OWN CORRESPONDENT and REUTERS, Cape Town | Tuesday
SOUTH Africa’s armed forces are riddled with racism, starved of funds, demoralised and getting older, according to a report published by Defence Minister Mosiuoa Lekota.
The interim report on the shooting of eight white people – seven soldiers and a civilian woman – by a black lieutenant at the Tempe military base near Bloemfontein last year will be followed by recommendations by the end of the year.
”Racism does exist in the Defence Force. It manifests itself in many ways,” the interim report said.
It listed harassment, assaults, intimidating behaviour towards black troops, indifference by white officers, abusive language, discrimination, poor accommodation, lack of promotion and courts martial seen as whites judging blacks.
The report noted also that there was still differentiation between members of the former apartheid army and liberation fighters despite the fact that the forces are all supposed to have been fully integrated over the past six years.
”Military culture is in a crisis because there has not been exercises to build the much talked about one army concept,” the report said.
It noted cases where military police were instructed not to search vehicles driven by white soldiers or to arrest them if they committed any infringement of military law.
General Siphiwe Nyanda, head of the South African National Defence Force, said a key problem was that the majority of officers were white while most ordinary soldiers were black.
”There is alienation between the mass of troops and the leader group,” he said. ”It is not something you can transform immediately. It is a process.”
The report noted that the closure of military bases as the army has shrunk to 86 000 people and is headed towards a target of 70 000 had lead to hardships for remaining members as they moved further from the families and had further to travel.
Absences without leave had climbed sharply but little or no consideration was given to the offenders, the report said.
Nyanda and Lekota said the army was also studying the possibility of reverting to some form of national service to rebuild the pool of trained personnel, but Nyanda said he did not expect conscription to resume. – Reuters