[Marxism] A spasm of xenophobia

[glparramatta]

*Social Movements Indaba *

*March against xenophobia and hate*

*21 May 2008*

 

*/The SMI is mobilising social movements, immigrant communities, NGOs, 
unions, concerned residents from poor areas around the province for a 
march this Saturday, 24^th of May.  The march will gather at Marks Park 
(Empire and Hospital Road) from 9a.m., proceed through Hillbrow and stop 
at the Departments of Home Affairs and Housing before ending at the 
Library Gardens. The message marchers will be conveying is that our 
struggle is common and knows no borders. Everyone who wants to make 
their voices heard should join us – our struggle knows no borders./*

 

The Social Movements Indaba (SMI) – a co-ordinating national body of 
social movements, civil society and activist organisations – is 
organising with its affiliated organisations and immigrant communities 
to roll back the groundswell of xenophobia. In the years since its 
formation in 2002, the SMI has linked organisations of the poor in 
struggle for basic services, international solidarity and against police 
repression. At its last national meeting in December in Cape Town, the 
SMI identified xenophobia as a pervasive problem in communities and 
undertook to campaign against hatred of foreigners. Now that the crisis 
of hate crime is no longer foreboding and is terrifyingly HERE, there is 
no time to stall and wish we were better prepared. We are without 
hesitation committed to the struggles for social justice, 
internationalism and solidarity with all repressed people.

While the police have been deployed to try keep a lid on the pressure 
that has boiled over, this is no solution to the safety and security of 
all. As a xenophobic force in Johannesburg pre-existing the outbreak of 
violence, the police cannot be trusted to be more than the brute barrier 
between perpetrators and their targeted victims. The South African 
Police Services and Johannesburg Metro Police harass immigrants to 
solicit bribes as a matter of practice. Calling on the police to 'do 
their work' as president Thabo Mbeki and his government have done does 
not, therefore, address the issues of safety and security amongst 
immigrant communities. The refugee communities do not trust the police 
as impartial arbiters of the conflict. The police conducted a brutal 
raid on the Central Methodist Church on the 31^st of January 2008 under 
the pretext of crime prevention. Criminalisation of immigrants is a 
smokescreen for deportation and bribery that the police has not cleared.

Long-lasting safety and security for all does not include deportation of 
foreign nationals, whether voluntary or not. Xenophobia's origins lie 
within the conditions of poverty in which the majority of South Africans 
live. Immigrants have been targeted for their ethnic difference and for 
their very similarity with their persecutors. Seen as competitors for 
scarce jobs and housing, south Africans have misdirected their anger at 
conditions of poverty that are unchanging.  Their fellow brothers and 
sisters who are enduring the same cannot be responsible for what the 
economic and political system has created.

While we struggle for a change to the neo-liberal capitalist system that 
has created this reality, rearguard struggles for safety and security of 
immigrants in the country must continue. The SMI gives thanks for those 
humanitarian organisations, emergency services and churches that are 
trying to stem the tide of bloodletting and forced removals. We will 
organize against the creation of refugee camps and work towards the 
reintegration of immigrants in our communities. In working to recover 
our common humanity and restore calm, delegations from the SMI are 
meeting with community-based organisations in Alex and the inner city, 
and as the programme of action to roll-back the hate unfolds, the SMI 
will be going further afield to speak to affected communities. 

—   *No one is illegal —*

The SMI will be convening  a press conference about the wave of 
xenophobic violence tearing through Gauteng and what civil society 
organisations and social movements are doing to combat it.  *The press 
conference will be taking place tomorrow, Wednesday 21 May 2008  - APF 
offices - 7^th floor of Vogas House, 123 Pritchard Street (cnr Mooi) 
Johannesburg at 11a.m.***

 

*/For directions or other enquiries, please contact the Anti 
Privatisation Forum on 011 333 8334./**//*

*/For comment, please contact: Silumko Radebe (APF) 0721737268; Mhlobo 
Gunguluzi (Khanya College) 0843773013; Brian Burayai (Refugee 
Fellowship) 0732865667/**//*

 



Louis Proyect wrote:
> NY Times, May 21, 2008
> South Africans Vent Rage at Migrants
> By BARRY BEARAK and CELIA W.DUGGER
>
> JOHANNESBURG — The man certainly looked dead, lying motionless in the 
> dust of the squatter camp. His body seemed almost like a bottle that had 
> been turned on its side, spilling blood. His pants were red with the 
> moisture.
>
> Nearby was evidence of what he had endured. A large rock had been used 
> to gouge his torso. Embers remained from a fire that had been part of 
> some torture. Shards of a burned jacket still clung to the victim’s left 
> forearm.
>
> Then, as people stepped closer, there was the faintest of breath pushing 
> against his chest. “This guy may be alive,” someone surmised. As if to 
> confirm it, the man moved the fingers of his right hand.
>
> The jaded crowd neither rejoiced nor lamented. After all, the horrific 
> attacks against immigrants around Johannesburg had already been going on 
> for a week, and in their eyes the victim was just some Malawian or 
> Zimbabwean, another casualty in the continuing purge.
>
> This nation is undergoing a spasm of xenophobia, with poor South 
> Africans taking out their rage on the poor foreigners living in their 
> midst. At least 22 people had been killed by Monday in the unrelenting 
> mayhem, the police said.
>
> But the death toll only hints at the consequences. Thousands of 
> immigrants have been scattered from their tumbledown homes. They now 
> crowd the police stations and community centers of Johannesburg, some 
> with the few possessions they could carry before mobs ransacked their 
> hovels, most with nothing but the clothes they wore as they escaped.
>
> “They came at night, trying to kill us, with people pointing out, ‘this 
> one is a foreigner and this one is not,’ ” said Charles Mannyike, 28, an 
> immigrant from Mozambique. “It was a very cruel and ugly hatred.”
>
> Xenophobic violence, once an occasional malady around Johannesburg, is 
> now a contagion, skipping from one area to another. The city has no 
> shortage of neighborhoods where the poor cobble together shacks from 
> corrugated metal and wood planks.
>
> Since the end of apartheid, a small percentage of the nation’s black 
> population — the highly skilled and the politically connected — has 
> thrived. But the gap between the rich and poor has widened. The official 
> rate of unemployment is 23 percent. Housing remains a deplorable problem.
>
> “That’s fueling the rage at the bottom,” said Marius Root, a researcher 
> at the South African Institute of Race Relations. “There’s the 
> perception that they’re not enjoying the fruits of the liberation.”
>
> Here at the Ramaphosa Settlement Camp, the squatter’s colony southeast 
> of the city, six immigrants have been killed in the past two days — or 
> perhaps seven if the man found in the dust Monday morning does not survive.
>
> “We want all these foreigners to go back to their own lands,” said 
> Thapelo Mgoqi, who considers himself a leader in Ramaphosa. “We waited 
> for our government to do something about these people. But they did 
> nothing and so now we are doing it ourselves, and we will not be stopped.”
>
> The authorities have inveighed, perhaps belatedly, against the violence. 
> ‘’Citizens from other countries on the African continent and beyond are 
> as human as we are and deserve to be treated with respect and diginity,” 
> President Thabo Mbeki said in a statement issued late Monday, expressing 
> confidence in the ability of the police to ‘’make significant 
> breakthroughs in getting to the root of this anarchy.”
>
> But, among people here, a familiar litany of complaints against 
> foreigners is passionately, if not always rationally, argued: They 
> commit crimes. They undercut wages. They hold jobs that others deserve.
>
> George Booysen said that as a born-again Christian he did not believe in 
> killing. Still, something had to be done about these unwanted immigrants.
>
> They are bad people, he said: “A South African may take your cellphone, 
> but he won’t kill you. A foreigner will take your phone and kill you.”
>
> Beyond that, he said, immigrants were too easy to exploit.
>
> “White people hire the foreigners because they work hard and they do it 
> for less money,” Mr. Booysen said. “A South African demands his rights 
> and will go on strike. Foreigners are afraid.”
>
> These days, the nights and early mornings belong to Ramaphosa’s 
> marauders. On Monday, soon after dawn, they were boldly celebrating 
> their victories. Stores belonging to immigrants already had been looted, 
> but there were still fires to set and walls to overturn. There was 
> dancing and some singing.
>
> Then the police arrived, quick to fire rubber-tipped bullets. Rocks were 
> tossed by the mob in counterattack, but in order to triumph they really 
> only had to be patient. The police did not stay long. They could not 
> keep up with the widespread frenzy.
>
> Those left behind by the nation’s post-apartheid economy commonly blame 
> those left even further behind, the powerless making scapegoats of the 
> defenseless.
>
> South Africa has 48 million people. It is hard to find a reliable 
> estimate of the number of foreigners in the mix. Most certainly, not all 
> immigrants push ahead of South Africans economically. But Somalis and 
> Ethiopians have proved themselves successful shopkeepers in the townships.
>
> Zimbabweans, who make up this country’s largest immigrant group, 
> benefited from a strong educational system before their homeland plunged 
> into collapse, sending an estimated three million across the border to 
> seek refuge here. Schoolteachers and other professionals — their 
> salaries rendered worthless by Zimbabwe’s hyperinflation — come to work 
> as housekeepers and menial laborers.
>
> Many South Africans consider themselves at a disadvantage with 
> employers. “If you have a surname like mine, you can’t get a job,” said 
> Samantha DuPlessis, 23, a woman of mixed race. “I’ve been looking for a 
> job for four years. All the employers want to hire foreigners.”
>
> So there is a nationalistic sense of jubilation in the areas where the 
> immigrants have been dislodged. “The Maputos, we don’t want them around 
> anymore and we’ll never have to worry about them again,” said Benjamin 
> Matlala, 27, using a common term for people from Mozambique.
>
> Mr. Matlala, who is unemployed, lives in Primrose, a community now 
> emptied of its foreigners. The sections they lived in are being 
> dismantled. First, the belongings of the fleeing immigrants were looted.
>
> On Monday, the dwellings themselves were torn apart by dozens of eager 
> men. It wasn’t difficult. Walls of thin metal were knocked over with a 
> few blows. Wooden posts were pulled from the ground. Picture frames were 
> tossed into a heap of rubbish.
>
> Mr. Matlala had managed to get a shopping cart, which he filled with 
> scrap metal. Each load, he said, would fetch 40 rand in trade, or about 
> $5. He was hoping for three loads, more money than he had made in a long 
> time.
>
>
> ________________________________________________
> YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message.
> Send list submissions to: Marxism at lists.econ.utah.edu
> Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/glparramatta%40greenleft.org.au
>
>
>
>