Armed mob throws African refugees off highrise

Six people, including a ruling-party leader, have been charged with the murder of two African foreigners who were forced to jump off a high rise building in Durban, South Africa by an armed mob in January 2009. The six men were released on $200 bail.

Among the six arrested men was Vusumuzi Khoza, the local African National Congress town councillor who had earlier, vehemently denied in interviews with the news media that the mob attack against the three foreign Africans had been at all 'xenophobic' in nature. This local ANC-leader had in fact condemned this attack in the strongest of terms and had called for 'restraint', accusing the news media of blowing matters out of all proportion. Now he's also been arrested for alleged involvement in organising the mob and will go to trial from May 5 in the local magistrate's court. Early in January, Zimbabwean Victor Zowa, 24, and Tanzanian Omar Said, 25, fell to their deaths from a building in Durban when they were confronted by a 150-strong mob of South African black men, who were wielding bush knives - machetes. A third person, 23-year-old Eugene Madondo of Zimbabwe, was also forced to jump from a window. He survived. This latest incident shows that these so-called 'xenophobic' attacks targetting the millions of foreign African refugees who have been flooding into South Africa over the past five years, are not stopping. These murders and attacks are merely being denied by local officials and police alike - but they are still occurring every weekend. There is a growing battle to access the country's shrinking (food) resources between indigenous black South Africans and the millions of foreign Africans flooding into the townships.The clashes often aren't only battles for resources: they also deal with often very divergent religious and cultural differences between the Africans from the north and the indigenous South Africans. Thousands of Somali refugees also fled their homes and businesses after xenophobic violence broke out in the Johannesburg township of Alexandra in May last year -- rapidly spread throughout the country and displaced at least 100,000 people. It all was highly organised. The black South Africans waging these ethnic-cleansing campaigns in their own suburbs claim that these black foreigners not only take their food, but also are responsible for the high crime rate, are taking jobs, and bribing government officials to be first in line for state housing. see and also see Indeed from this latest arrest of ANC-councillor Vusumuzi Khoza in Durban, it's clear that some local black South African leaders may even be actively engaged in organising these ethnic-cleansing mobs to get 'foreign Africans' out of their neighbourhoods. There are other such recorded incidents by officials: on Friday, 2 January 2009, KwaZulu-Natal detectives from the Howick police station in Pietermaritzburg for instance, said they arrested a gang they described as a 'farm-attack gang' which police said was travelling across the country attacking both ' foreigners and also white farmers'. Indeed, some 3,035 white farmers have already been murdered in such mystery attacks by large, heavily armed male gangs since 1994, and very few of these gangs have ever been arrested. see Said police spokesman Henry Budhram about this arrest: 'so far our investigations have revealed that these men form part of a larger attack gang operating nationally. ' Such arrests however remain unusual. see Battle for shrinking food resources: On Sept 8 2008, the African Christian Democratic Party http://www.acdp.org.za/ in the Western Cape province came out in support of black South African shopkeepers in Khayelitsha, the sprawling township near Cape Town -- who demanded that their Somali counterparts shut up shop in the township. Shortage of affordable food: The party says the underlying cause of all these ethnic clashes is the growing shortage of affordable food for millions of South Africa's poorest people, with food-aid agencies such as Operation Hunger warning that SA is being plunged into a 'silent famine tsunami', with many millions of people totally unable to afford a daily meal. 6-million children get only one school meal a day: Some 6-million township children countrywide are being sent to school hungry each day, warned the Save the Children fund recently from South Africa. The country now grows very little of its own food, using less than one percent of the country's entire land-surface for irrigated crop-production - so vast supplies of grains and other staples now must be imported at huge cost from off-continent. Before 1994, South Africa was a major food-exporter; now it's a major food-importer - and these clashes over food-resources will grow as long as the food-production keeps dropping. This Zimbabwean man in the centre of this poster was set alight in Reiger Park, south of Johannesburg on Sunday May 18, 2008. The well-organised ethnic-cleansing mob went from door to door to find the 'foreigners', dragged them out of their shacks and set them alight. They didn't care whether the news media filmed this or not, and told the news media openly that they wanted the 'foreigners' out of South Africa. see one BBC news reporthere However there is another aspect at play here: the Somali refugees are muslims, and the Xhosas are traditional tribalists and/or Christians. Tensions between these two specific ethnic groups - in this case Somali refugees, often running small spaza shops from their shacks in townships, -- and the local Xhosas continue to run high in the Western Cape, where many Somalis have been migrating to. These anti-Somali but also anti-Zimbabwean and anti-Mozambiquan sentiments are simmering countrywide: recently in Bushbuckridge, Limpopo, Somali shopkeeper Mohammed Rafiq was tortured with a hot iron to force him to close up shop and all the food was looted from his shelves. The many hundreds of thousands of Somali refugees in South Africa traditionally run shops from their homes - it's the only way they can survive. Apparently most refuse to return to their own country - which they say is totally lawless. Somalis told: 'you are killing us...' The ACDP's Western Cape chairman Mzuvukile Nikelo - who represents a large number of Xhosa-speaking Christians in this region see -- told the Somalis at a meeting: "You are killing us. You're talking about the number of people killed because of the xenophobic attacks, but not of our people who are dying of hunger because of your businesses." But the Somalis vow that they will not heed the demand. "If they must kill us, then they must kill us," a community leader said. Somali shopkeepers received letters from the Zanokhanyo Retailers' Association, demanding that they close down their businesses. These attacks against black African refugees have been increasingly occurring throughout last year in South Africa, flaring up suddenly in intensity and in a very organised way from about May 2008, when hundreds of thousands of 'foreign'African families were forced from their shacks in townships across the country within just a few weeks. Many thousands were raped, mutilated and injured, untold hundreds were killed -- although the official South African death toll claims that 65 were killed, the civil-rights organisations say there were many more unreported deaths. Many victims were even torched or set alight inside their shanties right in front of the news media. In the latest reported ethnic-clash in Durban, when three foreign men were forced to jump from a high-rise building by an angry mob, police initially remained adamant that these killings 'had been criminal acts, not xenophobia'. They had only arrested and charged 24-year-old Sean Jacobs at the time. However since then, they have also arrested and charged the ANC-councillor, together with Nkosinathi Dlamini, 24, Delisle Ngwane, 54, Linda Nala, 32 and Zoleka Siglau, 50. These men all are facing two charges of murder, one of attempted murder and another of assault with intent to do grievous bodily harm. Khoza is also facing a robbery- and assault charge in an unrelated case. see