"Welcome back to reality, you foreign bastard..."
Government has announced that a national day of mourning for those who died in recent attacks on foreigners will be observed on June 24. Government spokesperson Themba Maseko says it will not be a public holiday.
The public will be asked to pay its respects to the 62 people who lost their lives during the violence. Maseko says a national memorial tribute event will be held in Pretoria.
Meanwhile, the reintegration process of foreigners into the Atteridgeville community, west of Pretoria, is underway. They were forced out of their shacks following xenophobic attacks over the Easter weekend, during which shacks were set alight and foreigners chased away.
SABC News 13 June 2008 | Day of mourning declared for xenophobia victims
The situation could not be worse. The opportunity exists to further compare South Africans' predilection for setting foreigners afire and the official response to it with the disastrously callous abuse of Hurricane Katrina survivors.
In Cape Town, Mayor Zille and Western Cape premier Ebrahim Rasool insist the "reintegration" of foreigners into local communities is the only feasible response to last month's xenophobic attacks that officially left 62 dead and tens of thousands homeless.
I've had ongoing contact with the Culemborg refugees over the past week and, beside the obvious deterioration of their physical well-being with passing time, little has changed for them.
However, as many citizens and NGOs pretend a 'return to normal', the Treatment Action Campaign (TAC), the eMzantsi Ubuntu Coalition and several other organizations have opposed the nakedly racist motives of the city in forcing traumatized refugees back to townships they fled in fear of their lives.
By denying the refugees inner-city shelter, the city and province are actively pursuing apartheid-era policies to divide and rule the desperate, disparate, and disconnected groups of foreigners. Very few community or church halls have been opened in Cape Town's predominantly white southern suburbs.
Earlier this week, with the assistance of the TAC, several hundred belonging to the 'Caledon Square Group' managed to infiltrate and enforce their right to shelter and protection in the Cape Town Civic Centre, a stone's throw from the 'Culemborg Group'.
As conditions deteriorate elsewhere, I've watched the Culemborg Group being subject to what can only be seen as an officially sanctioned and systematic campaign of terror prosecuted by the SAPS, the Metro cops, and G4S security thugs.
Business and government are colluding to use these state and formal-sector services as a private army. Protected or backed by the SAPS and Metro cops, of which I've seen groups circling the 'camp' like vultures, the G4S guards allegedly move in to destroy shelters and steal or 'confiscate' possessions.
Who the hell is G4S? It's the world's largest security company. It's employed by the Cape Town City Improvement District (CTCID) which, with the City of Cape Town (the Web site of which bears little relation to reality), forms the Cape Town Partnership.
These are the people who run our town and, justifying their actions through a form of pomo relativism, they do not want black fuckers from Africa's failed states littering one of the world's prime tourist destinations.
In much the same way and using the same subterfuge as that employed by New Orleans when using Blackwater mercenaries to clean up that sad city and further the Global War on the Poor, Cape Town is allegedly using G4S to return refugees to the charnel houses of the townships.
Yet again, business trumps philanthropy in providing much-vaunted 'humanitarian aid' to refugees.
Noting the reports bracketing this entry were issued within 24 hours of each other, this is the result.
Another Mozambican has died at the hands of an angry mob, this time in Atteridgeville near Pretoria. Police say the 30-year-old man was dowsed with petrol and stoned to death in the Phomolong section of the township.
The attackers accused the victim of being part of a group that had burnt a shack belonging to a local. Police have ruled out xenophobia. Spokesperson Thomas Mufamadi says armed criminals attacked the man, robbing him of cash. However, the man's family says he lost three spaza shops during previous xenophobic attacks.
SABC News 14 June 2008 | Another Mozambican burnt to death in SA
