Somali war refugees find more grief in South Africa

Shops are looted and burned to the ground in wave of xenophobic attacks

By ROBYN DIXON
Los Angeles Times
Saturday, November 04, 2006

MASIPHUMELELE, SOUTH AFRICA — One evening in August, Mohammad Abdille watched his normally polite customers in this drab, crowded black township outside Cape Town become a mob.

The whole place seemed to go mad: People who happily bought cheaply priced Chinese goods from the Somali trader were sweeping down on his small shop like crows, grabbing whatever they could.

As Abdille, 28, hastily locked himself inside the shop, trying to save what he could, he heard the mob screaming, "Go home, Somalis, we don't want Somalis here."

Then rocks began to hammer on his wall.

• Targets: The Somalis stand out in not only because they look different and use their own language, but because they attract more customers to their shops than local traders, creating resentment.

Many Somalis hoped that life in South Africa, with Africa's strongest economy, would indeed be a blessing after fleeing perhaps the most chaotic and dangerous country on earth. But a wave of xenophobic attacks in poor black and mixed-race South African neighborhoods against Somali traders has seen dozens of them killed in the past few months and many more maimed.

At least four Somali traders have been killed in the past two weeks, according to a Somali community organization in South Africa, which puts the number of killings since midyear at 40. South African police do not organize crime statistics on the ethnicity of crime victims, but police in the Western Cape province, where most attacks took place, put the killings at half that number.

In the optimism that followed the abolishment of apartheid, South Africa dubbed itself the "rainbow nation" to denote racial tolerance. But in poor townships, where economic survival is at stake and unemployment is estimated as being as high as 80 percent, the attacks display a disturbing undercurrent of xenophobic violence toward foreigners.

In Masiphumelele, 27 Somali shops were looted Aug. 28, many of them burned to the ground, and 71 Somalis were forced to flee, in what traders say are efforts by business rivals to eliminate Somali traders.

Some have trickled back to the township in recent weeks, hoping to start again.

"I thought I came to escape war. But then we find this funny war against us here," said Omar Somey, 27, whose brother was killed and cousin blinded in another August attack on their shop in Khayelitsha township.

The Department of Home Affairs says more than 6,000 Somali refugees and more than 17,000 Somali asylum-seekers are in South Africa, fleeing a country that has had raging clan warfare and no government for most of the past 14 years.

But they have escaped to one of the world's most violent societies, for a country not at war, with more gun killings per capita than any other country.

Source: LA Times, Nov 4, 2006