http://www.themercury.co.za/index.php?fArticleId=4356190
The solution is not to ‘kill the bastards’
April 16, 2008 Edition 1
Imraan Buccus
South Africans are angry. Interest rates are skyrocketing, escalating food prices are making existence impossible for many, the housing crisis is exploding, our president seems to be giving tacit assent to Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe’s attempt to steal an election, and Eskom is threatening a massive hike in the price of electricity.
Crime, for so long the national obsession, is now merely the “cherry on top”.
But how safe can civilians feel when, over the weekend, armed robbers made off with documents from the Johannesburg High Court building?
The robbers overpowered security guards at the court and an office dealing with high-profile organised crime cases was broken into.
And almost every South African has been the victim of some sort of crime.
Recently a friend recalled how, when stopped at a traffic light, a teenager reached into his car and grabbed his cellphone – while he was in the middle of a call.
“How ill-mannered,” he thought. He was able to joke about it because, fortunately, he was the victim of a crime that didn’t come with the brutality that we often see.
In fact, he even quipped that crime in South Africa needed to evolve to another level, where criminals acquired a level of sophistication and courteousness.
Imagine a criminal who greets you politely, saying: “Good morning, I’ll be your hijacker this morning. Please don’t panic, simply hand over the keys and I’ll be off.”
Then, at least, no one gets hurt.
But while jokes may help us cope with the unacceptable crime, it remains a deadly and serious threat to our society. People continue to be victims of hijackings and of violent crime while sitting at home.
Walking in one’s neighbourhood after sunset is a no-no. In a country with such enormous inequality and disparity, some experts are able to show the link between poverty and crime.
Others argue that this is nonsense, as other countries with similar inequality levels do not have the same culture of violence and impunity, and point to police incompetence. But whatever the case may be, South Africans have had enough with crime.
So when, during an anti-crime imbizo last week, the Deputy Minister of Safety and Security, Susan Shabangu, said: “If criminals dare to threaten the police or the livelihood or lives of innocent men, women and children, they must be killed. End of story,” she was echoing the feeling of many ordinary South Africans – even though this was unacceptable behaviour for a leader.
In fact, she also said: “You must kill the bastards if they threaten you or the community. You must not worry about the regulations. That is my responsibility. Your responsibility is to serve and protect.”
Her statement was irresponsible, too, as it lent itself to being interpreted in a range of ways. The fact that South Africans have had it with crime does not mean that the deputy minister can resort to promoting a feeling of vigilantism.
Human rights experts such as former cabinet minister Kader Asmal slammed Shabangu’s statements, warning that it would in effect give the police a “licence to kill”, turning them into vigilantes, as they have been in Brazil.
Asmal warned that this could even result in street children being shot and police engaging in “social killing”.
The critical question in South Africa is: have we not, to some extent, already reached that point?
We have seen police killings in post-apartheid South Africa and we have seen vigilantism.
In Durban, we have seen the mass arrests of street traders last year and the ongoing illegal evictions of shack dwellers by the notorious Land Invasions Unit – clear examples of armed state vigilantism.
The shack dwellers’ movement Abahlali baseMjondolo, with the support of Amnesty International, is suing the Sydenham police for allegedly torturing its leaders.
Even before Shabangu’s comments, some of the most sober-minded critics were arguing that we often saw immoral, unlawful and unconstitutional action by the police.
We need to ask ourselves how things could have gone so badly wrong so quickly.
Some have suggested that this breakdown is because we are now quite close to 2010 and that this is the reason for increased levels of harsh police action, the kind of “social policing” that Asmal referred to.
And, with the way things are going in South Africa, we can well expect increased “social policing” to protect the World Cup from the legitimate and desperate anger of poor people, whose livelihoods and communities have been destroyed to make our cities look good for foreign football fans.
If it does happen that the beautiful game has to be played with a ring of police officers protecting it, not from criminals, but from the anger of ordinary people, our cities will be remembered across the world in a negative way.
And if Shabangu has her way, and police start to “kill the bastards” then even street children, street traders and the poor who hang around the streets had better be careful, or they may be seen as a threat to social order and may just become victims of “social killings”.
South Africans have every right to have had it with crime. But the solution is certainly not to kill the bastards.
International experience, like that of Brazil, should be a warning for us of the dangers of going down that road.
Dear People,
I would like to comment on Imraan Buccus’ piece on crime in South Africa.
I very much like the way he approached it by pointing out that the solution will not come from what has been tried somewhere else, before (e.g. Brasil), but he could have also mentioned many other places, such as the US.
In the case of South Africa there are deep and more immediate roots to the problem. And both feed onto each other. Down below I shall add a brief note as to why I am mentioning the US.
Before anything else I presume one all agrees on the axiom that Humanity is one, whether one is poor, rich, sick, healthy, black, green, yellow, brown, white, pink, gray, men, women, children, elders. Solidarity is something which is part of Humanity’s DNA, even if there are attempts to change it with the solidarity preferred by the rich: charity. Charity dictates submission and silence. Solidarity calls for equality regardless of the cost. Solidarity means selflessness while Charity leaves plenty of room for selfishness.
South Africa’s current violence is one which must be looked at not just from 1994, but from as far back as possible, certainly from as far back as 1948 and even before, to 1642 when the unrelenting process of conquest and splitting got underway. Such a process went along with a level of violence which came to be seen as “normal”, at least to those who were its perpetrators. How violent that process has been on those who were at the receiving end has been indelibly inscribed in the bodies, mostly, of black people, especially women, children, elders and men, more or less in that order. Because, in the end, they are the ones who had to be clobbered into submission. That is in very very broad strokes for the deep root.
Then came 1994 and the TRC. It is now clear that the TRC did not lead to what was expected, i.e. healing of the South African society, i.e. making humanity whole again in that part of the Planet where it had been severely mangled, at times beyond recognition. In a nutshell the TRC underestimated what it was going to take to HEAL. For several reasons, the most important being the following:
1) the TRC was conceived as a sort of parastatal infrastructure put in place to facilitate the transition from one type of power based state to another;
2) The TRC was NOT an autonomous organization in the sense that its mandate was designed so that it would respond to the State, and not to what the majority of people were expecting;
3) If healing had been its priority, the TRC would not have been constrained by terms of reference dictated by those who were leaving, and by those who were coming to, power
Why was healing not looked at as an option?
The short answer is that while it is easy to understand what it refers to, it is most difficult to implement because unlike the TRC modus operandi (as outlined above) which is structured by representativity, healing means that every single person speaks for him/her/self as he/she is. Healing, by definition, is not constrained by either time and/or power related structures, be they a ministry, state justice, etc.
The TRC, as has been shown by most of the writings I have seen on the subject, (I have not read the full report), could not, given its mandate and how it was structured, bring out and show how deep and how traumatic the violence against a segment of humanity had been. Sure it is better than the Nüremberg Trials set up in 1945, but given the shortcomings of the latter, it is a poor comparison.
At this point, it is crucial to add that the violence was not only ethnically or racially based. People often think that when one refers to capitalism as having been born (at least in its America’s and Caribbean roots) out of genocidal sequences, one is merely being rhetorical. Not so. A system such as capitalism, having been born out of genocide can only end reproducing itself through the mindset which says that might is right, at all times. Which is why, in part at least, those who are in charge of running the state machinery (and its accessories) think that they can never ever be wrong. The level of violence which has been generated/invented/discovered in order to defend such a system has become part and parcel of what defines capitalism. What is crucial is not the safety or the security of people, whether rich or poor. What must be protected at all times and by any means necessary is the system, even if it is not spelled out in such terms.
To this day even though we do know (we can see it) the wealth generated by slavery, colonial rule, apartheid, neo-colonialism, we still do not know AT WHICH PRICE, because there is no way such a price could be calculated. Using capitalist accounting procedures will obviously not help the process of accountability for the crimes against humanity which have been committed. Such accountability will be fiercely resisted by those who should step forward and account for what happened. That is also one of the reason why the TRC could not go beyond where it got stuck.
The level of violence, because it has not been accounted for what it was, continues to generate more violence. The limit reached by the apartheid violence was so high that it provided a space within which (today) it could continue to simmer within boundaries considered acceptable. If this is difficult to understand, consider the following on a world scale: The Nüremberg Trials were supposed to put an end to WW II in a way that justice was supposed to have been made. Yet, one of the signatories of the Nüremberg Trials went on and dropped two atomic bombs to just demonstrate what would happen to any challenger to its power. Here “its” must be understood both as a nation and as a system. The resulting consequences are still with us today. As Eric Hobsbawm has pointed out: warfare and violence at the end of the 20th century was at a much higher level than it was at the end of the 19th century.
One does not have to wait for another cataclysm to move away from TRCs. The TRC programmed to take place in the DRC never took off. The Great Ghanean writer Ayi Kwei Armah pointed out in his novel Healers (1978), how one could think about and conceive of healing processes under our current condition. Healing means healing away from the system which has brought about such misery, violence, poverty, destruction. Reparation must mean to repair humanity away from the system which has reduced suffering to something which can be only assessed in monetary terms. No wonder then that, under such a system, people would be tempted to repair in their own terms.
Whereas violence used to be concentrated in the hands of the State, now one can see how, slowly but inexorably it has become more and more privatized as well as more and more virulent.
Thanks and take care, jd