South Africa white supremacists mourn Terre'blanche leader

VENTERSDORP, South Africa (Reuters) - Supporters of murdered South African white supremacist Eugene Terre'blanche streamed to his farm on Monday to mourn his death in a killing that has raised fears of racial violence.

"Emotions are running very high at the moment," said Andre Nienaber, a relative of Terre'blanche, who was hacked and battered to death on Saturday after a suspected pay dispute with two black farm workers.

Terre'blanche's Afrikaner Resistance Movement, marginalised since his failed struggle to preserve apartheid in the 1990s, has vowed to avenge a death it blames on sentiment whipped up by the leader of the ruling ANC's youth league.

But South African leaders have appealed for calm in the "Rainbow Nation," which is due to host the soccer World Cup in little over two months and already struggles with a reputation for crime and violence.

Whatever the motive for the killing, it has exposed racial polarisation 16 years after the end of apartheid.

Opponents of the ruling African National Congress accuse its youth leader Julius Malema of stoking this through rhetoric, and particularly his singing of an apartheid-era song with the words "Kill the Boer" -- now banned by the courts as hate speech.

Terre'blanche sympathisers drove from around South Africa to Ventersdorp, in rolling farmland over 100 km (60 miles) west of Johannesburg, to lay flowers at the gate of his farm. One had also brought a large white teddy bear.

Evidently angry, many of the mourners would not speak to reporters. Police kept watch from cars to prevent any trouble.

FLASHPOINTS

Potential flashpoints this week include the court appearance on Tuesday of the two men accused of killing Terre'blanche, and his burial on Friday. The AWB has said that after that it will decide how to avenge Terre'blanche's murder.

The party -- whose flag resembles a Nazi swastika -- has a tiny following among whites, who make up 10 percent of South Africans.

But some far-rightists carried out attacks in their efforts to preserve white minority rule and Afrikaner groups say that anger in white agricultural communities has been growing because of a series of farm murders.

"Unfortunately if the government is not seen to do something very serious and effective now, people are going to take the law into their own hands," Dan Roodt of the Pro-Afrikaans Action Group told South Africa's etv.

President Jacob Zuma condemned the killing, expressed his sympathies and called on all South Africans to live together and avoid allowing anyone to take advantage of the situation to incite racial hatred.

The ANC has said it sees no evidence of a link between the killing and the "Kill the Boer" song. Opposition parties accuse ANC youth leader Malema of undermining reconciliation and creating the impression that such attacks are acceptable.

Malema rejects that. At the weekend he was in Zimbabwe, where he praised President Robert Mugabe's seizures of land from white farmers to give to landless blacks -- land reforms that critics say helped to ruin Zimbabwe.

Terre'blanche had lived in relative obscurity since his release from prison in 2004 after serving a sentence for beating a black man nearly to death.

(Writing by Matthew Tostevin; editing by David Stamp)

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