True to Cape Town politics mayor and Democratic Alliance chair Helen Zille was criticised by provincial Premier Ebrahim Rasool for moving large numbers of refugees into a holiday campsite outside town.
‘We say beach camps are wrong. It removes people from their work and schools and turns fairly independent people into dependent people,†he said at a press conference this week.
Rasool also said these camps make reintegration impossible and create the impression that the government is non-humanitarian.
On Thursday Rasool declared parts of the province disaster areas so that more resources and aid could be distributed to the refugees with the help of the United Nations.
Zille hit back at Rasool, saying: ‘In the aftermath of the xenophobic attacks in Du Noon last Thursday, many foreign nationals fled in panic and arrived at police stations and other venues. Some could be accommodated in community halls [in Table View, Bothasig, Richwood, Summer Greens, Claremont, Nyanga, Khayelitsha and so forth], churches and private residences, but many could not. We had to add capacity to our various holiday resorts to accommodate people instantly. This was always intended to be a temporary measure, but we had to act in an emergencyâ€
Zille called for the South African National Defence Force to be deployed in townships from which foreign nationals had fled so that their safe reintegration into these communities could be guaranteed. She also called on the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees to help the city handle the crisis.
‘As the disaster is greater than we can manage, I have liaised with other spheres of government for assistance and called on them to bring in the United Nations with their vast experience and resources in dealing with such crises,†Zille said.
But the Treatment Action Campaign (TAC), which has co-ordinated civil society’s relief efforts in the city, is scathing about both politicians.
‘The state failed the refugees on every level in its handling of this crisis because Helen Zille and Ebrahim Rasool have not been cooperating with each other and consequently didn’t have a co-ordinated response,†the TAC’s Nathan Geffen said.
Geffen said the province didn’t respond to the refugee crisis — at one stage affecting more than 20Â 000 displaced people but now down to about 15Â 000 people — for the first three days.
‘Zille and Rasool played politics with each other at the expense of thousands and thousands of refugees,†he said. ‘The bottom line is that these two sides have been thinking about their voters and next year’s election rather than focusing on the real crisis at hand,†he said.
Geffen, like Rasool, is critical of Zille’s decision to place foreign refugees in camps far outside Cape Town.
‘These displaced people are not her voters and she’s interested in doing what’s politically useful for her and her voters and not what is right,†Geffen said.