Vehicles Torched in South Africa as a Court Ruling Meets the Street
At least twenty-four vehicles were set alight, fourteen in Durban and ten in Soweto, and foreign-owned shops looted as anti-immigration protests turned violent on Thursday. Police fired rubber bullets outside a refugee reception centre in Durban where protesters demanded it stop accepting asylum applications. The Department of Home Affairs now says it will change how it complies with a Constitutional Court ruling.
The ruling, handed down in July, struck down restrictions that barred some people from seeking asylum because of how they entered the country or because they had missed immigration deadlines — meaning applications must now be accepted even from those who arrived without documents. Long queues followed at immigration centres. On Friday the department said staff had been “overwhelmed” and that “serious threats to public safety and order had emerged”, and that it would change its approach while still abiding by the court; it gave no details. A government spokesman, William Baloyi, said people had deliberately spread false claims that undocumented migrants would automatically be granted legal status, and that applications will still be assessed individually. A senior police officer, Xolani Fihla, reported clashes between South African and foreign nationals with no injuries; three foreign nationals were arrested over an alleged assault on a protester, which is what tipped Thursday’s demonstration over. Unemployment runs at roughly a third of the workforce, and researchers say the claims made against migrants are not supported by evidence. The xenophobic attacks of 2008 killed more than sixty people. The retired South African constitutional court justice Edwin Cameron, reacting to this morning’s Nobel award to his compatriot, named the same wound: his country has been “wrecked by anguish about cross-border migration” and by movements “distributing toxic untruths”.