News Features
Winners and Losers in the New SADC Free Trade Area
Improving Disaster Preparedness in SADC
Gender Equity is a Challenge not a Threat
Racism and Xenophobia Debate Gains Momentum

Documents
GAD Exchange, Issue No.22, October 2000
DRC Chronology, August 1998 - September 2000

   There has been an increasing awareness towards racism throughout the southern Africa, due to land conflicts and resource-based racial tensions, as well as the increasing number of refugees and migrants that have challenged national governments to be more incisive in their policies concerning racial relations and immigration.

   In South Africa, a four-day conference, Combating Racism: A Nation in Dialogue, held last September brought together about 1,000 people, including political, religious and other leaders to discuss ways by which South Africans can overcome the racial impasse the country still faces six years after the end of apartheid. The Conference was organized by the Human Rights Commission (HCR) at the request of President Thabo Mbeki.

   Mbeki opened the Conference analysing how racism has prevented South Africa from building a strong and united nation. He highlighted the narrow relationship between poverty, inequality and racism in South Africa.

   "The social and economic structure of our society is such that the distribution of wealth, income, poverty, disease, land, skills, occupations, intellectual resources and opportunities for personal advancement, as well as the patterns of human settlement, are determined by the criteria of race and colour," he told the conference.

   Mbeki was critical of many whites who had benefited from apartheid but were now denying that racism has prevented the building of a new non-racial country.

   "Whites, who make up around one in 10 of the country's 43 million people, had a special responsibility to face the 'demon of racism' because of the abuses of apartheid," said Mbeki, who launched a visionary declaration against racism on 5 September, which has already been signed by more than thirty-five world leaders.

   During the conference, the ruling African National Congress (ANC) leaders also insisted that disparities in wealth, income and opportunities would not shrink until racism was defeated in South Africa. However, opposition parties that attended the conference argued that the government's increasing emphasis on racism was a strategy to divert the attention from the fact that ANC's economic policies, and not racism, was exacerbating inequalities between and among different racial groups.

   Delegates recommended that the government declare a "Decade Against Racism" and the HCR elaborate and implement a far-reaching national action plan and strategy to combat racism.

   Likewise, xenophobia has arisen in some SADC countries where locals are refusing to share with foreigners national resources and opportunities. The region is facing a large number of migrant workers, asylum-seekers and above all, refugees mainly from Angola and the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), and countries outside southern Africa.

   Against a background of increasing numbers of uprooted people, immigration laws have been tightened, while dislike for foreigners, despite their racial origin, has intensified, especially in richer countries of the region.

   In South Africa, national radio stations have spread a more personified and positive image of refugees rather than biased and statistical ones to fight xenophobic stances among the population. However, only 15,000 people out of 60,000 asylum seekers registered by April this year have been recognised as refugees.

   Recently the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) Office in Zambia expressed concern about the large number of refugees who have been detained by national authorities.

    "The refugee situation in southern Africa is characterized by protection problems. Asylum-seekers and refugees have thus been refused entry into countries in which they seek asylum, refused status, been detained and, in some cases, been subjected to inhuman treatment," said Fidellis Swai, from the UNHCR Regional Office in Pretoria.