Terry Crawford-Browne
Renewed xenophobic violence in South Africa has appalled the world. The violence is directed at black African refugees, not at white beneficiaries of the past apartheid era. Yet, reminiscent of the apartheid era, the response of a bewildered government is to send the army into affected townships instead of addressing the root causes of massive migrations in Africa.
The Guardian newspaper reported in England: “With every outbreak of xenophobic violence, the refrain is the same: ‘The kwerekwere(foreigners) are stealing our jobs’. Shops are torched. Streets are barricaded. Tyres are set alight. People are stabbed, shot and burnt to death. Mobs hound Somalis, Mozambicans, Zimbabweans, Pakistanis and Bangladeshis from their homes and businesses.”
Millions of African refugees have literally walked to South Africa to escape wars inflicted upon their countries. These wars are compounded by political repression of dictatorships kept in office by the US and its CIA.
Between 5 and 10 million Congolese have died in what is known as “Africa’s First World War” because its root cause is the plunder of the DRC’s enormous mineral wealth by First World corporations in collusion with European and North American governments.
Officially, the rate of unemployment in South Africa is 25 percent but, in reality, is about 40 percent, and rises amongst the youth to 70 percent.
The kwerekwere, including huge numbers of Congolese refugees, tend to be better educated and very often are self-employed. It is estimated that “only” 15 percent are unemployed.
The number of Zimbabwean kwerekwere is variously guesstimated at between 1 and 4 million people. Their numbers are actually unknown, but it is possible that South Africa is actually hosting more refugees than any other country. Reprehensible xenophobic violence against refugees and foreigners nonetheless expresses misdirected and pent-up fury.
Impoverished victims of the apartheid system remain impoverished. Reflecting the government’s disastrous education, health and economic policies since 1994, the gap between rich and poor South Africans (as expressed in the GINI co-efficient) is wider than ever, and is the worst in the world.
Food riots and crime driven by poverty rather than xenophobia have, for instance, been the cause of many of the attacks on Somali shops.
Similarly horrific and mindless, almost three years have elapsed since the Marikana massacre on August 16, 2012 at the Lonmin platinum mine when 34 miners were murdered in cold blood.
The massacre exposed the incompetence and brutality of the police, but also the unconscionable greed of Lonmin’s British owners. The political complicity reaches to South Africa’s deputy president, Cyril Ramaphosa, who is a shareholder and non-executive director, and also a rand billionaire.
The resulting inquiry has revealed that Lonmin was engaged in extensive transfer pricing practices via Bermuda and other British “treasure island” tax havens to avoid payment of South African taxes. Instead of annual tax of more than US$200 million for the years 2006 to 2008, these ploys enabled Lonmin to reduce its tax to only US$8 million.
Sadly, the apartheid-era migrant labour system remains essentially unchanged, and can rightly be described as war profiteering. These transfer payments – ostensibly for marketing expenses and management consultancy fees – deliberately drained Lonmin of funds that otherwise could have been used to pay living wages to illiterate and impoverished miners who risk their lives underground.
Thousands of miles to the north, hundreds (even thousands) of African and Asian refugees are drowning in the Mediterranean Sea in desperate attempts to escape wars inflicted upon their countries and resultant destitution.
Libya (the land of my youth) is a country in turmoil because the US, Britain and France so mindlessly launched a war in 2011 after Muammar Gaddafi demanded payment in gold for Libya’s oil exports. Likewise, the war against Iraq was launched in 2003 because Saddam Hussein had the audacity to demand payment for oil in euros instead of US dollars.
Prime Minister David Cameron and members of the British royal family repeatedly promote both arms exports and London’s banking services, ostensibly for job-creation benefits. The reality is that both the British arms industry and its banking industry are virtually without regulation, are highly subsidised, and scream vociferously whenever regulation is suggested.
When Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah died earlier this year, politicians – including Cameron and US President Barack Obama – flocked to Riyadh to pay obeisance to what is arguably the world’s most barbaric regime.
The House of Saud were bandits until elevated to royalty by the British and later, after the discovery of oil, adopted by the Americans.
In alliance with the US and Gulf state sheikhdoms, Saudi Arabia has now launched a war against the people of Yemen. The violent consequences of fundamentalist Wahhabite Islamic theology, including Boko Haram in Nigeria and Islamic State in the Arab world, most of it funded by Saudis at an estimated cost of US$130 billion, are daily evident on our television screens.
The US, British and German governments have poured weapons into the Middle East and elsewhere in pursuit of their agendas to control supplies of oil. The correlations between arms exports, wars and banks – in short, the war business – and tragic results for refugees are blatantly obvious.
At last, the blow-back costs of First World war-mongering are impacting even in Europe. As many as 1.6 million refugees from Syria and elsewhere are reportedly waiting in Turkey to enter Europe. To date, England has provided refuge for only 100 Syrian refugees.
Yet, The Sun newspaper there disgracefully suggests that gunships should be deployed to sink refugee boats, the refugees themselves being described as “cockroaches”.
Having spent 4 percent of its GDP on armaments, Greece has been the most heavily armed country in the European Union. The Greek financial crisis is due not only to the greed of Greek oligarchs and politicians, but, more pertinently, also corruption of European bankers complicit in tax evasion and money laundering.
The 189-page Debevoise & Plimpton report on Ferrostaal in 2011 revealed how Greece, Portugal, South Africa, Argentina, Colombia, Egypt, Turkey, Pakistan, Indonesia and many other countries were deliberately targeted and corrupted by the German armaments industry.
MAN Ferrostaal eventually plea-bargained a fine of e140 million for the corruption unleashed in Greece with a deal to sell four German submarines, almost identical to the three submarines sold to South Africa.
Regrettably, however, German bankers still refuse to accept the “haircuts” they richly deserve for failing dismally to institute appropriate due diligence procedures over corruption in their lending operations.
Will it take riots in Athens and other European cities to bring home the message to the British and German governments that war profiteering brings consequences, and that corruption in the Third World usually originates in the First World?
l Crawford-Browne is a former international banker who became a peace activist during the 1980s