SOUTH AFRICA: A week ago, South Africa's Afrikaans daily newspaper Beeld received a letter from the fanatical Afrikaner nationalist organisation Boeremag (Boer Force), warning that the arrest of 14 of its members on charges of high treason had not crippled its capacity for resistance.
"The fight continues without interruption," it declared. "The government will be powerless against the onslaught. We will fight until we die or triumph."
A week ago, most South Africans would have dismissed the letter as boastful talk by a few zealots whose verbosity exceeded their courage. The nine bombs that exploded in South Africa's biggest black township before dawn on Wednesday, however, might have given them pause for thought. The explosions, in Soweto, killed one woman and injured a man.
The bombing episode might signal the start of a more serious form of resistance than what the Afrikaner journalist, Max du Preez, yesterday labelled the "corpulent brand-and-coke clowns in khaki", a derisive reference to the Afrikaner Resistance Movement whose leader, Eugene Terreblanche, is now in prison.
Du Preez reminded South Africans yesterday that, nearly 10 years ago, a former commander of the South African defence force, Gen Constand Viljoen, assembled a disciplined force of soldiers and commandos to resist an African National Congress takeover. At the 11th hour, he abandoned that course in favour of political participation in the pending new order, thereby averting a more bloody course of events.
In the context of that historical episode, one detail that emerged after the first court appearance of alleged Boeremag members last month has assumed potentially greater significance. At that stage, mid-September, 10 men were indicted for treason, three of whom were serving officers in the post-apartheid South African National Defence Force. Another detail was similarly magnified by Wednesday's bombing spree: one of the aims of the Boeremag was to recruit combatants for their cause from the 3,700 men, most of them white, who serve in the commando system in the rural areas.
The manhunt for the Soweto bombers intensified yesterday and police were reportedly preparing identikits of two men, both white, who were seen "acting suspiciously" at a petrol station in Soweto on the night of the bombing and where a bomb was later defused. In the meantime, however, two more alleged members of the Boeremag were arrested only hours before the bombers struck.
They were almost certainly interrogated about the Boeremag, the Soweto bomb blasts and whether there was a nexus between the two.