Anger after AfriForum downplays apartheid

THERE were not enough people killed during apartheid to justify it being called a crime against humanity.

This was said by AfriForum chief executive Kallie Kriel on Monday. Kriel compared the number of people killed under the apartheid regime to the six million Jews murdered under Adolf Hitler.

“The figure we have is that 600 people were killed in the [19]90s. In the 80s and early 90s‚ people died during the people’s war conducted by the ANC‚” Kriel said.

Asked how many deaths would warrant apartheid to be classified as a crime against humanity‚ Kriel said: “A decision to eradicate people by Adolf Hitler.”

Kriel caused much anger when he told 702 Radio talkshow host Eusebius McKaiser that he did not believe that apartheid was a crime against humanity.

The Truth and Reconciliation Commission‚ charged with investigating politically motivated gross human rights violations committed between 1960 and 1994‚ in its report fully endorsed the international law position that apartheid was a crime against humanity.

ANC national spokesman Pule Mabe said what characterised apartheid was its entrenchment of divisions and hatred in society.

“It was through the democratic breakthrough facilitated by the ANC that everyone in this country has the right to vote and exercise their choice.”

Mabe said it was important that everyone contributed towards building a better country where people did not view each other according to the colour of their skins.

EFF national spokesman Mbuyiseni Ndlozi said AfriForum should be ignored.

DA federal chairman Athol Trollip said Kriel was not correct. “The DA believes apartheid was a real travesty in every single respect and nobody in their right mind can say apartheid was not a travesty. I believe it was‚” he said.

South Africans responded to Kriel’s comments with outrage.

Kriel attempted to brush off the condemnation in a response in which he used the “red peril” card against the DA’s Phumzile van Damme.

Van Damme bluntly told him: “The thing about apartheid denialists is that they rely on Godwin’s law to convince their followers that apartheid wasn’t so bad because it wasn’t like the Holocaust. Such argument not only shows low intellect but a lack of emotional intelligence.”

Kriel replied: “The ANC’s alternative to apartheid was communism‚ a system that killed 100 million people. To make this point is by no means an effort to justify apartheid.”