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"There is a national crisis - but there is no Robin Hood."
This was the heading on a LEADER PAGER in The Star about a meeting which might tackle the dangerously critical situation. Representatives of almost every legal interest in South Africa, pledged themselves to combine in the battle against crime, guns and violence.
I wrote this way back in the early 1990s . . . but the crises remains the same today - and so do the questions below:
What do you do when the man of the house waves a gun at his children and rapes his partner at gunpoint?
What do you do when children steal their father's gun and take it to
school? What do you do when you report drug-dealers to the police - and
a policeman tips off the drug-traffickers?
What do you do when your children are
woken by gun-shots in the night, see a crime committed in the street at
dawn, and step over a corpse on the way to school?
What do you do when you are mugged, and your car is stolen, twice?
And what do you do when violence blocks government development schemes, and drives private skills and investments from the country?
The answer is that you summon all the resources available, and combine to challenge the threat, get rid of the gangsters, and work to change the ugly, disillusiioned culture. That answer just may have started to happen, after an unheralded and unpublicised meeting in Randburg this week.
The Government, represented by the ministries of the RDP and Safety and Security, were there. The "civics" and the poor were represented, and so were a supermarket chain and a major bank. The Churches were there, and so was Big Business, in the shape of Sacob and the National Business Initiative. Gun Free South Africa organised the meeting at the behest of Jay Naidoo's RDP ministry, and invited an entire cross-section of society - including the SA Gun-owners Association, who offered funds for research into violence.
Anglo-American's Michael O'Dowd reminded the meeting: "We are dealing with a profound social issue. . .with the most fundamental of human rights - the right to protection from criminal violence." Protection from criminality was the first, the primary, the least contentious and - in the oldest times - often the only function of State.
In South Africa there were two forms of violence:- inter-communal conflict, and ordinary criminal violence. The first had decreased remarkably, the second had soared.
Before listing the economic costs of crime, O'Dowd said, "The victims are the poor. The Robin Hood story is a myth. The poor are weak and easy to prey on, and so they are the main victims. . . And when the economy is hurt by crime, the unemployed suffer first."
The meeting was warned that violent tension was increasing as the local elections approached. But militarised youth, with their own language, their own uniforms, were seen as the greatest threat.
The most poignant messages came from "civics" representatives, describing the feelings, and the experience in many townships of women and children living amid violence, helplessly, without anyone to turn to.
"We are seeing killings, and drug-running and rape - but nothing to counter them," said Joseph de Broize. "The police are in cahoots with the drug dealers. . . and if you arrest a man waving an illegal gun, he's taken to court - and let go. Where's the justice?"
Thandi Motokeng, of the Sowetan SAVE campaign which will climax on June 16, said that it was not enough for communities to reject violence. They had to affirm support for a culture of learning and literacy. This weekend (March 18) they are asking Sowetan children to bring to school weapons - any weapons - and to destroy them. They will also be asking pupils to educate others through poetry and drama. And to nominate role models of non-violence (instead of lauding the Rambos of violent cinema).
Gerald Simpson, of the Centre for the Study of Violence and Recreation, questioned the inaction caused by the fact that "crime is the result of poverty". He questioned too the view of an unbreakable vicious circle caused by the fact that "crime resulted in further poverty".
There was applause for Rabbi Harris for "my radical proposal" that the authorities seal off entire neighbourhoods in all areas, and then heavily punish anyone found with an illegal weapon. Others cautioned that such methods were ineffective.
Assessing the Government's Development Programme as an antidote to violence, Simpson urged: "Something must be done. But remember, investment of resources in the poverty-stricken areas could increase conflict, if not violence. Development in itself can destroy a whole lot of vested interests and bring dangerous resistance - not only from the criminal element, but from others who are uncomfortable with change, such as migrant workers. You must address the concerns of these vested interests. You must provide alternatives for them."
There was consensus on at least one issue: unbridled and virtually uncontrolled violence is threatening everyone of us, and everything we do - and something radical must be done about it.
Violence is costing the country billions of rand, and is a potential threat to as much as half the national GNP. Yet there is an even greater cost in human lives and in the degradation of the human condition.
The government ministries listened, and did not argue. They encouraged further talks - and joint, properly co-ordinated action.
More meetings are to follow. Many of us who attended the first are hoping that action will come immediately after the next meeting - with a formal partnership of half-a-dozen government ministries and many private sector and community interests. These should combine in a National Forum to promote security, hand-in-hand with material development. We visualise a national body to meet a national crisis; an organisation such as T C Robertson's Veld Trust which, half a century ago, set out to save the land - literally.
[This was written in the early 1990s shortly after we had formed
the forlorn 'Gun-free South Africa'. . . Tough work advocating that you give up your gun while Law is in flux and Order is absent - even when loose guns are part of the problem.
Going the gun-free route means that you have to fight crime more effectively.
Crime was rampant when this editorial-page piece appeared. . .
Unfortunately little has changed in the last 13 years. - HT 2007] |
