Schwartzerwitz: Charges against jailed Jo'burg homeless people dropped

Tuesday, July 7, 2009

Charges against jailed Jo'burg homeless people dropped

All charges against the more than 350 homeless people jailed over the weekend have been dropped in the Johannesburg Magistrates Court today. Those arrested, mostly Zimbabweans, were freed following the court decision. Earlier on state lawyers refused to prosecute the jailed homeless who were arrested and charged with loitering.

Those freed were nabbed during a police round-up in a midnight raid on Friday. They were crammed into a police cell for the weekend, and now they have expressed their relief at being released but many of them have complained, calling on the police not to treat them like animals.

Police insist those arrested broke the law by sleeping outside a church in the Central Business District. But state prosecutors weren't convinced, and it took them less than an hour to withdraw the case. Now it's the action of the police officers that hangs in balance amid accusations of heavy-handed tactics.

Jacob Van Garderen from the Lawyers for Human Rights says they are disappointed at the way authorities cleared the police operation in question. Garderen says they have received number of complaints over the conduct of the police during the operation.

Meanwhile the South African Police Service says any complaints against its members must be made at the nearest police station. Over the weekend they claimed the arrests were part of a drive to clean up the streets, and insisted that the crackdown will continue. An estimated 60 000 people will sleep on the streets of Johannesburg tonight and non-government organisations say even if some are taken off the streets, others will just replace them.

- SABC

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Every Pogrom needs an Armband....

Welcome to Schwartzerwitz. The inevitable consequence of 4 million illegal immigrants arriving in South Africa. More desperate than our local folk they are willing to work longer harder faster for less. The immigrants are more reliable than South African unskilled labour and have outcompeted the local folk. No matter what anyone says it's not FAIR on our locals. Adding 4 million hungry mouths to the country has exacerbated the rocketing food prices felt across the globe. Adding 4 million potential electricity users to the mix has undoubtedly worsened the electricity situation. Having 4 million people send home money to their family drains the economy of money which should stay within the borders. Adding 4 million people and not registering them as taxpayers has cost the country billions. What chance does our government of ridding the country of shacks as per the Millennium Development Goal when 4 million immigrants build/rent shacks. Murambatsvina in Zimbabwe....? Just move to a shack in South Africa. On an individual basis this site condemns violent acts against individuals. However as a collective the illegal immigrants deserve no sympathy and should be deported back from whence they came. These people are economic refugees - "not real refugees" - and they are(generally speaking) in South Africa illegally.

kwerekwere.

The inside cover of my Oxford English dictionary features a word with which I have become all too familiar: the word is kwerekwere.

(It may be more familiar to you with one of its vernacular language–dependant prefixes prepended — the Sotho singular being le– and plural ma–, the Nguni singular being i– and plural ama–). This word is used to refer to black (in the morphological sense) Africans who are not South Africans — South African being defined as Sotho, Nguni, Venda and Tsonga ethnic groups (by that measure the Swazis, Batswana, etc. would be South African?). This word has a very negative sting to it and is often used with contempt. From what I gather it has undertones which speak of how black Africans are believed to be sub–human, too dark and have a pungent smell.