Howard Barrell
Over a Barrel
An anarchic British pop group of the 1970s – called, I think, the Bonzo Dog Doo-Daa Band – used to play a time-travel trick on commuters on the London Tube. It involved the band getting hold of the newspapers from a particular day, say 20 years earlier, and then stepping on to the same Underground carriage, and proceeding to read them.
The main stories might be about, for example, the general election in 1951 which brought Winston Churchill and the conservatives back to power. The front- page headlines might declare something like “Churchill triumphs” or “Attlee concedes”, while the sports pages might be full of news about then soccer star Stanley Matthews. Other passengers would become concerned. Had they somehow slipped back into the 1950s? Were they travelling in a time machine rather than the 8.25 from Richmond to Piccadilly?
Capetonians might have thought they were time-travelling last Friday. Outside the Castle a few indignant demonstrators were waving placards, generally expressing their disapproval. They were upset about the presence on South African soil of British Prime Minister Tony Blair, responsible for his country’s involvement in recent air raids against Iraq. The organisations behind the demonstration, Muslims against Global Oppression and People against Gangsterism and Drugs (Pagad), had been out on the streets the day before, and their intention to demonstrate again had been well- publicised.
There was nothing unusual in the fact of the demonstration. People were expressing their opinion. The local constabulary was in attendance to guarantee them that right provided the demonstration was legal; to get them to disperse if this was not the case; and to ensure that, if anyone in the crowd got a tad overexcited, he or she could be given time to cool off at the president’s pleasure.
Capetonians had every right to marvel at our democracy at work. And they had every right to expect the reptiles of the British media to do the same. This was, after all, 1999, five years into our hard-won freedom – and were we not getting our act together?
The precise train of events once the demonstration got going is not clear. What is clear, however, is that while Blair was handing out medals inside the Castle, outside its walls there was a police request to the demonstrators to disperse. Soon thereafter, the guardians of our democracy were firing into the crowd with rubber bullets, birdshot and service pistols in full view of television cameras and other assembled media.
One local headline read: “Five people wounded as police fire on crowd”. Had the clock somehow been turned back 20 years?
The wounded included a reporter from SABC Radio. A 23-year-old man, apparently struck on the temple by a rubber bullet, lay critically ill in hospital. And a few leaders of Pagad warned of mayhem if he died.
The enthusiasm with which these Pagad leaders voiced their threats led some to suspect their first concern might not be for the young man’s survival. In the end, however, no one could help him. Yusuf Jacobs died on Tuesday, and the Western Cape’s Islamist militants gained a martyr to the security forces.
As if to explain his force’s resort to firearms, a police officer told journalists that, shortly after demonstrators were ordered to disperse, an individual in the crowd was seen giving out handguns to others around him. The officer’s argument presumably is that the police used appropriate pre-emptive force.
Let us assume that this and other police officers’ eyesight did not let them down on the day and that they are not now telling porkies. The question still arises: why, four-and-a-half years into our democracy, after countless assurances that our police are being retrained in crowd-control techniques, are they still unable to use methods designed to minimise violence that have been employed for decades in other democracies and centres of conflict?
Whether in the new democracies of Eastern Europe or in a trouble spot like Northern Ireland, policing of demonstrations is based on three principles. The first is protecting the rights of those demonstrating to do so in an orderly fashion. The second is containing and isolating any disorder if it breaks out. One way of doing so may be by ensuring police have appropriate protective gear which makes the use of only minimal force on their part necessary in extreme situations.
And the third principle is directing any counter-violence that may become necessary in a highly targeted fashion against only provocative individuals or groups within a crowd. Only in the most extreme circumstances, such as an incipient threat to state power itself, is there any resort to firearms, and then only under the tightest controls.
What is the process in our country? Where a demonstration is deemed illegal, according to Wicus Holtzhausen, a police representative, “the routine the police use … is firstly verbal warnings followed by a five-minute allowance to disperse. This is followed by stun grenades, which only give a loud bang and cannot harm anyone. Then rubber bullets are fired. Rubber bullets are shot toward the ground, but unfortunately they ricochet and that is what causes injuries.”
Call it tough, if you will, antediluvian or Neanderthal, the effect of this approach is to inflame feelings. Which is exactly what it has done in the Western Cape, where relations in some communities are highly flammable after two years of urban terrorism and a display of consistent police incompetence in catching perpetrators that beggars belief.
The day after the confrontation outside the Castle, as if to answer the growing alarm of people in the province – and, of course, with not a thought of improving the African National Congress’s uncertain chances of winning the Western Cape in the election later this year – Deputy President Thabo Mbeki announced that the minister of safety and security and the police National Commissioner George Fivaz would personally step in to give some purpose to policing there.
This came as a surprise to Fivaz. Evidently nobody had bothered to tell him. Of Fivaz’s minister, Sydney Mufamadi, an optimistic Sunday Times headline declared the day after Mbeki’s announcement: “Mufamadi to seize control of Cape cops”.
Oh yeah? Mufamadi is a very, very nice man. But the idea of him seizing control of anything reminds me of what a former British Labour Party politician, Denis Healey, said in 1978 about being criticised by his rather limp conservative counterpart, Geoffrey Howe. He likened the experience to “being savaged by a dead sheep”.
The police service is one of those areas of the “new” South Africa in which the more things change, the more they stay the same. Who can make the police change? Find them and give them the job. Now. It is a matter of the utmost national importance.