20100409
PRESS TV

About 3,000 people attended the funeral of South Africa's white supremacist leader, who was murdered on Saturday by two of his black farm-workers.

The funeral of Eugene Terre'Blanche, who led the Afrikaner Resistance Movement (AWB), was held on Friday at the conservative Afrikaner Protestant Church in Ventersdorp, BBC reported.

South Africa's police and army units were present at the service as a precautionary measure in case of clashes between the local black community and members of AWB broke-out.

As a good will gesture, notable figures from the black community attended the funeral ceremony in the midst of the white AWB members, who were dressed in paramilitary clothes.

Police authorities now believe that the murder of Terre'Blanche, who was hacked to death on his farm, was not politically motivated rather as a result of a pay dispute between him and his employees, Reuters reported.

However, Secretary General of AWB, Andre Visagie, who disagrees with police, told reporters, “We think it was an assassination, not a murder.”

“We are going to ask the government to give us our own homeland. We want to be free. We are not interested in being a part of this failure of South Africa,” Visagie said. “Our very very last resort would be violence, but we hope that we can go without it.”

Terre'blanche had become marginalized for his efforts in the early 1990's to maintain white minority rule and to preserve apartheid in South Africa, Reuters reported.

The reaction to his murder by the white supremacists is a clear indication of the racial divide that still exists in South Africa 16 years after the fall of apartheid.