The unfortunate incidents of xenophobia that have gripped South Africa over the last couple of weeks seem to have calmed down now. Now the issue of what is the best way forward has arisen and the future is not looking any promising. The damage has been done, lives have been lost and no one can bring them back, properties and been destroyed and peoples life savings have gone up in smoke. Many people today carry physical and mental scares from these xenophobia attacks and these will be scares that they have for the rest of their lives. The question now is, “What next?”
Many foreigners displaced by these xenophobia attacks had taken up refuge at police stations, but now the time has come for them to be relocated. Others had been placed at temporary halls and shelters across the country but they also can not stay there forever. The options available are; they either go back to their home country, they move to refugee camps the government in South Africa are setting up or they move back to communities they were chased away from.
According to the South African government, they hope to reintegrate those displaced by the attacks back into the communities they left. I find this to be a hard task to accomplish. How many people would be willing to go back and live next to the same person that looted their home and physically abused them? They will live in constant fear as they will always be looking over their back fearing they could be attacked again. There is nothing stopping these people who instigated this xenophobia from doing it again. I had a good laugh this morning reading an article of News24 which headlined: ‘We need the foreigners’. It was basically saying that the community leaders of the Du Noon community in Cape Town, now want the displaced foreigners to come back blaming the attacks on ‘young thugs’. The foreigners are the ones who owned small shops which sustained the community and now that they are gone, the residents are struggling. Now they want these foreigners to come back and hope life can go on as it was. I do not think it will be that easy. Foreigners are now scared! Even if the attacks were not all about xenophobia and were acts of crime, someone will not willing go back to a place filled with bad memories and fears of loosing ones life. Reintegrating the foreigners back to where they came from is not going to be easy.
On the other hand there is the plan to setup refugee camps for the displaced foreigners. My main worry about these camps is how safe will they be? If you have a camp with 600 odd foreigners staying there, what is stopping a group of people to attack them? The government has said there will be security at these camps but how much security? What will stop a group of xenophobic minded individuals to one night storm these camps and attack the foreigners? It would be so easy for these attackers as they know that all the foreigners are in one place so whoever we attack we know it is a foreigner. Besides the security concern, will these camps have running water and how hygienic will they be? A report in The Times said that the setup of these camps has been met by residence from residents living close to where these camps are going to be located. Already these camps are causing problems before the people have even moved into them.
Some foreigners have decided to go back to their home countries as they fear for their lives in South Africa. But many foreigners do not want to go back to their home countries and would rather stay in South Africa. It is those that want to stay, who have to be accommodated for one way or the other, either by reintegrating them with local communities are temporarily setting up camps for them and then trying to reintegrate them. By the sound of things, it seems like the South African government sees the solution being to reintegrate foreigners to where they once stayed. I think this is still going to get messy and we may not have heard the last of this xenophobia in South Africa.
As the South Africa economy continues to head through harder times, the poor are getting poorer and it is said that the frustrations of the poor are what caused these xenophobia attacks. Maybe if the government wants a solution to the xenophobia crisis they should look at the bigger picture which is; getting a grip of the economy and finding a way to ‘put more money’ into the pockets of the poor.
