I started to wonder the other day just why Macs are so much more expensive in South Africa than elsewhere.

As I write, an entry-level white MacBook is advertised in the US at $999, or R7,300. They’re more expensive in the UK, for example, R8,700. No doubt tariffs and taxes play a role here. But if I want to buy the same MacBook here in Cape Town, though, I must pay … R12,000. No less than 64% higher than the US price.

Is this an inevitable consequence of importing electronics into South Africa? A local dealer tells me the price gap is partly a consequence of buying exchange rate cover. If so, all imports should be similarly affected. But, to take just one example, local PC retailers Incredible Connection manage to sell an Acer Aspire One A110 Blue for just R1,999, when the same machine is advertised in the US at $265, or R1,959.

So who’s behind the 64%?

Apples are distributed in this country by an organisation calling themselves “Core Group”, to whom Apple appear to have granted a license to profiteer (local dealers assure me their margins are no more than 10%). So, who or what is “Core Group”? Its website (which is pretty shabby compared to the gleaming elegance one usually expects from Mac sites) tells us that:

Core Group consists of The Core Computer Business (Pty) Ltd – the distribution company of Apple Computer in SA – and Core Peripherals (Pty) Ltd, which distributes all other brands…

In 2001, the ‘Ichikowitz Group’, which previously was a minority shareholder, bought a controlling interest in Core Group and installed a new management team, and implemented a new strategy…

[Ichikowitz] operates businesses ranging from automotive import and distribution, lotteries and gaming, information technology, sporting goods and dental equipment to minerals, petroleum and other natural resources.”

Lotteries and gaming, petroleum… this does not sound like your usual computer business. And the ‘Ichikowitz Group’ (why the inverted commas?) clearly likes to keep a low profile – it has no website of its own. Dig a little furthur, and we find this: “The arms dealer who flies Zuma“, and begin to understand why. One Ivor Ichikowitz, it seems, is the brother of Core Group CEO Rodney Ichikowitz, and it turns out:

Ivor Ichikowitz, the arms and oil broker who laid on his company jet to ferry Nelson Mandela to a Jacob Zuma election rally in Transkei, has made a career from turning political connections into profit… Ichikowitz (42) made a fortune selling surplus South African armoured vehicles into Africa and the Middle East, and seems to have manoeuvred his way into Zuma’s inner circle … Ichikowitz, who also represents controversial commodities trader Glencore, partnered Majali in his 2001 bid to supply Iraqi crude to South Africa under the controversial oil-for-food programme allowing limited trade with Saddam’s Iraq … In 2005 the M&G revealed Majali, with official ANC backing, intended setting up an oil trading operation intended to benefit the ANC and Saddam’s Ba’ath party … Ichikowitz’s other main business: selling reconditioned surplus South African military equipment into Africa and the Middle East.

(None of this is mentioned in the Wikipedia entry for Ichikowitz’s company, Paramount.)

A couple of threads on a local website reflect a certain amount of public unhappiness with the ‘Apple experience’ in South Africa.

Lotteries, gaming, arms dealing in Africa, oil deals with Saddam… Way cool, Apple.

I have in the last few days had an exchange of thoughts, impressions and views on the Gaza crisis with a Jewish friend in the UK. We’ve not actually seen each other in the flesh for over five years, so have taken special pains to avoid misunderstanding of each other’s tone, and have steered well clear of the kinds of virtualised screaming matches that are flaming across the net at the moment. I have certainly learnt quite a lot from the exchange, and renewed my understanding of a more Israeli-sympathetic perspective. It’s been an interesting process, as I think our fundamental values are probably pretty similar.

We have both taken pains to be as honest with the facts so far as we’ve been able to determine them, but please make your own judgments on how authoritative we are.

I’m not going to copy-edit it into perfection, so please bear with any rawness of language.

Being a family man, Michael’s been too busy to respond so far to my final mail, which should not be considered the last word.

On 2009/1/11, David Le Page wrote:

Sales guy v. techie:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BcQ7RkyBoBc

On 12 Jan 2009, at 1:21 AM, Michael wrote:

On the good side, this had me howling with laughter in between dealing with horrifying news from Gaza, and equally horrifying “analysis” from friends.

On the bad side, I tried to share it with my wife, who dismissed the whole thing, saying she didn’t understand enough of it for it to be funny…

On Sun, Jan 11, 2009 at 11:45 PM, David Le Page wrote:

Hmm, I hope my analysis doesn’t fall into the horrifying category. I try to start with the sanctity of life, and work backwards.

I’ve had a couple of semi-awkward, incomplete conversations with Jewish friends this last weekend, who waver between horror, despair and tribal solidarity.

The reading I’ve done as a result of what’s happening has certainly taught me a few new things, detail and scale of the Gaza blockade and W. Bank settlements, for example.

I’ve also gotten a better sense of what an enormous amount of misinformation is circulating. Somebody on Facebook was telling me that the Arab League is sworn to Israel’s destruction.

Chris McGreal seems to be doing a good job reporting for the Guardian.

What do you think of Naomi Klein’s renewing a call for boycott, sanctions and disinvestment?

Glad you enjoyed the vid!

On 12 Jan 2009, at 3:39 AM, Michael wrote:

Let’s just say that, while Israeli military actions are pretty horrific, no one seems to acknowledge the agency of the Arab States [including the Arab League] and the post-67 Palestinian leadership in creating the situation they have now.  Let’s leave aside the decision to use rockets and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion as a means to “dispute resolution”.

Perhaps the statement of the Arab League Secretary General in 1948, and the concerted attack on Israel by the six main Arab League members, combined with the “no recognition” clause in the 1967 statement contributes to the notion that the Arab League is sworn to Israel’s destruction.  Hamas certainly is, as is Hezbollah. See Wikipedia [for all its faults] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arab_League_and_the_Arab%E2%80%93Israeli_conflict

I’m finding lots of overblown rhetoric on both sides.  What’s telling is the repetition of key phrases; it’s obvious on the Israeli side [I saw one intelligence report calling the cease-fire "the lull in the fighting"....lol], but perhaps less noticed among others.  “Open-air prison”; “concentration camp”; “proportionality” comparisons with the Warsaw Ghetto, etc.

The Warsaw Ghetto one is the best.  As if the Jews of Poland had collaborated with sworn enemies of Germany; as if they’d rioted against Germans; as is they’d turned down a UN-mandated state and put their hopes in an invasion of Germany; and as if, when surrounding states were unable to deliver, had begun to blow things up and shoot rockets from out of the shtetls.  Sorry, it’s just one too far.

And none of this excuses the use of military force to solve a political problem, and none of it justifies the Occupation.

Boycotts and sanctions are fine.  One could make a plausible case that the economic destruction combined with de-mobilizing self-defence units in South Africa fuelled what would have been a nasty crime problem anyway, and I don’t really look forward to empowering Israeli black marketeers.

Who’s going to stop those rockets?

Peace,

Michael

On Mon, Jan 12, 2009 at 12:17 PM, David Le Page wrote:

I’m inching through the fog here, so bear with me.

It’s my impression that the intentions of the Arab states have shifted a very long way from the days when they were all ready to invade. They certainly lend the Palestinians very little support — what support Hamas has seems to come from a non-Arab state, and from non-state parties. Egypt, right now, is making it impossible for civilians to leave Gaza through the southern border, not so?

Prior to 1994, the ANC official line was a socialist South Africa; so should we really assume that struggle manifestoes have to be the obstacle to final settlement that is constantly used as the reason to demonise Hamas? In other words, would sincere dialogue not open possibilities currently invisible and unimaginable? ‘The rainbow nation’ was utterly inconceivable 20 years ago.

I can’t help remembering my own upbringing in this country: the ANC and ‘the communists’ were in our minds utter demons, the personification of all evil. We were under siege, surrounded by enemies on all sides. We were in no doubt that given the chance, we would be overrun and experience no end of horrors. Really and truly, that is how it was. We could not possibly have imagined that one day not too far away we would be simply and happily united in the pursuit of SL500s and Hummers.

And so it is with Hamas. They are painted as being uniquely evil because of their tactics, but really, they just take the lottery out of killing their kids. Send your child to war and you’re just gambling they’ll return, you’re declaring your readiness ‘to make the sacrifice’ while hoping someone will pay. Hamas’ undisputed war crimes are no worse than Israel’s.

I wonder if the horror at suicide bombing is not just being appalled to discover that there is a weapon available to your opponent that you cannot yourself deploy. Or that at root, you do not have the moral courage to deploy. Those prepared to make the greater sacrifices are usually those with the more authentically outraged sense of justice. Or, self-evidently, they are just more desperate. A lot more desperate.

After all, that horror at suicide bombing cannot be concern for the youngsters involved, or there would be equal horror at the thought that they might inadvertently be killed in the current shelling.

I don’t think suicide bombing is so far from our own culture as we like to think. A pilot during WW2 was not so very different to a suicide bomber, given casualty rates. Nor is it somehow an intrinsically Islamic thing; the secular Tamil Tigers use suicide bombers. Sure, Hamas justify it in Islamic terms, but I think tactics may have preceded theology.

So the ANC and IRA started talks without forswearing violence and coming over all lovey-dovey; why should Hamas need to do so? Their leaders (well, those that are left, and those that will come) have their own increasingly bitter constituents to placate, no doubt.

Oh, have you seen this: analysed the statistics on Israeli and Hamas attacks

What seems to me to be missing in all this is a recognition that powerful states don’t need to use violence when they can deploy any amount of police, institutional and administrative violence against those they oppress. But the oppressed don’t have that option. The Palestinians don’t have an army they can just send in to forcibly remove settlements that are illegal even under Israeli law. But you know all this …

Being something of a dove myself (!), I used to wonder why the Palestinians did not use non-violent means of resistance. In fact, I think for a while I allowed myself to be suckered into a notion that they’re somehow intrinsically/culturally more given to violence. Then I read a bit more of the history, discovering that there were extensive attempts at non-violent resistance, particularly in the 1980s, marches, civil disobedience — all ruthlessly crushed by Israel. The same as with South Africa …

I don’t know about the intricacies of the Warsaw Ghetto metaphor. I tend to avoid dragging that kind of history into contemporary debates — it just muddies stuff more. But if the logic of trying to stop the missiles is the military one now being used, then an awful, awful lot of people who cannot leave a war zone are going to be killed before that last rocket is stopped. And because assault breeds more resistance, that last rocket is unlikely to be fired much before the last Palestinians are pulverised.

“Open-air prison” seems reasonable to me; after all, people cannot leave. If someone just built a wall around my home, and told me I could not leave, I’d consider it a prison. If they then started shelling it, I’d be especially miffed!

Wish we were talking face to face!

I don’t know the bit about turning down a UN-mandated state?

Following the Iraq debacle, I find it utterly impossible to accept that the publicly stated reasons for a war are what really drives it. I don’t know what is really driving this one, but I seriously doubt it’s just “stopping the rockets”. Probably it simply means that the current batch of politicians really want to be seen to be tough — but in their hearts, I think they know they cannot stop the rockets militarily. It’s the oldest one in the book; you as politician find yourself seated atop this writhing, unruly mass of human beings; being a politician you have a pathological need for approval, and the easiest way to escape their gaze and feel loved and trusted by them is to get them to hate somebody else.

This war, I suspect, must be as much of a driver of anti-semitism as the PEZ. Probably far more so.

If this is the kind of analysis that has dismayed you, please be frank in saying so.

best wishes,

David

On 13 Jan 2009, at 2:15 AM, Michael wrote:

Hi David,

We’re all inching through fog, but I find that increasingly we’re all using very different compasses, that is to say different versions of history and news.  I’ve just seen IDF videos, for example, showing large secondary explosions [weapons dumps] in some of the mosques which have been targeted; I also saw one showing a rather crudely booby-trapped school.  Some will believe that these represent the truth, and that videos showing wailing civilians are faked, and some will believe that these are faked and the wailing civilians are the only truth.

To take your points in order [and I'm working--as you are-- to engage with the other point of view, rather than get into the slanging match so often seen on the internet]:

1. Intentions of Arab states.

I agree that the focus has shifted from an Arab-Israeli problem from 1880-1967 to an Israeli-Palestinian problem with connections and resonances to earlier conflicts.  Some of the intentions of some Arab states have shifted.  Egypt is an interesting example: they still have state-sponsored anti-semitism, and a democratic election there would put Jihadomanics in a very strong position, if not in power.  They made a principled move to make peace with Israel in 1977, got their land and oil back, and that’s that.  Mubarak also hates Hamas as much as the Israelis do, and as much as Abbas does.  In fact, just about the only people who don’t hate them are the Syrians who fund them and the Western opponents of Israel who often make excuses for them.

Iran [not Arab, I know] and Syria sponsor serious fighting forces committed to the destruction of Israel; Iraq shot missiles at Israel in response to a US attack in 1991, and it is not at all clear that all the surrounding States are resigned to Israel’s presence.

2. Hamas’ fascism [and I agree that there are fascist elements in Israel as well] is a facade which will melt away when they are treated seriously, just as the ANC’s socialism faded.

I can understand comparisons of Israeli behaviour [walls, passes, checkpoints, casual racism] with Apartheid.  I think some of these are overblown, but the main problem with them is this:  Israel may be acting a bit like South Africa, but Hamas cannot be compared to the ANC.

The ANC always had a multi-racial, inclusive, and democratic organization at the top, even if rogue elements violated that.  The ANC had a fierce debate about the ethics of soft targets, and I don’t think anyone is under any illusions about Hamas’ scruples on this matter.  The ANC grew out of legal challenges, whereas Hamas was spawned from the dubious soil of Syrian and Israeli covert operations.

Part of what was wrong with South Africa’s actions [not all] was that the ANC would have been a democratic participant in change, and never adopted the “one settler one bullet” approach of the PAC.  Hamas thinks one bullet is too few.

I take their anti-semitism seriously because it doesn’t spring from recent events; this strand in Arab and Palestinian politics has been evident since the 1920s, as has the regrettable similar strand in Jewish politics.  If we are to accept that it’s ok for a downtrodden people to use fascism, we’d be approving of the German turn to Nazism in the wake of military defeat, punitive reparations and economic collapse.  People have choices.

3. Suicide bombings

I don’t have a particularly negative opinion of suicide bombings as opposed to any other tactic in asymmetrical warfare.  The tactics I oppose are the same ones I oppose on the Israeli side: using fascist rhetoric and politics, cynically using and causing Palestinian civilian deaths, and trying to settle a political problem with weapons.

Asymmetrical warfare, however, is exactly that: asymmetrical.  That said, the most recent figures I saw from Gaza suggested nearly 1000 dead, but Palestinian medical sources [I'll find this if you want--lost it now] suggesting about half were civilians.  Assuming that were true, that’s still 500 civilians too many in my view, and yet I can’t help thinking that if one had a serious modern war machine and really wanted to cause civilian deaths, 500 over two weeks is not the figure I’d come up with.  Compare the first few weeks of the US/British invasion of Iraq, or Russian actions in Chechnya.

4. ANC and IRA talks without forswearing violence

And yet it was very clear as the Soviet Union collapsed that neither of them was going to last very long as a military force.  the same cannot be said for Hamas’ sources of funds.

Equally, neither of them dropped anything like 3000 explosives on their targets in the entire years of struggle, and Hamas did that in 6 months in early 2008.

Neither of them were specifically genocidal in their calls, either; something about their socialist tutors kept them from employing the language of extinction or exile.  At least in the ANC case; I’m less familiar with internal IRA politics.

5. Hamas’ violence as the recourse of the [relatively] weak

You know as well as I do that it’s a stupid recourse, and the fact that we can *understand* how someone might be angry doesn’t validate the choices they make about how to express and work with that anger.  Israel *pulled all the settlers out of Gaza*.  The first thing the new rulers did was blow up lots of infrastructure, and then promptly elect leaders committed to rewarding this concession with more rockets, more bombs, and more inflammatory rhetoric.

The blockade has been incredibly destructive, and I dislike it as much as most people–in fact most Israelis I know don’t like it.  Interestingly, one wonders what Gaza would be like, and what Hamas’ reputation would be like if they had spent all that effort smuggling in food, fuel and medicine instead of the thousands of rockets and mortar shells they keep dumping on Israel.  That’s what I mean about choices.

6. Palestinian attempts at non-violence

I was not aware of these, but a quick look at the one website I found when Googling it [http://www.stopapartheid.org/history] begins its history of Palestinian non-violence in the 1930s.  1936-9 were the years of a serious armed revolt amongst the Arab population, including riots and the formation of militias against the British [and immigrant Jews].  They then categorise remaining in the Occupied Territories after 1967 as intrinsically non-violent protest, without citing any actions or campaigns, and the next big thing they raise is the First Intifada, which no one would claim as non-violent resistance.

If you have better sources, I’d appreciate them, but this is a sympathetic website to Palestinians and non-violence, and I can’t find any here.  I don’t doubt, by the way, that they’d be pretty ruthlessly crushed, but then all of those movements are at first.

7. UN-mandated State

The official partition plan in 1947 would have created two states, a Jewish one and an Arab one.  A quick look at the borders [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1947_UN_Partition_Plan] shows them to be uniformly un-defendable, and when the coalition of Arab states attacked [is this disputed anywhere?] the Haganah put into action plans to shift people ["ethnic cleansing"] to make the defence of Jewish areas feasible.  Anyone who has spent 20 minutes thinking about invasion would look at the 1947 partition plan and see that the Jewish areas would need more depth if attacked, as they were.  This gave us the 1949 Armistice line, ‘The Green Line’, retreat to which is now the apparent Palestinian demand.

The Nakba, as it is known in Palestinian history did indeed happen.  It might have happened had the entire coalition of neighbouring states not attacked Israel, and had the Palestinian population and leadership not put its trust in those states to eradicate the Jewish state.  But I would like someone to explain how, with the warmaking technology of 1948, the Jewish state as constituted by the UN could have been defended without “driving out” those Palestinian villages. It’s a terrible thing, war; no one really wins.

On that score, please note that Tel Aviv is 11 miles from the Westernmost point of the Occupied Territories.  That’s artillery range.  Given the history of attacks in 1948, 1956, the attempted attack in 1967 [yes, I buy that], the attack in 1973, and the steady rocket and guerilla attacks since then, would you situate a sworn enemy with military capability within artillery range of a major population centre?

So the Palestinian people are indeed victims.  Victims of often cruel Israeli policies.  For example I disapprove of the dual-law and dual-level citizenship, but recognize that Israel’s raison d’etre is to serve as a haven of last resort for Jews.  I’m unsure that would be preserved in a state where Jews were a minority.  It’s a difficult balance, and no one’s got it right, yet.

But they are also victims of their own leadership and misguided politics.  They ought to have accepted the 1947 partition; they ought to have got Jordan and Egypt to declare the West Bank and Gaza states anytime from 1948-1967; they ought to have listened more to their Soviet tutors than to their Arab patrons; they ought to have looked inward in Gaza and built a vibrant, democratic and peaceful state; and they ought to now come to the table not with a ten-year cease-fire “to build up for the final conflict” as they say, but to wage peace, and to return the word Jihad to its rightful meaning, an inner struggle against the ego.  I have lots of suggestions for Israel and the Israelis, as well, but we’re discussing the Palestinians now.

So while we disagree, I’m happy to have this conversation with you, because I believe that it will be truly two-way.  I’m not trying to get you to think differently, only to see that there might be sound reasons for me to do so.

Peace,

Michael

On 13 January 2009, at 6:49:01 AM, David wrote:

Hey, Michael

Responding broadly to some of your points, my feeling is that much of Israel’s past actions indeed made sense at the time, were justifiable at the time. But their current actions are so utterly cynical: for example, the involvement of senior IDF officers in collaborating with illegal settlement: http://www.lrb.co.uk/v29/n16/sieg01_.html, and the persistence of those settlements in the first place.

And their equally cynical efforts to eternally put off a political settlement while slowly making a just settlement ever less likely.

So for me, it’s irrelevant, to some degree, to dig back through history, and say, x, y, and z land grabs were justified. They probably were at the time. But the time has changed. Israel has exhausted its moral capital.

2. Nature of Hamas (by facism, do you mean would-be genocidal racism?)

You’re right that Hamas is a nastier entity than was the ANC. I don’t know whether that’s a function of far more brutal repression (just think of the sheer numbers of Palestinians detained) or of the toxic brew of Israeli and Syrian collaboration, or just bad diet. I’m interested to see you confirm Israeli sponsorship of Hamas as an opponent to Fatah — I’d read about that, but not been able to find many confirmatory resources that I trusted.

But since Israel sponsored the creation of Hamas, it makes de facto collective punishment of the Palestinians all the more unjust. “We’ve created a terror movement in your midst; now you get rid of them.”

You wonder what Hamas’ reputation would be if they spent more on welfare — but all accounts I have read suggest they do spend enormous amounts on welfare, which is why they have the levels of popular support they do. Which suggests that there may be many faces to Hamas besides the anti-semitic propagandists — but we don’t know, really, do we?

3-5.

The bottom line is that Israel has to be forced to talk to Hamas, no matter how much everyone may loath them. Your points with respect to the happier politics of the ANC stand, but I think my points with respect to the psychology of accepting the need to speak to an enemy are important: understanding that however repulsed you may find the notion of doing so, the possibility of settlement exists. In other words, Israel is not refusing to talk to Hamas because of who Hamas are; they’re refusing because of the position Hamas occupies. If Hamas were a bunch of vegetarians in sandals with Toqueville on their night tables carefully targeting their missiles at the middle of empty fields, Israel would still not be talking.

The problem of course, is that where white South Africa was under the pressure of being a minority, and a global pariah (apart from its relations with Israel), at present Israel is neither (widely disliked but carefully sheltered).

I don’t think the IDF is out to kill civilians deliberately, and I don’t think I implied that. I just don’t think they really – as an institution – care much when they do. No army ever does. Armies are not designed for working around civilians.

All the accounts of how Palestinians are treated at checkpoints, for example; accounts I have heard from South Africans who have visited Israel, point to widespread racism and dehumanisation of the Palestinians, confirmed by Israelis themselves, to give just one example, in Chris McGreal’s article yesterday: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/jan/11/gaza-israel-political-attitudes:

– quote –

“With the harshness of the criticism, they’re slowly but surely turning off more Israelis to elements of humanity, consideration, so eventually they say: who the hell cares? We don’t see the human face. In that situation we can do anything we want. There’s a lack of identity of who the enemy is. He’s not human any more.”

– end quote –

6. Palestinian attempts at non-violence

I found the reference I had in mind with respect to non-violent resistance – happily I’d saved it on Furl – and my recollection of it was not complete, because it did outline certain victories through non-violence – which have subsequently been undone, though. It confirms my recollection of repression: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2007/nov/16/israel.comment

7. UN-mandated state

Thanks for this detailed account of that history. I have been looking at maps today, trying to untangle the border shifts in the 1940s, and the legalities thereof, and have not yet straightened it all out in my head. I did read one article today saying that it was by international law illegal for Israel to hold onto territory ‘gained by war’ in 1947. At which point I thought, well hang on, fine to say it’s illegal if you’re the aggressor, but if you’re attacked? Fair dibs, surely, to take territory in defending yourself.

But again, that was then. And there is a huge difference between what is justified when facing a conventional army, and when facing irregular forces which so often (as here in South Africa during the Boer War) inspires particularly brutal repression.

While many of your suggestions for how the Palestinians should have conducted themselves make perfect sense, in practice these things can be enormous difficult for a population which at times has been caught up in simply trying to survive, which is increasingly geographically fragmented, which has far fewer resources for political organisation than have the Israelis, and which are the object of constant efforts at destabilisation by the Israelis — such as the creation of Hamas to beat out Fatah — and the US, whose very recent support of Fatah against Hamas had precisely the opposite effect to that intended. I think you use the word “they” rather too loosely.

I’m not actually sure that there’s a huge gulf between us. (Nor did I started this exchange with that assumption.) But I fear that between Palestinians and Israelis is growing deeper by the minute.

David

Note: The conversation is not over, and will probably be updated here in the course of the next few days.

War is horrible: Bodies outside the Hamas police headquarters in Gaza City, following an Israeli air strike on 27 December.

Avi Shlaim is a professor of international relations at the University of Oxford, who has written in the Guardian of the effects of Israel’s policies and attacks on Gaza.

“I write as someone who served loyally in the Israeli army in the mid-1960s and who has never questioned the legitimacy of the state of Israel within its pre-1967 borders. What I utterly reject is the Zionist colonial project beyond the Green Line.”

“Gaza, however, is not simply a case of economic under-development but a uniquely cruel case of deliberate de-development. To use the Biblical phrase, Israel turned the people of Gaza into the hewers of wood and the drawers of water, into a source of cheap labour and a captive market for Israeli goods. The development of local industry was actively impeded so as to make it impossible for the Palestinians to end their subordination to Israel and to establish the economic underpinnings essential for real political independence.”

“In Gaza, the Jewish settlers numbered only 8,000 in 2005 compared with 1.4 million local residents. Yet the settlers controlled 25% of the territory, 40% of the arable land and the lion’s share of the scarce water resources.”

“America and the EU shamelessly joined Israel in ostracising and demonising the Hamas government and in trying to bring it down by withholding tax revenues and foreign aid. A surreal situation thus developed with a significant part of the international community imposing economic sanctions not against the occupier but against the occupied, not against the oppressor but against the oppressed.”

“Whatever the numbers, killing civilians is wrong. This rule applies to Israel as much as it does to Hamas, but Israel’s entire record is one of unbridled and unremitting brutality towards the inhabitants of Gaza.”

“A rogue state habitually violates international law, possesses weapons of mass destruction and practises terrorism – the use of violence against civilians for political purposes. Israel fulfils all of these three criteria.”

Nancy Kanwisher of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and colleagues have analysed the statistics on Israeli and Hamas attacks. The stats suggest that Hamas is able to reduce attacks nearly to zero when it wishes. The stats also seem to show that in most instances it is Israel that breaks ceasefires.

Indeed, of the 25 periods of nonviolence lasting longer than a week, Israel unilaterally interrupted 24, or 96%, and it unilaterally interrupted 100% of the 14 periods of nonviolence lasting longer than 9 days.

They conclude:

First, Hamas can indeed control the rockets, when it is in their interest. The data shows that ceasefires can work, reducing the violence to nearly zero for months at a time. Second, if Israel wants to reduce rocket fire from Gaza, it should cherish and preserve the peace when it starts to break out, not be the first to kill.

War is horrible: An Israeli man killed by a Hamas rocket in the southern town of Netivot.

The US Army War College released a report this week that argues that Hamas is badly misunderstood by both Israel and the US.

“Negotiating solely with the weaker Palestinian party-Fatah-cannot deliver the security Israel requires. . . . The underlying strategies of Israel and HAMAS appear mutually exclusive . . . . Yet each side is still capable of revising its desired endstate and of necessary concessions to establish and preserve a long-term truce, or even a longer-term peace.”

A 2005 letter from Human Rights Watch to President Bush adds some context on the continuing expansion of Israeli settlements in the West Bank, a policy which would probably be considered aggressive if deployed by, say, Mexico, in southern Texas:

You said, [President Bush], on October 20, 2005, following your meeting with Palestinian President Abbas: “Israel should not undertake any activity that contravenes its road map obligations, or prejudices the final status negotiations with regard to Gaza, the West Bank, and Jerusalem. This means that Israel must remove unauthorized outposts and stop settlement expansion.” Israel has acted contrary to these obligations, escalating the building of settlements in 2005. According to the Israeli Central Bureau of Statistics, in the first half of 2005, there was a 28% increase in settlement housing starts compared to the same period in 2004. Israel now proposes to further expand West Bank settlements in the coming year.

Going back a little, Vanity Fair explains how the Bush Administration’s attempts to manipulate Palestinian politics led to Hamas getting the upper hand:

How could the U.S. have played Gaza so wrong? Neocon critics of the administration—who until last year were inside it—blame an old State Department vice: the rush to anoint a strongman instead of solving problems directly. This ploy has failed in places as diverse as Vietnam, the Philippines, Central America, and Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, during its war against Iran. To rely on proxies such as Muhammad Dahlan, says former U.N. ambassador John Bolton, is “an institutional failure, a failure of strategy.”

Writing in the Christian Science Monitor, Sara Roy agonises over the deaths of Palestinian children and questions what Israeli victories mean for Jews.

As Jews celebrated the last night of Hanukkah, the Jewish festival of lights commemorating our resurgence as a people, I asked myself: How am I to celebrate my Jewishness while Palestinians are being killed?

The religious scholar Marc Ellis challenges us further by asking whether the Jewish covenant with God is present or absent in the face of Jewish oppression of Palestinians? Is the Jewish ethical tradition still available to us? Is the promise of holiness – so central to our existence – now beyond our ability to reclaim?

The pictures are licensed Creative Commons, from Amir Farshad Ebrahimi; here’s his Flickr photostream.

Not enough days in the meek

The swift passage of ideals? Madiba at the unveiling of his statue in Parliament Square, London, 2007

Not enough days in the meek by David Le Page is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 2.5 South Africa License.

Because 10 years on, evidence suggests that the number of people living in poverty has increased.
– Njongonkulu Ndungane, Business Report, 21 August 2008.

The only time I have heard [Western Cape premier] Ebrahim Rasool speak was at the launch of a book of Sufi philosophy I had helped edit.

The Somali section of the Soetwater camp – flimsy catering tents offered as shelter

The now notorious refugee camp called Soetwater is a few kilometres from where I live. Three thousand people have been living there in bitter cold, increasingly wet tents for two weeks, tortured by uncertainty. They were wrenched from their homes and businesses by violence and terror. Overnight, the patient, painful work of years was plundered, burnt or crumbling behind them. The response of the authorities, and the UN, to their plight has been to insist that they must return to the communities that turned on them so suddenly and brutally. In other words, preserving the illusion of national harmony and tolerance is considered more important than the feelings of those who know more than anyone else that it is, at present, just an illusion.

Many of the refugees, many of them, have fled violence, unimaginable violence, elsewhere in Africa. Some have been running all their lives from killing, torture and rape. They ran to the rainbow nation, to the land where human rights are guaranteed by what those who framed it like to call the world’s most progressive constitution. Increasingly, though, it seems we should just call it a piece of paper.

Last Monday night, at 8 o’clock, buses arrived at Soetwater, at this encampment as dismal as the authorities that created it. In the dark, buses and armed men descended, and started urging people onto the buses. They gave no advance warning. They did not say where they were taking people. They did not force people onto the buses, but their very arrival and presence must have been extraordinarily intimidating. They were acting in the name of the province, and the premier, the man once known as Ebrahim Rasool.

Again, on the Tuesday evening, the same pattern. Large numbers of buses, armed men, destinations uncertain, despite official claims that explanatory pamphlets have been distributed. For people who have escaped state violence elsewhere on the continent, what could be more terrifying? Then the premier’s “social transformation consultant” consultant, one Zelda Holtzman, threatened the refugee leaders with the removal of tents, food and medicine unless they would meet with her individually, and not collectively as they preferred.

There is something about power that seems to corrupt inevitably, and the corruption of the soul is rather more scary than that of the hands that must wave away gifts. How does it happen?

You start out, perhaps, with the best of intentions. Perhaps. But then you must wrench yourself through one bitter compromise after another, make payment in word or in kind to the unscrupulous, ward off or absorb the insistent counsel of sycophants and fellow-travellers, till finally you stand in an office determined, you think, to do good. But you are now surrounded with the machine of bureaucracy. You are no longer a single human being of flesh and blood. The person who began the journey to power no longer exists. You have become a vast and sprawling creature made of officials and databases and the steel of public machinery; and the blood that runs through your veins is dark with the self-interested prejudices of those who elected you. As your time in office flows out, you wither into a creaking husk pulling levers to guide the mighty armoured machine that encases you.

For the middle classes of this city, aside from the many who have gone so very far out of their way to assist, it is quite easy to forget altogether that there is a refugee crisis. But the forces that created that crisis and the meanness of the response to it are the very same thing. They are connected by a fundamental disregard for the full humanity of others. Unchecked, this force can only spread in this nation. In Zimbabwe too, the early signs of tyranny began with the persecution of minorities, the slaughters in Matabeleland. But other Zimbabweans did not think it affected them. It is the old pattern.

In the developing world, it is rarely the case that a country becomes and simply remains a democracy. A more typical history is that after an early experiment with ballots and parties and candidate, people brutalised by the past regain the upper hand, and the tentative democracy is strangled, for years, before another painful resurgence of liberty. Sometimes these oscillations between liberty and tyranny repeat themselves several times. Is democracy eternal, as we like to imagine? We will only know when we can stand at the end of time and look back. In the meantime, the precautionary principle suggests we should assume it is eternal only as long as we are fighting for it on a daily basis.

The cycle of democratic advance and decline will not necessarily be restricted to the developing world. Close study of the laws and edicts deployed in the US and UK over the last several years show an unmistakable and relentless retreat from democratic values so painfully won. Since there are no obvious countervailing forces, there is little reason to doubt that in twenty years time the phrase ‘Western democracies’ will no longer cover those two noisy and belligerent states. Even if the person Barack Obama survives the election of his body, and the signs that he will are not good, he is but one man. What hope there is for his country lies not with him, but with the human wave that may carry him to office.

There is no reason why this pattern of democratic advance and retreat should not repeat itself in South Africa. Indeed, if our country’s people persist in their pursuit of material things while neglecting the warp and woof of society, and the endless but indispensable tedium of engaging with fellow citizens whom one does not much like and with whom finding common ground seems improbable, then democratic retreat is a certainty. Democracy withers behind a large screen tv, or the wheel of a large, locked and sealed vehicle, or long walls barbed with fear; and this country is full of them.

We like to think that our comfort, if we have it, is secured by noble values. But at present this is only true if we are prepared to list exploitation and inequality alongside freedom of speech, the right to vote and habeas corpus.

When refugees we’ve nearly forgotten are intimidated, treated with extraordinary disregard, and mustered at night for travel to unannounced destinations, we should know that there is a part of us that is also being pulled away into the darkness. Unless we respond with the same anguish and fury as those who are being treated as human cargo, we too will be lost.

Hope? That comes when when our voices are speaking louder and stronger, and our legs are moving, and our hands are writing, and our hearts alive and thinking, and we know, finally and certainly, that the madness of xenophobia, and the xenophobia of bureaucracy, affects us no less than than the refugees of all camps, and of Soetwater.

This is a young woman’s experience of xenophobic violence, and police complicity, in her community:

I live in Joe Slovo settlement, in Milnerton. It was Thursday afternoon (22 May). Me and my friends were talking, and my friends were saying, “These foreigners, they must leave the country.” My feelings were different, that these are Africans, and we must stand together, but my friends said their parents feel betrayed by these foreigners, because they’re losing their jobs to these foreigners. So if someone’s standing with foreigners looking for a job, the foreigners will say to whoever’s going to hire them, “You can give me less money than to the South Africans.”

That’s where the complications come in, like say, the Somalians, they have these shops, where the prices are cheaper, which makes it difficult for the other black people, like the Xhosa, because people are going to go to the Somalian shops. So that’s where the conflict comes in.

And the other issue that came up in our discussion is that [my friends] believe that these foreigners come to South Africa with drugs, and that these drugs are affecting their children and their lives. But me, in my own opinion, there may be some who come in and sell drugs and stuff like that, but the other [foreigners] who are innocent, they work very hard, like five to five a day for minimum wages . . . But my friends say, “They’re not supposed to be here, they must go back to their country, ‘cause they’re simply messing up our country.”

But at the same time, while these riots are happening, our brothers, our brothers who are very close-minded, criminals who normally do stuff, get a chance to do things. So that night, when the riots were happening, they were burning people’s containers, you know, where [the foreigners] do business. People were burning these containers. Some of the foreigners were rushing into the containers before their things were all burnt up and they would lose a lot of money.

It was messy. People were running and screaming. It was women and children, and men were trying to protect their wives and their kids. And they didn’t know where to go, and the people were standing and yelling and screaming at them.

And the flames were going and the police were there all over, and the police were trying to stop [the mob]. But people didn’t listen and they were throwing stones. But at the same time, there were policemen who were not helping. There were policemen who went into Somalian shops and they took their money. You know, they took their money but they were the police. I was expecting them to protect these people, but they were not protecting them, they were just corrupt, they would take the money and leave and allow the mob to come into the shop and take their stuff. It was so sad. You know there was this Somali guy on the TV who said, “I worked very, very hard for everything that I have. Why is this government not protecting us? We are not criminals.”

Then there were two guys who stood up for the Somalians, two Rastafarian guys, South African guys. They were not afraid to stand up and say, “What you are doing is wrong.” And what happened to them? They got stabbed, and now they’re lying in Somerset hospital. The [mob] stabbed them just because they were trying to protect the Somalis. The rest of us, when we saw that happen, we feared, even though we knew it was wrong, we feared to let our voices be heard because we saw what could happen to us. If we were to say, “What you are doing is wrong”, they would hurt us too.

So we just stood there and kept our emotions inside ourselves. It was just horrible.
Ninety per cent of the people in the community hate the foreigners, ninety per cent blame the foreigners for losing their jobs and every bad thing that ever happens to them. And ten per cent actually feel for the foreigners, but they don’t have a foot to stand on. Ten per cent. That small. It’s very messy.

How did it start in specific places? I don’t have the facts for this, but apparently there’s a letter that arrived from Johannesburg that was delivered to each police station in Cape Town [saying] that they [Cape people] must chase these people [the foreigners] away, and if they don’t do it then the Jo’burg people will come down to Cape Town and they will do it themselves the violent way. So that’s how it started.

I’m not saying the police started the violence but that’s where the letter was delivered, the letter was delivered there [to the police] because the police have contacts in the community. So I wouldn’t say that [the police] started the violence but it started somewhere because the letter was delivered at the police stations ordering them that these people must get rid of the foreigners. If they don’t, they would come from Johannesburg and make a mess here. So, that night, people did it.

My own opinion – I think it was started by criminals, criminals wanting a chance. When they heard that [about the letter] they found a gap to do these things they always wanted to do. Neighbours, next to me, boys . . . when all these things were happening, they were carrying big screen tvs into the yard, and a tv stand and such big hi-fi speakers, things that they stole from other people.

So when [the violence] started, the people were running [after] these foreigners and burning their places. In our black community, when something like that happens, everyone leaves their home. They run to [where everything’s happening] so nobody’s left at home. So the criminals get a chance to break in and they take things and stuff like that. So South Africans were being robbed as well, it was not only the foreigners.

A Somali woman in the Cape Town city Youngfield refugee camp. Pic: Miriam Mannak

And people, you know, the Somalis, their shops were locked, but people broke them open, it didn’t matter how locked they were, they broke it open, they took … [It was] our mothers, big women… The other thing I don’t understand . . . our parents, they go to church. They practice this Christianity that says that I shall not kill, you shall not, things like that. But the things they did . . . I was so ashamed when I saw it, it was our parents running into these shops, taking their stuff.

And I was like, these people practice [Christianity]! Like even yesterday [Saturday 24] I was going past a church and I heard them sing and I thought, not too long ago they were robbing people, chasing people, throwing stones at them, and right now they were at church. I don’t know why they go to church when they do all these things.

Because it wasn’t only youngsters [looting], there were mothers, fathers, grown-ups breaking and shouting and going into the shops. They came out with big bags of food and dish liquids and all those things. And in their own way they feel they’re entitled to it, which was wrong. It was unbelievable. They were supposed to stop their kids, but they were doing it with their kids. I don’t care what they say but in my eyes they were criminals, they were stealing because those things did not belong to them and they took them; that was theft.

And the funny thing is this, during the day, it’s quite quiet, people just shush-shush here, shush-shush there, they talk about it. [But] at night people come out of their houses and they do these things. Why do they do it at night if they feel like they have the right to do it? Why not do it during the day when everybody can see? [But] they do it at night when it’s dark, you can barely see.

It’s wrong. People don’t feel safe, you know, when they walk. Yesterday, I was passing by, there was this child sitting there, it’s a girl, she was probably about 13 years old, she’s sitting there, she’s crying, very loud, it’s a foreigner, she was foreign, I could see, she was looking around. I think she misplaced her parents, she doesn’t know where her parents are, she’s crying. And then there are people standing around her. Nobody went over and asked her, “Why are you crying, where’s your parents?” . . . whatever. People just passed by like it’s nothing. She didn’t know where her mother was, her mother probably didn’t know where she was

I wouldn’t be able to say if there’s any way of stopping it [the violence]. If people change inside their hearts, the way they feel . . . They are far from getting over this. But apparently today the president of the ANC, Jacob Zuma, will be arriving here in Cape Town to talk to the people and plead with them to stop what they are doing. I don’t know if that is going to help. But you know even if the Lord himself were to come down and say, “Please people, stop,” I don’t think [it would stop]. They want to do this, this is something they feel like they are entitled to.

You know the food prices are up and things like that now. My friend says that if these people leave the country – at the moment she’s not working – then she’ll get a job. And things (arguments) like that: if they leave, our parents will have work, they’ll get the pay that they want, because the foreigners, they get themselves small pay. If I were to work for somebody, I might ask for R100 a day, and that person, he wants to charge R40 a day. It’s their right, you know, to say that they’re going to work for R40 a day. But now people [South Africans] are losing their jobs. ‘Cause even me, if somebody said to me, “I’m going to sell this to you for R20,” and the other one says, “for R100”, I’m going to buy the R20 one, I wouldn’t buy the R100 one. So that’s how they (South Africans) feel. They feel betrayed.

But the worst part of all this is that they may not realise this now but what they’re doing is they’re being racist against their own, at a very wrong time, because this is supposed to be Africa month, we’re meant to unite and stand together but here we are falling divided.

Some people, they make jokes of this, they make fun. Me, it makes me sad. When I’m around people I know, I do voice up but again when I’m around a lot of people and I can see these people can hurt me, I don’t say anything, but I do feel that what they’re doing is wrong.

You know, the foreigners walk around, they have to look behind their shoulders every five minutes because they don’t know what that [some] person might do to them . They have to hide, and I can see they’re frustrated. And yesterday – it’s a pity I didn’t go – but yesterday they held a meeting, the Joe Slovo community held meeting. Not too many people were there, but people did go, to decide whether to continue with this riot thing. But I can assure you that the foreigners were not there . . . I don’t know who organised the meeting. In some open field, they were discussing it.

You know, the foreigners, they’ve lost a lot. The other thing is, if they must go home as people say they must go home, some of them do not have the money to go, it’s very expensive to go. They have their places, they’ve bought houses here and now they must leave and drop everything. Because if you live in your house and you are a foreigner, they will burn you alive in your house. They wouldn’t think, they wouldn’t hesitate to burn you alive. So people just have to run. Because I wouldn’t choose to burn in my house either.

Some of them have babies. You must see there in the [budget] Formule 1 Hotel in Joe Slovo, the people sitting there, the foreigners booked themselves in there. The hotel’s full, they just sit and the women cry, they don’t know which way to go, who to turn to, who to trust because even the police, some of the police, they’ve got the same dirt in their hearts, they do the same thing. [The police are] supposed to protect [the foreigners] but they steal their money, they do everything.

Slovo is messed up, you can drive past there. Places have burnt, it’s just ashes everywhere.

Rastafarian waving a flag in protest against xenophobia, at a vigil outside Parliament, on May 23. No politicians attended the vigil. Rastas have been brutally assaulted when standing up against xenophobic mobs.

The use of the term “internment camps” for the City of Cape Town refugee camps, by the Treatment Action Campaign, has become somewhat controversial. This is my view, posted as a comment elsewhere. I omitted to mention the sheer terror with which many refugees, victims of state violence elsewhere on the continent, respond to official action :

["Internment camps" is] a very emotive term — but the city was at one stage undoubtedly heading towards creating places that would have been internment camps in all but name.

I have absolutely no doubt about this, because I heard discussions amongst city officials myself, in person, with my own ears, showing that they were at times considering lockdowns on the camps and sites, for ’security reasons’, and that they thought they might end up forcibly removing people from certain locations. At least one of the sites was in fact locked down over Sunday night. What’s more, the city wanted to remove people from all the smaller refuges and concentrate them in the camps.

God alone knows what might have happened if people had been handed into the power of our unspeakably corrupt and brutal Home Affairs department for “processing”. There is no doubt in my mind at all that this is what would have happened if this emergency had been left to the authorities, and not headed off by the huge civil society response.

TAC used inflammatory language, sure, in this statement. But if it helped clarify the issues, clarified where we might have headed, then it was absolutely warranted, even if it now looks a bit excessive.

As for the politics surrounding the authorities’ handling of the response — well, you have to have your head stuck in the sand not to know that both the ANC and DA have long been at loggerheads in this province. That they could not set aside their differences long enough to deal properly with a humanitarian emergency shows neither really has the interests of ordinary people at heart. I have, at different times, and in different contexts, admired both Zille and Rasool — but no longer.

It’s a cheap shot to level a charge of politicking against TAC. I quite often feel uncomfortable with the militancy of TAC myself — on the other hand, I do not see ANY less militant organisations fighting as hard or as successfully for the human rights of ordinary South Africans. In this country, unless you are militant, or if you show signs of weakness, you are all too often brutally trampled. As has been amply demonstrated in the last week.

David Le Page, currently TAC volunteer

Refugee leader Theo addresses his fellows outside Caledon Square police station, in central Cape Town

I can’t get the stench of urine out of my nostrils. It’s the smell of fear, anger and humiliation.

I smelt it last night, when I spoke to the refugees outside Caledon Square police station. I saw it running thick in the gutters a couple of feet away from where people were sleeping. I smelt it again this morning, when I went round to advise them that lawyers and press were about to visit to take statements. The refugees were preparing to embark on a hunger strike. Theo, a published author from the DRC, was standing on a milk crate, addressing his comrades. They were refusing to abandon the pavement, in protest at their treatment by the government.

There must have been a whole lot of developments during the day which I was unable to track, as this evening they were being driven to a community hall in Sea Point, awaiting a visit by the provincial premier or his representative.

After talking to the refugees at Caledon Square, I crossed the road to the District Six Museum, to request they open up toilet facilities. Filled with righteous indignation at the doors I’d found barred the night before, I embarrassed myself fairly thoroughly, as it turned out the side doors had been open, and the museum staff had been doing a great deal for the refugees.

Then I drove out with another volunteer to assessments of the refugee sites, one of several teams with that task today. We expected to see signs of misery, and to run into obstructive and unpleasant officials. Fortunately we did not. Others, however, did.

Silwerstroom, which is one of the six official city camps, is 45 mins drive out of the city, north, near Atlantis. It’s a resort. Now there are six large tents erected there, the kind events management people erect for banquets. Carpets cover the earth.

Refugees queue for ‘brunch’ at the Silverstroom camp, 45 mins north of Cape Town

The site was created to cater for 2000 people. Fortunately, only 250 are there, and in what seemed like relatively decent conditions, though as the rain pours down now, I dread to think how miserable they must be. Though they have many blankets and sleeping mats, many said they’d been terribly cold at night, and I know from experience how cold it can get right next to the Atlantic, even in the middle of summer.

The Red Cross is now leading efforts to feed people, albeit inconsistently. They get just two meals a day, and the ‘brunch’ we saw served late at 12.15 was little more than two slices of bread.

Officials from the Department of Home Affairs were visiting. One of the DRC refugees pointed at one of them, and said he had told her that her son, born in South Africa, is not a South African national.

Many of them came from Du Noon, and again I heard reports of how police in that area had collaborated in the looting of their homes and shops. The refugees now have a fairly universal distrust and fear of black South Africans, by all accounts. At one of the sites, some were threatened with throat slitting gestures by people erecting tents. Officials running some of the sites are siphoning off supplies and selling them or giving them away to non-refugees.

TAC volunteers sort clothes for distribution to refugees, with frenetic speed – Sunday 25 May

We then visited several churches in Rondebosch, Claremont and Mowbray, each housing between 20 and 100 people. In all of them, the local communities had provided amazing support. At one church in Claremont, doctors, even counsellors, had been organised. There are many hundreds of people around the city working very hard to support other refugees in similar circumstances.

But the situations do vary. Twenty people holed up in a church in Mowbray will not venture onto the streets. They were hounded by an angry mob outside a church right in the middle of Cape Town, an incident which has gone completely unreported it seems.

The vast majority of refugees seem to be Zimbabwean and Congolese. In other words, from two of the most conflict-ridden countries in the region.

Someone from TAC this evening heard the following statement from one of the refugees departing the pavement at Caledon Square. They embarked on the buses in terrible fear, dreading where they might actually be taken. This man, a Burundian, spoke along these lines:

“Many of us have been running all our lives. Since I was six, I have been surrounded by death. I escaped genocide in Burundi to go to Rwanda. I fled genocide in Rwanda to the DRC, and fled from mass killings there to return to Rwanda. From there, I went to Tanzania, and then came to South Africa. Now, this happens, and I must flee again.”

Here’s a New York Times article on everything that’s happening, written in their customary remote and genteel tones.

This evening, I stood outside the Caledon Square police station, where 150 displaced South Africans of other nationalities are sleeping on the pavement, amidst a heavy smell of urine. They’ve been here for two nights already. The rain is about to come, heavy rain for the next three days. Around them swirls a fight between the city authorities and the provincial authorities. No more than 20m from a fucking police station, and they’ve not after two days been provided with anything other than food and blankets by members of the community.

Zimbabweans who have been holed up in a backyard shack in Khayelitsha for three days, after being stoned by locals, prepare to leave

My armchair theory that South Africa is in fact one of the continent’s least developed countries, when one looks at human decency and not at numbers of shopping malls, looks dismayingly substantial.

A group of 12 people from the DRC and Tanzania and Rwanda and Burundi and Somalia surround me (not threateningly) and grill me on what’s happening. “My business of ten years has been destroyed, how can I go back to my mother empty-handed?” “How will we get restitution?” “This government treats us like animals.” “Where is the government, why do they not come to talk us?” “We don’t trust anyone any more, we want the UNHCR.” “They must send us to Namibia, to Zambia. There we will be okay.”

John, from the DRC, had two businesses which he ran from containers in Nyanga. He is married to a South African woman. He has two South African children. Yet he has been hounded from his home to sleep on a stinking pavement outside a police station. He has no idea whether he will ever be able to return to his family.

They are all sleeping on the pavement across the road from the District Six Museum, a museum supposedly dedicated to the rights of forcibly displaced people. Yet tonight, with dozens of forcibly displaced people on its doorstep, those doors remain tightly barred. [update on Wednesday: I was completely wrong about the museum, they are doing lots to assist]

Earlier this evening, we heard that officials from the Department of Social Development, were telling the manager of one of the sites out on the flats, Father Louis, to keep out TAC, and to keep out journalists. So government officials are trying to muzzle the media and block civil society assistance.

Fortunately they are not succeeding. While there are now 21 000 people in recognised sites around the peninsula, many in church halls and mosques, there are many as well in private homes. They are the fortunate ones. I spoke today to a man in Paarden Island whose non-profit company is cooking meals for 6 000. Here outside Caledon Square, I meet Bilel, a Muslim whose community is feeding hundreds of people in the Youngsfield Military Base. Donations are pouring in to TAC. Many are helping. Conditions in the camps are bad, in many instances. Tomorrow I’ll know more.

What should I tell the people around me? That the mayor, Helen Zille, once considered a determined leader for human rights would rather shut them up in internment camps than allow them into smaller, more humane community halls – because to do so would disrupt some weddings!!? That she, the mayor of an entire city of millions, was indignantly telling TAC (the small volunteer-based organisation with which I’m working) this morning that the city had done at least as much as us? That the government has spent the last two weeks mostly sitting on its collective backside while the president contemplates his evaporating legacy through thick glass and amber fluid? That the authorities are now forcibly preventing people from leaving some of the camps, camps even the likes of TAC initially supported.This is a tourist city. But it does not welcome those who are black. At the foot of Africa, something revoltingly close to apartheid is alive and kicking.

And during the day, the suburbs and the city move on, most people mostly unmoved, as always, by the disaster a few feet away.

Update: Wednesday morning

Going, at least, by what I read in the Cape Times, it seems some measure of order may be descending.

The UNHCR has spoken against the camps established by the city. Reading between the lines, there seems to be a greater measure of consensus amongst the various parties. Let’s hope dialogue continues. The challenge seems to remain getting information about what is actually happening, and where, and properly coordinating (to whatever degree is possible) the multitude of efforts.

Vast amounts of resources are now being mobilised. There’s probably even a danger that too much may be pushed into the situation.

I am, more than ever, convinced that in situations such as these, it is the efforts of ordinary people working in their immediate environment, that truly makes a difference, as much if not far more than the efforts of large organisations. All have their place, but the first kind of effort is more valuable. And when people start shouting at each other, and pointing fingers, it simply strengthens those who are neglectful, apathetic or incompetent, while undermining those determined to do good in allegiance with others doing the same.