Hundreds of police and right-wing paramilitaries guarded the funeral of murdered South African white supremacist Eugène Terre'Blanche, his coffin draped in a neo-Nazi flag.
Armed police in bullet-proof jackets and members of Terre’Blanche’s Afrikaner Resistance Movement stood watch inside and outside the church during the service amid concerns that emotions could boil over into racial clashes.
‘He was a good person, the world was against him, they looked for the bad things about him,’ Reverend Ferdie Devenir said of Terre’Blanche who was killed on his farm near Ventersdorp on 6 April.
Two black workers have been charged with his murder, which was allegedly sparked by a pay dispute.
About 1,000 mainly Afrikaner mourners packed the church and a loudspeaker broadcast the service to followers outside, many of them in paramilitary gear, who could not fit into the building.
His body was to be buried on his farm.
The government has called for calm while the Terre'Blanche family appealed for a quiet ceremony with no political activities.
National police chief Bheki Cele visited the AWB headquarters ahead of the funeral and said afterwards: ‘We agreed we hope the day will be fine. We know it's a very emotional day so we take that one on board.’
The police chief refused to racialise crime, saying: ‘Last year we lost a lot of people in South Africa. We lost 18,000 people. We don’t look whether they are white or black.’
But the AWB, whose flag resembles a Nazi swastika, has seized on the episode to highlight grievances over crime and repeat its calls for a separate white homeland, for which Terre'Blanche had campaigned.
A senior AWB member told journalists that the movement would meet South Africa's police minister next week and ‘ask the government to give us our own homeland’.
