FT933-2434
_AN-DISAKAC8FT
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FT 18 SEP 93 / On patrol in the townships of death: Patti Waldmeir spent a
night on South Africa's front line with the 'self defence unit' of one
embattled black community
By PATTI WALDMEIR
'We killed him and then we burned his body'.
SHALL I bother to ask why, as though reason can comprehend the primordial
hatred that spurred the deed and the bloodlust that carried it through?
But I cling to reason in this land driven half-mad by violence. I insist on
a rational motive for the deed and it is chillingly simple: this South
African township, Katlehong, is at war, one of the focal points of a
conflict that has left 10,000 blacks dead since 1990. And the dead man was
the enemy.
He was a resident of a migrant workers hostel - which means he was probably
also a Zulu and a member of the Inkatha Freedom Party. And his killers -
these young black men who tell the tale in a cramped township kitchen, while
I perch on a Formica stool and glance nervously at their AK-47 rifles - are
residents of the area surrounding the hostel, who owe allegiance primarily
to the African National Congress.
They are obviously filled with a sense of righteousness at their deed, a
victory in the just war against the cruel aggressor: 'hostel dwellers' they
explain, have killed scores of residents in this section of Katlehong;
burned, looted and destroyed their homes; forced them to flee.
Now the residents have formed a 'self-defence unit' to protect their
territory; and anyone found on the wrong side of the invisible line that
separates 'residents' and 'hostel dwellers' - or ANC and Inkatha, if you
prefer neater, though less accurate labels - courts a gruesome death.
The dead hostel dweller was found well behind enemy lines: at the taxi rank,
in 'residents' territory. On his way home, he was caught, killed and set
alight. When I ask who killed him, the reply is obvious: 'the community'.
Thabo, 27, is the leader of this band of urban guerrillas. Disarmingly shy,
with a slow wide smile and a gentle manner, he inspires no fear; he does not
even tell me to disguise his identity, but I have done so. Still, he is the
one who instructs the others - young men with hard, wild eyes which have
seen too much atrocity - in the art of loading an ammunition clip on to an
AK-47.
It is near midnight, and we are in the kitchen of an abandoned house that
the self-defence unit uses as a base, on the front line with a neighbouring
area colonised by hostel residents. (The latter have established security
zones around the hostels, driving out the residents and setting up their
own, ostensibly defensive bases).
On one side of the eerie, empty street, young men from the self-defence unit
sit in darkened rooms behind incongruous net curtains, their weapons trained
on the houses opposite - where other (usually older) men from the hostels do
the same. Thabo claims to have 15 such bases, 150 fighters, and to have
killed 200 hostel dwellers. We both know he exaggerates, but his point is
clear: the self-defence unit is extensive and relatively well-armed - and it
is winning the just war against the hostels. (Some 200 people were killed in
Katlehong and its contiguous townships of Thokoza and Vosloorus last month,
as well as 400 the previous month, but police do not record the allegiance
of corpses).
Thabo guides me into a pitch-dark sitting room, and cautiously shifts the
net curtain a few centimetres to point out the enemy base opposite. He
recounts numerous recent incidents of police collusion with the
hostel-dwellers - on such-and-such a day they brought Inkatha men in
armoured cars to attack the residents, another night they brought guns to
the hostel fighters, or attacked the residents entirely of their own accord.
Some of the stories must be apocryphal, but they cannot all be untrue. And
it is clear that Thabo's motives for launching the self-defence unit were in
his view unassailably righteous: the community, a tight-knit group that
developed a strong collective identity under apartheid, was under attack
from the hostels; he could not stand by while defenceless women and children
were killed.
But the worst savagery often proceeds from the purest motives, and the just
war is notoriously hard to end. Thabo's troops may not thank him for ending
it, even if he would; for they are the 'lost generation', teenagers who have
known only the fight against apartheid, and now the battle against police
and Inkatha. They clearly enjoy the exalted status which SDU membership
brings, prefering the romanticised life of the guerrilla to the desperate
boredom of the hopeless unemployed.
These young men are my bodyguards as I join one of the unit's nightly
patrols, following a maze of paths between houses that crowd upon each
other, wall to wall, past malodorous outdoor toilets (the water was switched
off earlier in the day), under washing lines in backyards crammed with
rubble, taking cover from snipers behind half-demolished walls. All the
houses are dark - residents observe the SDU's 8.30pm curfew, and black out
windows with blankets - and Thabo explains that he will shoot at anything
that moves.
Luckily, nothing does. It is a quiet night. Occasionally, Thabo scratches
quietly at a back door, and a resident lets us silently into a warm kitchen
where the patrol deposits me for a while. One terrified resident after
another tells a horrifying tale of daily life in Katlehong: the fear, the
nights of shooting, the ever-present danger; the gratitude to the SDU, which
has substantially improved security. Then we are out again into the night,
squeezing through fence gaps, waking up the dogs, sprinting across wide dirt
streets open to snipers. A police armoured vehicle trundles by, with its
powerful spotlights trained on the houses; we freeze, a single shot rings
out (not aimed at us, they have not seen us), and then move on.
When I decide I have had enough, sometime in the early hours, Thabo sends
two young runners to negotiate my safe passage out of the township with the
neighbouring self-defence unit; they might otherwise shoot at an alien
vehicle breaking curfew.
But before I go, he has some serious complaints to lodge against Nelson
Mandela, the ANC leader. Thabo was a member of the South African Communist
Party, the ANC's staunchest ally. But the SACP 'betrayed the struggle of the
working class' to the ANC, whose moderation he condemns, and so he has
joined the 'Communist International'. He opposes negotiation, resents
Mandela for suspending the armed struggle and leaving Katlehong residents
unprotected, and thinks the ANC should go back into exile. Mandela cannot
control him, and neither can the police; how will the new South Africa
survive him?
But it would be wrong to suggest that Thabo is the only, or even the worst,
threat to post-apartheid Katlehong. For every party to the conflict believes
that right is on its side; they excuse the most ghastly acts on the grounds
of just cause.
That cause is not ideological, nor theological, nor even truly 'political';
their battle is for survival. Wilson, a young resident of Madala hostel in
Thokoza, puts it simply: 'They think we are going to attack them and we
think they are going to attack us.' Residents think the hostel dwellers want
their homes; and hostel residents think the residents want the hostels
demolished. For both, poor people who live perilously close to the edge of
survival, housing is a life-and-death issue.
Even the police have seen 1,000 of their members killed in the past decade
as part of an anti-apartheid strategy to kill security force members, and
they too know fear.
But the triple township - Katlehong, Thokoza and Vosloorus are known
administratively as 'Katorus' - was relatively quiet until 1990, in spite of
its desperate poverty, intense competition for housing, high population
density and low employment. Something set them at each other's throats, and
no one knows for certain what it was.
Most experts believe that the already high level of socio-economic rivalry
was ignited by the political competition set off by the release from prison
of Mandela in 1990. ANC branches were formed, IFP strengthened its presence,
and political leaders from both sides inflamed passions with aggressive
rhetoric. Repeated massacres, carried out by shadowy characters never
apprehended by police, kept tensions at boiling point and suggested the
involvement of a 'third force' from the right wing or the police. Though
Judge Richard Goldstone found no evidence of such a force in a 1992 report
into Thokoza violence, most township residents still believe it exists.
Inkatha, for its part, says the ANC launched a campaign to 'wipe out the
Zulus', giving the early conflict a strong ethnic flavour as Zulus in the
hostels fought Xhosas in squatter camps and in the main township. Since that
time, the hostels have been ethnically cleansed, with only Zulus daring to
remain and many Zulus from the township withdrawing into the hostels for
protection. But though an ethnic element remains, it is far from clear-cut:
many of the SDU members are also Zulus, including Thabo.
Hostel dwellers now feel just as threatened as Thabo and his residents:
besieged within the hostels, they believe the ANC wants their homes
demolished (Thabo is certain they will be levelled before next year's
elections); they also complain of police harassment, and ask why - if the
police are on their side - they have not defeated the ANC-supporting
residents long ago.
Peter Harris, director of the Wits-Vaal Peace Secretariat, which maintains
permanent peace monitors in the area, says: 'There is a powerful cocktail of
ingredients in the social makeup of (the area) that contributes to the
violence: a complete disintegration of civil society; a large criminal
element that uses violence as a shield; a total breakdown in law and order;
intense political confrontation; conflict around housing.' The list goes on
and on.
But possibly the worst problem of all is the belief among residents that the
police are the real enemy, worse even than Inkatha. Residents do not believe
police will protect them, so they form self-defence units; they will not
co-operate with police, so crimes are not solved.
Until they trust the security forces - and until police give them cause to
do so - violence can only drag on.
* * *
'Time for our regular dose of adrenalin,' says Police Sergeant Jakes
Bleeker, as he pulls up beside the moonlit shacks of Thokoza's Phola Park
squatter camp. He is driving a Nyala armoured personnel carrier filled with
members of the police riot unit, the Internal Stability Division. 'If we sit
here long enough they always shoot at us,' he says; behind us, their assault
rifles at the ready, young constables taunt the shack residents in
Afrikaans: 'Come, shoot at us,' they cry out, not even trying to conceal
their lust for action. If they will go this far with a journalist present, I
wonder what they will do when I have gone.
During eight hours of night-time patrol, I (not surprisingly) see them
commit none of the much-rumoured atrocities. But I leave with a new
understanding of why township residents complain of harassment,
intimidation, insults. And the events I saw at Phola Park lends credence to
the claim that police often shoot at residents - with little, or no
provocation.
But the real problem is their attitude. Maybe they too have been brutalised
by violence; but when we stop to collect a dead body, they laugh and joke in
the face of the bereaved husband and sister; when they dump the body on to a
stretcher, they do not notice that the wind has blown her skirt up above her
waist (the husband hastily reaches forward to make her decent); they look
for no witnesses, ask no questions, merely collect a cartridge for
ballistics testing. They assure me that 'these people' don't even notice
death any more; and neither do the police, nor, one suspects, do they try
very hard to stop it.
With the best will in the world, they could not in any case: there are too
many guns, too much hatred, too many scores to be settled. One can only weep
for the people of 'Katorus'; their lives are unending nightmare. The new
South Africa, from which they expect so much, can do little for them.
Countries:-
ZAZ South Africa, Africa.
Industries:-
P9711 National Security.
P9229 Public Order and Safety, NEC.
Types:-
CMMT Comment & Analysis.
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