of a six-month moving average (which plots the average number of attacks over the previous six months), it is apparent that the number of attacks increased consistently between mid-1997 and mid-1998, whereafter the number of attacks stabilised and even declined slightly during the latter part of 1999 (figure 2).
The incidence of attacks on farms and smallholdings is not uniform throughout the country. During 1999, most attacks on farms and smallholdings occurred in Gauteng (224 attacks), followed by Mpumalanga (169 attacks), and KwaZulu-Natal (141 attacks). The province with the fewest attacks in 1999 was the Northern Cape with 11 attacks (figure 3). The rate of increase in the number of attacks on farms and smallholdings between 1997 and 1999 also varied from province to province. Thus, Gauteng experienced a massive 579% increase in the number of attacks over this period. This was followed by the Western Cape (333%) and Mpumalanga (67%). The Free State and the Northern Province experienced no change in the number of attacks over this period (figure 4). 14 – Attacks on farms and smallholdings
Figure 1: Number of attacks on farms and smallholdings, and the number of murders committed during attacks, 1997-1999
900 809 800 767 700
600
500 433 400
300
200 142 136 100 84
0 1997 1998 1999
Attacks Murders
Figure 2: Number of attacks committed monthly on farms and smallholdings, 1997-1999 90
80
70
60
50
40
30
20 01-97 02-97 03-97 04-97 05-97 06-97 07-97 08-97 09-97 10-97 11-97 12-97 01-98 02-98 03-98 04-98 05-98 06-98 07-98 08-98 09-98 10-98 11-98 12-98 01-99 02-99 03-99 04-99 05-99 06-99 07-99 08-99 09-99 10-99 11-99 12-99 15
Figure 3: Number of attacks annually on farms and smallholdings per province, 1997-1999 250
224
200 182 169 164
150 141
110 107 101 100 93
73 60 63 63 53 51 51 44 48 44 50 39 33 36 26 12 11 6 7 0 Cape Cape Natal estern W ree State Gauteng Northern Province Northern F KwaZulu- North-West Eastern Cape Mpumalanga 1997 1998 1999
Figure 4: Percentage change in the number of attacks on farms and smallholdings, 1997-1999
600 579
500
400 333 300
200
100 67 66 57 32 31 0 0 0 Cape Natal Cape estern W ree State Gauteng Province Northern Northern F KwaZulu- North-West Eastern Cape Mpumalanga 16 – Attacks on farms and smallholdings
Figure 5: Number of murders committed monthly during attacks on farms and smallholdings, 1997-1999 20
18
16
14
12
10
8
6
4
2 01-97 02-97 03-97 04-97 05-97 06-97 07-97 08-97 09-97 10-97 11-97 12-97 01-98 02-98 03-98 04-98 05-98 06-98 07-98 08-98 09-98 10-98 11-98 12-98 01-99 02-99 03-99 04-99 05-99 06-99 07-99 08-99 09-99 10-99 11-99 12-99
Figure 6: Number of murders committed annually during attacks on farms and smallholdings per province, 1997-1999
45 42 40 36 35 31 30 30
24 25 23
20 19
15 13 13 12 12 11 10 9 9999 9 9 77 7 6 5 4 2 1 0 0 Cape Cape Natal estern W ree State Gauteng Province Northern Northern F KwaZulu- North-West Eastern Cape Mpumalanga 1997 1998 1999 17
Figure 7: Proportion of farm and smallholding attacks resulting in a murder, per province, 1997-1999
30 27.6 26.7 25 23.5
20 19.5 18.1 17.1 15.1 15 13.9 13.3
10
5
0 Cape Cape Natal estern W ree State Gauteng Province Northern Northern F KwaZulu- North-West Eastern Cape Mpumalanga
Between 1997 and 1999, the number of murders committed monthly during attacks on farms and smallholdings also varied considerably from one month to the next. The six-month moving average shows a clear increase in the number of murders from mid-1997 to mid-1998. There is a decline in the number of murders in the latter half of 1998, after which the level of murders stabilises (figure 5).
During 1999, Gauteng experienced the highest number of murders (36) committed during attacks on farms and smallholdings, followed by KwaZulu-Natal (31), and Mpumalanga (23). During 1998, KwaZulu-Natal experienced the highest number of murders committed during attacks on farms and smallholdings, followed by Gauteng and Mpumalanga (figure 6).
Between 1997 and 1999, the Western Cape experienced the highest level of murders measured as a proportion of the number of attacks on farms and smallholdings over this period. Thus, between 1997 and 1999, 27.6% of all recorded attacks on farms and smallholdings in the Western Cape resulted in a murder. In the Northern Cape, it was 26.7%, and in KwaZulu-Natal, 23.5%. Lowest was the Eastern Cape and 18 – Attacks on farms and smallholdings
Mpumalanga where less than 14% of all recorded attacks on farms and smallholdings between 1997 and 1999 resulted in a murder.
Appendix II provides information on the number of attacks perpetrated monthly on farms and smallholdings, and the number of murders committed during the attacks, per province for the period January 1997 to December 1999.
Notes
1 See endnote 1, chapter 1. 2The South African Agricultural Union (now Agri South Africa) started collecting statistics on farm attacks, and the number of people murdered during the attacks, from 1991. Their figures, however, are not strictly comparable to those of the CIAC. The CIAC, for example, includes attacks on smallholdings in its statistics. According to Agri South Africa, the number of farm attacks (with the number of people murdered during the attacks in brackets) between 1991 and 1996 were as follows: 1991: 327 attacks (66 murders); 1992: 365 attacks (63); 1993: 442 attacks (84); 1994: 442 attacks (92); 1995: 551 attacks (121); 1996: 468 attacks (109). Chapter 2 The rural protection plan
t a February 1997 meeting of the National Operational Co-ordinating A Committee (NOCOC) – which co-ordinates SAPS and SANDF activities at national level – the South African Agricultural Union (SAAU) requested that something should be done to prevent the escalating number of attacks on the farming community. The SAAU felt that the security structures existing at the time were not functioning effectively. It specifically indicated that follow-up actions by security force personnel after farm attacks were largely unco-ordinated which hampered the arrest of suspects.1
In response, the Joint Security Staff at the time identified violent crimes against the farming community as a specific crime tendency which required particular operational attention. The Joint Security Staff ordered that a steering group on rural protection should be established. The group consisted of various roleplayers, such as the SAPS, the SANDF and organised agriculture.
In the months following the NOCOC meeting, a task team was appointed which visited all the provinces and spoke to approximately 400 roleplayers (farmers, farm workers, security force personnel, organised agriculture, business people, and others). The findings and recommendations of the task team brought about the rural protection plan which was implemented in October 1997 at the request of the former president, Nelson Mandela.2
The object of the rural protection plan is to encourage all roleplayers concerned with rural safety to work together in a co-ordinated manner, and engage in joint planning, action and monitoring to combat crime in the country’s rural areas.3
Moreover, the rural protection plan seeks to co-ordinate the operational activities of all relevant roleplayers effectively within the priority committees for rural protection which were established as part of the national operational co- ordinating mechanism on all levels. These are the SAPS, the SANDF, organised 20 – Attacks on farms and smallholdings agriculture, provincial and local government and any other person, group or organisation which can play an active role in, or support the rural protection plan.4
National Operational Co-ordinating Mechanism structure National Operational Co-ordinating Committee (NOCOC) headed by SAPS commissioner C A Pruis and SANDF general D Ferreira
Provincial Operational Co-ordinating Committees (POCOCs) headed by SAPS commissioners and SANDF general officers commanding of regional task forces
Area Operational Co-ordinating Committees (AOCOCs) headed by SAPS area commissioners and SANDF army group commanders
Ground Level Operational Co-ordinating Committees (GOCOCs) headed by SAPS station commissioners and SANDF commando commanders
National Operational Co-ordinating Mechanism structure
Every committee (NOCOC, POCOC, AOCOC and GOCOC) has its own priority committees. There are, for example, priority committees on rural protection, gang violence, taxi violence and political violence. The priority committees on rural protection were added in October 1998. They are responsible for the operational planning and implementation of the rural protection plan.5 Other functions of the priority committees on rural safety include:
• co-ordinating all security related actions relating to rural protection; • identifying factors that have a negative influence on the safety of the farming community; and • distributing relevant information and providing feedback on the rural protection plan to all relevant roleplayers.6
The commando structure
At the beginning of 2000, there were 186 commando units (officially called the ‘territorial reserve force system’). There are approximately 82 000 commando members deployed in South Africa, covering 98% of the country.7 21
The commando structure
Chief: Joint Operations (SANDF)
Regional SANDF task forces (one per province)
SANDF army groups (two per province, except KwaZulu-Natal and Gauteng with three each)
Commando units (186 commando units in the country)
Members of the public can belong to one of three types of commando structures:
• Area-bound reaction force commando members: These are generally staffed by people who live in the country’s towns and cities. In an emergency, the local commando to which they belong, can call them up for commando duty. Having been called, such commando members are issued with a rifle and uniform, which they have to return once they are booked off duty. These commando members are paid for the hours they work. Area-bound reaction force commando members are trained jointly with police reservists to conduct patrols, roadblocks, follow-up operations, cordon and search operations, and farm visits.8
• Home and hearth protection reaction force commando members: These are staffed by farmers and smallholders, and their workers. Members of this type of commando are responsible for assisting other farmers and smallholders in their district only if a farm or smallholding attack has occurred. Such commando groups then go into action (for example, setting up roadblocks or searching an area) until the area-bound reaction force commando members arrive on the scene and takes over from them.
• House and hearth protection commando members: These are staffed by farmers and smallholders, and their workers. Members of this type of commando are not 22 – Attacks on farms and smallholdings
called up, but are responsible for protecting themselves and their own farm or smallholding if under attack. Such commando members are issued with a military rifle only if they do not possess their own rifle.
Notes
1 J M J Visser, Violent attacks on farmers in South Africa, ISSUP Bulletin 3/98, 1998, pp 11-12. 2 Interview with Lt Col H J Boshoff, National Operational Co-ordinating Committee, Pretoria, 20 April 1999. 3 Visser, op cit, p 12. 4 Interview with Lt Col H J Boshoff, National Operational Co-ordinating Committee, Pretoria, 20 April 1999. 5 Interview with Lt Col H J Boshoff, National Operational Co-ordinating Committee, Pretoria, 17 February 2000. 6 National Operational Co-ordinating Committee document, National Operational Coordinating Committee crime prevention and response service, 29 September 1998, NOCOC/3/9, p 5. 7 Letter from Col B J Schoeman, Senior Staff Officer, Operational Planning (Land), South African National Defence Force, 3 March 2000. 8 NOCOC/3/9, op cit, p 6. Chapter 3 The rural safety summit
he seriousness of continued violent attacks against the farming community in T South Africa and the urgency of confronting the issue led the former president, Nelson Mandela, to convene a rural safety summit to formulate a comprehensive strategy to deal with the problem.
The summit, which took place on 10 October 1998, aimed at achieving consensus around a future process to deal with the issue of attacks against farms and smallholdings, as well as more general issues of rural insecurity. The summit also aimed at strengthening existing strategies to deal with rural crime, as well as the development of further action plans.
In the run-up to the summit, an attempt was made not only to include as many roleplayers as possible in the process, but also to get some agreement around a draft declaration. These were presented to participants at the summit and debated in some detail. Amendments to the declaration were made and a final declaration was adopted. A summary of the declaration follows below.
Rural safety summit declaration
I We from all sectors of the farming and rural community, and government and business, unconditionally condemn the spate of senseless killings and other forms of criminal activity affecting farming and rural communities. We are collectively determined to bring an and to these crimes.
II We recognise that the causes of attacks on farming and rural communities specifically, and the cause of rural crime more generally, are complex and multi- faceted. The summit therefore recognises that a security approach alone will not solve the problem of crime in the rural areas in the longer term. Thorough research into the probable causes and motives needs to be completed in order to develop proper preventative strategies. 24 – Attacks on farms and smallholdings
III Of immediate importance in curbing attacks on the farming and rural community is effective law enforcement. The summit accepts that the rural protection plan should be utilised as the operational strategy to combat and prevent violent crimes against farming and rural communities. All legitimate private sector initiatives aimed at protecting the farming and rural communities should be incorporated within the framework of the rural protection plan and its structures.
IV We agree that all initiatives to ensure greater safety and security, in particular the rural protection plan, need to be more inclusive of all people in the farming and rural communities by inter alia strengthening and expanding the commandos and police reservists so that they become more accessible to the whole rural community.
VThe summit is of the view that organised agriculture, agri-business, non- governmental organisations and community organisations, government and other relevant roleplayers must co-operate where possible and appropriate in mobilising resources to meet the identified needs aimed at enhancing rural safety.
VI Government commits itself to continued improvements including adequate funding and harmonisation in the operation and functioning of the criminal justice system to ensure an effective system of deterrence in rural areas.
VII The summit recognises that clarity is required in relation to a number of legal issues, especially with regards to the rights of victims and potential victims in the farming and rural community.
VIII Given the range of causal factors and motives contributing to attacks on the farming community, it is recognised that an ongoing process of information collection and analysis must be conducted. Well analysed information has to be gathered to assist with the planning of both preventative and law enforcement responses, as well as countering perceptions as to the causes of attacks on the farming and rural community. The causes for attacks on farms and smallholdings should be more scientifically researched by inter alia academic institutions.
IX We recognise that, to ensure long-term safety in rural and farming communities, a sustained focus is required. We therefore commit ourselves as roleplayers both in and outside of government to collaborate with the department for safety and security in the development of a long-term policy framework for rural safety and security. This framework will include the determining of overall capacity and resource needs, as well as the roles and responsibilities of a range of 25
government departments and other roleplayers in ensuring safer rural communities.
XThe spiritual leaders of the nation need to unite in humility and prayer to revive the moral values and standards which will again condemn lawlessness of all kind, create social pressure against criminality and reward decency.
Rural safety task team
After the summit, the rural safety task team constituted itself from the original parties who had contributed towards organising the summit. The task team has to give effect to the resolutions adopted at the summit. Three task team working groups were formed.1
Working group 1: Communication, information and research This working group is responsible for ensuring that all parties to the summit refrain from inflammatory statements, while communicating a single series of messages to the public. The group is also responsible for initiating research in relation to rural safety and security, and co-ordinating the collection and collation of information and statistics relating to incidents of attacks on farms and smallholdings.
Working group 2: Operational interventions (rural protection plan) Improvements to the rural protection plan as suggested by the summit are considered and implemented within this working group. This is done by, inter alia, recruiting people from all communities into the police’s reservist structures and the army’s commando system. Some effort has also gone into improving intelligence collection in an attempt to pre-empt attacks on farms and smallholdings. Specific operations are also co-ordinated through this working group.2 In essence, the working group constitutes those operational roleplayers engaged in rural protection duties under the NOCOC.
Working group 3: Rural safety policy Issues that require longer term policy development fall under the auspices of (or are at least co-ordinated by) this working group. Specifically, the focus is on the development of a longer term policy for rural safety which includes inputs from across the spectrum of interested roleplayers.
Notes
1 See M Shaw, A grim harvest: Countering attacks on farms and smallholdings, Crime & Conflict 15, August 1999, pp 5-8. 26 – Attacks on farms and smallholdings
2 For example, Operation Octopus in Vaalrand (Gauteng) in March 1999 involved co-operation between the SAPS and the SANDF, and included visibility operations, vehicle control points, search operations and farm visits. Chapter 4 Review of government reports
Attacks on farms and smallholdings, January-June 1999, CIAC report
he report1 provides a provincial breakdown of the number of farms and T smallholdings that were attacked, and the number of people who were murdered in the attacks, for the period January to June 1999. The report also provides a comparison of the number of attacks on farms and smallholdings (and the number of people murdered) during the first six months of the years 1997 to 1999.
Other relevant findings and comments contained in the report include:
• During the first half of 1999 (the time period covered by the report), attacks on farms and smallholdings were escalating at a rate greater than the increase in crime in South Africa as a whole. • During the first six months of 1999, the number of murders committed during attacks on farms and smallholdings did not escalate at the same rate as the number of reported attacks. However, the number of murders committed during such attacks increased by 4.5% between the first six months of 1998 and the first six months of 1999. This increase was almost four times as high as the annual increase in the overall murder rate in South Africa between 1997 and 1998. • While most attacks on farms and smallholdings occur in a random fashion, “a glance at the distribution of attacks both in time and in space does seem to suggest a pattern in at least some areas. It appears as if attacks sometimes tend to occur in clusters, which might indicate that at least some of these attacks could be ascribed to criminal gangs targeting a specific area.”2 The report, however, does caution that the CIAC’s limited research capacity does not permit more than a “superficial conclusion in this regard.” • In a few cases, domestic workers supplied information to criminals regarding the layout and contents of homesteads. Some of the attacks were well planned and preceded by thorough reconnaissance. 28 – Attacks on farms and smallholdings
• In some cases, police officials were being investigated for having colluded in the attacks. At the time of the report’s compilation, the results of these investigations were still outstanding. •The perception that only white farmers or farm owners were attacked, was incorrect. Criminals targeting farms do not appear to be distinguishing between their victims’ skin colour. • Many of the attacks continue to be of an extremely brutal nature. •The police service had achieved a generally high success rate in apprehending suspects involved in attacks on members of the farming community, and the courts had imposed heavy sentences on persons convicted of farm attacks.
Attacks on farms and smallholdings, November 1998 – 15 March 1999, Joint Operations report
Between November 1998 and 15 March 1999, according to this report,3 some 284 attacks on farms and smallholdings were reported to the NOCOC. Of these, the SANDF’s commando units were involved in 73 incidents, of which 55 provided sufficient information to the Chief Joint Operations for analysis in the report.
The report found that farmers and smallholders who were members of the state’s security structures had a higher chance of survival and offered more effective resistance. Thus, 21 (38%) of the attacked farms and smallholdings analysed by the report were occupied by active commando members or SAPS reservists. Overall, 22 persons (out of a total of 113 victims in all the attacks) were murdered in 19 separate attacks on farms and smallholdings. In seven separate attacks, ten attackers (out of a total of 224 suspected attackers) were killed by the farmers or smallholders under attack, or by members of the security forces. In contrast, in attacks where the victims were commando members, only one farmer was killed. Moreover, in 20% of the attacks where the farms or smallholdings under attack were occupied by commando members, the attack was repelled with loss of life among the attackers.
The report further found that:
• In 58% of the attacks analysed, inadequate security measures existed on the attacked farms and smallholdings.4 On the remainder of the farms and smallholdings (where adequate security measures existed), almost a quarter (22%) did not utilise the available security measures. • Most of the attacks (56%) analysed occurred inside the houses on the farms or smallholdings. A further 18% occurred outside the houses; 16% occurred in farm stalls or small shops located on the farms and smallholdings; and 9% occurred at the gate – or on the road – leading to the farms and smallholdings. 29
•The motive for most of the attacks (80%) was theft or robbery of property, with firearms, vehicles and cash the most sought after items. In 18% of the attacks, the motive was revenge (mainly to do with past labour disputes). • In the attacks analysed, all the victims of the attacks were aged between 49 and 84 years, with 69% of the victims older than 60 years. •Virtually all (91%) of the attacks involved three or more assailants. • Of the suspects apprehended or killed as a result of the attacks, all were between the ages of 16 and 31 years, and 82% were younger than 21 years. • In 76% of the incidents analysed, at least one of the attackers was known to his victims. In 20% of the incidents, all the attackers were known to their victims. • In 56% of the incidents, the attackers were armed with firearms, followed by blunt objects (25%), and knives or other weapons (18%).
Attacks on farms and smallholdings, number 1 of 1999, CIAC report
The report5 provides a detailed provincial breakdown on the number of farms and smallholdings that were attacked during 1998. The number of murders committed during attacks on farms and smallholdings in 1998 is also provided in the report.
The report presents the results of a survey of 207 Eastern Cape farms, conducted during August and September 1998. The survey was conducted by the CIAC in the Eastern Cape, in co-operation with crime prevention components of the SAPS. The survey focused mainly on elderly people living on farms as older people are more likely to be targeted by criminals attacking farm residents. Some of the survey’s findings were as follows:
• Of the respondents, 60% either did not own a dog or had dogs which ‘did not command respect’ (ie, the fieldworkers did not feel intimidated or frightened by the dogs). •Of the farmers’ homes covered by the survey, 55% did not have security gates. • In 56% of the houses surveyed, the fieldworkers (who did not announce their visit before the time) found that the security gates or doors leading into the homes were unlocked or open. • Of the houses surveyed, 55% did not have burglar guards on their windows, and 39% did not have external lighting. • Of the farmers interviewed, 81% did not carry a firearm with them. However, more than half of the farm houses surveyed contained five or more firearms. •Of the farms surveyed, 17% did not have any means of communication with the outside world other than a Telkom landline telephone. Most farms (56%) had a 29 mHz radio and just over a quarter (26%) were connected to the Marnet/Nearnet radio system. 30 – Attacks on farms and smallholdings
The survey concluded that most farmers surveyed were not sufficiently safety conscious in respect of their own personal security, and the security of their farmhouse and its inhabitants. “The answer to the threat [against farmers] will have to be found in increasing security consciousness among potential victims and close cooperation among all concerned, as well as improved information and intelligence gathering.”6
Attacks on farms and smallholdings, number 2 of 1998, CIAC report
The report7 deals with the period prior to the rural safety summit held in October 1998. The report analyses the attacks – and the murders committed during such attacks – on farms and smallholdings which occurred during the first six months of 1998.
The report warns that the police’s crime code list does not provide for a category of crime defined as ‘attacks on farms and smallholdings’. The crimes committed during such attacks are recorded under their relevant crime codes, such as murder, robbery, or rape. The crime code list also does not define, nor make provision for, the occupation of crime victims, or the type of premises on which crimes occur. The CIAC’s statistics relating to attacks on farms and smallholdings are consequently dependent on ad hoc reports from police stations. Moreover, the CIAC farm and smallholding attack figures do not include crimes committed against members of the farming community which did not occur on farms or smallholdings. The statistics reflect only those crimes which were committed on farms and smallholdings.
The report provides the CIAC’s definition of a farm or smallholding attack:
Acts aimed against persons or residents, of workers at and/or visitors to farms and smallholdings, whether with the intent to murder, rape, rob or inflict bodily harm (cases relating to domestic violence, drunkenness or resulting from commonplace social interaction between people – where victims and offenders are often known to one another – are excluded). Moreover, all actions aimed at disrupting farming activities as a commercial concern, whether for motives related to ideology, labour disputes, land issues, revenge, grievances or racist concerns like, for example, intimidation.8
Crimes committed and motives The report looked at attacks on farms and smallholdings in the first half of 1998, and came to the following conclusions:
• Armed robbery was the most common crime (committed during 58% of all attacks over this period), followed by attempted murder (21%), murder (17%), and burglary (15%). 31
• In respect of property robbed or stolen in attacks during the first half of 1998, cash was taken most frequently (in 38% of reported attacks), followed by electrical appliances (30%), firearms (28%),9 and vehicles (24%). • In over a quarter of the reported incidents (27%), nothing was stolen or robbed. There were a number of explanations for this. For example, the victims offered resistance (22% of the cases where nothing was taken); the suspects were surprised at the scene of the crime (14%); and the criminals had the intention to commit non-property crimes such as rape (8%). However, in 26% of the cases, no reason was found why nothing had been robbed or stolen during the attacks.10 • No pattern in terms of preferences for the day of the week when attacks occurred, could be discerned. However, attacks were more prevalent at certain times. Thus, 25% of attacks occurred between 8h00 and 12h00, and 44% between 16h00 and 24h00. •A total of 58% of the victims were attacked inside their homes, and 45% outside their homes.11 In almost two-thirds of the incidents where victims were attacked inside their homes, the attackers gained unforced entry into their victims’ homes. •In just over a quarter (26%) of the incidents, the victims were ambushed by criminals lying in wait for them. In such cases, the attackers were hiding in the farmyard (in 28% of cases where the victims were ambushed), inside the homesteads (20%), at farm entrances (17%), and in outhouses (11%). • In about two-thirds of the incidents, the attackers used firearms – primarily handguns – to commit their crimes. • In 51% of the incidents, the attackers fled the crime scene on foot, followed by using the vehicles of their victims (24%), and using their own vehicles (9%). • According to the investigating officers of the attacks, “financial gain and/or economic gain” was the motive for 83% of the attacks. In a further 3.4% of the cases, the motive was murder, followed by theft of a firearm (2.8%), rape and revenge (1.9%). In 6% of the cases, the motive was unknown.
The report’s author analysed questionnaires completed by detectives investigating attacks on farms and smallholdings during the first half of 1998. The questionnaires required detectives to provide their reasons why the attacked farms and smallholdings were selected for attack. A large number of detectives indicated that they did not know of a reason why the farms and smallholdings were chosen by criminals.
The majority of questionnaires which provided a suspected reason stated that the attacks were related to the fact that:
Residents of farms and smallholdings are perceived to be soft targets. In order of importance, other suspected reasons referred to the existence of shops or farm 32 – Attacks on farms and smallholdings
stalls on the premises, that a personal dispute existed between the perpetrators and the victims involved, the financial status of the owner, information that cash could be robbed on a specific farm, that the suspects were familiar with the layout of the farm involved, the fact that the premises were isolated or that bad security measures existed, or that the property concerned bordered on an informal settlement.12
The report sought to determine whether any relationship could be established between victims of farm and smallholding attacks and the perpetrators of such attacks. In 4.5% of the incidents, it was found that one or more of the suspects involved in the attacks were employed by their victim(s) at the time of the attack. In another 2.2% of the incidents, the suspects had been employed by their victim(s) in the past. In 1% of the incidents, the suspects were relatives of their victims’ employees. The report concludes that the “vast majority of attacks are committed by strangers who are unknown to the victims, which means that farm attacks can be considered as mainly belonging to the category of stranger crimes.”13
Victims’ particulars Some 510 people were victimised in the 357 attacks on farms and smallholdings which occurred during the first half of 1998. The following categories of victims were identified by the report:
• Most (46%) of the victims owned the property where they were attacked; 23% were workers on the property; 4% worked on the property as managers;19% were relatives of one of the above groups; and 8% were guests on the property. • Most (69%) of the victims were white, followed by blacks (23%), Asians (5%), and coloureds (3%). Of the murdered victims, 74% were white, 17% black, 3% Asian, and 6% coloured. • Of the victims, 13% were murdered. Of those murdered, 71% were older than 50 years of age. A further 38% of the victims were injured during the attacks (of which more than half sustained serious injuries). • Most (58%) of the victims were male. •A third (33%) of the victims were aged 60 years or older. A further 33% were aged between 40 and 59 years, and 27% of the victims were aged 20 to 39 years.
Accessibility of attacked farms and smallholdings The report’s author analysed the relationship between attacked farms and smallholdings, and their distance from the nearest public road.
It emerged that just over a third of the attacks (36%) occurred on farms and smallholdings which were situated less than one kilometre from the nearest public 33 road. In a further 38% of the attacks, the distance was between one and four kilometres; in 13% of the attacks the distance was between five and nine kilometres; in 4.5% of the attacks the distance was between ten and 14 kilometres; and in 3% of the attacks the distance was 15 or more kilometres.14
Suspects involved in the attacks The report found that 894 suspects were known to be involved in the 357 attacks on farms and smallholdings in the first half of 1998. The following findings were made in respect of the suspects involved in the attacks:
•A single suspect was involved in 17% of the incidents; two suspects in 26% of the incidents; three suspects in 22% of the incidents; four suspects in 11% of the incidents; five suspects in 6% of the incidents; six suspects in 5% of the incidents; and more than six suspects in 1% of the incidents. In 11% of the incidents, the number of suspects could not be established. • At the time the report was written at the end of 1998, some 342 suspects had been arrested and charged in connection with 145 attacks on farms and smallholdings. Of the arrested suspects, 97% were South African citizens and 3% were foreign nationals. • Of the arrested suspects, 93% were black and 7% were coloured. All the arrested suspects were male. • Of the arrested suspects, 22% were under the age of 20 years; 55% were aged 20 to 29 years; 17% were aged 30 to 39 years. The remainder (6%) were older than 40 years, or their ages were unknown. • Most of the arrested suspects (70%) were unemployed at the time of their arrest. A further 14% were labourers, and 7% school pupils.
CIAC Quarterly crime report, number 3 of 1998
The report15 provides a detailed provincial breakdown of the number of farms and smallholdings that were attacked during 1997. The number of murders committed during attacks on farms and smallholdings in 1997 is also provided in the report.
The report provides a detailed analysis of the attacks that occurred during 1997. This includes, inter alia, the types of crimes committed during attacks on farms and smallholdings; the modus operandi employed by the attackers during the attacks; the motives associated with the attacks; information on the victims of the attacks; the accessibility of the attacked farms and smallholdings; and information on the suspects involved in the attacks. The findings of the report do not differ markedly from those contained in report number 2 of 1998 which analysed the attacks on farms and smallholdings that occurred during the first half of 1998 (see above). 34 – Attacks on farms and smallholdings
Attacks on farms and smallholdings, Britz report
The report16 contains the findings of investigations conducted between January and May 1998 on farm and smallholding attacks. The investigation was undertaken by the head and deputy head of the police’s serious and violent crimes unit, assistant commissioner Suiker Britz and director Errol Seyisi, respectively.
The report deals with 305 attacks on farms and smallholdings that occurred during the first five months of 1998. To establish the motives for these attacks, 191 suspects arrested in connection with the attacks investigated were “subjected to thorough interrogation and were questioned by different role players.”17
The report’s authors also investigated information received from the state’s intelligence agencies, the South African Agricultural Union (now called Agri South Africa), and the public. Use was also made of informants to gather information on farm and smallholding attacks and the perpetrators behind them.
The report came, inter alia, to the following conclusions:
• “Irrefutable evidence exists that the motive for approximately 99% of the attacks on farms and smallholdings is common criminality, with robbery being the prime incentive ... at this stage no evidence is available to suggest that any sinister forces are responsible for the attacks. However, there have been a few incidents where racial tension, dismissals and conflict between employer and employee played a contributing role in the attacks.”18 •A distinction has to be made between attacks on farms and attacks on smallholdings. A large proportion of farm attackers live in the vicinity of the farm (or even on the attacked farm itself), or have friends or relatives who live on or near the farm chosen by the attackers. Many of the people who attack smallholdings live in informal settlements in the vicinity of the smallholdings they attack. •Farmers are considered a ‘soft’ target because of their isolated position. This is not the case with most smallholders who usually live close to cities and towns.
Notes
1 J C Strauss, Attacks on farms and smallholdings 1 January – 30 June 1999, Crime Information Analysis Centre, September 1999, Pretoria. 2Ibid, p 9. 3 Brig-Gen J F Lusse, Research report: Attacks on farms and smallholdings: November 1998 – 15 March 1999, Chief of the South African National Defence Force (Joint Operations), March 1999, Pretoria. 35
4 By ‘inadequate security measures’, the report means no or ineffective burglar bars before windows/doors; no outdoor lighting; and no or an ineffective early warning system such as dogs, geese, or bells on security fences/gates. 5 J C Strauss, Attacks on farms and smallholdings, number 1 of 1999, Crime Information Analysis Centre, May 1999, Pretoria. 6 Ibid, p 17. 7 J C Strauss, Attacks on farms and smallholdings, number 2 of 1998, Crime Information Analysis Centre, December 1998, Pretoria. 8 Ibid, p 2. 9 In most incidents, more than one firearm were taken. Overall, 185 firearms were taken in 98 incidents where a theft or robbery of a firearm(s) occurred. 10 J C Strauss, Attacks on farms and smallholdings, number 2 of 1998, op cit, p 15. 11 Adds up to more than 100% as some victims were attacked both inside and outside their homes during the same incident. 12 J C Strauss, Attacks on farms and smallholdings, number 2 of 1998, op cit, p 18. 13 Ibid, pp 20-21. Care needs to be taken, however, in the analysis of these figures. The figures refer to known suspects only. In many cases, victims did not get a proper look at their attackers, and in others, no witnesses survived the attack to identify the suspects involved. 14 In 5% of the cases, the distance between the attacked farm or smallholding and the nearest public road was unknown. 15 The incidence of serious crime, January to June 1998, Quarterly Crime Report 3/1998, Crime Information Analysis Centre, September 1998, Pretoria, pp 20-42. 16 K J Britz & M E Seyisi, Attacks on farms and smallholdings, August 1998. 17 Ibid, p 9. 18 Ibid, p 18. Section II Evaluation of the rural protection plan
ection II contains the results of the research undertaken to evaluate the S functioning of the rural protection plan in four areas in three of the provinces most subjected to attacks and murders on farms and smallholdings: the Piet Retief area in Mpumalanga (chapter 5); the Greytown and Ixopo areas in KwaZulu- Natal (chapters 6 and 7); and the Wierdabrug area in Gauteng (chapter 8).
Apart from the myriad problems with the rural protection plan that were identified by the research, three main points emerge which are crucial to the plan’s success (chapter 9):
•The high participation of farmers in the security cell system leads to an excellent rapid reaction capability. •The presence of a strong provincial agricultural union, as well as an army group willing to play a role in mediating and resolving conflict contributes strongly to the plan’s success. •The effective co-ordination of the various security agencies and their responses is crucial to the plan’s effectiveness in addressing attacks on farms and smallholdings.
Recommendations (chapter 10) are made in this section with regard to a number of issues that were identified as problematic. These include, among others:
• publicity to ensure that farmers and smallholders are adequately informed about the rural protection plan; • improvements in terms of intelligence and detective work; • better screening of potential farm and smallholding employees; • the involvement of farm and smallholding employees in security structures; •a devolution of responsibility from government to include roleplayers on the ground; and • the identification of local solutions to local problems. Eastern Mpumalanga
Nelspruit
Belfast Waterval-Boven Barberton Middelburg
Carolina
Breyten
Bethal Ermelo Wesselton SWAZILAND
ton Piet Retief
Sulphur Springs Commondale Charlestown Lüneburg Volksrust KWAZULU-NATAL Chapter 5 The Piet Retief area – Mpumalanga
The Piet Retief police district
he Piet Retief police district spans 4 000 square kilometres of Mpumalanga’s T Eastern Highveld region. Situated in the south-eastern corner of Mpumalanga, the district’s eastern boundary is 30 kilometres from the international border between South Africa and Swaziland. Eighty kilometres to the south-east is the provincial border separating Mpumalanga from KwaZulu-Natal.
There are approximately 300 small and medium-sized family-owned farms in the Piet Retief police district, as well as two large forestry plantations, owned by Sappi and Mondi, respectively. In the 1950s, the vast majority of family-owned farms specialised in maize production, but all farmers in the area have diversified their output considerably during the last four decades. Cattle, and to a lesser extent pigs and chickens, are farmed in the area. Several dozen farms in the Piet Retief police district sport small forestry plantations. A handful specialises exclusively in forestry. (As is explained later, the widespread introduction of timber farming has reshaped the local labour market, demographic movement and the physical terrain considerably, and forms an import backdrop to the nature and incidence of armed robbery on Piet Retief’s farms.) Sheep farming was common in the 1970s and 1980s, but prolific stock theft in the area resulted in the near extinction of sheep farming on the Eastern Highveld as a whole.
The majority of the 300 or so farms in the area are family businesses that have been passed down from father to son over three or four generations. Approximately 160 of Piet Retief’s farms are owned by German-speaking farmers whose ancestors settled on the Eastern Highveld in the late 19th century. There has been remarkable continuity in this close-knit, German-speaking community during the last 120 years. While descendants of German-speaking Piet Retief farming families periodically leave the area to settle in Gauteng – usually in the small German-speaking 40 – Attacks on farms and smallholdings communities on the East Rand – the vast majority of farms are owned and run by the descendants of the original German settlers.1
Local farmers and security personnel describe the rural labour market in the Piet Retief district as ‘traditional farm labour’. The Mthethwa chieftaincy – approximately 8 000 people – inhabits 27 farms and surrounding areas between Piet Retief and Luneberg. The Hlatswayo chieftaincy – approximately 10 000 people – inhabits 22 farms and surrounding areas in the Commondale district to the south of Piet Retief. Both groups have been in the area since the mid-19th century and both constitute the bulk of farm labour in the southern part of the Piet Retief district. Since the late 19th century, black settlements in the area have exchanged labour in return for grazing land. It is difficult to determine precisely when wage labour was introduced into the area. There is a consensus among the labourers interviewed that, as late as the 1960s, labour was exchanged exclusively for grazing land, not for wages. Some place the introduction of wages into the local economy in the mid-1970s, some in the early 1980s.
The vast majority of young men who grow up in traditional farm labour families in the Piet Retief area migrate to Gauteng, almost invariably to the East Rand, in early adulthood. Some settle there, others return to the Piet Retief area with spouses and family.
The relationship between farmers and traditional farm labour appears to be, despite claims to the contrary by local farmers and security personnel, increasingly hostile and distrustful, and sometimes violent.
Traditional farm labour does not exhaust the local labour market. Timber farmers generally employ contract workers for harvesting. Their contracts usually last for the duration of one harvest. With the exception of machine operators, timber harvesting is relatively unskilled work, and few farmers employ the same people year in and year out. Contract workers are often recruited from northern KwaZulu-Natal and are transported in and out of the Piet Retief district at dawn and dusk. Other contract labour is recruited from several of the informal settlements that have mushroomed in the Piet Retief area since the early 1990s.
Two of Piet Retief’s informal settlements are situated on the periphery of the town itself. Phoswa Village, immediately south of Piet Retief’s township, was formed in late 1994. The area was, until the early 1990s, a family-owned timber farm. The Piet Retief town council bought the land in 1994 to develop for low-income residential use. Before the council could establish an infrastructure, the area was invaded by several hundred land-hungry families. Today, security personnel estimate that several 41 thousand people live in Phoswa Village. It has neither running water nor electricity. A lucrative form of business in the formal township is the selling of water to the residents of the informal settlement. The settlement has neither street names nor shack numbers. Piet Retief police claim that the area is almost impossible to police. On the few occasions when crime suspects are found, the police claim, the complainant often cannot be found in the dense, unmapped labyrinths of the settlement.
On the opposite side of the formal township is another large informal settlement, Mangosotho, which was formed in 1995 after a land invasion by a group of several hundred families from the densely populated Dumbe Trust land, situated more than 100 kilometres south of Piet Retief. Mangosotho is far less dense than Phoswa Village and extends several kilometres north of Piet Retief.
Security personnel in the area have no clear idea of who lives in Phoswa Village and Mangosotho. Anecdotal evidence suggests that an eclectic and cosmopolitan mix of people have settled there, a significant minority temporarily, the vast majority for good. Piet Retief finds itself on two regional thoroughfares used by illegal immigrants to get to Gauteng – one from Swaziland, the other from Mozambique. It is safe to assume that a fair proportion of the population in the two settlements are Mozambican and Swazi.
Phoswa Village and Mangosotho are by no means the only visible signs of either land hunger or regional migration in the Piet Retief district. Security personnel say that the worker compounds on the Mondi property are home to about 30 000 people, the bulk of whom neither work for Mondi, nor have any connection to Mondi employees.
Farmers in the area are deeply troubled by the mounting pressures exerted by land hunger. Many farmers in the area say that an increasing number of people who live on their land are strangers who neither work in their fields, nor pay rent. The southern-most strip of the district comprises empty farms used by their owners for grazing only during the winter months. Every farm in that area, according to members of the Piet Retief commando, is occupied by scores of families who settle on the farmlands during the summer months.
Farm and smallholding attacks
Between January and September 1999, serious violent crimes against owners and occupants of farms and smallholdings in Mpumalanga rose by 33.3% compared to the same period in 1998. There were 112 attacks in the first nine months of 1999, compared to 84 attacks in the first nine months of 1998. Ninety of the 112 attacks in 1999 occurred on farms, and 22 on smallholdings. Of a total of 145 victims, 93 42 – Attacks on farms and smallholdings were white and 52 black. Just over half of the victims were between 51 and 75 years of age. One in three armed robberies during the 1998 period resulted in the murder of the victim, compared to one in three-and-a-half during the 1999 period.
On the Eastern Highveld, farm attacks rose by 46% during the first nine months of 1999 compared to the same period in 1998: 28 attacks in the nine-month period in 1998 compared to 41 in 1999. In the Piet Retief police district, farm attacks rose by 40% during the first nine months of 1999 compared to the same period in 1998: seven attacks compared to five.
Case studies
Robbery of firearm and cash On 12 November 1998, Mrs A2 was returning home to her farm, about two kilometres from the Mangosotho informal settlement, at about 17h00 on a Tuesday afternoon. Mrs A runs a tuckshop in Sulpher Springs, 70 kilometres from her farm. The 12th of each month is pension day in the Sulpher Springs area, and Mrs A’s tuckshop takings are always high on this date. On arriving home, Mrs A found that her farm gate was shut, an unusual occurrence. The area around the gate was covered by dense bush. Mrs A left her bakkie running, leaving her Colt .38 in the cabin, to open the gate. She was attacked by three men as she made her way back to her car. One of the men addressed her in Zulu. “We’ve got you, granny,” he said. The three suspects took Mrs A’s Colt .38 and R30 000 in cash. They hit Mrs A repeatedly over the head with a plank, knocking her unconscious, and fled on foot, leaving her bakkie behind. None of the three men appeared to have firearms. Detectives found the tracks of the three men on a dirt track that winds its way into Mangosotho. The tracks disappeared after 100 metres and the three suspects were not found. Two months later, Mrs A’s gun was found by police in Boksburg on the East Rand of Gauteng. It had been used there in an armed robbery. Mrs A’s home had a two-way radio, but the radio was of little help under the circumstances. If Mrs A had had a panic button around her neck, it is conceivable that she would have been able to access it during the attack.
Four points, which emerge again in the other case studies below, are worth noting:
•The suspects were after firearms and cash. (Mrs A believes that the suspects left her bakkie because they would have had to drive it in reverse for more than 200 metres before getting to a public road.) • It is reasonable to assume that the suspects knew Mrs A was returning from a lucrative day at the Sulpher Springs tuck shop. The attack was planned and well informed. 43
•The suspects appeared to use the sprawling and largely unpoliced Mangosotho settlement as refuge immediately after the attack. • One or more of the attackers appear to have links to the East Rand.
That Mrs A runs a tuckshop in Sulpher Springs is not widely known in the Piet Retief area. The suspects must have received information from sources with a detailed knowledge of Mrs A’s movements. Mrs A identified four people with an intimate knowledge of her routines, all employed as drivers in her son-in-law’s transport business.
Attempted armed robbery In August 1999, Mr and Mrs B, whose farm is 20 kilometres from the Mahamba border post with Swaziland, were attacked by two men on a Sunday morning when they returned to their home from church. The couple grew suspicious when their dogs did not come out to greet them. On getting out of the car to open the gate, two men attacked Mrs B, hitting her on the head with the back of a handgun. As she fell to the ground, Mrs B pressed the panic button attached to a chain around her neck, which was concealed under her blouse. The two men demanded the keys to the family safe, tied the couple up, made them lie down on the front lawn, and entered the house (the house had no alarm).
Two of the couple’s neighbours arrived on the scene five minutes after Mrs B pressed her panic button. The two culprits fled into adjacent fields, firing at the couple’s neighbours as they fled. The couple’s neighbours returned fire, killing one suspect and injuring the other. During his interview with the arresting officer, the injured suspect revealed that a third man, posted as a lookout on the public road, had been involved in planning the attack. The third suspect worked on the couple’s farm ten years before the attack. He was arrested on his employer’s premises on the East Rand two weeks later, where he worked as a meat packer. The injured and the dead suspect both lived in northern KwaZulu-Natal.
The following points are worth noting in the attack on Mr and Mrs B:
•The suspects were after firearms. It appears that their primary goal was to gain access to the safe. Mr and Mrs B believe their former employee knew where the safe was and that it was used to store firearms. • It appears the suspects knew the couple would be returning from church in the late morning. • One suspect grew up in the Piet Retief area, but lived on the East Rand. •The security cell system was entirely responsible for the apprehension of the first two suspects. Police investigation was responsible for the apprehension of the third suspect. 44 – Attacks on farms and smallholdings
Attempted murder and armed robbery At 10h40 on a Sunday in May 1999, Mr C was returning to his farm, ten kilometres from Piet Retief, having gone to town to buy bread and milk. Mr C has a high fence around his property and a remote control electric gate. The area around the perimeter of his property was overgrown at the time. As Mr C opened his gate, six men jumped on the back of his bakkie and opened fire. Mr C sustained three gunshot wounds to his torso. The suspects dragged Mr C into the house and demanded that he open his safe. Neither Mr C, nor the suspects were able to open the safe. While the suspects were in the house, Mr C managed to crawl to the two- way radio in his bedroom and alerted his local security cell. The suspects fled in Mr C’s bakkie. As they left the property, the suspects drove into the vehicle of a commando member and a neighbouring farmer who had responded to Mr C’s radio signal. A gun battle ensued. Two suspects were captured, one of whom was wounded in the head. The other four fled into a neighbouring plantation. An extensive search operation, including an air search, was conducted. The four suspects were not found.
The following points are worth noting in the attack on Mr C:
•The suspects stole a vehicle and appeared to be searching for firearms. •The suspects appeared to know Mr C’s Sunday routine. • One suspect was from the East Rand. •The security cell system and commando patrol were responsible for the apprehension of two of the six suspects. Police investigations failed to trace the other four suspects.
Recurring trends in farm attacks
Several closely related trends can be gleaned, both from the descriptions above and from anecdotal evidence about other farm attacks in the area. Firstly, the motivation for the majority of the attacks was the theft of firearms, cash or vehicles. The research team heard of no incidents where suspects appeared to be looking for anything else. Attacks were generally both well-planned and based on detailed reconnaissance and information. Attackers were both familiar with the routines of their victims and appeared to know where to find what they were looking for. It is reasonable to assume that, in general, those who attack farms in the Piet Retief area have ready access to South Africa’s underground markets for stolen vehicles and firearms. They are either professionals, or, at the very least, are well acquainted with illicit firearm and vehicle markets.
To the extent that the attacks were violent, the violence appeared to be tactical and instrumental, rather than gratuitous. While the culprits appeared to have few qualms 45 about injuring or even killing their victims, in the cases studied, violence was deployed either to access safes or to leave the victim incapable of signalling for help.3
Secondly, the majority of attacks appear to be committed by a combination of local people and others who came to the area to commit the robbery. At the very least, the locals constitute a source of tactical information indispensable to the successful commission of the crime. The Piet Retief district is a thoroughfare for regional migration to Gauteng. The district is awash with strangers who can settle anonymously for some time in one of the district’s dense informal settlements.
However, if the research project is at all representative of farm attacks in the district, it would be a mistake to lay the blame for farm attacks entirely on people who have no connection to the area. Based on ten interviews with members of the district’s traditional labour force, it appears to be common for young men who grow up on the district’s farms to migrate to Gauteng, and in particular, to the East Rand to look for work. Young men typically access small, parochial and easily identifiable networks when they reach the East Rand. Most return to the Piet Retief district intermittently throughout their lives. It is reasonable to assume that some, who journey to the East Rand and fail to find work there, become involved in the area’s infamous illicit economy. It would appear that this category of person – one who both knows the Piet Retief district well and is connected to Gauteng’s underworld – plays a pivotal role in the commission of farm attacks in the Piet Retief district.
Finally, it would appear that the Piet Retief district’s informal settlements, Phoswa Village and Mangosotho being the most prominent ones, play a significant role in the commission of farm attacks. Densely populated, unmapped, barely policed and surrounded by the thick vegetation of neighbouring timber fields, the settlements appear to provide excellent cover in the aftermath of an attack. It is also possible that shebeens (illegal taverns) and other public places in the settlements constitute areas where outsiders gather information about the district and perhaps tempt locals into their plans. Security personnel stated that both Phoswa Village and Mangosotho are home to well-organised cattle theft syndicates. Security personnel do not know whether these syndicates are also responsible for farm attacks.
Piet Retief police have reported the emergence of incipient gang activity in Phoswa Village. The settlement appears to have a large population of unemployed youths. Rape and armed robbery committed by groups of young men are, according to the local police, increasingly common in the settlement itself. It is possible that residents of the informal settlements are involved in the planning and execution of farm attacks. 46 – Attacks on farms and smallholdings
Labour relations and labour-related violence
Given the limitations of the research project, it is impossible to indicate the extent to which poor labour relations in the district are a contributing factor to farm attacks with any certainty. However, there is an endemic and severe crisis in the relationship between local farmers and traditional labour, of which the roots go back several decades.
A system of labour tenancy has been in place in the Piet Retief district since the latter part of the 19th century. Generations of small farmers have exchanged grazing land for labour with the inhabitants of Piet Retief’s black settlements throughout the 20th century. According to the testimony of ten labourers employed on various farms in the area, the labour tenancy system has come under increasing strain during the last three or four decades. Some pointed to the emergence of large-scale timber farming in the area as the origin of the trouble. Farmers needed extra land for timber farming and began decreasing allocations of grazing land to workers. Others say that, with the rapid industrialisation of South Africa in the 1950s and the 1960s, young men and women in the Piet Retief district became increasingly dissatisfied with the district’s wageless economy, and left for the cities to look for work. In what appears to be a host of cases, the parents of the children who left the area were evicted from the farms on which they had lived their entire lives.
Farmers, in turn, say that the increasing movement and migration of people in the district has rendered the labour tenancy system unworkable. More and more families who live on their land are not connected to the farm by their labour. Their land must be constantly policed to avoid farms “being overrun by strangers”, as one farmer put it. It appears that the fragile quid pro quo that evolved over generations – land for labour – has been repeatedly broken by both sides during the past decades.
The district has experienced two waves of mass evictions in recent times, the first during the late 1980s, the second during the mid-1990s. Most locals tend to blame crime on outsiders. But one story is noteworthy, if only because it crops up repeatedly. Many of the families evicted in recent times, the story goes, have resettled in northern KwaZulu-Natal. These people return periodically to the Piet Retief district to attend ceremonies and to visit and bury their dead. Local labourers testify that a stock theft ring located in northern KwaZulu-Natal preys incessantly on the Piet Retief district, largely because of information provided by some of those who have been displaced from the district. There is no evidence to suggest that people evicted from the district have participated in farm attacks, but it is a possibility worth investigating. 47
Many labourers have responded to the recent spate of evictions by lodging land claims under the Land reform (labour tenancy) act. One chief in the area said that several hundred of his subjects were planning to lodge claims. A staff member at the land affairs department in Ermelo said that he had received several hundred claims from across the Eastern Highveld during the past year (1998/99).
In the Commondale area in the Piet Retief district, about 40 farmers employ the services of a private protection agency, which ostensibly investigates cases of theft and violent crime on behalf of its clients. The agency is headed by a former South African Defence Force soldier, who employs about a dozen men who wear camouflage uniforms and patrol the area every night. Several labourers in the Commondale area maintain that the protection agency’s primary function is not to investigate crime, but to harass those who are connected to the land but do not work.
Several farmers in the Piet Retief district have stated openly that they will summarily evict those who claim land on their property. It appears that the worst of the district’s troubled labour relations is still to come.
The rural protection plan in the Piet Retief district
The commando and security cell structure The Piet Retief district commando, whose jurisdiction maps that of the Piet Retief police area, is divided into two companies, one rural, the other urban. In November 1999, the urban company had 51 members, the rural company 89. All 89 rural company members were white.
Among the 89 rural company members are managers and supervisors on the Sappi and Mondi plantations, as well as a handful of smallholders. Some family-owned farms have two or three commando members. While exact figures were not available at the time of writing, it would appear that, in less than one in four, but more than one in five, family-owned farms, at least one member of the household was a member of the commando.
In theory, each commando unit in the rural company maps each Mpumalanga Agricultural Union (MAU) farmers’ association (boere vereeniging) – a cluster of farms linked by geographic proximity. In practice, things do not work out quite this way, mainly for two reasons. Firstly, membership of the MAU is at best sporadic. Secondly, the geographic character of farmers’ associations is not always conducive to the most effective security, and in particular rapid response plans. As a result, the rural company is divided into ten sectors, which map farmers’ security cells, rather than farmers’ associations. 48 – Attacks on farms and smallholdings
Commando personnel maintain that just under 80% of farmers in the district belong to a security cell and that the commando itself has a presence in each of the cells. The commando patrols each cell at least weekly, depending on how strong a presence it has in the particular cell. Commando patrols are never routine. Instead, they respond to crime patterns and threats, which are re-evaluated on a monthly basis. The majority of farm attacks in the Piet Retief district are executed on Sunday mornings. In mid-1999, the commando instituted a ‘church patrol’ each Sunday morning in each cell, usually staffed by two commando members in a single vehicle.
The members of each cell are linked to one another, as well as to commando headquarters by radio. According to commando personnel, about 75% of farms in the area have radios. Some cell members are also linked to one another by an alarm system, activated by panic buttons and by infrared sensors. When the alarm is activated, each member of the cell receives a signal, informing him which activator on which farm has triggered the signal. It was not possible to ascertain precisely how many farms in the area had alarms. Anecdotal evidence suggests that one in every two farms, at most, have an alarm system.
Each cell has developed a carefully plotted rapid response strategy. When an alarm signal or radio call is activated, neighbouring cell members drive to the farm where the signal was triggered, while the others spread themselves into a pre-arranged formation designed to block familiar exit routes. According to commando personnel, civilians are instructed not to set up roadblocks nor to confront fleeing suspects. Instead, cell members are instructed to report the movement of suspects to commando headquarters, who, in turn, are in radio contact with the Piet Retief police station. In practice, it appears that civilians do regularly engage in gun battles with fleeing suspects. In each case, cell members reported that they returned fire. Cell members invariably arrive on the scene long before the security forces.
As is apparent from the case studies above, the cell system, and in particular its radio and alarm communication system and its rapid response plan, is without question the most effective component of the rural protection plan in the Piet Retief area. In almost every case where an attack is averted or foiled, or where suspects are apprehended, the success is a direct result of the local cell’s rapid response plan. Senior police management in the area openly acknowledge that, when a suspect is not apprehended within a couple of hours of the attack, the chances of making an arrest are close to zero.
The Mpumalanga Agricultural Union The Mpumalanga Agricultural Union (MAU) is a fledgling organisation and its membership constitutes a small percentage of Mpumalanga’s total farming 49 population. According to its own estimates, 20% of Mpumalanga farmers belong to a farmers union. Head of the MAU’s security committee, Mr Kali Erichson, cites three reasons for low farm union membership in the province:
• Under the old dispensation, generous government subsidies lubricated the workings of the Transvaal Agricultural Union. Membership fees were nominal, while the union was both rich and well placed as a powerful lobby and interest group in the politics of the old dispensation. In contrast, the MAU, which broke away from the Transvaal Agricultural Union under acrimonious circumstances, was forced to begin from scratch with no infrastructure and little income. The result is that union fees have increased about ten-fold during the last ten years. Farmers argue that the new union is both more expensive and far less effective than the rich and politically influential unions of old. • Some farmers, who still claim membership of the Transvaal Agricultural Union, refuse to join the MAU because it admits black members. •The Transvaal Agricultural Union was a fertile recruitment ground for right-wing politics in the late 1980s and early 1990s. With the fragmentation and partial withering of organised right-wing politics under the new dispensation, agricultural union organisation has suffered as well. The central task of the MAU is to reinvent the ethos and culture of agricultural politics, to draw farmers back into union membership through corporate and economic issues, rather than through political mobilisation.
Many farmers, not just in Piet Retief but throughout the Eastern Highveld, are peripherally associated with the rural protection plan despite their non-membership of any farmers’ union. Membership of the security cells described above does not entail membership of a farmers association. It requires no more than an informal security arrangement with one’s neighbours, as well as a loose relationship with the local commando. Indeed, it appears that farmers in the Eastern Highveld are far more eager to organise themselves into security cells than they are to join organised agriculture in any of its formations.
Security personnel and MAU officials worry about this trend. They are concerned that informal security formations, completely detached from and unaccountable to formal security structures, could begin to mushroom throughout the Mpumalanga countryside.
The South African Police Service The Piet Retief police district is 4 000 square kilometres large, and includes within its jurisdiction a formerly white town, a black township, two large informal settlements, two timber plantations, as well as thousands of square kilometres of farmland. The 50 – Attacks on farms and smallholdings town’s police station has four vehicles at its disposal, two client service vehicles that patrol Piet Retief 24 hours a day, one crime prevention vehicle and one community police vehicle, both of which patrol 40 hours per week. Given these meagre resources, the SAPS’s rapid response capacity in the rural areas of the Piet Retief district is negligible. The tasks of rapid response are left primarily to the civilian members of the security cells, and secondarily to the civilians who staff the district commando.
The police station’s crime intelligence office is staffed by five people, the local detective complement by 18 people. The work of local crime intelligence is consumed primarily by the collection of information on stock theft.
Farm attacks that involve murder, attempted murder or armed robbery are usually investigated by the murder and robbery squad based in Ermelo, 100 kilometres away from Piet Retief. The murder and robbery squad typically assigns two investigators to each case.
Weaknesses in the rural protection plan
Lack of participation of farm workers The security cell system, and its association with the commando’s sector patrols, is one of the rural protection plan’s greatest strengths. In the event of a farm attack, it is de facto the only rapid response capacity in place. That approximately 80% of farmers in the district participate in the system adds to its strength. The security cell system has been the single most incisive capacity in the apprehension and the arrest of farm attack suspects.
However, the fact that neither the commando, nor the security cell system, has a single black member is of concern, particularly in light of the poor labour relations that characterise parts of the district. Anecdotal evidence suggests that the homes, property and livestock of farm labourers are as vulnerable to predatory crime as the lives and properties of farmers themselves. On the face of it, there is a large area of common interest between workers and farmers with regard to the prevention of crime. Farmers complain of the encroachment of predatory strangers on their land. Given high rates of stock theft, it would appear that workers also have a powerful interest in detecting and reporting the presence of strangers on farms. There can be little doubt that the recruitment of workers into the rural protection plan can significantly enhance its capacity. Its informational capacity, and in particular, the efficacy of its early warning systems, appear to suffer from the lack of worker participation.
Bringing workers into the rural protection plan, however, is fraught with difficulty. A farmer is unlikely to accept the presence in the plan of a workforce he believes is 51 harbouring families who do not provide labour, and perhaps commit intermittent cattle theft. A working family, in turn, that believes it could face eviction at any moment, is unlikely to be a reliable source of information where the farmer’s interests are at stake.
Bringing farmers and workers together around the issue of safety clearly involves bringing into the open a host of potentially intractable problems. Work would have to be done to restore, albeit in a modified form, the delicate quid pro quo that has passed down the generations. Whether this task is indeed possible remains a mute point. Black families in the area require land on which to graze their cattle, but they also require the contractual freedom to seek employment of their own accord. Farmers, in turn, are unprepared to give sections of their land to families who neither pay rent, nor provide labour in return. Formulating a common set of rules, consented to by both sides, is probably a prerequisite for large-scale worker participation in the rural protection plan.
The first and most important step in drawing workers into the plan is a process of mediation and negotiation between farmers and workers. The lack of communication between the two on the issue of land claims and evictions is striking. Workers lodge land claims without informing their employers. Some employers evict workers without notice. Clearly, a channel of communication needs to be opened before employers and workers can work together in the rural protection plan in any meaningful way. Who might play such a mediation role is difficult to pinpoint here. Much depends on the sophistication and charisma of the personalities that drive the rural protection plan itself.
Matters are made more difficult by the fact that public life among white farmers in the area, and political public life in particular, has dissipated under the new post- 1994 dispensation. It appears that few farmers come together to discuss labour relations, or indeed other common concerns that might require collective thought and action. Building a more inclusive rural protection plan would seem to entail building public forums among a publicly inactive constituency.
Intelligence gathering and investigation Senior provincial police officials openly acknowledge that culprits who are not apprehended by civilians in the immediate aftermath of an attack are seldom apprehended at all. As far as reactive detection and investigation are concerned, the SAPS is thus contributing little to the rural protection plan.
The investigation of farm attacks in the Piet Retief district is a formidable task. The area is a regional thoroughfare and thus awash with strangers who can enter and 52 – Attacks on farms and smallholdings leave the district undetected. Large-scale forestry in the area makes for thick and dense terrain where culprits can take refuge. Dense, unmapped informal settlements make both for convenient cover in the aftermath of an attack and a source of information gathering and recruitment for criminals.
Nonetheless, there appear to be two areas where police work can be improved considerably:
• Station-level intelligence produces little in the way of crime profiles of the two informal settlements that border the town of Piet Retief: Mangosotho and Phoswa Village. These settlements are relatively small, their social geography presumably fairly easy to comprehend for those who live there. There is every reason to believe that their criminal networks are relatively small, and in principle, at any rate, easy to identify.
Detailed information on criminal activity in the settlements could inform several policing strategies. In terms of proactive policing, the lives of criminals could be made more difficult if the public spaces which they occupy, were known. Carefully selected illicit shebeens (illegal taverns) could be closed down. The commission of petty crimes by particular groups and networks could be targeted. Moreover, if the names and profiles of key figures in the settlement’s criminal networks were known, police would begin to get a sense of the micropolitics that animate crime in the settlements.
Such information would also prove useful for reaction work. In Mrs A’s case (see case studies above), once the culprits ‘disappeared’ into the Mangosotho settlement, investigative work came to an abrupt halt. If investigators had had access to detailed information on the nature and geography of the settlement’s criminal networks, the police may have been able to search the settlement intelligently and selectively in the aftermath of the attack.
•There is a regional dimension to farm attacks in the Piet Retief district. Local people who migrate to the East Rand and return home intermittently cropped up again and again among farm attack suspects. The connection between farm attacks in the Piet Retief district and the illicit economies of Gauteng appears to be a strong one. Yet, it appears that, for the most part, both local crime intelligence, and the murder and robbery unit work in relative isolation and do not track the regional dimension of the crimes they investigate.
It is difficult to ascertain how thoroughly farm attack suspects are questioned by investigating officers. What seems clear, is that investigators do little follow-up 53
work in other areas, even when it is certain that the firearms and vehicles stolen in the Piet Retief district are intended to be sold in Gauteng. It would appear that both crime intelligence and the local murder and robbery unit seldom work with their counterparts in other parts of South Africa.
It is probable that the networks in Gauteng accessed by Piet Retief migrants are small and easily identifiable. It is even more probable that the criminal networks accessed by a minority of Piet Retief migrants are even more discernible. Thorough questioning of suspects and comprehensive follow-up work that traces the networks in which suspects operate would greatly enhance the rural protection plan’s knowledge of the underworld from which farm attacks in the district are planned. For example, the Nylstroom murder and robbery unit has, during the past two years (1998-99), arrested murder and armed robbery suspects as far afield as Port Elizabeth and Bloemfontein. It is not inconceivable that Mpumalanga investigators can similarly trace the regional ties through which attacks are planned.
Notes
1 There are strong economic ties between the German community of Piet Retief and that on the East Rand. The latter is strongly associated with the meat retail sector and is, in part, supplied with beef and pork from the Piet Retief area. 2 Real names have been omitted to protect the confidentiality of those involved. 3 There was one exception. In April 1998, a visitor to a farm in the Piet Retief district was gunned down with an AK-47 rifle at the entrance of the farm he was visiting. Neither his vehicle, nor any of his possessions were stolen. Police subsequently learned that the murder was an assassination. The owner of the farm had evicted several families from his property. The murder was an act of retribution. The assassins, however, picked the wrong target. They believed that the victim was the farmer in question. KwaZulu-Natal Midlands area
Tugela Ferry N3 Weenen Kranskop Estcourt Greytown
Mooiriver Umvoti Stanger ESOTHO Howick Pietermaritzburg Tongaat Edendale Verulam N3 Inanda Lindelani Mpumalanga Pinetown Durban Donnybrook Umlazi Creighton
Ixopo Highflats N2 EASTERN Umzinto CAPE
Bhongweni Kokstad
Port Shepstone
EASTERN CAPE Chapter 6 The Greytown area – KwaZulu-Natal
The Greytown district
he Greytown district1 is situated within the jurisdiction of the Umvoti T commando, but it is necessary to distinguish the Greytown district from the rest of the commando’s jurisdiction. The rural protection plan in the Greytown district is highly organised and extremely sophisticated. In the remainder of the jurisdiction, participation in the rural protection plan is sporadic. This state of affairs appears to reflect the state of the rural protection plan in the Midlands in general: pockets of excellence are surrounded by large stretches of poor and sporadic organisation. In the case of the Umvoti commando, the unevenness in the strength of the plan is partly explained by the fact that two Greytown farmers have gone to great lengths to develop and sustain the plan, and have creatively used the resources of the SANDF at every point. Relationships with senior SANDF personnel have been close and productive. The farming community has been highly responsive to initiatives, probably as a result of a series of acute problems faced by the district over the past few years.
The town of Greytown itself is at the epicentre of the Greytown farming district. It is surrounded by a ring of approximately 200 medium and large commercial farms. Timber and sugar are the predominant crops farmed in the area. Both employ a combination of permanent and seasonal labour. Farmers in the area estimate that about half of the farming area’s workforce are permanent and live on the farms themselves. The other half are employed seasonally to cut timber and to plant sugar. Beef, dairy and vegetables are also farmed in the area, but not very extensively. Beef production declined rapidly in the area during the 1990s, largely as a result of widespread stock theft.
Surrounding the ring of 200 commercial farms is a far larger ring of ‘traditional land’. Constituted by 37 chieftaincies and inhabited by more than half a million people, the area is densely populated and poverty-stricken. While cattle remains both a 56 – Attacks on farms and smallholdings symbol of wealth and an indispensable component of marriage, land in the traditional areas is severely overgrazed and increasingly unsustainable. Due to extremely fluid population movements, levels of unemployment in the area are almost impossible to gauge. Anecdotal evidence, however, suggests that the area is inhabited by thousands of unemployed young people, and that the authority of the elderly over the young is increasingly strained.
Given its severe poverty and the scarcity of opportunities, few residents of Greytown’s traditional land live their entire lives in the district. The vast majority migrate to Durban and Johannesburg. Some return to the district seasonally, others intermittently during the course of their lives. According to the police area command, the population of the district expands by as much as 30% over Christmas and Easter, as migrant workers return home for the holidays.
The tradition of migrancy in the Greytown district alleviates some, but not all of the district’s economic woes. While migrant remittances do bring much-needed cash into the traditional areas, many migrants still get married in the district and require cattle to do so. The centrality of cattle in the area’s traditional culture and economy, in the context of dwindling sustainable land, has created acute land hunger and is partly responsible for growing land encroachment. Land hunger, the breakdown of the authority of elders over the young, and the widespread practice of migrancy form a critical backdrop to understanding farm attacks in the Greytown district.
Land encroachment
Many farmers in the Umvoti area insist that land encroachment is the single biggest cause of farm attacks. As is argued below, there is reason to be sceptical of this claim. Nonetheless, the question of land encroachment deserves careful attention.
The Greytown farming district is surrounded on all sides by a massive expanse of traditional land. The problem of land encroachment from traditional areas to commercial farms is confined to the northern boundary of the Greytown district. Some security personnel claim that this is because farms in the north are far larger than those on the southern, eastern and western boundaries, and thus far more difficult for farmers to police. Others argue that the problem is concentrated in the north because traditional authority there is particularly weak. Security personnel say that, by late 1999, seven farms in the Greytown district had been affected by land encroachment.
Encroachment began in 1994 and, according to farmers and security personnel, has occurred in two distinct ways: 57
• Land claims are lodged against a farm, or portions of it. The farmer then agrees to sell his farm to the department of land affairs. Once word gets out that the farmer is leaving, his land is invaded by cattle and goats from the neighbouring traditional area, as well as by informal dwellings. Land affairs is invariably slow to close the deal. Two or three years down the line, the farmer begins to doubt whether the deal is still on. He wants to recommence using the land that has been invaded and clashes with those who have settled there. • No land claim is lodged. Instead, those on the borders of a farm begin a quiet and subtle process of encroachment. The invaders mark out a portion of the farm. Seeds planted there are uprooted. Cattle that graze there are killed. The farmer retreats from that section of his land, only to find that the encroachment process follows suit.
At least one murder of a farmer in the area appears to be directly related to a land dispute. In October 1998, Mr Redinger, a prominent farmer in the Kranskop area, which is located on the north-western boundary of the Greytown farming district, was shot and killed in his vehicle by three young men on a public road about one kilometre from his farm gate. In 1997, a chief whose jurisdiction covers the land adjacent to the western boundary of Mr Redinger’s farm, lodged a title deed claim to a portion of Mr Redinger’s land. In response to the claim, Mr Redinger agreed in principle to donate a portion of his land to community development and entered into a dialogue with the chief and with community and state structures with the intention of building a school on the allocated land.
During the process, a group of young men who lived in the area and became community representatives in the dialogue, demonstrated repeated hostility both towards Mr Redinger and the initiative itself. In the months before his death, Mr Redinger’s life was threatened on several occasions by young men from the area. In October 1998, a group of three young men stopped Mr Redinger’s bakkie as he was returning home. Recognising them, Mr Redinger got out of his vehicle to talk to them. He was shot at point-blank range with a shotgun and his vehicle was stolen. Three days later, the Greytown murder and robbery unit arrested two of the three culprits. They were found guilty of murder in the local regional court. Both served on the local community police forum with Mr Redinger, knew him well and had been peripherally involved in the dialogue about the fate of his land.
The reasons behind the murder remain a source of debate in the local community and among the security forces. Same say it was a simple hijacking. Others insist that the killing was directly related to the ongoing debate about the future of Mr Redinger’s land. 58 – Attacks on farms and smallholdings
The context of the murder is both sobering and instructive regarding the capabilities of the rural protection plan. It is deeply ironic that Mr Redinger was killed in the very process of ‘getting things right’: responding to land hunger by giving up land in an impeccably consultative process. The young men who killed Mr Redinger were neither aspirant farmers, nor community representatives in any real sense. They appeared to be animated by a wild and disturbing political identity, one only obliquely connected to the hunger for land, and one which could not be contained, even by an inclusive and sophisticated consultative process.
At this point, it is worth describing the history of the relationship between the rural protection plan and traditional leadership in the Greytown area. As short a time ago as 1996, there was barely a relationship between them at all. The traditional areas north of Greytown are inhabited by highly militarised and well-armed communities. Both the conflict between African National Congress and Inkatha Freedom Party- aligned communities in the late 1980s and early 1990s, as well as longstanding conflicts between rival chieftaincies, have left a legacy of organised violence. Until 1997, the traditional areas north of Greytown were de facto no-go zones for the security forces. In 1996, plainclothes police officials were attacked in the traditional areas on two separate occasions. In 1997, members of the police’s illegal firearms unit were ambushed by a group of over a hundred men, many armed with automatic weapons. A one-and-a-half hour gun battle ensued. The police officials were eventually airlifted out of the area by an SANDF helicopter.
In 1998, the various component institutions of the rural protection plan began to develop relationships with the area’s traditional leadership. The army and police consult with local chiefs before entering the area in search of illegal firearms. The KwaZulu-Natal Agricultural Union (Kwanalu) meets once a month with the Greytown district’s traditional leadership to discuss land and security matters.
Security personnel report that every chief in the area has pledged to act against the illegal encroachment of land by his subjects. Many farmers, as well as senior security personnel, however, believe that while the involvement of chiefs in the rural protection plan is crucial, such involvement has its limitations, and this for two reasons:
•The social fabric of community life in the jurisdictions of many traditional leaders is frail. The authority of traditional structures over young people, in particular, is weak. • Many traditional leaders are deeply suspicious of the rural protection plan and regard it as an encroachment upon their rightful authority. The relationship between traditional leaders and the rural protection plan is often cautious and distrustful. 59
Farmers, as well as army and police leaders expressed a great deal of anger at the manner in which the department of land affairs has conducted the land claims process. Word gets out that land is to be redistributed, raising expectations in the area, but land affairs is invariably painfully slow to act on land that has been earmarked both for title deed and tenant claims and for purchase by land affairs itself. The result is that the fate of large tracts of land remains interminably suspended, raising tensions and creating the space for unlawful occupation, farmers and security personnel claim.2
Farmers and security personnel say they have no principled objection to land distribution. They insist only that it occurs in a manner that is both sustainable and lucrative. If redistributed land is overpopulated and overgrazed, the problem of land hunger is delayed, rather than solved. However, as a land affairs official pointed out, those who encroach on commercial farm land are seldom those who intend to put it to commercial use. Growing pressures of dire poverty, the erosion of the authority of political structures and the increasing aggression of unemployed youths makes the politics of land encroachment an extremely difficult process to manage or contain.
As important as land encroachment is, a detailed study of the area’s murder and robbery dockets illustrates that issues of land ownership and occupation are directly responsible for only a small minority of farm attacks and should not dominate thinking about the rural protection plan.
Case studies
Axe attack and vehicle theft In August 1999, a farmer in the Rietvlei district, about 35 kilometres south of Greytown, was building cottages on his farm. He drove through his farm gates to drop a group of labourers off at the building site, leaving his gate open as he was due to return to the gate a few minutes later. When he returned to the gate, two men dragged him out of his bakkie, assaulted him with an axe and fled in his bakkie. Two days later, members of the Greytown murder and robbery unit arrested two men in Sweetwaters, a settlement on the periphery of Pietermaritzburg. One of the two knew the farm on which the attack took place well. An aunt of his had worked on the farm for many years, and the suspect often visited the farm for extended periods.
The suspects in this case were youths from the area and rank amateurs at armed robbery. (The axe was borrowed from an aunt of one of the suspects.) It appears unlikely that the suspects had sustained access to the region’s illicit economy. They appear not to have been contracted to commit the crime. A reading of the files of the Greytown murder and robbery unit, and discussions with its personnel, indicate that 60 – Attacks on farms and smallholdings about 30% of farm attacks in the area fit this category: local, amateur perpetrators, working alone.
The farm on which the attack occurred, was not part of a local security cell and the rural protection plan’s rapid reaction capacity was thus not available.
Murder and theft of firearm I In September 1999, a 75-year old farmer in the Weenen district was shot dead while opening the gates of his farm in the middle of the afternoon. The suspects took his revolver, but left both his bakkie and a considerable amount of cash that was lying in the glove compartment of his bakkie. A reward for information leading to the conviction of the perpetrators was advertised. Following up information received from members of the public, the Greytown murder and robbery unit arrested three men six weeks after the murder. All were between 20 and 24 years old. All lived on traditional land on the outskirts of the Weenen district. None had any direct connection to the farm. However, it appears that the perpetrators had inside information on the farmer’s movements. The farmer had been dipping cattle that day, an activity that required him to return to his farm house during the course of the afternoon, something he seldom does. Investigators surmised that a labourer assisting in the cattle dipping process informed the suspects of the farmer’s movements. Several labourers were interviewed by detectives, but nothing followed from the interviews.
Investigators believe the suspects intended to sell the gun in the Weenen area. They failed to take the bakkie, investigators believe, because they were amateurs and had no idea where they might sell it. It is well-known that there is fierce demand for firearms in the Midlands area. According to investigators, even in the poorest of informal settlements, a 9mm handgun can fetch a price of five or six goats. A stolen firearm is thus a source of formidable wealth – relatively speaking – for some of the destitute who live in informal settlements in the Midlands.
Murder and theft of firearm II In September 1999, the employee of a prominent Weenen farmer learned that his employer had deposited more than R200 000 in a safe in his farmhouse. The employee recruited five men, none of them from the Weenen district, to plan an armed robbery. Three of the five approached the house early on a Monday morning while the other two stood guard on the public road (the employee himself did not participate in the attack for fear of being recognised). The three approached the farmer’s foreman and asked to buy cattle. At this point, the farmer emerged from his house and reached for his handgun which was holstered on his hip. One of the three suspects shot him at point-blank range, took his firearm and chased after the 61 foreman. The farmer’s domestic worker radioed for help, the local security cell responded and the five fled in different directions.
Ten days later all six suspects had been arrested. Investigators received information that the employee was involved and questioned him. The employee led police to the other five. One of the six was about to board a taxi to Soweto (Johannesburg) when he was arrested. In his home in a peri-urban Midlands settlement, investigators found three rifles and 315 rounds of ammunition. One of the rifles was a police-issue R1 that had been stolen in Kimberley three months previously. The same afternoon, investigators drove the suspect to a room he rented in Soweto. There they found the gun used to kill the farmer, as well as R40 000 in cash.
Greytown murder and robbery detectives say that about 30% of suspects arrested for farm attacks in the Greytown area are arrested in Gauteng. Detectives also say that the figure of the ‘professional entrepreneur’, a full-time criminal well networked in South Africa’s illicit economy, appears in about 30% of cases investigated. Typically, as in the case above, the ‘entrepreneur’ has both local links in the Midlands and to illicit markets in South Africa’s urban centres.
It should be pointed out that the Midlands area is deeply involved in the regional illicit firearm market, primarily as a consumer. Some traditional areas are highly militarised and well-armed, often with automatic weapons. Security personnel believe that most automatic weapons in the area are purchased in Gauteng. Whether there is a connection between farm attacks and the illegal firearm trade between Gauteng and the Midlands is a matter for further exploration. Some security personnel believe that some of the firearms stolen in farm attacks are destined for the arsenals of warlords in the traditional areas of the Midlands. There is no evidence for this thesis, but it is worth investigating. Whether true or not, it is significant that large and well-oiled illegal markets between the Midlands and Gauteng already exist. It is possible that farm attacks use market links – for vehicles and firearms – that have been in existence for many years.
The rural protection plan in the Greytown district
The structure of the rural protection plan in the district is both innovative and unusual. All security structures and initiatives in the district are linked to a single nerve centre, a control room in the middle of Greytown called the ‘911 centre’. The name of the centre refers to just one of its functions: three 24-hour hotlines have been established at the centre, accessible to the entire telephone network in the district. In addition, the 911 centre is in radio contact with all 200 farms in the district, with specialised police units in the area (murder and robbery, and stock 62 – Attacks on farms and smallholdings theft), with the Greytown police station, as well as with all other emergency services in the area, and with Army Group 9 headquarters in Pietermaritzburg. The centre has a ten-person reaction force at its disposal, available 24 hours a day, and a 20-person, ten-vehicle proactive unit that patrols both the town and the countryside. Both the reaction and the proactive unit are staffed by a combination of permanent force and commando personnel.
The 200 farms in the district are organised into security zones. Given the principle that all members of a cell should be within less than eight minutes driving time from each other, each zone is divided into roads. Thus, when a distress signal is transmitted on the radio network, road members are instructed to get to the scene, and zone members to staff access points to the district. The 911 centre is notified at the same time, and co-ordinates the response of the reaction unit and the police. The centre also performs a daily radio check with each of the 200 farms in the area, beginning at 7h00.
The Greytown district falls within the jurisdiction of the Umvoti commando which is staffed by 250 civilians. One-third of the commando’s citizen personnel is black and for the most part unemployed. These unemployed men form the backbone of patrol, guarding and reaction activity.
Much of the commando’s work consists of proactive patrols designed to prevent stock theft. A typical stock theft patrol is performed on foot, between 8h00 and 16h00, and covers approximately 20 kilometres of the Greytown countryside. The placement of patrols is driven by information gathered from farmers and is never routine. Commando personnel claim that 1998 stock theft levels were 70% lower than those recorded in 1996.
The 911 centre, supported primarily by SANDF resources and personnel, has all but taken over both proactive policing and rapid reaction in the Greytown area. The centre, in conjunction with local police personnel, has established a wide crime information network in the town of Greytown itself and has deployed its town patrols accordingly. To the extent that it is possible, proactive patrolling in the countryside is also informed by the centre’s intelligence gathering and is performed by SANDF personnel. The one area where the police still play a crucial and largely autonomous role is in investigation.
This situation is very unusual in the Midlands. It appears that farmers in many districts respond to the lack of police capacity by hiring private security firms that offer guarding, patrol and reaction services. There are as many as 40 private security firms operative in the farming districts of the Midlands area. Seldom do farmers 63 respond to the lack of police capacity by pulling their weight behind the rural protection plan over a sustained period, as has happened in the Greytown district. The Greytown approach has obvious advantages over districts that skirt the rural protection plan and opt for private security instead:
•Civilian security cells are better placed to deliver a rapid reaction capacity than professional patrols in sparsely populated farming districts. • All aspects of crime-fighting – from information gathering to proactive policing to response and investigation – are co-ordinated from a central point. All security personnel are thus driven by a single strategy. •The 911 centre draws heavily on SANDF resources and is thus less expensive for farmers than private security.
Has the Greytown strategy worked? On the face of it, it appears that it has. Certainly, with regard to housebreaking in town and stock theft in the countryside, crime levels have declined as much as 70% since the 911 centre was put in place. With regard to farm attacks, the evidence is a little more ambiguous. Farm attacks have declined in the Greytown district since the rural protection plan kicked in. In 1996, the year before the 911 centre began its work, the Greytown police district recorded the highest levels of farm attacks in the Midlands police area. In 1997, attacks declined by 20% and in 1998 by 25%.
How much of this decline is attributable to the capacity brought to the district by the rural protection plan? At first glance, it is difficult to say. The arrest rate for farm attacks in the district is high: 74% over the three-year period between 1997 and 1999. However, in only 35% of successes was rapid reaction responsible for the apprehension of suspects. Statistically, this means that the perpetrators of three out of four farm attacks evade the rapid reaction capacity of the rural protection plan. In 65% of cases, investigative work by the Greytown murder and robbery unit was responsible for bringing suspects to book. It is therefore possible that the decline in farm attacks is the result of good detective work, which would exist irrespective of whether the plan was in place. On the other hand, it is possible that the presence of the plan in the district has had a deterrent effect, and that its successes are thus invisible. Indeed, the 911 centre appears to have an extensive information network and conducts regular preventive exercises.
Notes
1 The KwaZulu-Natal Midlands constitutes a massive police area inhabited by nearly two million people. The research team elected to concentrate on two areas comprehensively, rather than on several superficially. The districts chosen were Greytown and Ixopo where the rural protection plan 64 – Attacks on farms and smallholdings
is particularly strong. The decision to study two successful districts has both advantages and disadvantages. On the one hand, it masks the fact that the plan is weak in other Midlands districts. On the other hand, choosing two strong districts has the advantage of highlighting best practice. 2 Land affairs officials in the area refused requests for interviews, and it was not possible to ascertain first-hand information on the progress of the land claims process. Chapter 7 The Ixopo area – KwaZulu-Natal
The Ixopo district
here are many similarities in the social and physical geographies of the Ixopo and T the Greytown farming districts. The Ixopo district consists of 201 commercial farms and three large timber plantations, owned by Sappi, Mondi and Timbo. Timber and dairy predominate in the area and sugar is farmed in the south of the district.
As in the Greytown district, the traditional areas in Ixopo were engaged in sustained and violent conflict in the late 1980s and early 1990s and remain highly militarised. Two of the traditional areas are controlled by Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP) aligned chiefs, the other two by African National Congress (ANC) aligned chiefs. As in Greytown, the single biggest issue in the minds of commercial farmers is land encroachment. The problem, again as in Greytown, is uneven. There is sustained encroachment in two areas, Highflats and Ixopo, but very little in Creighton and almost none in Donnybrook. As is shown later, the reasons behind this unevenness illuminate important aspects of the rural protection plan.
Security personnel report that traditional leaders in the area are facing a sustained and traumatic crisis. Their areas of jurisdiction are massively overpopulated and their land increasingly unable to sustain the area’s population of cattle.
Land encroachment
As in Greytown, Ixopo farmers regard land encroachment as the single most important issue in the area. Yet, encroachment has been directly responsible for only one farm attack in the area. It appears that the fears raised by the spectre of encroachment have less to do with personal safety than with the viability of farming in the district.
Security personnel and farmers claim that, immediately prior to the 1994 election, grassroots ANC activists in the area earmarked ten farms in the district and told mass 66 – Attacks on farms and smallholdings audiences that they would be redistributed to the rural poor after the ANC came to power. Farmers acknowledge that tensions around land hunger were brewing long before 1994, but insist that the 1994 election campaign acted as a catalyst, and that land encroachment began in earnest immediately after the election.
The intensity of encroachment across the district is uneven. Some argue that the intensity of encroachment is directly related to the strength of traditional leadership in the area. Where encroachment is nonexistent, a delicate quid pro quo between the local chief and the local security structures is in place. The local security structures undertake to investigate incidents of cattle theft within the chief’s jurisdiction. Subjects of the chief are generously rewarded for information leading to the arrest of suspects in cases of crime on commercial farms. Community projects in the traditional areas, like the upgrading of schools, are subsidised by the local farming community. In return, traditional leaders closely monitor border areas and discipline those who encroach. This arrangement only works where traditional leaders have sufficient authority over their jurisdictions. In Highflats, the area where land encroachment is most severe, traditional leadership, by all accounts, has lost control of its jurisdiction.
Others are less encouraging about working with traditional leaders. Some argue that chiefs have everything to lose by stopping land hungry subjects from encroaching upon commercial farmland, and merely paid lip service to the rural protection plan.
Case study
Murder John and Paul, a father and son, owned a large farm in the Highflats district, bordering traditional land.1 Their neighbour was infamous throughout the district for the poor and unfair treatment of his employees. The neighbour’s land was continually subject to arson and other forms of sabotage. The farmer himself received a series of death threats in 1997 and 1998 and eventually abandoned his farm late in 1998. Days after he left, several informal structures were erected on his land.
John and Paul bought their neighbour’s farm in early 1999 and began plans to put it to commercial use. Immediately, a war of attrition between John and Paul, and the occupants of their new farm began. John and Paul went to the courts to bring an eviction order against the occupants. In turn, John and Paul were consistently threatened and their land and livestock destroyed. In October 1999, Paul was murdered on a public road close to his farm. No arrests had been made at the time of writing. 67
Like the murder of Mr Redinger in the Kranskop area, the Paul murder poses difficult questions for the rural protection plan. Traditional authority in the Highflats district, to all intents and purposes, has broken down. Those encroaching on the land are unlikely to use it for cultivation. They seem, rather, to be driven by a wild and aggressive political identity. Development solutions, which make land available for small-scale commercial farming are no doubt desirable, but are unlikely to address the causes of the Paul murder.
The rural protection plan and the Ixopo Farm Watch
The Ixopo Farm Watch is a non-profit section 21 company that employs ten full-time employees, six of them professional security personnel. There is a board of directors, consisting of local farmers, a managing director, a central committee and four action committees, one for each of the area’s four districts: Creighton, Donnybrook, Ixopo and Highflats. Each action committee employs one co-ordinator, a full-time position funded by the Farm Watch. Co-ordinators wear uniforms and have blue lights on their vehicles. The central committee meets once a month to exchange information and to plan proactive crime prevention measures. The managing director meets with the police’s crime intelligence unit, the murder and robbery unit, and the stock theft unit every day. The Farm Watch’s jurisdiction covers two police station areas: Ixopo and Donnybrook. Farm Watch personnel meet weekly with the station commissioner, detective commander and proactive unit commander at both stations.
The 1999 annual budget of the Farm Watch was R667 000. All three timber corporations and 197 of the 201 commercial farms in the area belong to the Farm Watch and pay annual fees. Every member of the Farm Watch is organised into a security cell and has a two-way radio. All cell members are within eight minutes driving distance from each other.
The commando in the area is divided into a rural and an urban company. The latter is staffed mainly by coloured members. Its proactive patrols concentrate primarily on the prevention of vehicle theft and housebreaking. The rural company is all white and its proactive patrols concentrate primarily on the prevention of stock theft.
The nerve centre of the Farm Watch is an operations room, situated at the back of the crime intelligence office at the Ixopo police station. In the event of a distress call (usually transmitted by radio or cell phone), both the local security cell and the operations room are activated. The former race to the scene. The operations room does two things. Firstly, it contacts the appropriate district’s co-ordinator, as well as the appropriate police unit (eg, stock theft, murder and robbery). The co-ordinator and the police arrive on the scene together. Thereafter, the co-ordinator remains 68 – Attacks on farms and smallholdings intricately involved in the police investigation. Secondly, the operations room alerts other co-ordinators who, depending on the nature and location of the crime, move into the area’s key access points. (This function is crucial because most armed robberies in the area appear to emanate from Durban and perpetrators flee on a regional artery stretching between Richmond and Durban.)
The Farm Watch’s four co-ordinators appear to constitute the pivot of its operation. They play every imaginable policing role, from information collecting, to intelligence gathering, to mediation, to response, to investigation. They spend eight to ten hours a day in their respective districts and have an intimate knowledge of their respective jurisdictions.
As in Greytown, a civilian initiative has taken the lead in crucial spheres of policing work, from intelligence gathering to proactive policing and rapid response and, to an extent, investigation. A crucial difference is that, while Greytown relies heavily on SANDF resources and corporate donations, the financing of the rural protection plan in Ixopo comes largely from farmers’ pockets. This is a source of great anger in the district. In October 1999, farmers in the district held a public demonstration and handed over a memorandum of demands to the member of the provincial executive council (MEC) for agriculture. The memorandum demanded that the government should acknowledge that citizens were both performing and paying for what should be a state duty – the provision of safety and security – and demanded that the work of citizens should be subsidised. Ironically, the security forces believe the rural protection plan in Ixopo is a resounding success because of high levels of citizen participation, while citizens believe the plan is a failure precisely because the bulk of the burden falls on their shoulders.
Note
1 Real names have been omitted to protect the confidentiality of those involved. Chapter 8 The Wierdabrug area – Gauteng
The Wierdabrug police district
he Wierdabrug police district, south-west of Pretoria, covers a surface area of T 467 square kilometres. The police district comprises a highly urbanised and middle class component, a number of squatter and informal settlements, low cost housing areas, a large area of smallholdings of various sizes, and a few farms.
Many, if not most, of the smallholdings in the Wierdabrug area are not used for commercial purposes. They are, in essence, large residential properties occupied by people who want to live close to the city, but not in a normal high density residential neighbourhood. Moreover, most of the smallholdings in the area are lumped together in clusters. As a result, the majority of smallholdings are not isolated and far removed from their neighbours (as would be the case with farms in rural areas). Generally, the house on a smallholding is not more than 75 to 100 metres away from the house of its nearest neighbour.
At the end of 1999, the number of inhabitants in the Wierdabrug police district was upward of 168 000 people. This figure is growing rapidly as young people move into the squatter and informal settlements from outlying areas to be closer to the Pretoria- Midrand-Johannesburg industrial-commercial complex in search of work. It is estimated that some 55 000 people are living in the squatter and informal settlements. The number of inhabitants in the Wierdabrug area grew rapidly after 1994 as part of a larger trend of young rural and poor people moving closer to the cities with the hope of finding employment.
Smallholding attacks in the Wierdabrug area
If the period January to June 1998 is compared with the same period in 1999, it is apparent that the number of attacks on farms and smallholdings in Gauteng increased substantially: from 80 to 124 attacks (an increase of 55%). Over the same period, the Gauteng
NORTH-WEST Akasia Pretoria Mamelodi Atteridgeville Laudium Centurion Valhalla Irene Midrand Tembisa RTH- Sandton Randburg Kempton Park EST Krugersdorp Alexandra Randfontein Benoni Roodepoort Johannesburg Mohlakeng Soweto Germiston Brakpan Alberton Boksburg Springs Katlehong Westonaria KwaThema arletonwille Thokoza Nigel Orange Farm Heidelberg Evaton Lekoa Meyerton Sebokeng Sharpeville Vereeniging Vanderbijlpark MPUMALAN 71 number of attacks in the Pretoria police area increased by 181%, and in the Wierdabrug police district, the number of attacks increased by a massive 475% (from 4 to 23).
Virtually all the smallholding attacks which occurred in the Wierdabrug area in 1999 were directed against the property of the smallholders. (Of the 23 smallholding attacks between January and June 1999, 21 were armed robberies, and two attempted murders in connection with armed robberies.) That is, it appeared that the culprits were motivated primarily by greed. Not surprisingly, most crimes registered under ‘smallholding attacks’ were those of robbery, and housebreaking with the intent to rob. In two instances, smallholders were seriously injured in the attacks and attempted murder dockets were opened. It would appear, however, that the violence used by the culprits was aimed at achieving their primary objective to rob the smallholder of his or her possessions. The violence involved in these attacks did not seem to be gratuitous.
While most of the smallholding attacks in the Wierdabrug area do not involve a high degree of violence, this does not mean that smallholders’ quality of life is not affected by crime in their areas. All the smallholders interviewed were adamant that crime in their area had increased substantially over the last few years. Smallholders blamed the increase in crime primarily on an ineffective criminal justice system which fails to apprehend most criminals, and which does not punish convicted criminals severely enough. Smallholders’ way of life had also changed considerably because of a fear of crime. Most smallholders interviewed said that they no longer left their property after sunset (many do not even dare to venture outside of their houses at night), and many had spent considerable amounts of money on security structures and systems.
No real pattern could be established in respect of where the attacks took place in the Wierdabrug police area, or the days of the week on which they were most likely to occur. Most of the attacks seemed to be randomly situated, and culprits did not select only those smallholdings which had weak or no security measures in place. A number of observations can be made from the smallholding attacks studied in the Wierdabrug area.
Pattern of escalating victimisation In many of the instances of smallholding attacks that were analysed, the smallholder (or his or her family) had been victimised by criminals in the weeks and months leading up to the eventual serious ‘smallholding attack’.
There was often a pattern of escalating victimisation. That is, some weeks or months before the eventual ‘attack’, the smallholding concerned experienced some 72 – Attacks on farms and smallholdings relatively minor crime. This typically involved the theft of some washing from an outside washing line, the tampering with a motor vehicle which had been parked outside, or the theft of garden implements or furniture left outside. This then typically escalated a few weeks later to more serious crimes such as theft out of a motor vehicle, or housebreaking (while the inhabitants were out). Finally, the inhabitants of the smallholding would come into direct contact with their attackers whereupon the crime would be one of robbery. At times, smallholders were hurt or injured in such robberies.
In-house co-operation Many of the smallholding attacks analysed seemed to involve some kind of collusion or co-operation between the culprits and domestic workers living on the smallholding, or with workers who worked on the smallholding during the day, or people who had worked for the smallholder in the past.
In a high proportion of the attacks investigated, there was strong circumstantial evidence that the culprits were familiar with the terrain of the smallholding, the inside of the dwellings on the smallholdings, and that they knew where valuables and safes were hidden.
Motive for attacks In all the attacks investigated, the primary motive for the attack was one of greed. The theft of valuables, especially money, vehicles and electronic appliances seemed to be high on the culprits’ agenda. No evidence was found that the majority of attacks were motivated by a desire to obtain firearms.
The research team asked everyone they came across in their investigation (victims, members of the security forces, workers on the smallholdings and non-victims) whether they thought that the smallholding attacks in the Wierdabrug area could have been motivated by anything other than greed and common criminality. Specifically, the research team sought to ascertain whether any of the attacks could have had an underlying political or ideological motive. None of the people interviewed thought that the attacks in the Wierdabrug area had been motivated by anything else but the desire to rob and steal.
Type of culprits In cases where the culprits were identified by their victims, they tended to be young black males operating in groups of three or four. According to some members of the security forces, the culprits were generally well prepared and methodical in their ‘attack’ on the smallholding. Often, one of the culprits would not be physically involved in the actual attack on the smallholding, but would remain away from the 73 crime scene to act as a lookout to warn his accomplices about the arrival of the smallholder or the security forces. It also appeared that some attackers made use of a ‘sweeper’ who followed his accomplices and made sure that no incriminating evidence (such as fingerprints and cartridge shells) were left behind.
Smallholders’ level of security Of the smallholdings inspected, the research team’s investigations revealed that there was no direct relationship between smallholders’ security measures and the likelihood that they would be attacked. There was a considerable disparity in the levels of security employed by the inspected smallholdings which had been attacked. Some had comprehensive security measures (such as alarms, high walls with electric fencing, dogs, and the dwellings on the smallholding were clearly visible from the road), while others had no security measures in place (such as a fence or outside lights).
Cognisance must be taken, however, of the fact that the research team only inspected about a dozen smallholdings which had been attacked over a one-year period. The sample is consequently a small one and does not provide conclusive proof that there is no relationship between a smallholding’s level of security and the likelihood that it will be attacked. The conclusion, however, can be drawn that even the best security measures are no guarantee against smallholding attacks.
Areas of attacks Overall – looking at the whole Wierdabrug police area – there are no geographic patterns to the smallholding attacks. However, a high proportion of the attacks investigated occurred in the vicinity of shebeens (illegal taverns) and bars, and squatter and informal settlements.
The smallholding and rural areas within the Wierdabrug police district contain some 27 registered liquor licences. There are, moreover, a number of shebeens and taverns in the area which are not licenced. According to the police, shebeens and taverns are general crime hot-spots in the area. Criminals prey on intoxicated people to assault, rob and even rape them on their way home from shebeens and taverns. Criminals exploit the fact that their victims – who are on foot – are intoxicated, and that it is usually late at night or early in the morning when revellers go home. These kinds of attacks peak towards the end of the week or month when victims have been paid and carry relatively large amounts of cash.
Anecdotal evidence suggests that criminals from outside of the district frequent shebeens in the Wierdabrug area to gather information on the locality they want to victimise. Such criminals would befriend a local person. With the inebriating effect 74 – Attacks on farms and smallholdings of alcohol, a local labourer might reveal information on his employer – and his or her habits, security structures and possessions – vital to the criminal who is selecting his next target. As it is likely that local labourers would frequent a shebeen within walking distance of where they work, it would be logical (if shebeens are information gathering centres for criminals) that many of the smallholding attacks would occur within the vicinity of a local shebeen. Moreover, it is possible that outside criminals use the shebeens to recruit local people to assist them in their attacks on smallholdings.
Case studies
Attempted murder and armed robbery In October 1998, Mr and Mrs A – a middle-aged couple – were returning home from church on a Sunday evening.1 It was raining and Mrs A rushed from the car, in which she and her husband had travelled, to her house’s front door to unlock it and switch off the house alarm. As Mr A got out of the car, he was accosted by three or four youths. They pushed him into the house. Mr A also saw a further three culprits remaining outside of the house. As he was being pushed into his house, Mr A struggled with his assailants. Two shots were fired by the assailant holding Mr A. Mr A was seriously injured in his arm and back. Mrs A then set off the alarm and the attackers fled.
Mrs A immediately phoned for an ambulance which arrived within minutes. She also phoned a police reservist in their area who also arrived at the crime scene within minutes. The police reservist then called the police who responded rapidly. Mr and Mrs A were also hooked up to a private armed response security company. They never responded to the activated alarm.
While the police’s initial response was good, the follow-up by the detective service was poor. Mrs A claimed she had a clear view of one of the assailants, but the police never sought to develop an identikit of the identifiable culprit. Mr A’s statement was only taken at the end of January 1999 – some three months after the attack. Moreover, one of the bullets fired by the assailants passed through Mr A’s body and lodged itself into the lounge wall of his house. This discharged bullet was never taken by the police for the purposes of a ballistic test to see if the same firearm was used in the commission of any other crime(s). The second bullet fired that night was never found.
On the night of the attack, the A’s house had an alarm system connected to a private armed rapid response security company. The windows of the house were covered with burglar guards. The property was surrounded by a fence of approximately 1.8 75 metres in height. The house was clearly visible from the road (it is approximately 30 to 40 metres from the road), and the house was lit up by two large spotlights on the roof, and five smaller outside lights attached to the house and along the driveway leading up to the house.
The A’s property was not large, and the houses of their two neighbours were not more than 50 metres away. However, even though two shots were fired, the alarm was activated and Mrs A claimed that she screamed for help, neither of her neighbours came to her assistance or tried to ascertain what had happened.
Mr and Mrs A thought that the motive for the attack was theft as their assailants started looking around as soon as they had entered the house. At the time of the attack, two people who worked for Mr and Mrs A lived on the property: a woman who worked as a domestic servant inside the house, and her common law husband who worked as a gardener on the property. Both had worked for Mr and Mrs A for six years. The domestic servant initially claimed that she knew who the attackers were, but later denied it. She was an alcoholic and it appeared that the police did not take her utterances all too seriously. She disappeared shortly after the attack, and the police do not know her whereabouts.
Prior to the attack on Mr and Mrs A in October 1998, a number of other criminal incidents occurred on their smallholding. About six weeks prior to the attack, unknown persons broke through Mr and Mrs A’s back kitchen door. The culprits entered the house, but it seemed that they were surprised and fled, as very little was taken. In response, Mr and Mrs A installed an iron gate on their back door, installed an alarm in their house and subscribed to a private armed response security firm.
About five weeks prior to the attack, the tyres were stolen off Mr and Mrs A’s car which they had parked outside their garage. A week later, their car was stolen. The thieves could not open the electric gate, so they cut a large hole in the fence and pushed the stolen car through the hole.
Theft of motor vehicles Mr B lives on a large smallholding with his wife and children, and his brother and his family. Also on the smallholding is a vehicle repair workshop where Mr B works with his brother and approximately 30 workers.
At the end of 1998, Mr B built a two metre high wall around his entire smallholding. Electrified wires run along the top of the wall. If the wires touch or are cut an alarm is activated. The wall is three kilometres long and cost half a million rand to build. 76 – Attacks on farms and smallholdings
In October 1999, thieves carefully broke a large hole in the wall without disturbing the electrified wires on the top. The hole was broken into the wall at a point furthest from Mr B’s house. The thieves then broke into the premises of the vehicle workshop, retrieved the keys for two bakkies and drove the bakkies out of the property of the smallholding though the hole in the wall – again without disturbing the electrified wires on top of the wall.
By virtue of the fact that the thieves knew where the keys for the bakkies were, and where a hidden immobiliser switch was inside the bakkies, it is likely that the thieves were employees, or former employees of Mr B, or had been briefed by one of his employees.
On discovering the theft the next morning, Mr B called the Wierdabrug police station which responded rapidly. Mr B, however, was disappointed with the follow-up by the police’s detective service. While the police were first notified at 7h00 in the morning, the detectives only arrived at 15h30 to lift fingerprints.
Other security measures on the smallholding include two powerful floodlights which cover the whole workshop area where the vehicles were stolen. Mr B and his brother also had a number of dogs. Because the houses are far from the workshop, it is likely that the dogs did not hear anything.
Previous to the vehicle theft incident, Mr B experienced a number of minor incidents of theft in his workshop. About a year prior to the incident, someone had short- circuited the electrified wires on top of the wall surrounding the smallholding. This was done in such a way that the person doing this would have known how the alarm system connected to the fence worked. In other words, the probability was high that this was done by someone who had some inside knowledge of Mr B’s security set- up.
Armed robbery Ms C is a domestic worker who lived on a smallholding in a room attached to her employer’s house. In April 1999, she, her child and two of her friends were sleeping when three youths (whom Ms C claimed came from a nearby squatter camp) broke into her room, threatened them with a gun and a knife and tied them up. The robbers then broke into the main house whereupon the alarm went off. The robbers took a video machine and some other household items and ran away.
Ms C managed to untie herself and phone the police, who took 30 minutes to arrive. The personnel of the private security company working for Ms C’s employer arrived first at the scene of the crime. At the time of the incident, the smallholding was not 77 properly fenced. There were no dogs on the smallholding. The smallholding was well lit at night, however, with a number of lights around the perimeter of the house.
The smallholding had a history of escalating criminal victimisation. Two months prior to the incident, clothes were stolen from the washing line at night and a garden shed was broken into and some minor items stolen. The owner of the smallholding did not report this incident to the police. A month later, someone tampered with Ms C’s employer’s motor vehicle while it was parked on the smallholding during the night. This time, the matter was reported to the police who took a written statement from the vehicle’s owner. To Ms C’s recollection, no attempt was made by the police to lift any fingerprints from the tampered vehicle.
The rural protection plan in the Wierdabrug area
The structure Structurally, the rural protection plan is working well in the Wierdabrug area. A captain of the Wierdabrug police is the chairman of the local Ground Level Operational Co-ordinating Committee (GOCOC). Members of the Pretoria East Commando and the SANDF’s Army Group 15 are also represented on the GOCOC, as is the local agricultural union, and a representative of the Centurion city council which partly funds a non-profit section 21 security company which frequently assists the Wierdabrug police in their operations by providing vehicles and personnel.
Pretoria East Commando The Wierdabrug area falls under the jurisdiction of the Pretoria East Commando. The commando is responsible for a large area stretching from Garsfontein in the east to Erasmia in the west, and Pretoria central in the north to Midrand in the south. The Pretoria East Commando has some 900 members of which 15% to 30% are active at any one time. There are about 150 commando members in the Wierdabrug area, of which 30 are fully trained area-bound reaction force members. Most of the remainder are home and hearth protection reaction force commando members.
The relationship between the Pretoria East Commando and the Wierdabrug police is good. There have been numerous joint patrols involving both organisations. Some commando members are also SAPS reservists, and vice versa.
Weaknesses in the commando’s operational effectiveness: •The Pretoria East Commando has limited resources and a lack of properly functioning non-armoured vehicles and radios. Unless the commando receives new vehicles, it is likely that the few remaining non-armoured vehicles at its disposal will cease functioning because of old age. This would severely affect the 78 – Attacks on farms and smallholdings
commando’s operational capacity. The commando is also suffering from a shortage of modern handheld radios. For example, it has no radios which can tune into the SAPS’s radio frequency. As a result, during joint commando-SAPS operations, the communication between the two forces is severely limited. Pretoria East Commando can obtain SANDF Kenwood radios (with access to the SAPS’s radio frequency) from Group 15 headquarters. However, this is a lengthy and bureaucratic process and takes too long in an emergency such as a smallholding attack. Cellular phones and the fact that some commando members are also SAPS reservists (by virtue of which they have access to SAPS radios) alleviate this problem somewhat. The situation is far from ideal, however. (The ostensibly trivial case of the radios is a good example of where a relatively small investment in a few radios could make a substantial and positive impact on the commando’s ability to engage in joint operations with the SAPS after a smallholding attack.) •The commando has a limited reach into the black community and consequently little advance intelligence from the black community in the Wierdabrug area. This is being addressed, and the commando has begun to train black volunteers from Laudium. This is a slow process, however, and there seems to be a degree of apprehension from some of the ordinary white commando members at the process of racially integrating the commando. This could delay the integration process within the commando. Moreover there are very few black commando members who live on the smallholdings or in the squatter and informal settlements in the Wierdabrug area. This is clearly a weakness in the rural protection plan, and is recognised as such by the commando’s leadership. This weakness is being addressed, but it will take some time before the rural protection plan can benefit from the new integrative approach. •A concern raised by the commando is that the area bound reaction force members are slow to mobilise. This is especially so during daytime hours on weekdays when most of these members are at work. By the time the commando’s reaction force is mobilised, smallholding attackers have disappeared out of the area because of the high number of escape routes criss- crossing the district.
SAPS Wierdabrug At the time of the research project (October 1999), the Wierdabrug police station had a total staff complement of 111, of whom 22 were administrative staff. Of the remaining 89 members, 11 were working on crime prevention duties. A further 23 members were detectives. The station had 25 vehicles, of which four were for crime prevention functions, and six for detective duties. According to the police, the Wierdabrug police station was understaffed by 47%. There is approximately one SAPS employee in the Wierdabrug police district for every 1 500 inhabitants in the 79 area. This is low by national standards, with about one SAPS employee for every 315 people living in South Africa.
The Wierdabrug police have adopted a sector policing approach. Two crime prevention members are devoted exclusively to the policing of smallholding areas in the police district. The station had approximately 30 trained police reservists, of whom six lived in the smallholding areas. Two of the six reservists who live in the smallholding area were also commando members.
The sector policing approach is beneficial to all concerned. Large parts of the smallholding areas in the Wierdabrug police district have badly marked roads and smallholdings. There are also many private and informal roads in the area which are not marked on any map. Such an area can be policed effectively only by police officers who know the geographical layout of the area intimately and are familiar with its terrain. Moreover, the sector policing approach allows the two police inspectors who are responsible for the smallholding areas to acquaint themselves with a relatively large number of its residents.
A further strength of the Wierdabrug police is the willingness of its leadership to co- operate with neighbouring police districts, especially the adjacent Erasmia police district which also includes a large number of smallholdings. This process of co- operation is facilitated by regular GOCOC meetings where SAPS members, who deal with crime on smallholdings, from Wierdabrug and Erasmia police are represented.
Members of the security forces felt that some of the smallholding attacks were related and involved the same people. Criminals would attack a smallholding in one police district and then attack another smallholding a few days or weeks later in another police district, and so forth. The culprits’ strategy is to shift from one police district to the next with the hope that the police does not make the connection between these seemingly separate attacks. The good lines of communication which exist between the Wierdabrug and Erasmia police enable them (at least in these two areas) to develop a better understanding of the smallholding attacks which are occurring in their areas and identify any trends which might assist them to apprehend the culprits involved.
Weaknesses in the operational effectiveness of the SAPS • Resources: The Wierdabrug police’s operational capacity suffers from a lack of resources, primarily in terms of personnel and functioning vehicles. As has been mentioned, the station is 47% understaffed. Crucially, the Wierdabrug police can only devote two full-time police inspectors for crime prevention duties in its 80 – Attacks on farms and smallholdings
smallholding areas. As these two police officers work in a pair and generally work eight hour shifts, it means that the smallholding areas are not policed (for crime prevention purposes) for some 16 hours out of very 24 hours.
• Public apathy: There is a high degree of apathy on the side of smallholders to get involved in security structures such as the police’s reservists or the commando. Most of the victimised smallholders even expressed little interest in participating in the available security structures.
The reasons for this lack of participation were varied. Most smallholders argued that they did not have the time to get involved. Many were also under the misconception that becoming a police reservist or commando member would entail long periods away from home to man roadblocks and do crime prevention duties in areas away from their neighbourhood. None of the smallholders interviewed had heard of the rural protection plan, and virtually none of them had heard of the commando’s home and hearth protection force membership option, whereby participants do not have to do commando duties away from their homes.
• Geography: The Wierdabrug police area is easily accessible from a number of major roads which criss-cross the area. For example, the N1 national highway, the Krugersdorp highway, and the old Johannesburg road all pass through, or are immediately adjacent to the police area. This allows criminals to make a quick escape from the area after they have committed a crime. According to the police, it is possible to get onto a major arterial road or highway from anywhere in the Wierdabrug police area within five minutes in a fast car, and out of the police area in less than ten minutes. It is consequently almost impossible to implement any kind of contingency plan where the security forces can cordon off the area after a smallholding attack with the aim of trapping the suspects in the area and finding them through the use of dogs and trackers.
The Wierdabrug police area is not particularly mountainous and has few major natural obstacles such as rivers. As a result, numerous informal roads and paths have developed throughout the area. These are also used by criminals to escape quickly from the area.
The Wierdabrug police district contains numerous squatter and informal settlements. These settlements have a highly transient population as people are continuously moving out to get closer to Johannesburg and Pretoria, and new people are moving in from outlying areas to look for work. It is consequently relatively easy for persons who have participated in a smallholding attack (and 81
who cannot flee from the area because they do not have access to a vehicle) to ‘disappear’ in one of the many squatter and informal settlements. After waiting for a few hours after the smallholding attack (and for the security force activity to wane), such persons can then board a taxi and be driven out of the area. Because of the high volume of traffic, the numerous roads and the anonymity provided by a densely populated area, the security forces are virtually unable to apprehend smallholding attackers once they have disappeared from the scene of the crime.
The Wierdabrug police station is situated in the northern-most corner of the district. Because the police district is large, it takes a police vehicle up to 20 minutes to drive from the police station to the other side of the district.
The Wierdabrug police district covers a number of magisterial districts and six municipal areas (Pretoria, Centurion, Krugersdorp, Midrand, and small sections of Randburg and Sandton). Crimes which, for example, occur in Midrand (but within the Wierdabrug police district) are often reported to the Midrand police as the public are unaware of the exact police district boundaries. It often takes one to two weeks for the docket, which has been opened in Midrand, to reach the Wierdabrug police. In the interim, no investigation takes place of the reported crime. By the time Wierdabrug detectives arrive at the scene of the crime, some two weeks later, the crime scene is ruined and of little use for the collection of forensic evidence.
• Detective support: If the security forces are unable to make an arrest immediately after a smallholding attack, their only hope is to solve the case through good detective work. However, the detective work in respect of smallholding attacks is often less than adequate (see ‘case studies’ above).
Part of the problem is simply a shortage of experienced personnel. Because the Wierdabrug police are also responsible for a highly populated urban area, they have to deal with numerous cases of housebreaking and theft out of motor vehicles, especially over weekends. As a result, the limited detective capacity of the Wierdabrug police is torn between the district’s urban and smallholding areas. With more serious crimes, the Wierdabrug police rely on specialist detective support from Pretoria (eg, ballistic tests, taking of blood samples at a crime scene, and the taking of photographs). Because such specialist detectives are responsible for a number of policing districts, there is frequently a lengthy delay between the time of a smallholding attack, and the time the first detective arrives on the crime scene. 82 – Attacks on farms and smallholdings
Note
1 Real names have been omitted to protect the confidentiality of those involved. Chapter 9 Conclusion
omparing the rural protection plan in Piet Retief, on the one hand, and Ixopo C and Greytown, on the other, provides a useful opportunity to demonstrate the repercussions when, as in Piet Retief, only one aspect of the plan is working well. The strength of the Piet Retief plan resides in the high participation of farmers in the security cell system, as well as its reliance on alarms and panic buttons rather than just radios. The result is an excellent rapid reaction system, one that has been responsible for the apprehension of suspects in a number of cases.
However, the rapid reaction capacity of the security cell system, combined with a close relationship with the commando, receives little support from other aspects of the rural protection plan. It appears that crime intelligence has insufficient capacity to play any significant role in crime prevention, or to guide investigation. Investigation itself rarely leads to the apprehension of suspects. Moreover, the rural protection plan has failed to address, or even to acknowledge, a brewing crisis in labour relations in the district. An impending wave of land claims and evictions could lead to a severe deterioration in an already volatile arena. Whether such deterioration will result in an escalation of farm attacks is open to speculation. Meaningful black participation in the rural protection plan is highly unlikely until dialogue regarding a great deal of cumulative anger and distrust is addressed.
Why the plan has failed to address the relationship between black and white communities is not clear. The political disposition of many farmers in the area may be one factor. The weakness of the Mpumalanga Agricultural Union, combined with the general decline in public activity by farmers in the region under the new dispensation is probably another factor. Nonetheless, the failure of both the SANDF and the SAPS to attempt to play a leadership role in this regard is a matter of concern.
Ixopo and Greytown, in contrast, benefit considerably from the presence of a strong provincial agricultural union, Kwanalu. For some time, the union has engaged in 84 – Attacks on farms and smallholdings formal dialogue with traditional leaders, the department of land affairs and the security forces. Ixopo and Greytown also benefit from the presence of Army Group 9, which is eager to play a mediation and conflict resolution role in the area, and which has contributed to the formulation of creative variants on the rural protection plan. That both areas are served by murder and robbery units with fairly high success rates is probably the result of sustained citizen participation in the plan.
The strength of the rural protection plan in Greytown and Ixopo is not replicated across the Midlands area. Many commandos reported that participation in the plan intensifies in the aftermath of a farm attack, but then peters out two or three months later. Why the rural protection plan was particularly strong in some parts of the Midlands and not in others is a matter that requires further investigation.
Studying Greytown and Ixopo also affords the opportunity to examine problems that remain, even when the rural protection plan is working well. In both areas, attempts to bring traditional leaders into the plan brought some success, but also showed up many of the plan’s inherent limits. The crisis of poverty and social discord that beset traditional areas in the Midlands render the most sophisticated crime prevention plans very difficult to implement. Traditional leaders, in general, are on the defensive and are attempting to shore up authority, sometimes well, sometimes hopelessly, that they have held in the past. The result is that the rural protection plan often finds itself in dialogue with people who either have little control over their jurisdictions or who have little desire to see the plan work. Moreover, it is not clear whether development solutions are immediate or direct answers to the problem of land encroachment. Land encroachment is not simply a symptom of land hunger, but also of social decay. Those who encroach on commercial farm land often have little desire or capacity to cultivate the land.
While the plan was strong in both Ixopo and Greytown, its heavy reliance on the (particularly financial) commitments of civilians is worrying. In Ixopo, in particular, farmers believe that they are forced to go it alone. Some argue that the benefits of working with the security forces are becoming less apparent.
In the Wierdabrug area, the rural protection plan’s success is its ability to bring together the various security agencies and to co-ordinate their responses to combat attacks on smallholdings. The plan’s weakness in the area is the high degree of public apathy. Few people are aware of the plan, and only a small minority of smallholders in the area are prepared to participate in the plan. A further weakness of the plan – although this is not unique to the Wierdabrug area – is the lack of resources available to the security forces that would enable them to operate at an optimum level. 85
In both Piet Retief and the Midlands, many attacks had a regional dimension. Typically, a perpetrator who had grown up or spent time in the local area, but lived in a large metropolitan centre and had access to its illicit economy, would recruit locals to assist in the commission of a crime. This rural/urban interface mirrors the lives lived by many South Africans who participate in both urban and rural society. That urban perpetrators who commit farm attacks appear, in general, to have a history in the area where they commit attacks, probably makes investigative work less difficult than appears at first glance. At the very least, the regional dimension of many attacks needs to be mirrored by a regional investigative strategy. In the Wierdabrug area, many of the perpetrators of attacks had some link to the smallholding they attacked. Frequently, the perpetrators had worked on the smallholding they attacked in the past, or knew an employee or former employee of the smallholder whose smallholding they attacked.
The motivation for the majority of the attacks researched was the theft of firearms, cash or vehicles. Attacks were, in general, both well-planned and based on detailed reconnaissance and information. Most attackers were both familiar with the routines of their victims and appeared to know where to find what they were looking for. It is reasonable to assume that, in general, those who attack farms and smallholdings have ready access to South Africa’s underground markets for stolen vehicles and firearms.
To the extent that the attacks were violent, the violence generally appeared to be tactical and instrumental, rather than gratuitous. While the culprits appeared to have few qualms about injuring or even killing their victims, violence was deployed in the cases studied either to access safes, to leave the victim incapable of signalling for help, or to overpower the victim. Chapter 10 Recommendations
he object of the rural protection plan is to encourage all roleplayers in rural safety Tto work together in a co-ordinated manner, and engage in joint planning, action and monitoring to combat crime in the country’s rural areas. The statistics on farm and smallholding attacks indicate that the rate of increase in the number of attacks (and the murders associated with the attacks) has diminished since the plan came into operation.
From the research conducted so far it appears that the plan’s success varies from one area to the next. Generally, the police and the SANDF (as well as the police reservist structures and the commandos) co-operate and assist each other. However, civilian participation – especially among farm workers – is inadequate. Organised agriculture needs to encourage farmers and their workers to participate in the rural protection plan. The security forces are too thin on the ground in the country’s rural areas to prevent farm and smallholding attacks in any meaningful way. Civilian participation is consequently crucial if the plan is to succeed.
The state’s most glaring weakness is in its intelligence and detection capabilities. Too few farm and smallholding attacks are prevented because the security forces rarely obtain advance warning of such attacks. Moreover, once the perpetrators of an attack have disappeared the detective service frequently lacks the resources and capacity to arrest the culprits.
Publicity campaigns
The research team came across a high level of ignorance among farmers and smallholders (the latter, in particular) concerning their potential role in making their homes and community safer against criminal attack. Many of the people interviewed had not heard, or did not know of the rural protection plan. Many (especially among smallholders) did not know that they could become home and hearth protection commando members, whereby they would be primarily responsible for their own farm and smallholding and those of their immediate neighbours only. 88 – Attacks on farms and smallholdings
It appears that many people do not take heed of the existing publicity campaigns of the police and the commandos. It might be appropriate to revisit the way such schemes are marketed to the public. Emphasis will have to be placed on those aspects of these schemes which show the public what they can gain by joining the police’s reservists or the commandos.
It is also apparent that there is little contact between neighbours even among smallholding residents. It appeared that many smallholders left the city to develop a more individualistic lifestyle uninhibited by neighbourly interference. As a result, many smallholders are not motivated to get to know their neighbours, or indeed to get involved in community structures in their neighbourhoods. The police encourages smallholders to get to know their neighbours and to join community police forums and similar structures which would assist the police in its crime prevention functions. A new approach might be required which emphasises the benefit of greater public involvement for the participating smallholders and farmers.
Resources
The security forces in the areas researched – the SAPS, and the SANDF and its commando structures – are working under severe resource constraints. While it would be unrealistic to expect additional funding for the hiring of more personnel or major capital expenditures, relatively minor spending could make a substantial difference to the security forces’ effectiveness. For example, newer radios for the Pretoria East Commando (with a link to the police’s radio frequency) would substantially improve the co-ordination between the SAPS and the local commando in an emergency. Some of these costs could be covered through private sector assistance.
Given the resource constraints of the security forces, it might be prudent to conduct focused and regular high intensity operations in certain areas which are linked to farm and smallholding attacks. While it is a labour intensive process to raid and close down shebeens and illegally operating taverns, such an approach could be beneficial if many of the farm and smallholding attacks are planned in shebeens and taverns.
Improved intelligence and detective work
Circumstantial evidence suggests that some of the farm and smallholding attacks – especially those which involve the theft of motor vehicles, expensive household items and firearms – are committed by criminals who are part of larger organised crime structures. To combat this kind of criminality effectively, sufficient intelligence needs to be gathered on such groups to allow the state to arrest the crime kingpins involved and prosecute them successfully. 89
Generally, the ability of the police and the commandos to gather advance intelligence before an attack on a farm or smallholding is limited. Greater effort is required to develop better intelligence gathering capabilities, especially in the squatter and informal settlements from where a high proportion of the culprits are allegedly emanating. One member of a commando remarked that they would be able to gather much better intelligence if they had even a small budget from which they could pay R50 or R100 to people who supply them with useful information. This might warrant further consideration and investigation.
Most farm and smallholding attackers are nor apprehended at the scene of the crime. As a result, the police’s detective service is greatly relied upon to investigate attacks which can lead to arrests and eventual successful prosecutions. As has been alluded to, much dissatisfaction was expressed by a number of the victims about the level of service provided by the detective service. If the functioning of the detective service is improved, more people might participate in the rural protection plan as they would think that their participation could make a real difference. Detectives need to be given the resources, and they need to be motivated to pay due attention to the more serious attacks on farms and smallholdings.
Farm and smallholding employees
Given the evidence – albeit it circumstantial in places – that employees of farmers and smallholders frequently abet the actions of attackers, greater care needs to be exercised by farmers and smallholders in screening applicants for employment. The security forces need to advise farmers and smallholders that new employees should ideally be sought through official channels such as employment agencies or the department of labour. Moreover, farmers and smallholders need to be made aware of the fact that it is illegal to employ foreigners without a valid work permit.
Greater effort also needs to be made to involve employees on farms and smallholdings in security structures. It is crucial, if the rural protection plan is to succeed, that people who work and often live on farms and smallholdings become SAPS reservists or join the commando structures.
Devolution of responsibility
Many smallholders (and some farmers) have the attitude that the state is responsible to provide for their security 24 hours a day. Given the state’s limited resources, this is clearly not possible. Even with more resources and personnel, it would be impossible for the security forces to patrol all smallholding and farming areas in the 90 – Attacks on farms and smallholdings country. Smallholders and farmers need to be made aware that they must take some of the responsibility to provide for their own security and safety.1
The rural protection plan’s success often stems from a few committed individuals. The success of most structures – such as GOCOCs, residents’ associations, or even neighbourhood or farm watches – can frequently be attributed to a few motivated and committed individuals. The implication is that even the best structures cannot succeed in their aim if they are not driven by at least a small number of people who have the commitment to make them work.
Local solutions to local problems
The rural protection plan is a viable framework around which rural safety initiatives should be undertaken. From the research conducted in three separate areas, it is apparent that the rural protection plan can be made to work – and reduce attacks on farms and smallholdings – provided it is adapted to local conditions and needs. The rural protection plan needs to be flexible enough to accommodate local security needs. Dialogue between local, provincial and national roleplayers on the rural protection plan needs to be fostered. This will bring about a greater sharing of information to assist operational planners at national level to accommodate local conditions in their strategic plan for the country as a whole.
Definition of smallholding attacks
The official definition of a smallholding attack used by the security forces reads as follows: “Acts aimed against the person of residents on smallholdings, whether with the intent to murder, rape, rob or inflict bodily harm.” For statistical purposes, only the following crimes are recorded as a smallholding attack (provided they fall into the above definition): murder, attempted murder, rape, assault with the intent to commit grievous bodily harm, robbery and armed robbery, vehicle hijacking, malicious damage to property (if the damage caused exceeds R10 000), and arson.
The definition is problematic as all violent crimes are arguably directed against the person of the victim. As a result, criminality which would generally be treated as normal (albeit serious) is given a different status as constituting attacks on smallholdings and/or smallholders. Thus, while a housebreaking coupled with a robbery in the urbanised part of the Wierdabrug police district is simply that, if it occurs five kilometres away on a smallholding it is statistically registered as a smallholding attack.
The research team did not come across any evidence, in its analysis of statistics on smallholding attacks during the one-year period after October 1998, which 91 indicated that smallholders in the Wierdabrug area were victimised because they lived on smallholdings or were smallholders. Obviously, many smallholders – especially those living in isolated and outlying areas – are particularly vulnerable to criminal victimisation. However, vulnerability should not be confused with criminals’ motives. Criminals – motivated by greed – might rob a smallholder rather than a flat resident because of the former’s vulnerability, and not because of his or her being a resident of a smallholding. Vulnerability to criminal victimisation is not unique to smallholders. Other groups of people such as the aged, women and children who live, for example, in Wierdabrug, are also more vulnerable to criminal attack than other members of society.
By singling out serious crime committed on smallholdings and calling it attacks against smallholdings, the impression is given that there is considerably more serious and violent crime on smallholdings than in the country’s cities and towns. This partly erroneous perception may in itself fuel the fear of crime among smallholding residents. Moreover, by combining smallholding and farm attack figures, it is difficult for the public (including smallholders and farmers) to gain an accurate impression of changing levels of rural crime and safety. It would be beneficial if the incidence of farm and smallholding attacks were counted separately.
Note
1That this can be effective, was shown by a group of smallholders (in the Timsrand area of Wierdabrug) where the community came together to fight crime. Most of the smallholders in the area meet regularly to discuss issues of mutual concern. The smallholders also got together and persuaded the town council to erect street lights in their area. The smallholders pay for maintenance and electricity to make this service possible. Through their own initiative, the smallholders have also developed a good and ongoing relationship with the residents of a small squatter settlement in their area. Smallholding attacks in the Timsrand area have decreased dramatically since the smallholder community became more involved in taking responsibility for their own security. Appendix I Interview questions
Farm Safety Research Project Guidelines for questions to be asked:
Objectives of the research project: • Assessing initiatives to reduce farm and smallholding attacks. • Making recommendations to inform policy on rural safety and in particular the rural protection plan. • Developing a better understanding of the nature of crime on farms and smallholdings. • Developing a profile of those who commit these violent attacks, as well as an understanding of their motives.
The rural protection plan: • Are all the role players involved? (SAPS; commandos; police reservists; organise agriculture etc.)? • Does the respondent know there is a rural protection plan? If yes, what does he think it entails? • Is the respondent part of the rural protection plan/SAPS reservist structures/ commando structures? If not, why not, and what procedure does the respondent think must be followed to become part of it? • Does the respondent feel safe with the rural protection plan in place? • Respondents’ suggestions to improve the rural protection plan.
Assessment of security forces: •How does the respondent evaluate the effectiveness of the: SAPS, police reservist structures, and commando structures in his area in fighting crime/preventing farm or smallholding attacks/reacting to farm or smallholding attacks? •For respondents who have been attacked/victimised: How did they alert the security forces and how do they evaluate their response? 94 – Attacks on farms and smallholdings
• Respondents’ comments on how the SAPS, police reservists, and commando structures could be more effective in fighting farm or smallholding attacks. • Respondents’ comments on whether the SAPS/commandos give out information and provide training on security measures.
Motive for attacks: • What do respondents think is contributing towards the attacks? What is the attackers’ primary motive? • Did the respondent (who had been attacked) know some or all of the attackers? If so, who were they? • What does the respondent think was the motive/purpose for the attack? • Does the respondent think that the attack was premeditated? • Respondents comments on why some attacks are accompanied by excessive brutality.
Respondents’ security measures: • What security measures have respondents undertaken? • What will the respondent actually do in the event of an attack? (Respondent to show in practical steps his potential actions.) • If respondents have been victimised what – if any – security measures did they adopt as a response? •To what extent are respondents prepared to get involved in security measures (such as the rural protection plan)?
Employee issues: • What is the relationship between the respondent and his workers? •The effect of land claims/labour legislation/political statements on the relationship between respondents and their workers. •How are labour disputes on the respondent’s farm or smallholding resolved?
General: •How safe/unsafe do respondents’ feel? • Do they feel more/less safe than a year ago? • What makes respondents feel the most unsafe? • What interventions can be made to make them feel safer? • Do respondents know of people who have left their farm/smallholding because of the attacks? • Is there any form of intimidation against people on smallholdings/farms? • Impact of attacks/crime on respondents’ lifestyle? Appendix II Attacks and murders per month and province, Jan 1997 – Dec 1999
Table 1(a): Number of attacks committed monthly on farms and smallholdings per province, 1997
PROVINCE JAN FEB MAR APR MAY JUN JUL AUG SEP OCT NOV DEC TOTAL KwaZulu-Natal 8 7 12 12 6 3 14 6 12 5 13 9 107 Mpumalanga 8 12 9 9 7 14 3 2 8 10 8 11 101 Free State 1 12 413638334351 Eastern Cape 15035236842544 North-West 00523627466748 Northern Prov 27534460100436 Gauteng 14311311560733 Northern Cape 000300200200 7 Western Cape 200020001010 6 TOTAL 23 4738343138343042363446433
CIAC, Quarterly crime report 3/98,
Table 1(b): Number of murders committed monthly during attacks on farms and smallholdings per province, 1997
PROVINCE JAN FEB MAR APR MAY JUN JUL AUG SEP OCT NOV DEC TOTAL KwaZulu-Natal 11340231116124 Mpumalanga 11110000211311 Free State 13010103120012 Eastern Cape 010002111111 9 North-West 001111021110 9 Northern Prov 042010000002 9 Gauteng 011001000303 9 Northern Cape 000000000000 0 Western Cape 000000001000 1 TOTAL311 8727477991084
CIAC, Quarterly crime report 3/98,
Table 2(a): Number of attacks committed monthly on farms and smallholdings per province, 1998
PROVINCE JAN FEB MAR APR MAY JUN JUL AUG SEP OCT NOV DEC TOTAL KwaZulu-Natal 7 9 16 8 17 12 18 15 17 19 12 14 164 Mpumalanga 4 7 7 10 19 9 10 895814110 Free State 38546984366163 Eastern Cape 5 9 6 11 11 8 6 10 13 6 4 4 93 North-West 3 11 635148375460 Northern Prov 10485128123439 Gauteng 10 15 23 8 13 11 11 18 11 27 19 16 182 Northern Cape 10202021211012 Western Cape 12014619972244 TOTAL 35 6169538257628168806059767
CIAC 97
Table 2(b): Number of murders committed monthly during attacks on farms and smallholdings per province, 1998
PROVINCE JAN FEB MAR APR MAY JUN JUL AUG SEP OCT NOV DEC TOTAL KwaZulu-Natal 00515444536542 Mpumalanga 11222152110119 Free State 010010400021 9 Eastern Cape 010100022100 7 North-West 030130000101 9 Northern Prov 001310010001 7 Gauteng 22523432223030 Northern Cape 000020200110 6 Western Cape 01000415100113 TOTAL 3 9 13 1017131916119 1210142
CIAC
Table 3(a): Number of attacks committed monthly on farms and smallholdings per province, 1999
PROVINCE JAN FEB MAR APR MAY JUN JUL AUG SEP OCT NOV DEC TOTAL KwaZulu-Natal 9 9 14 17 16 14 9 12 16 12 7 6 141 Mpumalanga 16 13 17 14 7 18 16 11 18 10 16 12 168 Free State 866510303125251 Eastern Cape 38885737375973 North-West 37635636878163 Northern Prov 71843223645853 Gauteng 14 20 27 20 23 20 14 19 10 19 20 18 224 Northern Cape 25200000002011 Western Cape 12153252101225 TOTAL 63 7189767272526363616958809
CIAC. Figures for the last six months of 1999 have not been verified and are therefore subject to change 98 – Attacks on farms and smallholdings
Table 3(b): Number of murders committed monthly during attacks on farms and smallholdings per province, 1999
PROVINCE JAN FEB MAR APR MAY JUN JUL AUG SEP OCT NOV DEC TOTAL KwaZulu-Natal 21203723532030 Mpumalanga 24131231401123 Free State 110010000010 4 Eastern Cape 11020102102212 North-West 30010122022013 Northern Prov 102000002013 9 Gauteng 13426244212536 Northern Cape 110000000000 2 Western Cape 010211001001 7 TOTAL 12 1291012141112156 1112136
CIAC. Figures for the last six months of 1999 have not been verified and are therefore subject to change