By Angela Quintal
President Thabo Mbeki has denounced critics of South Africa's crime statistics as racists, singling out two female writers for his ire.
They are freelance journalist Charlene Smith - whom he did not mention by name - and South African expatriate Bronwyn McIntosh. Mbeki has criticised Smith before. Smith is a rape survivor and outspoken activist who has campaigned for anti-retroviral treatment, and whom Mbeki has accused of being blinded by racist rage.
Smith wrote in an article published the week after she was raped and stabbed in her home in 1999: "I want you to know that rape is not about race, as some South Africans think... It is about what a few sick individuals do, it has nothing to do with race or malehood."
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Writing in his weekly online column, Mbeki said those who questioned the crime statistics were asserting that the government was "lying to the country when we say that gradually we are winning the war against crime".
The statistics showed that, overall, the incidence of reported crime was declining.
Mbeki pounced on a newspaper editorial titled "Crime Stats Lack Credibility", as well as on two articles in last week's The Sunday Independent. One of them, by Smith, was titled "Rape has become a sickening way of life in our land".
He took exception to what he said was a view that defamed African people, and said it should come as no surprise that Smith had written that "South Africa has the highest rape in the world according to Interpol".
"To her, this assertion would have been obviously correct, because, after all, we are an African country and therefore have the men conditioned by African culture, tradition and religion to commit rape."
Referring to Kathleen Cravero, the deputy executive director of UNAids, Mbeki said "other people in high places" shared "Smith's view" that African and Asian men were sexual predators.
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