Mbeki's soft approach to Mugabe is sparking acts of hate as South African xenophobia targets fleeing Zimbabweans, writes DEREK McDOWELL.
IN THE past fortnight, at least 24 people have been killed in mob violence on the streets of Johannesburg and the townships which surround the city. Hundreds more have been injured. Most of the victims are foreigners from adjoining countries, victims of horrific xenophobic attacks instigated it seems by gangs made up largely of young, poor, Zulu men.
Some of the scenes have been truly horrific. Cameras captured the moments when police sought in vain to help a young man who had been set alight by the mob. On Sunday night last, another man was killed when a gang set fire to his house. His crime? He had apparently employed foreign workers.
These incidents are shocking but they are not a surprise. It is not difficult to find a dozen reasons for the current unrest. Poverty, overcrowding, poor services and rising food prices all play a part. So too does straightforward criminality.
But out there too, providing the background and the spark, is the crisis in Zimbabwe.
Take Alexandra, the township where the violence started on Sunday, May 11th. Alexandra is a long-established black area close to the centre of Johannesburg. It was originally designed for 70,000 people.
A typical site was 500sq m, generous by any standards. But now, decades later, most of the sites also accommodate backyard shacks, some of them brick, many of them not. The township is also surrounded by informal settlements where tens of thousands of people live in appalling living conditions.
There are now at least half a million people in Alexandra. Many of the new arrivals are foreigners and many of them are refugees from Robert Mugabe's Zimbabwe. It is these people who are taking the brunt of the current attacks.
Five years ago while on holidays with friends in KwaZulu Natal, I found myself in conversation with a Zulu man. He told us in an almost casual way that there would soon be trouble with the people from "Zim". They were, he said, "taking over South Africa" and they were out for trouble. All of the children from Zimbabwe knew how to use a machine gun before they were 10, he said.
Five years later, it is clear that this sort of prejudice is rife among poor South African blacks. A few weeks ago, the Cape Times, the main English language daily in Cape Town, interviewed people living in a township near Cape Town. The picture that emerged was one of serious unrest fuelled by deep xenophobia.
Foreigners are variously described as dishonest, sick, rude and violent, as purveyors of disease and as criminals. Above all else, there is a widespread conviction that foreigners are taking jobs which would otherwise be taken by South African blacks. There is little hard evidence to support this latter belief but plenty of anecdotal evidence. Many of the local workers with whom European tourists come into contact are in fact from Zimbabwe, something that would not have been true only a few years back. People working informally, such as the ubiquitous "car guards" are just as likely to come from Harare or Kinshasa as Johannesburg or Cape Town.
The belief that refugees and illegal immigrants are involved in crime is not the sole preserve of poor blacks. Many better-off South Africans, both black and white, hold the same view. In fact, it is impossible to verify or disprove the suggestion - the South African authorities are notoriously coy with crime statistics. All that can be said with certainty is that there are almost 250 foreign prisoners in South African jails serving sentences for armed robbery with aggravating circumstances - of these, two-thirds are from Zimbabwe.
The problem is not the presence of people from Zimbabwe. The problem is the sheer number of them - estimates suggest up to three million - and the fact that many of them are staying in townships where the infrastructure is terrible and the people are poor and unemployed.
It is not just in the townships that the effects of the crisis in Zimbabwe is making itself felt. Many better-off South Africans are deeply apprehensive about Zimbabwe. They worry about possible spillover effects. They agonise over the inadequacy of the response from their own government, and from Thabo Mbeki in particular. Most of all, and this is specially true of the white community, they are terrified the Zimbabwe experience could be repeated in their own country.
This concern is rapidly approaching the level of a collective neurosis impervious to rational argument. The visitor will be told time after time that Mugabe, like Mandela, started well but it all went horribly wrong when his grip on power began to slip. Something similar could happen in South Africa, it is said, if the ANC ever needed to rally its troops.
The argument ignores many of the positive things about South Africa which set it out as different - the written constitution, the vigorous and free press, the strong economy, a vocal opposition and indeed the apparently genuine commitment to liberal democracy of many in the leadership of the ANC.
Fear is often not amenable to rational argument and there are many in South Africa right now who are genuinely fearful.
All of which makes it difficult to understand the softly-softly approach being taken by Mbeki. On a visit to Harare shortly after the March 29th presidential elections, he asserted there was "no crisis in Zimbabwe".
In the days that followed, the ANC distanced itself from the remark and the president's spokesperson engaged in tortuous sophistry. The damage, though, was already done in that the remark epitomised for many the seeming insouciance of the president in the face of social collapse in Zimbabwe and serious tension in South Africa itself.
It is often said that Mbeki is slow to criticise Mugabe because of traditional links to him and to Zanu PF.
More likely, it reflects the style of a man more comfortable with behind-the-scenes manoeuvring than megaphone diplomacy. Either way, there are a great many of his fellow countrymen who fervently hope that the awful events of this week will be the final wake-up call.
Derek McDowell is a former Labour Party TD for Dublin North-Central. He spent much of the past year living in South Africa