Posted by TheBlackList on August 31, 2008 at 10:51am
The May 2008 attacks and the responses they have triggered from both
Government and South African civil society could well transform the
migration debate much more profoundly than first meets the eye.
The South African situation combines an extreme degree of violence (62
deaths for the May events only) with classic migration management
“mistakes” observed elsewhere in the world, i.e. a laissez-faire
attitude, denial of the gravity, tragic events then forcing Government
to acknowledge the issue and the usual flourishing of more or less
representative, more or less genuine organisations in defence of
migrants’ rights.
Another interesting feature is the discrepancy between, on the one hand, post-apartheid migration policy-makers, who have learned relatively fast from their mistakes and adapted, sometimes under much pressure, declarations and legislation accordingly, and on the other, the public and public officials on the ground who display continuous and
particularly violent xenophobic attitudes and behaviour against
foreigners and some South Africans of ‘dubious’ origin like Vendas or
Shangaans.
Having worked on the issue for almost 15 years now, I have a sense that
the May 2008 events mark a turn in the positioning of Government, NGOs and migrants’ associations. I would like to reflect briefly on emerging trends, some worrying and others more encouraging, and on some of the challenges brought into being by the current confrontation of interest groups competing in the South African migration agenda.
For several South African Human Rights organisations, migration was a
major source of mobilisation in the late 1990S and 2000s. As almost no
migrant association was structured enough to voice grievances in a way
that would oblige the South African government to change its policy and
practices, the human rights NGOs became Government’s obvious partner in the debate on migration. Things became more complex when the numbers of migrants and asylum seekers increased and new actors entered the arena forming alliances between academia, human rights organisations and emerging migrants’ associations.
Although xenophobic attacks occurred very regularly throughout these two decades, the degree of mobilisation never reached what was observed recently regarding the protection of the victims of the May 2008 attacks. However, the May events revealed fault lines between human rights NGOs and migrants’ associations who publicly criticized the NGOs’ decision to take Government to court for lack of a proper reintegration plan. How did the victims and protectors reach conflicting positions?...CONTINUE READING AT www.sacsis.org.zaBy Aurelia Wa Kabwe Segatti, a research fellow with the French Institute
of Research for Development (IRD) and the Forced Migration Studies
Programme at the University of the Witwatersrand.
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