http://www.themercury.co.za/index.php?fArticleId=4240852

Columnists

It’s a grim outlook for the rule of law

The Scorpions debacle suggests a lack of concern for legality that mirrors what already happens at another level where the poor are routinely assaulted

The Mercury February 06, 2008 Edition 1

Imraan Buccus

THE country’s leading political commentators and newspapers are all agreed that the post-Polokwane rush to disband the Scorpions is an ominous sign.

It does not augur well for the priorities of the ascending political elite, and it does not augur well for a commitment to the rule of law. The arrest of Scorpions investigator Gerrie Nel, and the manner of the arrest, indicates that at least some in the ascending elite actively aim to subordinate the law to the short-term interests of party leaders.

The anxieties that this has aroused are well founded. But what has often been missed by political commentators and journalists is that the disregard for the law and the constitutional order is not new.

Across space and time one of the great lessons of history is that elites tend to try out dubious behaviour on powerless people before gaining the confidence to move against other elites.

Hannah Arendt, one of the great German philosophers of the previous century, was the first to point out the European holocaust did not emerge from nowhere. On the contrary the tactics first learned in the then German colony of South West Africa in the genocidal killing of the Herero between 1904 and 1907 were then turned on Europeans. While Arendt’s argument was forgotten for a while, Mahmood Mamdani, the great Ugandan intellectual and global intellectual superstar, has made much use of Arendt’s insights in his more contemporary arguments in his recent book Good Muslim, Bad Muslim.

Illegal police action

In South Africa, civil society organisations of the poor have been subjected to serious illegal police action with, in many cases, the tacit consent of elites. The police killing of Michael Makhabane, a student shot while walking past a protest at the University of Durban-Westville in May 2000, was hardly a scandal.

No heads rolled after gratuitous beatings of Treatment Action Campaign members by the police in Durban in March 2003.

The 2006 local government elections were declared a “success” with no reflection on the death of Monica Ngcobo, who was shot in the back by police in Umlazi’s E section.

The regular police beatings of Abahlali baseMjondolo activists in this city may have made the New York Times, the Economist and Al Jazeera, but in Durban they have never been seen as a story worth following up after an initial report.

No heads have rolled. No police officer has ended up having to account for his actions to a judge.

This is hardly unique to Durban. One thinks also of the police torture of Landless People’s Movement activists in Johannesburg and police abduction and beating of Anti-Eviction Campaign Activists in Cape Town during the August 2004 election.

And of course, the way in which undocumented migrants are treated in South Africa has been atrocious for years. Year after year leading human rights organisations condemn the notorious Lindela Camp, in which the ANC Women’s League has shares, without anything changing or any real scandal developing among local elites.

Last week’s unlawful and violent attack on Zimbabweans seeking refuge in a Johannesburg church has at least attracted the support of the Legal Resources Centre, but there’s been nothing like the scandal that resulted in France from a raid on a Parisian church sheltering undocumented migrants in 2003. We seem to accept this kind of barbarism as being “okay” for Zimbabweans.

Of course a noble group of small NGOs such as the Freedom of Expression Institute, Amnesty International and others have tried to catalogue abuses and argue that they must be stopped.

Those among us who are under the impression that there is a sudden disregard for the rule of law and an equally sudden willingness to misuse state institutions to illegally target perceived enemies have assumed that our privileged reality is reality. But it is not.

Shocking violence

In Camps Bay or Hillcrest, we may have been enjoying the freedom of democracy, but in Khayelitsha and Orange Farm and in the shacks around Durban, the police are still violating basic freedoms with shocking violence.

All that is happening is that what has long been done to the poor with the tacit acceptance of the rich is now starting to be done to the rich.

The chickens are coming home to roost. If we think that it’s only a scandal when the state turns on the rich we are forgetting, at our peril, the great lessons of Arendt and Mamdani. What you tolerate for others will sooner or later be done to you.

If we are serious about defending our constitutional democracy we certainly should rail against the arrest of Gerrie Nel and the demand to shut down the Scorpions.

But we also need to demand justice for Makhabane and Ngcobo, to demand an immediate inquiry into the church raid last week, to demand that Lindela is shut down, to demand that shack dwellers can march in Durban without fear of police violence. If the rule of law is not for everyone it will crumble.

If respect for persons is not universal the barbarism that is okay for the “others’, but not for “us” will come home.

These are the lessons of history. We need to move fast if we want to defend what was won in 1994. It’s been under attack for a long time.