A tiny minority of individuals has inflicted pain on millions of people in the violence associated with the security sector strike, attacks on local government councillors and those using murder to advance their social and political goals, President Thabo Mbeki said on Wednesday.
He described the violence as ”an anti-democratic plague”.
While, significantly, the president did not refer at all to his political rival, African National Congress deputy president Jacob Zuma, he also did not refer in any way to the public protests associated with Zuma’s recent rape trial.
But Mbeki said in his Budget vote that: ”All of us have experienced the intense pain inflicted on the millions of our people by a tiny minority of individuals that holds the people’s democratic victory in contempt.
”This minority, which obviously believes that it has the right to do as it pleases, with impunity and outside the parameters of our democratic order, has sought to drag our country back to the killing fields that marked the dying days of the apartheid system.”
Mbeki said: ”I am talking here of the people who have, since the victory of democracy, committed murder to advance their social and political goals. I am talking of those who are throwing people off moving trains and assassinating workers in the private security sector. I refer also to those who have murdered local government councillors.”
In a strongly worded speech, he said: ”When I speak of people who hold the people’s democratic victory in contempt, I refer to those who burn down private and public buildings. I am talking about those who march down our streets, as the law allows, and then abuse this hard-earned freedom to damage, vandalise or destroy property, loot shops and trash our streets and other public spaces.
”When I speak of people who hold the people’s democratic victory in contempt, I am talking of those who have carried posters proclaiming that to win their victories, they must kill one police officer everyday. I speak of those who commit murder as part of the continuing but isolated taxi wars, and those who deliberately burn down the commuter trains on which the workers depend for transport to and from their places of employment.
”I must make this very clear to everybody involved in these criminal acts, intended to undermine our democracy, that they will not succeed to intimidate and terrorise into submission either the masses of our people and their organised formations, or our democratic state and government.”
The law enforcement agencies will act vigorously to defeat ”this anti-democratic plague”.
He called ”on all our people and their organised political, social and other formations to act with similar vigour to defeat the negative forces that believe that the liberation for which many sacrificed their lives gives them freedom to act in a manner that fundamentally negates the very meaning of our emancipation”. — I-Net Bridge