Black on black ethnic cleansing in South Africa
Scotsman:
I am reminded of a story told by James Baker on an occassion when Reagan was asked about his reaction to other remarks by Tuto, and Reagan responded "so so."
The NY Times report the death toll is now up to 12.
Seven more were killed following the initial violence. This puts into perspective the statements of Desmond Tutu in Chicago recently:IT BEGAN just over a week ago at a discussion in a poor township about crime. By yesterday, it had become a black-on-black ethnic-cleansing frenzy that engulfed central Johannesburg, taking more than a dozen lives and leaving hundreds injured, thousands homeless and many raped.The assaults by poor black South Africans on poor, terrified refugees, most of them Zimbabwean, is a crisis that has been waiting to happen for months and seems likely to escalate.
Reports yesterday said the attacks had spread to Cape Town, Durban, Port Elizabeth and Pretoria.
Some three million Zimbabweans have fled to South Africa from the political and economic terror waged by president Robert Mugabe. They have been joined by an estimated one to two million economic migrants from Mozambique and Malawi. In a country with 40 per cent unemployment, ordinary black South Africans have accused the foreigners of stealing their jobs, houses and women. And they have been growing increasingly angry with their own head of state, President Thabo Mbeki, accusing him of being more concerned with appeasing Mr Mugabe than recognising the scale of the problem caused by the flood of Zimbabweans into South Africa.
Eight days ago, in Alexandra, a poor township in the shadow of Johannesburg's business district and the richest square mile of earth in Africa, Jacob Ntuli, 67, a community leader and former security guard, called a meeting of residents to discuss the rape of four women and a girl.
Somehow, what began as a discussion about crime ended in people seething with anger about foreigners. They decided it was time to act, and soon, with cries of "Let's go and kill foreigners", a mob armed with guns, steel bars and whips was descending on non-South African homes.
The first to die was Sipho Madondo, a 41-year-old South African who refused the mob's demand that he join the planned killing spree. He was shot dead in front of his wife, Pretty.
Soon afterwards the first Zimbabwean died. Lungile Mtweni, 31, had just arrived jobless from his own country and was due to begin work the next day as a gardener for a white South African in the hope of providing for his wife and two children. He had borrowed the equivalent of 65p from a neighbour so he could travel to his job and was walking home when he was overwhelmed by the mob. After hearing his accent, they beat and stoned him to death, before moving on to loot and burn the homes of other foreigners.
Hundreds of foreigners fled Alexandra as they were attacked and their homes set alight. Some deadly genie had been let out of the bottle. Copycat attacks began in other townships and settlements – Tembisa, Katlehong, Reiger Park, Thokoza, Jeppestown, parts of the giant township of Soweto, names familiar from the violence that marked the 1989-1994 transition from apartheid to democracy.
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...I think Tuto has some work to do back home before he lectures the US on race. Black on black ethnic cleansing is as vile as any other type. South Africa has sat back while Mugabe has brutalized his people and now they are being brutalized in South Africa for being the "other." Shame on South Africa. Hat tip to Larwyn and Gateway Pundit for the Tuto material.
"You are a crazy country," Tutu, 76, winner of the Nobel Peace Prize in 1984, said in an interview with the Tribune. "You're a country that has I think some of the most generous people I've ever come across in the world."
But he chided Americans for getting "very, very upset" with the pastor of Sen. Barack Obama, noting that Rev. Jeremiah Wright Jr. "may have said more crudely what, actually, almost every African-American would have wanted to say. I mean that is how they feel in your country, that race ... is a very, very real issue."
"And I think on the whole you keep trying to pretend it isn't," he added, noting the issue will haunt Americans until there is a way to talk honestly about race, such as holding a reconciliation forum.
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I am reminded of a story told by James Baker on an occassion when Reagan was asked about his reaction to other remarks by Tuto, and Reagan responded "so so."
The NY Times report the death toll is now up to 12.
As evidenced by the brain drain that has hit South Africa over the last few years, and the number of South Africans living in Europe it's a sad fact that many South Africans themselves felt threatened by a sort of "Xenophobia" when they lived in their own country and decided to leave.
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