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The destruction of Kennedy Road: A precursor to Marikana

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The destruction of Kennedy Road: A precursor to Marikana

Kenneth Good on how the temerity of the organised poor was met with a ferocious counter-attack from the state

It was widely believed that the end of apartheid would mean the end of shack or squatter settlements, developmentally, consultatively, not by destruction and coercion. The need was pressing as the country’s new constitution of 1996 recognised. Section 26 declared that ‘everyone has the right to have access to adequate housing’, that ‘the state must take reasonable legislative and other measures…to achieve the progressive realisation of this right’, and that ‘no one may be evicted from their home, or have their home demolished, without an order of court made after considering all relevant circumstance. No legislation may permit arbitrary evictions’. Continue reading →

Undermining of the rule of law in Abahlali case

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Undermining of the rule of law in Abahlali case
Paul Trewhela

Politicsweb.co.za
08 November 2010

Paul Trewhela says prosecution delays have exhausted defence funding in a “political trial”

The trial on charges of public violence, assault and murder of twelve members of the shackdwellers’ organisation, Abahlali baseMjondolo – now in its 13th month in Durban/eThekwini – suggests a process of breakdown of law in South Africa . In what could reveal itself to be the first and most important political trial under the post-apartheid system of government, what is threatened is a breakdown of the constitutional structure of South Africa set in place in 1994.

In an Emergency Press Release on Sunday 27 September last year, AbM appeared to acknowledge that its members had been responsible for the deaths of two men, however under conditions in which they themselves had been attacked by a large gang of armed attackers. The attack appears to have had a strong political character.

The AbM statement reads: “Last night at about 11:30 a group of about 40 men heavily armed with guns, bush knives and even a sword attacked a meeting of the Kennedy Road Development Committee (KRDC) in the Kennedy Road community hall. There was no warning and the attack was a complete surprise. …The men who attacked were shouting: ‘The AmaMpondo are taking over Kennedy. Kennedy is for the AmaZulu.’ The KRDC and other community members who rushed to their aid were unarmed but tried to defend themselves as best they could. …

“The attackers…destroyed 15 houses belonging to people on or connected to the KRDC before launching their attack. They were knocking on each door shouting ‘All the amaZulu must come out’ and then destroying the shacks. …As far as we know two of the attackers were killed when people managed to take their bush knives off them. This was self defense.

“The Sydenham police were called but they did not come. They said that they had no vans available but they didn’t radio their vans to come. …This morning the police arrived under the authority of Glen Nayager and made eight arrests. As far as we can tell only members of the Kennedy Road Development Committee (KRDC) have been arrested and not one of the perpetrators has been arrested. …[All] the people who are arrested are amaMpondo.

“We believe that this attack has been planned and organised by Gumede, from the Lacy Road settlement, who is the head of the Branch Executive Committee of the local ANC. He is a former MK soldier and is armed. There has never been political freedom in Lacy Road. Since 2005 we have been told that anyone wearing the red shirt of Abahlali baseMjondolo in Lacy Road will be killed.”

This and other supporting statements would indicate a definite political element in the trial of the 12 members of AbM. For one thing, none of their attackers appears to have been arrested and charged with an offence. Nor have the organisers of the attack been identified and charged. This itself would tend to suggest prejudice on the part of the police, the prosecution service and the court, and must tend to compromise in advance a plea of self-defence on the part of all or some of the accused.

If only because of the issue of actual or purported conflict between amaZulu and amaMpondo, this becomes a trial with a strong political character in which the highest degree of judicial probity is demanded of the police, the prosecutorial service and the court. The available evidence is that this quality of judicial integrity has been lacking from all three agencies. That would tend to suggest the character of a political trial.

There is further a well known saying in law: Justice delayed is justice denied.

In the Rivonia Trial of 1963/64, in which Emeritus President Nelson Mandela and seven co-accused were sentenced to life imprisonment for sabotage, the legal process lasted eleven months from the day on which they were charged to the day they were sentenced – two months less than the current, unfinished trial of the AbM 12. The accused in the Rivonia Trial suffered no delay under the apartheid system, and justice was not denied. All those who were sentenced were in fact guilty as charged, in terms of the existing law. Given the status of the document “Operation Mayibuye” in this trial, in which a plan for violent military action in South Africa had been set out by the High Command of Umkhonto we Sizwe, directly involving several of the accused, the issues of violence in this trial were not less complex than in the AbM trial.

By comparison, the trial of the AbM 12 could as well drag on for months or years to come, with the state continuing to seek postponement after postponement, acceded to by the court in defiance of international standards and also…by the standards of the apartheid period.

This sectional and partisan character of the charges against the accused and the conduct of the court itself now increasingly appear to suggest political manipulation of the legal system on behalf of ANC structures in KwaZulu Natal, the main provincial power base of the ruling political ascendancy in the country.

It suggests a political vendetta waged against a poor people’s movement, perceived by the power elite as a threat to its own political support base among the province’s poor. There appears to be a strategy to undermine the legal process through a process of attrition, whereby the financial resources of AbM would be exhausted and with it its ability to mount a proper defence of the accused. AbM has been compelled to raise an appeal for funds – both within South Africa and internationally – to be able to continue to provide a proper legal defence of its members.

The whole matter casts a stain of shame and disgrace on the most important political narrative in the modern history of South Africa.

Nelson Mandela and his colleagues in the Rivonia Trial – Walter Sisulu, Govan Mbeki and their ANC and Communist Party fellow-accused – would probably have been hanged, if it had not been for the funding of their trial by the Defence and Aid Fund, based in London.

Directed by exiled members of the SACP but funded through outreach activities of the Church of England, set up initially under the auspices of Canon John Collins, the Dean of St Paul’s Cathedral in London, the International Defence and Aid Fund was crucial for the preservation of basic structures of the rule of law in South Africa through the worst decades of the apartheid period. Especially in high profile political trials in the three decades between the Sharpeville massacre in 1960 and the release of Mandela in 1990, the Defence and Aid Fund ensured that convictions in political trials in South Africa had to be grounded in evidence that would hold up in court, irrespective of the morality of the legislation that governed the courts.

This legal structure generally held intact. On the first day of the Rivonia trial, the entire prosecution case was properly thrown out by Judge Quartus de Wet, after a successful application was made on legal technicalities by the chief counsel for the defence, Bram Fischer QC, who as it happened was also chairman of the illegal Communist Party and – as his own subsequent life sentence proved – every bit as guilty as the main body of the accused. First-rate legal defence in this hanging trial was funded by D&A, as those of us who were accused in political trials in those years often called it. This funding of top quality legal defence ensured that one of Mandela’s co-accused – Rusty Bernstein – was found not guilty and acquitted, even though, as his autobiography later acknowledged, he was in fact as guilty as those sentenced to life imprisonment (but not…to death).

A whole raft of founding fathers of the legal system in post-apartheid South Africa – Emeritus Constitutional Court Judge Arthur Chaskalson, the late Judge Ismail Mohammed, Advocate George Bizos SC and many others – spent decades in defence of the accused in political trials in this way, with their work as counsel and that of their instructing attorneys funded by the D&A Fund in London.

This constituted a barrier in law that was never overturned by an oppressive state. It was the norm in hundreds of political cases. My wife and I were defended in a trial lasting eight months from the time we were charged, at no expense to ourselves, and at the sole expense of the Defence and Aid Fund, before being properly convicted in terms of the evidence. Two of our fellow accused against whom there was insufficient evidence were acquitted. There is no assurance this would have happened without the superb quality of our defence, funded by D&A.

My brother-in-law, who had received military training in China with the first tranche of members of Umkhonto we Sizwe to be sent abroad for this purpose – a group that included two of Mandela’s co-accused in the Rivonia Trial, Raymond Mhlaba and Andrew Mlangeni – was also acquitted and released at the end of a very long trial, on the grounds of insufficient evidence, all funded by the Defence and Aid Fund.

Members of the present government, and ministers under all four State Presidents since 1994, owe a personal debt to this fund, which ensured that a very important standard of jurisprudence was upheld in their own trials. The State President, Mr Jacob Zuma, is one of them. To that extent, modern South Africa owes a debt to this Fund for its Constitution, its Parliament and its system of Law, as well as for the welfare and even the lives of hundreds of political activists.

All this is now threatened.

Amnesty International, based in London, which alongside D&A provided crucial supervision of political trials and a defence of the rule of law in the decades before Mandela’s release, conducted its own independent investigation of the events at Kennedy Road on the nights of 26/27 September last year, with a statement of its findings issued on 16 December last year, the Day of Reconciliation. In this report of 11 months ago, headed “South Africa: Failure to conduct impartial investigation into Kennedy Road violence is leading to further human rights abuses” – with still no end to the trial yet in sight today – Amnesty suggested that legal procedure in South Africa was in grave deficit in this most sensitive of issues.

My own comment on the Amnesty report appeared on Politicsweb shortly afterwards.

This was nearly one year ago. By contrast with the Rivonia trial, the AbM 12 have suffered inordinate delay, in which justice has been effectively denied to them. This was understood already last May by Jeff Guy, in an article in The Mercury headed “Justice delayed and denied for 12 Kennedy Road accused”.

By contrast, to its honour, the Diakonia Council of Churches in South Africa – with exemplary guidance from Bishop Rubin Philip, the Anglican Bishop of Natal , a former colleague of Steve Biko in the Black Consciousness Movement – has provided steadfast witness, in the tradition set previously by Canon John Collins in London. This can be seen in statements such as “When liberators become oppressors” by Reverend Roger Scholtz
and “Current powers threatened by the power of the poor” by Bishop Michael Vorster.

The thinking of the ruling power in the ANC and government in relation to matters of this kind needs to be analysed. A clue can be found in the response of the National Working Committee of the ANC on 2 November to the civil society conference convened by COSATU last month, as issued by Gwede Mantashe, the secretary general of the ANC who doubles as chairman of the SACP (the same post held by his predecessor, my trial and prison colleague, Bram Fischer). In this statement, Mantashe described the “mobilization of a mass civic movement outside of the Alliance partners and the ANC” as something that might be interpreted as “initial steps for regime change in South Africa “.

Consider that phrase, “regime change”.

In terms of the Constitution agreed in 1994, South Africa is a parliamentary democracy in which government is chosen in accordance with the will of the governed, expressed in a general election. If the electorate wishes, it may replace any one party with another as the party of government, in terms of the constitutional process. This is not “regime change”. It is simply the replacement of one governing party by another. That is how governments are changed all the time in parliamentary democracies across the world, in accordance with the rule of law.

Mantashe is suggesting something very different.

In South Africa , the long period of government by white minority rule is often described with that term, “regime”, as in the phrase “apartheid regime”. Mantashe is suggesting that the hold of the ANC on government is that of a “regime”, meaning it would require a change of constitution – with all the immense expenditure of energy and life that took place up to 1994 – for the ANC to be displaced as party of government. It suggests that he and the National Working Committee of the ANC view their tenure of office in the state more as that of…a holding of power in perpetuity, as of right, as in the rule of an absolute monarch or king, from which the word “regime” derives (from the Latin word “rex”, for king). In modern political language, that means dictatorship.

This is the not-so-hidden meaning behind Mantashe’s argument that the critics of his party represent “reactionary forces” intent on “derailing the revolution”, informed by “the neo-liberal view that liberation movements in the region are too strong”.

This is indeed a non-liberal and anti-liberal view of parliamentary government, not surprising from the leader of a party (the SACP) which holds as an article of faith to the practice of “dictatorship of the proletariat”. In the same way, in associating the critics of the present administration with the Movement for Democratic Change in Zimbabwe, Mantashe and the NWC view the ANC as companion to the murderous government of ZANU-PF in Zimbabwe, which they regard as a fellow “liberation” movement.

The AbM trial in Durban/eThekwini is now the most graphic faultline in the struggle to preserve democratic freedoms in South Africa.

The accused in the Rivonia Trial had the propaganda and publicity support of a world superpower, the Soviet Union, and its dependent states, as well as a global network of Communist Parties across the world. Through the Anti-Apartheid Movement and the Defence and Aid Fund they had a very effective international support base in Britain for the raising of funds for their defence, extending into all the main parties in the House of Commons, the legal profession, the universities, the trade unions and throughout the society.

The Abahlali shackdwellers are by contrast in a pitifully different situation, yet facing prosecution from an equally powerfully state.

Everyone concerned for the future of civil liberties in South Africa should support their appeal for funding of a proper legal defence.

Amnesty International condemns Human Rights abuse of Abahlali members

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Amnesty International condemns Human Rights abuse of Abahlali members
Paul Trewhela
18 December 2009

Zuma’s government given criticism devoted in the past decades to the apartheid state

On the Day of Reconciliation in South Africa, 16 December, Amnesty International – the world’s foremost human rights organisation – has issued a damning condemnation of the conduct of the government of the African National Congress, led by President Jacob Zuma. (See here).

The ANC party/state was given the kind of criticism devoted in previous decades to the apartheid state, and to the ANC for its human rights abuses in exile, as in its Quatro prison camp in Angola.

The focus of this exemplary criticism by Amnesty International was the refusal of the Zuma government to uphold the law and even to make adequate inquiry into human rights abuses carried out by ANC party loyalists against black people in Zuma’s political home base, KwaZulu-Natal.

On the eve of the public debt-funded jamboree soon to be enjoyed by the get-rich-quick beneficiaries of ANC grace and favours at the 2010 football World Cup – not to mention the international beneficiaries of the global Roman circus that is contemporary professional football – the focus of this critique is the state’s attacks upon and its neglect of the so-called informal settlements, in which, as Amnesty states, “an estimated 10 percent of South African households are located.”

Colossall football Colosseums – for some.

Destruction of the shacks of the poor – for many.

In particular, Amnesty expresses its concern at an issue of “political control” as being at the heart of what it truthfully calls a “violent attack” upon the shackdwellers at Kennedy Road in Durban, members of a non-violent organisation of the poor, Abahlali baseMjondolo (AbM).

As a result of its guilty obsession with “political control” (ie control over the goodies of the public purse), the ANC and its government have been taken to ask for undermining the criminal justice system and for placing lives at risk, in a situation in which people had been left “vulnerable to threats of violence”.

Amnesty expresses further concern that its representations met only a low-grade response from the government. The office of the Head of State had “acknowledged receipt of Amnesty International’s letter, but the organization has not yet received a more substantial reply to its concerns”.

A crucial issue is the clear implication in the Amnesty statement that local ANC political authorities and the police force in Durban/eThekwini – a predominantly isiZulu-speaking area – are responsible for a racist campaign of terror, in contradiction to the founding principles of the ANC, and that a government headed by an isiZulu-speaking President has been at least neglectful of its duties.

Amnesty notes that the pogrom gang – armed with machetes and other weapons – which launched a murderous attack on the Kennedy Road settlement on the night of 26 September “identified targets to be removed from Kennedy Road in ethnic terms, as ‘amaMpondo’ (Xhosa-speakers) or as non-Zulus”; that the houses of all 13 Kennedy Road residents arrested by the police had been demolished; and that all of the arrested men “appeared to have a specific ethnic profile as Xhosa-speakers originally from the Eastern Cape Province”.

We have here an accusation by Amnesty of racist lynch law in contravention of the law and Constitution, and of the founding principles of the ANC itself.

There could be no more damning indictment of the political structure of the so-called “New” South Africa. But also: no more damning indictment of an opposition and a press that have failed to defend, failed to hold power to account, failed to oppose and failed to inform.

What a contemptible state of affairs, on the eve of the 60th anniversary of the massacre at Sharpeville, and the 20th anniversary of the unbanning of the ANC, the PAC, the SACP and other political organisations, as well as…the release from life imprisonment of President Emeritus Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela, himself an isi-Xhosa speaker.

The statement by Amnesty International, posted below, marks a sea-change in international perceptions of South Africa. It should be studied with care by every reader, in this season of revelry and festivity.

What has become of the “Rainbow Nation”, to have sunk to this condition?

Was it for this, that so much blood and tears were shed?

Happy Christmas, for the Abahlali men in jail and under charge, their families and friends, in this season of shame.

Happy Day of Reconciliation, comrades.

Anglican Church honours Abahlali leader

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Anglican Church honours Abahlali leader
Paul Trewhela
18 December 2009

Bishop Rubin Phillip’s citation of Holy Nativity award to S’bu Zikode

The Christian churches in South Africa, and in particular the Anglican Church under the guidance of Bishop Rubin Phillip, have confirmed their courageous and principled stand in defence of human rights by the award by the Diocese of the Natal Anglican Church of the Order of the Holy Nativity to S’bu Zikode, the elected president of the shackdwellers’ movement, Abahlali baseMjondolo (AbM).

“Jondolo” is a term for a shack. “Abahlali” are the residents who have no option except to live in one.

In the week before Christmas 2009, the Natal Anglican Church has given a lead to the whole of South Africa in the basic matters of defence of life, of the right to decent housing, and of respect for law and the Constitution.

The award of the Order of the Holy Nativity at this time looks to the contemporary reality of the birth of Jesus in a shack. Given the repression currently suffered by members of AbM in KwaZulu-Natal and the fate of S’bu Zikode and his family, it anticipates also, though, a recollection of the tradition of Christian martyrdom in the founding centuries of the faith. A deeply significant statement has been made, with resonance beyond the church into everyday civil and political life.

This award by the Diocese of the Natal Anglican Church is clear evidence of a new politics in South Africa which nevertheless remains far beneath the radar – not merely of the government, as Amnesty International has acknowledged – but of the opposition political parties, the press, and almost the whole of The Great and the Good whose opinions hover over South Africa like a great cloud, fixed in place for the past 20 years.

To its huge credit, and drawing upon a long spiritual tradition, the Anglican Church in KwaZulu-Natal has broken with a bad consensus in the public domain, to give witness beside the weak and downtrodden, in disdain of the conventional political correctness.

S’bu Zikode was forced to go into hiding when a killer squad attached to local ANC political authorities attacked the AbM residents at Kennedy Road in Durban on the nights of 26 and 27 September, his family was forced to flee and his house in the settlement was wrecked by the wreckers..

In a memorable statement, “We are the Third Force” (here), he wrote:

“Those in power are blind to our suffering. This is because they have not seen what we see, they have not felt what we are feeling every second, every day. My appeal is that leaders who are concerned about peoples’ lives must come and stay at least one week in the jondolos. They must feel the mud. They must share 6 toilets with 6 000 people. They must dispose of their own refuse while living next to the dump. They must come with us while we look for work. They must chase away the rats and keep the children from knocking the candles. They must care for the sick when there are long queues for the tap. They must have a turn to explain to the children why they can’t attend the Technical College down the hill. They must be there when we bury our children who have passed on in the fires, from diarrhoea or AIDS.”

The citation by the Diocese of the Natal Anglican Church of the award of the Order of the Holy Nativity to S’bu Zikode appears below.

At a time of mass immersion in the pleasures of the moment, it speaks of deeper matters.

…….

DIOCESE OF NATAL ANGLICAN CHURCH OF SOUTHERN AFRICA

ORDER OF THE HOLY NATIVITY

Whereas by resolution of Diocesan Council in the year of our Lord 2003 the Order of the Holy Nativity was authorised for Distinguished Lay Service to the Diocese of Natal.

And whereas the name of our beloved in Christ, SIBUSISO ZIKODE, has been submitted to us by Citation for such recognition.

We, Rubin, by Divine Permission, Bishop of Natal, do by those present confer the aforesaid honour upon him on the following grounds:

S’bu Zikode was born in 1975 in Loskop near Estcourt in the KwaZulu-Natal Midlands. He has become known to tens of thousands of shack-dwellers in South Africa, as well as admirers around the world, as the elected president of Abahlali baseMjondolo, the shack-dwellers movement. That movement, and the style and content of Zikode’s leadership within it, has been a beacon of dignity and hope in the ongoing struggle for genuine freedom and transformation in our country.

Zikode not only leads by listening and by taking action, he is also an extraordinary wordsmith capable of capturing and sharing the heart of a militant but quite beautiful and salvific poetics of struggle. We quite deliberately rely on his own words throughout this citation for he and Abahlali baseMjondolo have consistently made it plain that the poor can and should speak for themselves.

Zikode and his family first moved into a shack in the Kennedy Road settlement in Durban because the rental was affordable and the location was close to work and schools. “Life was much better because we could live close to work and schools at an affordable cost. But I told myself that this was not yet an acceptable life. … It was not acceptable for human beings to live like that and so I committed myself to change things”.

A key to Zikode’s involvement in that process of change was a thorough democratisation of the local development structure, the Kennedy Road Development Committee (KRDC), which had been in control of the settlement until then. “We mobilised the young people. We started with youth activities, like clean up campaigns, and then when the people were mobilised, we struggled to force that there must be elections, that there must be democracy”.

In the early years of this democratised KRDC, Zikode and his colleagues worked with the local and regional party political structures of the ANC and the City of Durban to try and address the challenges the community faced. But the repeated lies and failed promises built up, and disappointment led to reflection and a commitment to taking action on the people’s own terms. The Kennedy Road settlement made newspaper headlines in 2005 when they blockaded a major road nearby after yet another promise of better housing turned out to be a betrayal. That event also marked the decisive break from party politics to establishing a new politics of autonomous, grassroots action and reflection.

Zikode himself comments on how that day of the blockade felt: “It was good. … It was difficult to turn against our comrades in the ANC but we weren’t attacking them personally. We wanted to make them aware that all these meetings of the ANC – the BEC meetings, the Branch General Meetings, they were all a waste of time. In fact they were further oppressing us in a number of ways. … It had become clear that the only space for the poor in the ANC was as voters – there was no politics of the poor in the ANC. The road blockade was the beginning of a politics of the poor”.

And out of that politics of the poor )emerged Abahlali baseMjondolo:

“I had no idea that a movement would be formed, no idea. And I didn’t know what form would be taken by the politics of the poor that became possible after the road blockade. Most people think that this was planned – that a group of people sat down and decided to establish a movement. You know, how the NGOs work. … But all we knew was that we had decided to make the break. To accept that we were on our own and to insist that the people could not be ladders any more; that the new politics had to be led by poor people and to be for poor people; that nothing could be decided for us without us.

“The road blockade was the start. We didn’t know what would come next. After the blockade we discussed things and then we decided on a second step. That’s how it went, that’s how it grew. We learnt as we went. It is still like that now. We discuss things until we have decided on the next step and then we take it. … In the party you make compromises for some bigger picture but in the end all what is real is the suffering of the people right in front of you. In fact it had become a shame. To say that ‘enough is enough’ is to walk away from that shame. Instead of the party telling the community what to do, the community was now deciding what to do on its own”.

And this approach has shaped the movement’s understanding of its politics – which it refers to as a ‘living politics’ – and its leadership style. At their heart, both flow from a common sense understanding that “everyone is equal, that everyone matters, that the world must be shared”:

“Our movement is formed by different people, all poor people but some with different beliefs, different religious backgrounds. But the reality is that most people start with the belief that we are all created in the image of God, and that was the earliest understanding of the spirit of humanity in the movement. Here in the settlements we come from many places, we speak many languages. Therefore we are forced to ensure that the spirit of humanity is for everyone. We are forced to ensure that it is universal.

“There are all kinds of unfamiliar words that some of us are now using to explain this but it is actually very simple. From this it follows that we can not allow division, degradation – any form that keeps us apart. On this point we have to be completely inflexible. On this point we do not negotiate. If we give up this point we will have given up on our movement”.

This universality of equality, implied throughout the scriptures from Genesis’ account of our creation in the image of God to Revelation’s promise of a new heaven and a new earth, is the singular mark of genuine democracy and is the heartbeat of every genuine struggle for freedom and justice. In recognising S’bu Zikode and in conferring the aforesaid honour on him, we join ourselves with that struggle.

Our decision to confer the Order of the Holy Nativity on Zikode was made before September 2009 when the Kennedy Road settlement was attacked by armed vigilantes, and AbM was violently ejected with the connivance and support of police and local ANC leaders. These attacks have placed acute pressures on the movement and its politics. We have spoken out publicly against these developments and will continue to denounce them and to support Abahlali.

It is our hope that this award helps to strengthen Zikode and the shackdwellers’ movement – for we have seen before, in the history of struggle in South Africa, that concerted violent attacks on people’s politics and movements can result in a certain sclerosis of decent, open and democratic politics. It is vital, not just for Abahlali itself, but for all of us concerned with the project of transformation and true democracy, that its ‘living politics’ is kept living, defended in principal and established in practice..

We give thanks for this dedicated servant of the people and servant of the Lord.

Given under our hand and seal on this Sixteenth Day of December in the year of our Lord Two Thousand and Nine in the Fifteenth Year of our Consecration.

Politicsweb: “Five minutes to pray – and then leave”

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“Five minutes to pray – and then leave”.
Paul Trewhela
23 November 2009

Paul Trewhela on the Diakonia Council of Churches and the Kennedy 13

“Five minutes to pray – and then leave”.

This was the order of the station commander of Sydenham Police Station in Durban, Senior Superintendant Nayager, to the Diakonia Council of Churches last week, when it requested permission to visit 13 impoverished members of the shackdwellers’ movement, Abahlali baseMjondolo (AbM), to pray with them.

The Diakonia Council accuses the Sydenham police of having stoof idly by when a xenophobic pogrom gang associated with local ANC political authorities in the Durban area attacked the AbM community at Kennedy Road on 26 and 27 September, killing four people, destroying houses, causing thousands to flee in terror, seizing property and setting themselves up as unelected dictator over the residents.

Police from Sydenham Police Station allowed the murderers to flee unscathed, and then arrested 13 of the residents who had been attacked.

In a subsequent statement, issued on Saturday 21 November, the Council acccused Sydenham police of having once again stood idly by last Friday when the same semi-fascistic gang – reminiscent of Hitler’s Brownshirts – was permitted freely to attack and demolish houses of AbM residents at Kennedy Road all over again.

The Kennedy Road 13 have been refused bail at the Durban Magistrate’s Court on six separate occasions, most recently on Wednesday 18th November, when more than 30 clergy, headed by Bishop Rubin Phillip, Anglican Bishop of Natal, held a prayer service outside the court to stand by the detainees. (See “Church and state collide at Kennedy Road”, here).

Describing the incarceration of the 13 as amounting to “detention without trial”, the trial itself as a “political trial” and the court a “kangaroo court”, Bishop Phillip called for “people of conscience outside of the state” to join him and fellow clergy in setting up “an independent inquiry into the attack on Kennedy Road on 26 September; the subsequent demolition of the houses of Abahlali baseMjondolo members, the ongoing threats to Abahlali baseMjondolo members, [and] the role of the police, politicians and courts in this matter.”

The Diakonia Council of Churches described Superintendant Nayager’s attitude in limiting access to pray with the 13 in his police station to five minutes as “hard and callous”, reflecting a “blatant disregard for human rights”.

In its statement of 21 November, the Council said that despite many phone calls to the Sydenham Police Station to intervene, not one person had been arrested for last Friday’s attacks.

The Diakonia Council of Churches states that it “condemns these ongoing attacks in the strongest possible terms. The Council furthermore condemns the inaction of the police, and the silence from our government on this issue.”

The silence of the government of President Jacob Zuma on this basic issue of constitutional governance suggests at least toleration of these criminal attacks on what ANC political structures in KwaZulu-Natal clearly view as an intolerable affront: the successful mobilisation of the poor by what they view as a rival source of authority.

With justice, the Council believes that what is at stake is “the preservation of our democracy”.

The Council began in the 1970s when the late Archbishop Denis Hurley sought an ecumenical organisation to work for justice in the Greater Durban Area. He was motivated by awareness that the church should have been doing much more about apartheid: but how could churches which were themselves divided have any impact on the problem, unless they first overcame some of their own barriers? Archbishop Hurley looked to Durban to take the lead in setting up an inter-church structure that would concentrate on the sufferings of ordinary people: “Working together to alleviate suffering and to humanise society is perhaps the most promising and exciting opportunity for ecumenism”, he said.

Archbishop Hurley started discussions with the other church leaders in Durban, looked for the right person to head up this work, and founded Diakonia – using a Greek word which means serving the people. This was in March 1976 and the person was Paddy Kearney, who continued to serve Diakonia until 2004.

Since the first democratic elections in 1994, the work of the Council has increasingly focused on poverty.

Membership of the Diakonia Council includes:

* Anglican Church of Southern Africa (ACSA)
* Dutch Reformed Church (DRC)
* Ethiopian Episcopal Church
* Evangelical Lutheran Church in Southern Africa (ELCSA)
* Evangelical Lutheran Church in Southern Africa (Natal-Transvaal)
* Orthodox Church
* Methodist Church of Southern Africa (MCSA)
* Reformed Church in Africa (Observer Status)
* Religious Society of Friends
* Roman Catholic Church
* Salvation Army
* United Apostolic Church (UAC)
* United Congregational Church of Southern Africa (UCCSA)
* United Methodist Church
* Uniting Presbyterian Church in Southern Africa
* Uniting Reformed Church in Southern Africa

All political parties, civic organisations, law associations and academic institutions should take up this issue, following the lead set by the Diakonia Council.

Citing a “severe threat to the credibility of South African democracy”, a seminar was held at the premises of the South African Human Rights Commission (SAHRC) in Johannesburg on 4 November, under the heading: ‘Democracy under threat? What attacks on grasssroots activists mean for our politics”. Organised by the Centre for the Study of Democracy, based at Rhodes University and the University of Johannesburg, the seminar was addressed by Steven Friedman (CSD), Pregs Govender (SAHRC) and Andile Mngxitama (Foundation for Human Rights), as well as by representatives of AbM including its chairman, S’bu Zikode, who had to go into hiding after his house was wrecked and looted in the attacks on 26/27 September.

The silence of most of the mainstream press is, however, a scandal.