07/13/2021 17:42
Clarín.com
World
Updated 07/13/2021 5:42 PM
The wave of riots and massive looting that South Africa has suffered since last week, with levels of vandalism unprecedented in the democratic history of the southern nation,
has already accumulated 72 deaths and 1,234 detainees
, while the Police and the Army join forces to stabilize the affected areas .
The serious incidents are concentrated in two regions
: the eastern province of KwaZulu-Natal and the political and economic heart of the most developed nation in Africa, the province of Gauteng (where Johannesburg and Pretoria meet).
In these areas, during the last days mobs of people
completely leveled shopping centers
and shops, burned vehicles and buildings and blocked streets and highways.
What began as protests over the imprisonment of controversial former president Jacob Zuma (2009-2018) for judicial contempt,
degenerated into a wave of looting and indiscriminate vandalism
of a magnitude that the country's president, Cyril Ramaphosa, compared to the turbulent transition that South Africa He lived in the early 1990s, after the end of the "apartheid" segregation system.
Downtown Soweto in Johannesburg.
AP Photo
"The path of violence, looting and anarchy only leads to more violence and devastation. It leads to more poverty, more unemployment and more loss of innocent lives.
This is not who we are as a people,"
Ramaphosa lamented last night in a message to the nation.
As of 9 pm (19 GMT), the death toll
stood at 72,
with 45 dead in Gauteng and 27 in KwaZulu-Natal, according to the latest data released by the South African Police, which also confirmed a total of 1,234 arrests.
The situation during the day was kept out of control in many points due to the chaotic influx of people, even
despite the deployment of 2,500 soldiers
to support the Police, which had been completely overwhelmed by the altercations both today and in the past days.
A market attacked in Durban.
Reuters photo
"The looting continues,
so I cannot say that (the situation) is under control," admitted the head of the Gauteng government, David Makhura, in statements to the press after noon.
In the morning, at a press conference, South African Security Minister Bheki Cele had stressed that
"no discontent or personal circumstances"
gave "the right to anyone to loot, vandalize and do whatever they want and break the law."
Cele, who in recent days was the object of harsh criticism for the inability of the security forces to anticipate and handle the wave of vandalism, also warned that the many affected by the incidents - both personally and materially -
should not have now take justice into his own hand.
Likewise, the South African authorities appealed to the communities and social leaders so that, as is happening in counterpart in other provinces of the country, civil society
is organized to prevent
and discourage looting and violence.
From Zuma to looting
The incidents began last Friday in KwaZulu-Natal, the
home province of controversial former president Jacob Zuma, who on June 29 had been sentenced to 15 months in prison for judicial contempt after having repeatedly refused to testify for corruption.
Although the former president surrendered peacefully
to the authorities late Wednesday, Zuma had previously insisted that he was the victim of political-judicial persecution and that the prison sentence would be a "death sentence" for him.
In this context,
his supporters went out to cut roads as a show of support.
Destroys in Durban.
Reuters photo
In the following days, those protests spread across KwaZulu-Natal and
were replicated in other areas,
especially the Johannesburg area.
But by the weekend
they had already transformed into a chaotic wave of disturbances
, which more than with political motives are linked to pre-existing social problems, such as extreme inequality, the high levels of general crime in the country and discontent over the pandemic. of covid-19.
"What we are seeing now are
acts of opportunistic criminality,
with groups of people instigating chaos merely as an alibi to loot and rob," Ramaphosa said last night.
The president has warned that the chaotic situation
will have an impact on the country's food and health security, in
addition to being a severe setback for the economic recovery and for the advancement of the vaccination plan against the coronavirus.
The Ministry of Health confirmed, in fact, that in the affected areas
there were interruptions in immunization against covid-19
, but also problems of access to other basic medical services, such as medication for diabetes, HIV or tuberculosis.
The riots occur at the worst moment of an aggressive third wave of covid-19 driven by the delta variant,
with some 2.2 million accumulated infections and some 64,000 deaths.
Source: EFE
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Look also
South Africa “on fire”: arrest of former President Jacob Zuma triggers wave of violence
Former South African President Jacob Zuma Surrendered and Was Imprisoned for Contempt