Poverty fueling anti-immigrant violence in South Africa

from the International Herald Tribune

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 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, has become 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 squatters 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."

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," Booysen said. "A South African demands his rights and will go on strike. Foreigners are afraid."

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 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.

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 a counterattack, but in order to triumph they really only had to be patient. The police did not stay long. They cannot 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.

So there is a nationalistic sense of jubilation in the neighborhoods 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.

Matlala, who is unemployed, lives in the community of Primrose, now emptied of its foreigners. The sections they lived in are being dismantled. First, the belongings of the fleeing immigrants - their mattresses, blankets, clothes and cooking utensils - were looted.

On Monday, the dwellings themselves were torn apart by dozens of eager men. It was not difficult.