Mercenaries battling a humble community tied up by someone else’s law Justin Pearce reports
A LOCKED chain and two pistol-packing security guards ensure that you can’t drive a car into the Hoek van de Berg private nature reserve near Hawston. Police Casspirs, however, pass freely, stirring up the dune sand and pushing aside the dense fynbos on either side of the road.
The chain across the road is the remnant of a conflict last weekend which saw special police units from Cape Town descend on the south coast fishing village and arrest 12 people on charges relating to the poaching of shellfish. (The poachers continued undaunted and on Monday the police arrested 13 more of them). Apparently embarrassed by the failure of last year’s Operation Gangbust and determined to show their willingness to act against gangsterism, the police targeted Hawston as a testing ground for ”Operation Gloves Off”, the latest strong-arm anti-gang initiative.
Protesters hurled stones at the house of nature reserve owner Dr Frank Raimondo, who had engaged the services of a former Rhodesian Special Forces sniper to guard his property. In cinematic terms it was somewhere between Wild Geese and The Milagro Beanfield War: gun-toting white mercenaries battling against a humble community tied up by someone else’s law.
At the centre of the conflict was an equally humble mollusc, the perlemoen, which, like the rock lobster, is dwindling off the Cape coast as rising consumer prices make it an ever-more lucrative source of income.
There have been poachers ever since fishing-quota legislation introduced in the 1960s slapped the label of poacher on to any perlemoen catcher not in possession of a quota permit or daily licence. But a quiet, if illegal, operation suddenly attracted attention in December when poachers removed a gate erected by Raimondo on a road that crosses his land on the way to the sea, a road which Hawston residents claim is a public thoroughfare.
Raimondo promised action, the poachers weren’t going to give up without a struggle, and the result was a bizzare and much talked-about weekend of conflict — after which Raimondo put up the chain as a temporary replacement for the gate. Cape Town newspapers, taking their lead from Raimondo, have blamed the poaching on the Triads, the shadowy Chinese gangsters who are supposedly operating in conjunction with local gangs — adding a distinctly B-movie flavour to the scenario.
The Chinese connection is dismissed with contempt by those who stand accused of poaching — and is taken with a large pinch of salt by many observers. Although the police have sent in specialist gang units, police liaison chief Colonel Raymond Dowd says the police have no evidence of the involvement of the Triads — although they do have reason to believe that Cape gangs may be involved.
Gangs certainly exist in the rural Western Cape. The province’s small towns have the same history of poverty, dispossession and unemployment which has made Cape Town into a breeding ground for gangsters. In recent years, the search for new markets for drugs and guns has prompted city gangsters to create networks of associated gangs which stretch across the province. The rural gangs may go by other names, but most of them owe allegiance to one or other of the Cape Town gang empires.
In Hawston, a peace initiative brokered by the community two years ago saw the gang bosses lay down their guns. Hawston ANC chair Phillip May insists that the truce still holds, and he is angry that the spectre of the Triad gang is being raised to stigmatise people for whom poaching is the only means of livelihood. He admits former gang members may be in-volved in the poaching and selling of perlemoen – – but denies that the operation is as insidious as has been claimed. Even if poaching has escalated owing to gang activity, the roots of the problem go much deeper.
Farieda Khan, co-ordinator of the Environmental Advisory Unit at the University of Cape Town, blames last weekend’s conflagration on the laws which over the years have alienated coastal communities from the resource which has historically been their livelihood. Until last year, quotas were granted only to large (and predominantly white-owned) commercial concerns. The daily licences issued to recreational divers are inappropriate for local communities since they do not allow the fishermen to sell their catch.
”The Hawston community is impoverished and marginalised, and the violence was the result of decades of frustration,” Khan says. ”It is essentially a political issue which needs to be addressed very soon.”
The police themselves acknowledge that the kragdadige tactics which were displayed over the weekend are insufficient to address the alleged problem of gangsterism: ”Socio-economic factors such as unemployment and a lack of housing and infrastructure give rise to gangsterism,” Dowd says. ”Gangsterism is not going to be eradicated overnight.” In other words, the reasons people poach marine animals are identical to the reasons people join gangs — and gangs or no gangs, people will poach as long as they are barred from legally catching and trading in perlemoen.
Those accused of poaching realise the regulation of the catch is necessary to prevent the extinction of marine resources. ”The existing quotas must be redivided and given to these people here,” says one poacher.
Last year the Directorate of Sea Fisheries attempted to address the historical inequities by granting a small percentage of the annual hake quota to trusts that were supposedly representative of fishing communities. The result was chaos, as people clamoured to be recognised as bona fide community members, and community quotas were sold for cash to commercial concerns.
”The system was a recipe for disaster,” says Vic Kabalin of the marine conservation group National Ocean Watch. ”Just who is a community? South Africa’s marine resources belong to everyone.”
Kabalin believes the answer lies in preserving the in-shore and near-shore zones of the sea for the use of subsistence and recreational fishermen — and that the big commercial operators should be kept out. ”This would kill the crayfishing and prawn industry, and make the process more labour intensive. More people would be making a living out of it.”
Environment Minister Dawie de Villiers this week announced a moratorium on the granting of new commercial perlemoen permits until the matter has been resolved ”in consultation with all other interest groups”. De Villiers said the framing of a new fisheries policy — with attention to community quotas — had begun.
The Hawston community is keen to see a system in place which will allow it to profit from marine resources in a way which would make the lure of gangsterism irrelevant. ”Just give us six months and see what we can organise,” says a man who faces a court appearance for trying to do just that.