BUCHIZYA MSETEKA, Pretoria | Thursday 12.30pm.
XENOPHOBIA is on the rise in post-apartheid South Africa, with a growing number of brutal attacks and killings of foreigners, the United Nations refugee agency said on Wednesday.
”In the past two years, more than 30 innocent refugees and asylum seekers have been brutally killed, simply because they were foreigners,” said a report released by the deputy regional representative of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, Mengesha Kabede.
The UNHCR report cited the deaths of two Mozambicans and a Senegalese on a train in Pretoria last September when an angry mob accused them of stealing jobs from South Africans.
As many as 23% of foreigners in South Africa were assaulted and another 42% robbed, David McDonald of the Southern African Migration Project told the news conference.
The report was co-authored with the South African Human Rights Commission and the National Consortium on Refugee Affairs. It was released at the launch of a public awareness campaign against xenophobia by UNHCR and non-governmental organisations.
”Increasingly, persons perceived as foreigners fall victim to hostile attacks and otherwise outrageous, xenophobic behaviour,” the report said. McDonald said that xenophobia was mainly fuelled by a belief that immigrants were taking scarce jobs and were responsible for rising crime and disease.
South Africa has shed 500000 jobs in the first five years of democratic rule, pushing unemployment to around 30%. McDonald argued that ”many migrants were victims of crime and not perpetrators of crime in South Africa”.
Official government statistics show that up to four million immigrants, mostly from neighbouring Mozambique and Zimbabwe, live in the country. Officials at the department of home affairs said they were handling asylum applications at the rate of 1500 a month. — Reuters
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