Truth and reconciliation stands afar from S. Africa

Racial tensions continue to keep southern Africa a potential boiling pot.

White farmers in Zimbabwe appear ready to fight to the death to keep from returning land rightfully owned by Blacks who were booted off during colonial rule. And Blacks there seem equally determined to recapture what was lost.

And in South Africa, the continued clashes, particularly in rural areas, demonstrate some of the most brutal acts of violence comparable to slavery of Blacks in America.

Recent examples involve a Black farm worker and a white woman farmer, both killed in an incident that appears racially motivated. Two other people, one Black and one white, were injured in similar incidents in recent days.

Black farm workers Adam Smit, 38, and Dawid Klaaste were beaten by a white father and his 16-year-old son before being left chained by the neck to a tree on a farm in Northern Cape province. When found, Smit was dead. Klaaste was taken to a hospital.

Another white farmer received a 25 year jail sentence for attacking a Black farm worker with a cattle prod and dragging him to his death behind a vehicle (James Byrd Jr. style) with a rope around his neck. Another farmer forced families of Black farm workers to live with pigs in an attempt to evict them from his land.

Meanwhile, two white farmers were attacked by Blacks�a 59-year-old woman was strangled to death on her chicken farm and an 82-year-old man was shot and wounded when he returned to his farm from church.

Those attacks came a week after South African television showed video taken by an amateur photographer of six white policemen setting dogs on Black immigrants. The images of the savagery have been denounced by human rights groups and activists throughout the region as "apartheid-style" racial violence.

These latest images, so horrific that they have sparked retaliatory attacks, keep South Africa from really moving forward. One activist described the tensions as at "crisis levels."

"There�s an impression that white farmers and workers can murder and torture with impunity," the activist told reporters. "People are living in conditions of semi-slavery. Land reform and proper justice are vital."

South African President Thabo Mbeki offered a solution offered historically by many activists, humanitarians and people of good will who want solutions to the problems that divide humanity. Pres. Mbeki urged whites to confront their racism. "We have to address the matter openly and honestly. It is exceedingly uncomfortable for a lot of white people to deal with this," Pres. Mbeki said.

But deal with it they must, lest the violence getting media attention on white owned farms in Zimbabwe will pop up more frequently in the press about similar farm fights in South Africa.

If the South African government does not find a way to deal with race and land issues justly, and whites do not confront their racism, then the Truth and Reconciliation Hearings and the amnesty granted for crimes during apartheid will all be for naught.

For true reconciliation to occur, truth cannot be a casualty.