Dark side of the Rainbow Nation
YESTERDAY, within the glorious confines of Johannesburg’s Soccer City stadium, the football world basked in the warm glow of its four-year high.
But what happens on the pitch over the next month is not the entire story. In the shadow of the huge stadiums taking centre stage, a different side to the host nation will be quietly ignored.
To mark the start of World Cup 2010, the Irish branch of Amnesty International has given the Irish Examiner a dossier of civil and human rights concerns occurring in South Africa on a daily basis.
Amnesty says violent crime is rife in South Africa, which has one of the world’s highest murder rates – a growing proportion of which is being focussed against migrant groups.
In the first five months of 2010, at least a dozen incidents involving shop looting, assaults and other attacks against Zimbabweans, Somalis and Ethiopians were officially recorded.
“Migrants and refugees are perceived by some as competing for jobs, housing and economic opportunities, and become targets if violence during protests,” Amnesty has warned.
During a visit to some of the largest cities in the country in March, the group detailed repeated “unlawful police conduct” where officers publicly stated there were “cleaning up the streets in preparation for the World Cup”.
At this time, it noted that informal shelters and houses of homeless people and migrant workers were destroyed, with individuals arbitrarily arrested and released on condition they leave the city. In one case, police raided the Central Methodist Mission in Johannesburg where “several thousand” Zimbabwean refugees were sheltering.
In another case at the same facility in July 2009, a number of those arrested said they were beaten, pepper-sprayed and “shocked with electric stun guns.”
During a cabinet meeting last week, the South African government agreed to establish an “inter-ministerial committee” to give “urgent attention to the indications of possible large-scale xenophobic violence”.
Amnesty International has welcomed this move, albeit with a hint of realism.
In a country where cases of rape increased from 44,751 in 1994/5 to more than 55,000 last year, where there is an annual average of 21,000 murders in a 47 million population, and where petty theft and car-jacking is on the rise, it is unclear if protecting minority groups will be the main agenda.
The fact that the country will be viewed globally for the next month might be considered to be as good a reason as any for those in power to clean up their act.
But, instead, the government appears more focussed on “cleaning up the streets”, Amnesty has said.
Under municipal regulations created in compliance with the World Cup tournament cities requirements, police are expelling street traders from exclusion zones around the venues – preventing them from returning to their homes for a month.
Due to the “controlled access sites” laws, any breach of these new rules will lead to fines of up to 10,000 rand (€1,100) or six months in prison.
Considering the socio-economic challenges still facing the country, Amnesty has warned of the damage such a policy could cause.
“The requirements under the FIFA by-laws which create extensive exclusion zones for informal economic activity are particularly prejudicial in the context of a country where a large group are total reliant on the informal sector economy for their survival,” it said.
For many disenfranchised South Africans, 16 years after the country finally threw off the shackles of apartheid and embraced a new era of togetherness spurred on by the rugby World Cup success the following year, the Rainbow Nation is falling far below expectations.
