A militarised state is no answer to xenophobia

A militarised state is no answer to xenophobia

The full version, with footnotes, is available here and attached below in a word file.

President Thabo Mbeki has deployed the army to help police in dealing with the violence against people born in other countries. Manala Manzini, director-general of the National Intelligence Agency (NIA), said at a conference in Cape Town, “We believe that as SA prepares for another national election early next year, the so-called black-on-black violence that was witnessed prior to our first election in 1994 has deliberately been unleashed and orchestrated.”

Police in Durban blindly hold the line that growing numbers of attacks on ‘foreigners’ there this week are nothing more than criminality. According to the Mercury newspaper “Police Dir Phindile Radebe repeated statements that the attacks were ‘purely criminal’ and ‘not linked to xenophobia’. She added that police were increasing patrols in targeted areas, and that they had the resources to handle any problems”.

If these seem like wildly different – if equally ludicrous and bizarre – responses, consider that what’s common to both is to mark this out as a problem mostly requiring the response of the militarised-state – whether it’s a ‘national security’ issue (democracy being undermined by a shadowy ‘third force’) or a ‘law and order’ issue of criminality threatening order. Civil society structures, including church leaders and ecumenical organisations, are being drawn into meetings to become part of coordinated networks of intelligence-gathering and response-planning that are embedded in the police/military state.

Anyone in South Africa with a long enough memory should hear eerie echoes from the years of the apartheid state’s ‘low intensity conflict’ (LIC) in the lead up to the formal collapse of apartheid. This was a period when the militarised-state simultaneously created the conditions for (and actively supported and engaged in) debilitating, destructive violence against the poor on the one hand, and established localised Joint Management Committees (JMCs) to ‘deal with’ it on the other – all the while insisting that (a) they (the white state) were not complicit in the violence itself since it was ‘black-on-black’ savagery; (b) heightened levels of insurgency in black townships was the work of agitators bent on undermining peace and progress; and (c) ‘black-on-black’ violence had to be understood as the work of the “Third Force”. The JMCs were initiated and controlled by the state/military but drew in as much of what we would now call ‘civil society’ as possible.

Back then, the state lacked legitimacy of course, so the amount of civil society cooperation they got was somewhat limited – but the evolution of the overall LIC/COIN (Counter Insurgency) strategy into more nuanced forms expanded this when, for example, the National Peace Accord created replica forums effectively with the same functions that did draw in even liberal and ‘progressive’ civil society structures, including some church and ecumenical organisations.

Looking at the current wave of violence, Hein Marais has also made the important point that:

“the conduct of the home affairs department and especially the police has afforded them a veneer of legitimacy, too. The institutionalised denigration of refugees and the routine rounding-up of foreigners in ‘anti-crime’ sweeps has helped amplify the common slur that they’re thieves, imposters — and legitimate targets. The pillaging that has accompanied the most recent attacks is an amplified echo of the extortion and shakedowns many foreigners experience at the hands of the South African authorities, including the police. The routine victimisation and exploitation of foreigners — facilitated by their inability to summon the protection of the state — has legitimised their status as “deserving” targets of outrage and expropriation”.

Indeed, we must remember that this state starting rounding up people and deporting them; this state started refusing people the official papers they were entitled to (home affairs); this state routinely tears up immigrants’ papers (the cops), and this state started this crazy new ‘pencil test’ when police began this thing of asking people the isiZulu world for elbow – now the mobs are doing the same.

‘Law and order’ or sinister ‘third force’ explanations not only legitimate a strong state and an attendant creeping militarisation, they are a cynical and desperate attempt to draw our eyes away from seeing what is actually happening. As Jacques Rancière says: “police intervention in public spaces does not consist primarily in the interpellation of demonstrators, but in the breaking up of demonstrations. … It is, first of all, a reminder of the obviousness of what there is, or rather, of what there isn’t: ‘Move along! There is nothing to see here!'”

The statement from shack dwellers’ movement, Abahlali baseMjondolo, is rather better at helping us all see what is and isn’t there:

“We have been warning for years that the anger of the poor can go in many directions. … Let us be clear. Neither poverty nor oppression justify one poor person turning on another. A poor man who turns on his wife or a poor family that turn on their neighbours must be opposed, stopped and brought to justice. But the reason why this happens in Alex and not Sandton is because people in Alex are suffering and scared for the future of their lives. They are living under the kind of stress that can damage a person. The perpetrators of these attacks must be held responsible but the people who have crowded the poor onto tiny bits of land, threatened their hold on that land with evictions and forced removals, treated them all like criminals, exploited them, repressed their struggles, pushed up the price of food and built too few houses, that are too small and too far away and then corruptly sold them must also be held responsible.

There are other truths that also need to be faced up to. …”