UnFreedom Day 2014: We Mourn Twenty Years of UnFreedom

26 April 2014

Abahlali baseMjondolo press statement

 

We Mourn Twenty Years of UnFreedom

Twenty years of shack life has not been easy for us.

Twenty years of ANC rule with its evictions, its disconnections, its lies and all its greediness and violence has come to mean an abusive relationship with us. Twenty years after apartheid we live like pigs in the mud, our children die of diarrhœa, we are forced into transit camps at gun point, the police beat and shoot us in the streets and the assassins kill us with impunity. If we stand up and demand that our humanity is recognised we are removed from the housing list and placed on the death list.

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Shooting by the eThekwenini Land Invasion Unit at eNsimbini Ward 30

24 April 2014

Abahlali baseMjondolo – Urgent press statement

Shooting by the eThekwenini Land Invasion Unit at eNsimbini Ward 30

Abahlali baseMjondolo members are being violently attacked at eNsimbini by eThekwini Land Invasion Unit. Two comrades – Baba Cele at his 40 years of age and Baba David Ngubane at age 36 have just been shot and rushed to hospital. About 30 shacks have been demolished. We all know that the Land Invasion Unit are a new municipal hit squad that targest the poor, innocent and the homeless.

We all know that the eThekwini Municipality are law unto themselves. Today's eviction, just like any eviction in Durban is illegal, they have no court order and no legal right to evict residents without an eviction order. This illegal and violent attack on the people of eNsimbini happens at the same time Abahlali are still waiting for the Constitutional judgement on the matter of eviction in Durban by KZN MEC for Human Settlements.

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SACSIS: The Urban Land Question

http://www.sacsis.org.za/site/article/1965

Richard Pithouse

Urban land is acutely contested in contemporary South Africa. There are regular land occupations, some taking the form of quiet encroachment and some taking the form of overtly political acts. At the same time most municipalities have armed units that, often acting violently, and more or less invariably acting illegally, try to sustain the duopoly of the state and the market over the allocation and zoning of urban land. When land occupations are presented as simple acts of criminality, popular protest as about nothing but ‘service delivery’ and evictions as a simple matter of enforcing the rule of law, the curtain is drawn on this on-going drama.

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