Crime seen as 'ethnic cleansing'
2005-03-01 15:30
Pretoria - White South Africans living in gated communities think of crime as a type of ethnic cleansing forcing them into semi-migration, a study on the subject showed on Tuesday.
The study was presented at an international symposium on gated communities or townhouses, held in Pretoria at the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research's (CSIR) convention centre.
"Crime is a form of ethnic cleansing" was one of the statements from newspaper excerpts discussed at the symposium on Tuesday.
The study entitled "Fear and Loathing in Johannesburg: constructing new identities within gated communities", described gated communities as having emerged in response to a sense of embattlement.
They were a response to a series of failures in local state capacity, the rule of law and a reduced sense of citizenship.
One of its authors, Alex Wafer, a researcher at the University of the Witwatersrand said the idea of crime as a form of ethnic cleansing was articulated some years ago by one resident of such a community in an open letter to the Sandton Chronicle, the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (Nato) and the United Nations.
"Within the old and new white elite in Johannesburg has emerged a dream of living in a westernised, European environment," said Dr Teresa Dirsuweit, the study's other author.
Richard Ballard of the development studies school at the University of KwaZulu-Natal in another paper described white people's strategy for finding comfort zones in post-apartheid South Africa as "semi-gration".
This was different from emigration in that people did not leave the country, but rather gave up their citizenship by closing themselves off in gated communities and living a lifestyle that was completely non-synchronous to that of the rest of South African society.
- SAPA