Attacks on foreigners spread in S. Africa

By Scott Baldauf Thu May 22, 4:00 AM ET

Johannesburg, South Africa - South Africa's violence against foreigners took a turn for the worse on Wednesday as beleaguered foreign immigrants organized themselves to fight back.

In the Johannesburg township of Tshepisong, Mozambicans and Zimbabwean immigrants fled from gangs of South African residents, while immigrants in other neighborhoods threatened to resist attacks.

"If it means I have to fight back to protect my wife and children and property, I will," a Zimbabwean immigrant named Madalala Ndlovu told the Pretoria Times. "If the police can't stop these thugs, then I will. I'll kill them if I have to."

With community leaders urging against an escalation of violence, the South African government announced that it would start deploying military fixed-wing aircraft and armed personnel carriers to back up police, as the violence entered its 10th day.

"The organization of foreigners is to be expected, given the police's extreme difficulty in getting the violence under control," says Frans Kronje, deputy chairman of the South African Institute of Race Relations (SAIRR), a liberal think tank in Johannesburg.

"Foreigners have three options," says Mr. Kronje. "To go back to Zimbabwe, which is not a nicer option than what they already face here. To get into one of the informal camps around police stations, churches, and community centers, which are already estimated to have 13,000 displaced people in the Johannesburg area alone. Or they can organize to defend themselves, which then makes it much more difficult for the police to control."

Violence spreading
With 24 dead, 13,000 homeless, and attacks spreading to the racially mixed coastal city of Durban, South Africa's potent mix of economic hardship and ethnic targeting shows no signs of stopping.

It's a problem that has been a long time coming, with many South Africans blaming their government for failing to deliver on their promises of providing jobs, housing, and better services after the fall of apartheid in 1994, and also failing to ensure that South Africans actually reap the benefits of the current economic boom.

If left unsolved, the current violence could have enormous domestic social consequences for years to come and could damage the country's plans to hold a soccer World Cup – Africa's first – in 2010.

"Everybody is baffled why this is happening now," says Carole Njoki, World Vision's advocacy advisor in Johannesburg. "But locals see foreigners taking their jobs, and they see that the allocation of low-income housing is inequitable. With high inflation and high unemployment, people's patience has reached the breaking point."

South Africa's working-poor population appears to be in downward spiral of economic woe.

High food prices – a global phenomenon – have combined with persistent unemployment – officially estimated at 24 percent, but thought to be as high as 40 percent – to create an angry atmosphere where local South Africans tend to blame the foreigners in their midst.

Foreigners scapegoated for woes
The South African government, intentionally or not, often gives citizens a scapegoat, blaming everything from high crime to the stress on state services such as electricity, healthcare, and education on the continued influx of Zimbabweans and Mozambicans.

Many experts say that the government, therefore, shares some of the blame for sparking the current crisis.

"Essentially, [the government's] failures contributed to create a perfect storm of lawlessness, poverty, and unfulfilled expectations, which has now erupted into violence," the SAIRR said in a statement this past weekend. "In failing to maintain the rule of law, the state had conditioned many poor communities to violent behavior."

"The government has made terrible misstatements," says Kronje at the SAIRR. "While there is truth that Zimbabweans do take jobs, the problem is not the Zimbabweans. The problem is that there are not enough jobs for everybody."

In the Johannesburg township of Soweto, police said they now know who the ringleaders of recent violence were and would soon move in to make arrests. Captain Mpande Khoza told the Sowetan newspaper that shops belonging to foreign nationals were specifically targeted, and the prime attraction seemed to be the money, property, and other goods taken.

Mathias – a Malawi native and gardener who would not give his last name for fear of retribution – says he has no idea what sparked the violence against foreigners. But in the current environment, he now trusts no one and says he has only a 25 percent chance of coming out of the current crisis without significant loss of property.

"My building is next to a township," Mathias says. "And when I have a friend over for tea, he looks around the room and sees a TV, a stereo, and he keeps that image in his head. So when a time like this comes along, and the police are doing nothing, he might say, 'Now's the time. Let's take what we can.' "
http://news.yahoo.com/s/csm/20080522/wl_csm/ofight

Foreigner abuse involves all of us, and you too
Bongani Madondo: Be Mad on Friday Published:May 16, 2008


No more Alexandras. No more blood on the tracks

Come, please pray with me. These are high times. Dangerous seas.

It’s not a call directed specifically at the marauding gangs in Alexandra, Atteridgeville, Cape Town, everywhere; gangs masquerading as citizens seeking justice; gangs going around killing our African brothers and sisters, referring to them as makwerekwere [derogatory term for foreigners].

I am not calling on those bastards alone to prayer, but all of you. You, you and you, sister buzzing BEE. You, chap in pin-striped suit driving a Hummer. Yes, you, privileged whiner still whining about affirmative action. Yes, this is about you, too.

Yes, it’s about human annihilation in Alexandra. The victims are people the media refers to as “aliens”. Aliens, my knee! What makes other Africans “aliens”? So, what, next time you will be telling me they are not real people — they are extraterrestrials from Mars or Planet Mugabeland?

The problem with xenophobia goes deeper than what we’ve seen this past week. It starts with the language and how we frame this illness. We call them “foreigners.” We call ’em makwerex and we think it’s cute.

On Sunday night, a mob of about 200 local people attacked several shacks in the township, mostly belonging to Zimbabwean and other African refugees who have interwoven themselves into the social fabric of this once-lively part of Johannesburg.

Siphiwe Madondo — no relation — was shot dead. They shot him once, and realising he was still breathing, came back to zing him off for good. His crime? Refusing to join a gang of self-appointed Alexandra vigilantes with a self-appointed mandate to “clean up the township of foreigners”.

“Clean up” the township, in true Western film lore, means pumping bullets into others, splashing their brains against their shacks, spilling their blood on the floor, and leaving their bodies for vultures and night ogres to come feast on.

Siphiwe Madondo is not alone. Neither will he be the last. There are plenty of others killed for nonsensical reasons. Many more thousands of Zimbabweans are slaughtered on a daily basis. Their crime? Big-minded big professors with bigger explanations tell us its about socioeconomics. The un-met promises given to South Africans during the battle against apartheid.

That might be true. But I don’t care for that truth. It means nothing now.

What’s happening is South Africans, especially black South Africans are, sadly, and in a sadistic way, expressing the inhumanity they were told they possess in their genes.

People are asserting themselves against the wrong people. They accuse Zimbabweans of criminal activities and disrespect. Hear it from me, yes, there are lots of disrespectful Zimbabweans, Nigerians, Zambians, Congolese, but there are also many disrespectful South Africans of every stripe.

In the same breath, there are plenty of hard-working, loving, forward-looking Zimbabweans who are just super mensches!

Of course, I am aware I am just pissing in the wind. The people I am talking about and the people I am engaging do not even read papers like this or do not care for educated, middle-class toffs like us — fair enough.

But somebody in the government should hear this: enough is enough.

No more Alexandras. No more blood on the tracks, blood on the shacks, blood on our pens, our palms … there will not be blood ever! Someone rescue us from this Animal Farm. This is no longer 1984. And my name ain’t George Orwell.

Rioters sharpen their machetes on the ground as a crowd, armed with clubs, machetes and axes goes on a rampage on May 20, 2008 during violent xenophobic clashes at Reiger park informal settlement on the outskirt of Johannesburg.



A mob chant in the Reiger Park informal settlement outside Johannesburg, South Africa, Tuesday May 20, 2008. Clashes pitting the poorest of the poor against one another have focused attention on complaints that South Africa's post-apartheid government has failed to deliver enough jobs, housing and schools to go around.

A South African woman pleads with Ekurhuneli police chief Robert McBride, 2nd right, not to use violence to disperse a crowd of South African protesters in the Reiger Park informal settlement outside Johannesburg, South Africa, Tuesday, May 20, 2008. Although people were given a 10 minutes warning, the crowd was dispersed by Metro police officers firing rubber bullets. Five people were seen wounded. Clashes pitting the poorest of the poor against one another have focused attention on complaints that South Africa's post-apartheid government has failed to deliver enough jobs, housing and schools to go around.


Mozambican women carry their possessions as they flee the Reiger Park settlement near Johannesburg, 22 May 2008. More than 10,000 Mozambicans have fled home from South Africa to escape xenophobic attacks that have killed at least 42 people, officials in the neighbouring country said on Wednesday.




http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/7407592.stm

Oh, but they couldn't band together to find out who so many of them contracted AID/HIV, or when they were so oppressed in their own country by foreigners that made them second class citizens in their own country.

The way I see it, they should be joining a gang to clean up some of that trash laying all around on the street.

They sound like the Black gangs in America; won't bust a grape on the trash and delapidation of their communities, and will kill each other until the cow come home, but stand silent as so many of them are brutilized and murdered by the police, drugs, and drug dealing.

They need to be banding together in gang to take over those diamond mine so they can pull thier own people out of poverty. But, no, they would rather kill other Black people, while not caring that the west makes enough money from natural resources beloning to them to help the economies of the west and keep whites out of poverty there and in other parts of the world.