Anet Coetzee was at home with her foster son when she was shot in the face and arm by unknown assailants wielding a double-barreled shotgun.
“I called out, ‘God help me,’” Coetzee told the Daily Caller. She had recognized the weapon as it came through her shattered bedroom window during a blackout caused by scheduled power cuts known locally as "load shedding."
Despite being struck, Coetzee managed to warn her foster son to take cover just before a shot pierced the wall just above his headboard. “If he wouldn’t have hidden under his bed … he would have been dead,” she told the outlet. “They would have killed both of us.”
Coetzee managed to flee through a doorway shattered by a third shot. A neighbor who heard the shots jumped the fence to help.
She was later transported to a hospital but had to wait for hours until a doctor intervened. She lost her right eye in the attack. “How on Earth am I going to survive this?” she recalled saying to herself.
No items were stolen during the attack and no arrests have been made since. Coetzee believes her attackers—two or three men—thought she was dead and fled.
Criminologist Rudolph Zinn told 24 News that robbery, not racial hatred, drives most such incidents. “They make calculated decisions on who to rob,” Zinn said. “There is simply no evidence to show the attacks are racially motivated.” Others, however, strongly disagree. Bennie van Zyl, general manager of the Transvaal Agricultural Union, said, “You cannot compare these things with [ordinary crime]… the brutality of the way they do the farm murders is something that should be taken into consideration.”
A 2014 AfriForum report documented cases of torture and extreme violence in farm attacks. In one case, a man was dragged nearly a mile while still alive. In another, a family was executed and mutilated.
Coetzee’s case is one of countless that draw international attention, especially after recent events in the United States. At a rally in South Africa in March, EFF leader Julius Malema chanted “Kill the Boer, Kill the Farmer.” President Donald Trump has referred to South Africa’s ongoing violence against white farmers as genocide and raised the issue in a meeting with President Cyril Ramaphosa, who continues to deny that any such genocide is taking place.
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