Racism Kills All Races 9/16/99 The Reuters report below failed to explain why any white would want to live in S. Africa. All they are doing is destabilizing the area.

FOCUS-Eight dead in S.Africa soldier killing spree (Changes dateline, additional quotes) By Ellis Mnyandu BLOEMFONTEIN, South Africa, Sept 16 (Reuters) A black officer went on a killing rampage at a South African military base on Thursday, shooting dead six white soldiers and a white civilian before he was gunned down by colleagues. The lieutenant opened fire with an assault rifle as a group of soldiers of the First South Africa Infantry Battalion was on its way to a shooting practice. A major, a captain and four other soldiers died in the shooting. Five other white soldiers were injured, one critically, and were being treated in hospital. The attacker, who had served in the army for several years, was eventually shot dead by other members of the South African National Defence Force. ``He had to be shot because he would have killed more people,'' a police spokeswoman said. ``He just started shooting. Then we armed and fired back,'' one of the wounded soldiers told Lekota from his hospital bed at the base. Police said they were exploring the possibility that the 28-year-old lieutenant, whose name has not yet been released, went on the shooting rampage for racially motivated reasons. But Defence Minister Patrick Lekota said it was still too early to speculate on the reason behind the killings. ``From the briefings which I've had so far, I have no reason to believe that this (racial motivation) is the situation,'' Lekota told reporters at the Tempe military base in the central city of Bloemfontein, where the killings took place on Thursday. ``It will be wrong to speculate. Anybody who tries to suggest ahead of the inquiry that (the killings were racially motivated) will be wrong,'' he said. South Africa's top soldier said the shooting rampage showed racial integration remained far from complete. ``We think integration has progressed successfully over the years but this is one incident which indicates that there are difficulties and problems which we have not quite surmounted,'' Defence Force chief General Siphiwe Nyanda told Reuters. The commander of Tempe, one of the first military bases in South Africa to integrate former African National Congress freedom fighters with the apartheid Defence Force after the end of white rule in 1994, called for calm. ``Let us keep calm, let us allow the case to be thoroughly investigated before we draw any conclusions,'' Brigadier-General Hans Heinze said in Afrikaans on national television. RACIAL TENSIONS REMAIN Despite working hard at integration, South Africa remains wracked by racial tension five years after all-race elections brought former president Nelson Mandela and the ANC to power. The most common hostilities are between white farmers and black farm labourers, but many schools are also divided and the integration of national sports teams is a sensitive issue. One of the toughest tasks after the end of apartheid was to incorporate former ANC guerrilla fighters into the white South African Defence Force, which fought for decades to maintain white domination. Tempe military base is no stranger to controversy. In June 1998 two soldiers suspected of being white rightwingers were arrested after arms and ammunition were stolen from a hijacked military truck. There are about 100,000 soldiers in the SANDF although the government is working to reduce the force to around 70,000. The higher ranks still tend to be white dominated, although Nyanda is a former black guerrilla.

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