The trial of the accused in the Komi Zulu assassination is scheduled to begin tomorrow and to run from April 16 -19 in the Scottsburgh High Court. The Umlazi Crisis Committee will be there in red shirts and expect ANC supporters to the there in black shirts. For background information, including 4 detailed press releases from the Umlazi Crisis Committee and contact details please visit www.abahlali.org and follow the link from the ‘Important Media Alert’ at the top of the homepage.
The excerpt below, taken from a paper on the now endemic criminality of the local state in Durban which is online at http://abahlali.org/node/984, gives a very brief over view of the events leading up to this important trial:
The local government elections also resulted in serious repression in E-Section of Umlazi. A group of longstanding ANC and SACP activists were unhappy with their councillor, Bhekisasa Xulu, and claimed that he had withheld ANC membership cards to engineer his re-nomination despite widespread unhappiness with his conduct. They decided to put up an independent candidate, Zamani Mthethwa, to oppose Xulu. Supporters of the Mthethwa campaign claimed that there was widespread intimidation in the lead up to the election including death threats, assaults and whippings. They also alleged that there had been blatant fraud during the election.
On the day after the election they staged a small protest against the alleged electoral fraud. The Public Order Policing Unit shot dead a young woman, Monica Ngcobo, near the protest and shot and seriously wounded S’busiso Mthethwa in his home. The police claimed that Ngcobo had been shot in the stomach with a rubber bullet because she was throwing stones but the autopsy later showed that she had been shot in the back with live ammunition.
Abahlali made contact with Monica Ngcobo’s uncle, attended the funeral and then proposed that a local organisation be formed to deal with the crisis. This was agreed. It was primarily made up of women who had been evicted from Umkhumbane in their youth and they called it, in a direct reference to Women of Cato Manor, Women of Umlazi.
Women of Umlazi and Abahlali organised a large march on 31 March in protest at these police shootings. Then two former SACP activists who had worked closely with the Mthethwa campaign and the organisers of the march, Komi Zulu and Sinethembe Myeni, were later assassinated in separate carefully planned attacks. Others survived assassination attempts. MEC for Safety and Security, Bheki Cele, insisted that aside from the police shooting of Ngcobo none of the attacks were in any way political. Mayor Obed Mlaba, who lives in Umlazi, said nothing at all. Women of Umlazi responded by organising weekly mass meetings attended by hundreds of residents to which the Umlazi SAPS were invited. On 1 June, the Umlazi SAPS finally entered Councillor Xulu’s fortified house and arrested two of Xulu’s employees for the murder of Komi Zulu. Thousands of residents of E-Section then began organising to ensure that there is a fair trail and to push for the arrest and prosecution for Xulu.
The shootings and murders in Umlazi happened in a working class township far from elite eyes and received very little media attention. No newspaper has seen fit to seriously investigate the story or run an angry editorial. No Human Rights NGO issued a statement. None of the academic experts who trade in pithy soundbites have bothered to go and spend some time in Umlazi. Aside from Bheki Cele’s now infamous comment, there has been no statement on the Umlazi shootings from any politician. The scandal is that there is no scandal. Monica Ngcobo’s family laid a complaint with the ICD. A year later they have heard nothing and no police officer has been arrested for her murder.