South Africa's stature battered by migrant killings

By Pascal Fletcher

DAKAR (Reuters) - South Africa's aspirations to lead the continent are being shredded by the xenophobic mobs who have hacked, shot and beaten to death more than 40 African migrants in the land where apartheid was defeated.

The killing of Zimbabweans, Mozambicans, Nigerians and other Africans by machete-wielding gangs of South Africans has been greeted with horror and outrage in states which once welcomed South African fugitives from racial persecution.

From Maputo to Lusaka to Luanda and further north, African populations that gave refuge to the anti-apartheid African National Congress (ANC) are shocked to see their own people being slain and brutalized in ANC-ruled South Africa.

"If South Africa could remember what we did for them during the apartheid regime, they shouldn't be doing that to us," said Emmanuel Efuk, a resident of Nigeria's commercial capital Lagos.

The mobs accuse the immigrants of depriving South Africans of scarce jobs and fuelling crime.

Governments, civil society groups and commentators say the violence is soiling the image South Africa would like to project as a beacon of racial harmony and a continental peacemaker 14 years after apartheid ended.

"This appalling hunting of foreigners which stains the emblematic land of South Africa must be lived as an unspeakable shame, a slap against the struggle of (anti-apartheid hero and former South African President Nelson) Mandela," the Senegalese private daily Sud Quotidien said in a commentary this week.

Many see South Africa under President Thabo Mbeki stumbling in its aspirations to represent Africa in world forums, such as the U.N. Security Council, where Pretoria is campaigning for a permanent seat against other contenders like Egypt and Nigeria.

Condemning the "blind violence" of the attacks, the Dakar-based Pan-African human rights organization RADDHO said they dealt a heavy blow to Africa's leadership and image.

"It is difficult to understand how the country which amply enjoyed the support of all African peoples in its fight against apartheid and which hosted the World Conference against Racism and Xenophobia in 2001 can be the place where such events are taking place," RADDHO said in a strongly-worded statement.

ECHOES OF APARTHEID

The group sharply criticized Mbeki's administration, already being accused of limp leadership in efforts to resolve the political crisis in Zimbabwe. Zimbabweans fleeing turmoil at home have borne the brunt of the violence in South Africa.

"The South African government ... has been slow to take rigorous and firm measures to prevent the massacre of African migrants," the Dakar-based rights group said.

Observers said the images of migrants being hunted down and killed -- some doused with petrol and set alight -- harked back to the violence of the apartheid years, when opponents of South Africa's white minority government were shot and tortured by police and informers were "necklaced" with burning tires.

Others recalled the times when "Frontline States" such as Zimbabwe and Mozambique, which sheltered the ANC in exile, became the targets of military raids by the white apartheid government. Hundreds of African civilians were killed.