BACKGROUND NEWS ARTICLE:
http://www.news24.com/News24/South_Africa/News/0,6119,2-7-1442_1508968,0...

LANDLESS PEOPLE'S MOVEMENT

PRESS STATEMENT

"LPM CALLS ON SAHRC TO RETRACT 'HATE SPEECH' FINDING AND PROVIDE PROTECTION FOR OUR LEADERS"

The Landless People's Movement (LPM) - a national movement of poor and landless people struggling for land and agrarian reform - has called on the South African Human Rights Commission (SAHRC) to retract its so-called hate-speech "finding" against LPM National Organiser Mangaliso Kubheka, and to provide protection to Kubheka, his family and other LPM members whose lives have been placed in jeopardy by the SAHRC pronouncements.

Following careful consideration by the LPM, in consultation with the Freedom of Expression Institute, of the SAHRC finding, on the basis of a complaint by the white right-wing Freedom Front, that alleged utterances by Kubheka, based purely on a newspaper report, constituted "hate speech", Kubheka has now officially responded to the SAHRC debacle in the attached letter.

Our considerations have unearthed gross procedural irregularities in the SAHRC's conduct of this matter, and Kubheka's letter formally calls upon the statutory body tasked with protecting the fundamental human rights of all South Africans to vacate its decision on the basis of these irregularities and to re-open the entire process from the beginning. These procedural irregularities include the commission's failure to give Kubheka a reasonable time to respond to the complaint; the commission's flouting of its own regulations by apparently entertaining a complaint based purely on a media report and its apparent failure to investigate further before reaching a finding without having heard Kubheka's version.

The SAHRC holds a critical responsibility when it engages in processes that shape the content of our fundamental human rights, and the LPM finds it outrageous that a body with such power could so easily abandon the right to administrative justice in its own conduct.

The LPM further holds the SAHRC directly responsible for fomenting the climate of hysteria which has gripped white agricultural bodies, white political parties, and the entire white farming community in the wake of its ruling, and worse, for creating the conditions in which direct murderous threats have been issued against Kubheka and other LPM comrades.

Following the SAHRC's deeply-flawed ruling, the LPM has been demonised and vilified by the Freedom Front, Agri-SA, the Transvaal Agricultural Union, the Democratic Alliance, and the New National Party to the extent that white farmers and their heavily-armed security companies now threaten to kill our leaders with even greater impunity than is normally the case in South Africa's untransformed rural areas.

This hysteria directly resulted in an incident on Monday, 29 March, in which a white farmer and his security company responded to Kubheka's intervention in an illegal eviction outside Newcastle with threats of murder, saying "You are the one who is threatening our white political parties. We know where you live and we are coming to get you". As a result, Kubheka and other comrades are unable to sleep at their homes.

The LPM calls upon the SAHRC to formally and publicly apologise for its erroneous finding, and to provide Kubheka, his family and other endangered comrades with 24-hour protection, as the police are unable to guarantee their safety. If anything happens to Kubheka, his family, or other LPM comrades, the LPM will hold the SAHRC and other reckless political parties and agricultural organisations directly responsible.

The LPM calls on the Freedom Front, Agri-SA, the TAU, the DA, the NNP and the media to behave responsibly and desist from their defamatory efforts to breed hysteria among white farmers against Kubheka and the LPM, and to ensure that their members, respectively, respect the democratic rights of the LPM, and of poor and landless people in general.

The LPM wishes to repeat once again (and we attach an old press statement for the sake of setting the record straight) that we are a non-violent movement struggling for land and agrarian reform for South Africa's 26-million poor and landless majority. Our No Land! No Vote! Campaign is a legitimate and non-violent campaign through which we are exercising our hard-won democratic rights to choose not to vote in protest against 10 years of failed land reform.

Our planned land occupations, whether during this campaign or in the future, do not imply violence from our side, nor do we have any plans or intentions to form paramilitary units to "murder white farmers like dogs" as some irresponsible journalists have accused us of doing. Our aim is to force the government to host a national Land Summit where the failures of land reform can finally be addressed, and we have consistently made this reasonable demand to the government.

Our land occupations are aimed at the land of abusive farmers, absentee landlords, and unproductive or unused land. There is a lot of this kind of land in South Africa that can and must be redistributed to the poor and landless as a matter of urgency, and we cannot sit on our hands any longer waiting for a failed policy to deliver the land to us. We hope that land occupations by the poor and landless can play a positive role in demonstrating how an effective people-driven land reform programme could work to resolve the land crisis in South Africa.

ISSUED BY: The Landless People's Movement on Tuesday, 6 April, 2004

FOR MORE INFO: Contact LPM National Organiser Mangaliso Kubheka on 072-127-4055.

NB: PLEASE SEE THE ATTACHED PRESS STATEMENT ISSUED BY THE LPM NATIONAL COUNCIL ON 8 JANUARY, 2004, AS WELL AS THE LETTER TO THE SAHRC.