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S. Artesian wrote:
You mean the 70% downpayment is not headed to my bank account?
Hey comrade, we'll send it there: but have you got 1000 red tee-shirts
with a radical message for shipment to Durban by noon on Saturday? :-)
Here's what's at stake (and to be frank, I'm very nervous about
fascistic tendencies breaking out against immigrants here, as well as
Joburg and Cape Town, on/after 12 July):
The Mercury (Durban newspaper)
After the pixie-dust
It’s time South Africa looked at the real issues like social stresses
and the blood diamond trade in Zimbabwe
June 23, 2010 Edition 1
Patrick Bond
No matter how hard we cheered last night, the demise of Bafana Bafana’s
campaign will at least blow away much pixie-dust from the World Cup.
Today our eyes are left clearer to comprehend problems that
soccer-loving cynics have long predicted: loss of large chunks of state
sovereignty to Fifa, massively amplified income inequality, and future
economic calamities as debt payments come due - and perhaps soon also
xenophobia?
The crucial question in coming weeks is whether instead of offering some
kind of progressive resistance, as exemplified by the Durban Social
Forum coalition rally last Wednesday at City Hall, will society’s sore
losers adopt right-wing populist sentiments, and frame the foreigner?
This is not an idle concern, as the Facebook pages of hip young Joburg
gangstas exploded with xenophobic raves after Uruguay beat Bafana last
week.
Recalling the May 2008 violence that left 62 people dead and more than
100 000 displaced, President Jacob Zuma told his party executive in May
that “the branches of the ANC must start working now to deal with the
issue of xenophobia”.
Replying that “there is no tangible evidence,” police general Bheki Cele
added, a few days later: “We have observed a trend where foreigners
commit crime - taking advantage of the fact that we have an unacceptable
crime level - to tarnish our credibility and image.”
Generalisations against foreigners as prolific perpetrators of crime are
baseless, as no scientific trend can be discerned because no reliable
data exists to confirm whether immigrant tsotsis represent a greater
ratio of their numbers than indigenous tsotsis. (We don’t even know
roughly, to the 500 000th, how many immigrants there are in South Africa.)
Instead, the state should address root causes for social stresses
expressed as xenophobia: mass unemployment, housing shortages, intense
retail competition in townships and South Africa’s regional geopolitical
interests which create more refugees than prosperity.
If we thought (as did I) that the replacement of Mbeki with Zuma might
mean a change in Pretoria’s foreign policy so as to end the nurturing of
Robert Mugabe’s repression, then that was naive, as Zuma showed in
London by lobbying hard for an end to smart sanctions a few weeks ago.
These men are simply unwilling to reverse a 120-year-old structural
relationship of exploitation, by which South African companies - such as
those involved in eastern Zimbabwe’s bloody Marange diamond fields,
controlled by Mugabe’s army - rip off the region.
The Pretoria-Harare arrangement has given rise to more than two million
desperate border-jumpers, in turn fuelling South African worker resentment.
One victim of collusion, Zimbabwean civil society researcher Farai
Maguwu, was jailed last month because a South African officer of the
Kimberley Process with strong family connections to Marange-related
corporations allegedly set up Maguwu with Mugabe’s police, then issued a
report finding that Marange complies with international diamond trading
guidelines.
Several major South African mining houses stand to benefit if a
Kimberley Process summit under way in Tel Aviv today decides that
Zimbabwe is “clean”. (Maguwu’s bail was denied on Monday so he can’t be
there to make his scheduled input.)
But if the South African’s report is approved, leading civil society
groups like Human Rights Watch promise that the Kimberley Process
reputation for monitoring blood diamonds will become as soiled as
Mbeki-Zuma’s when it comes to Pretoria’s promotion of justice and
democracy in wretched Zimbabwe.
Given such relationships, it’s not surprising that a United Nations High
Commissioner for Refugees report last week records 158 200 Zimbabweans
currently seeking formal asylum, 90 percent of whom are in South Africa.
That’s more than three times as many as the second-place country, Burma,
which was followed by two Washington-backed regimes: Afghanistan and
Colombia.
Indeed, if Cele intends going after foreign criminals he might
concentrate a bit more of his force’s effort on a really dangerous crew:
Fifa. With the possible exception
