Democratic Alliance (DA) leader and Cape Town mayor Helen Zille has accused the police and Western Cape provincial minister of community safety Leonard Ramatlakane of trying to justify their actions by disseminating misinformation and conducting smear campaigns.
”Those who will not learn from history are doomed to repeat it,” she said in her weekly online newsletter on Friday, SA Today.
”This aphorism came to mind as I watched heavy-handed police action turn a small, peaceful and altogether uneventful anti-drug march in Mitchells Plain [last] Sunday night into an international incident.”
Zille said although the anti-drug march had been legal, and no conditions were breached, she and 11 others ended up under arrest.
Since the march itself, the historical parallels with a previous regime had become even clearer.
”The police and their accountable minister have sought to justify their actions by disseminating misinformation and conducting smear campaigns.
”There was no trespassing on any property, as the minister claimed, no incitement of any kind, and certainly no ‘vigilantism’.
”By attacking the growing anti-drug movement, the police and the African National Congress [ANC] are alienating the very people they should regard as their allies, not their enemies, and whose cooperation is essential if the battle against drugs is to be won,” she said.
This spontaneous popular movement was driven mainly by the parents of drug-addicted children, recovering addicts and religious leaders who were determined to take a stand against the flourishing drug trade, conducted with open brazenness from a network of well-known drug outlets throughout many suburbs.
Instead of building a united front to push back the drug tidal wave, the dismissive and unfounded ANC and police response to community anger had merely deepened the perception that the police were protecting the drug-lords and arresting the law-abiding people.
”I am the first to acknowledge that it is genuinely difficult for the police to secure convictions against the drug lords [who use intimidation, corruption and assassination to deter or remove witnesses and pervert the legal system].
”I also acknowledge and commend the police operations that have had some success in recent years in apprehending some drug kingpins.
”But the hostility and scale of the police response to a peaceful and legal march [with scores of personnel, vehicles, police cameras etc deployed to monitor a march of 200 people] reinforced the notion that the police have their priorities inverted.
”No one in the area has ever seen such a deployment of resources to tackle the drug problem,” Zille said.
Meanwhile, Zille is to take part in another anti-drug march this weekend, this time in Atlantis, north of Cape Town.
DA spokesperson Martin Slabbert said the DA had been granted permission for the Atlantis march, which would begin from the Silwerstroom Hotel at 3pm.
He said permission had been granted for a maximum 300 marchers on Sunday. — Sapa