Has the remilitarisation of the police led to an attitude of seeing public order maintenance as a form of warfare?
In early 2010, the South African Police Service (SAPS) began
a formal process of remilitarisation. At the time this was depicted as a
necessary project of reasserting ‘command and control’ and ‘discipline’ within
the service to better enable the police to fight violent criminals.
However, in the last two years the SAPS has become more
associated with a war on the wider public. The Independent Police
Investigations Directorate has seen a substantial increase of deaths in police
custody and reports of abuse and torture by officers. Last year, the killing of
protester Andries Tatane brought national attention to the increased lethality
of police crowd control tactics. In the province of KwaZulu-Natal this year
alone, there has already been the trial of the Cato Manor Organised Crime Unit
for extrajudicial killings and the shooting of unarmed demonstrators in Umlazi.
The cumulative effect is to suggest that the SAPS is
reverting back to its apartheid role as the brute enforcer of state power.
Last resort or matter of course?
This appears to have reached a new nadir in the killing of
34 miners at the Lonmin Mine in Marikana on August 16. By the time of the
shootings, the strike had already led to fatalities with ten people, including
two policemen, dying in clashes between members of the government-affiliated
National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) and the breakaway Association of
Mineworkers and Construction Union (AMCU).
The SAPS have maintained that the shootings only happened
after the strikers refused to peacefully dissemble and that lethal force was
approved as a last resort as armed strikers attempted to swarm police lines.
This has been reiterated by President Jacob Zuma and much of the South African
media which has presented the killings as an unavoidable tragedy in which law
enforcement was forced to take deplorable measures. Despite this and despite
the fact the national police command acknowledged that its officers killed the
strikers, the National Prosecuting Authority originally charged the arrested
miners with the murder of their colleagues, only dropping the charges and
beginning to release the workers today.
Against the narrative of the police using force only as a
last resort, however, a growing body of evidence suggests that rather than
being an act of self-defence, the killings were part of a premeditated plan to
stop the strike. Interviews with miners point to the police using barbed wire
to ‘kettle’ the strikers, who were then hunted down and shot as they attempted
to escape from police gunfire and teargas, while wounded survivors were run
over by armoured vehicles. Additionally, allegations have emerged which suggest
that the autopsies of the dead prove that most were killed while fleeing. There
is also recent evidence, found by The Daily Maverick, that 14 of the miners may
have been murdered by police 300 metres away from the main site of the clashes
at close range and with little sign of struggle. Furthermore, evidence of
systematic police torture against detained strikers in the last week hardly portrays
the SAPS as an institution which only uses violence as a last resort.
According to an official statement from the National
Education, Health, and Allied Workers' Union, “Our police service has adopted
and perfected the apartheid tactics and the militarisation of the service, and
encouraged the use of force to resolve disputes and conflicts.... all police
officers who deal with protests must be taught...disciplined ways of
controlling…the protesters because we cannot afford to have a police force that
is slaughtering protesters in the new dispensation.”
Echoing this sentiment, security analysts described the
shootings as the product of a poor training regime in which public order
expertise has been replaced by a focus on maximum force and crime-fighting.
Instead of using specialised forms of containment and negotiation, police take
the combative stance of aggressively breaking up gatherings and demonstrations.
In one particularly bizarre intervention, the former commander of an apartheid
riot squad claimed that the police should have used the ‘less’ confrontational
tactic of “popping” individual miners with snipers.
Friends and foes
However, in focusing exclusively on the issues of tactics
and training, many of the commentaries portray the police as an apolitical
organisation whose role is simply to adjudicate in social disputes and who can
be made less violent by the correct technocratic fixes. As Jane Duncan argues,
this ignores the role of the SAPS as an intrinsically political institution
which is in the business of “suppressing dissenting voices, especially (but not
exclusively) those outside the [ruling] ANC-SACP-COSATU [African National
Congress-South Africa Communist Party-Congress of South African Trade Unions]
alliance. The problem predates the remilitarisation of the police, although
remilitarisation has undoubtedly intensified it.”
These tactics have ranged from ‘invisible’ forms of
repression such as abuse of the legal system to deny permits to demonstrate and
heightened surveillance, all the way to the use of live ammunition and torture.
This starkly contrasts with how the police treat protests organised from within
the governing tripartite alliance. Public disturbances and violence at COSATU
and ANC strikes and marches are for the most part treated with kid gloves. A
recent strike by Metro Police in Durban, in which officers blockaded roads,
assaulted motorists and allegedly threatened to “burn down” the city hall, for
example, was met only with warnings of disciplinary action.
However, the authoritarian response to political movements
which attempt to organise outside the state is not exclusive to the ANC. The
Democratic Alliance party (DA) has exhibited comparable tactics in its
governance of the Western Cape, ranging from the violence which accompanied its
attempts to evict residents from Hangburg to the almost farcically draconian
clampdown of the small “Take back the commons” event in Cape Town.
A war on the poor?
This violence against political dissent can be considered as
a front in what many independent social movements are calling the “war on the
poor” in which the police, often aided by South Africa’s sprawling private
security sector, “are here to drive the poor out of the cities, contain us in
the human dumping grounds and repress our struggles.”
In many respects, this repression appears to repeat the work
of colonial and apartheid authorities under a new guise. For instance, the
Lonmin massacre joins many other historical incidents of the state using force
to protect the property and power of South Africa’s mining sector. But while
interpreting the recent upsurge in state violence through these historical
continuities is inevitable given the horrors of South Africa’s recent past, the
remilitarisation of law enforcement has taken place under a very different
context than the police state of the apartheid decades.
South Africa is now formally a constitutional democracy even
though, as the ‘war on the poor’ demonstrates, the enjoyment of these rights is
still circumscribed by class and race. And whereas aggressive crowd control in
the apartheid years was the response of a white supremacist state trying to
crush insurrection, state violence today emerges from a democratically-elected
government attempting to contain localised community protests and revolts. But,
like their apartheid predecessors, state officials often rely on paranoid
claims about mysterious ‘forces’ provoking violence rather than acknowledging
it as the result of frustration around South Africa’s obscene levels of inequality,
the failure of government to deliver meaningful socio-economic emancipation to
the country’s poor and black majority, and the arrogance and cruelty of the
state and big business.
The enemy within
The militarisation of police therefore is not about mobilising
to win a protracted war against a specific enemy but is reflective of
transnationally-floating concepts of ‘asymmetric war’ in which state forces
engage in ‘low-intensity’ (but still very violent) conflicts with a range of
non-state actors from ‘terrorists’ and armed gangs to ‘insurgent’ publics.
This is undergirded by a belief in the tactical
interchangeability between fighting a war and domestic policing. The last few
years has seen increased integration between the police and the South Africa
National Defence Force (SANDF), which has included joint ‘security operations’
and the exchange of equipment. Within the SAPS itself, there has been a focus
upon training up paramilitary SWAT-type units which bridge the gap between
police and military functions. Two of these units, the Special Task Force and
the Tactical Response Team, were on site at Lonmin. The Special Task Force
predates the remilitarisation of the police and is considered one of the most
elite special units in the world and has conducted training missions with the
Special Operations Command of the US military. However, they are trained for
hostage and terrorist situations, not crowd dispersal or control. It is notable
that miners mistook them for soldiers due to their uniforms.
By contrast, the Tactical Response Teams, which are assigned
to precincts throughout the country and which are recognisable by their berets,
are trained for both urban and rural combat and ‘advanced crowd management’.
These units were intended to be a flagship for the remilitarisation of the SAPS
and to simultaneously “hunt down criminals” and maintain public order. However,
the various teams have gained a reputation for abusive force. Video evidence
captured the Gauteng Tactical Response Team engaged in a military-style
campaign after civil unrest in a township near Johannesburg, including torture
and door-to-door raids, while the media acquired CCTV footage of response team
members attacking bar patrons in the city. The Mpumalanga division has also
faced a lawsuit for allegations of severe brutality.
While the government’s militarisation of the service has
been presented as a response to the dangers posed by armed criminals and
terrorists, the evidence suggests that such units are designed to be rapidly
targeted inward.
Keeping the order
National Police Minster Mthethwa has suggested that because
of historically-rooted “sensitivities”, South Africa’s population are too
sceptical of the police’s ability to implement crowd control with ‘‘the human
touch”. He says: “People criticise us for using water cannons. We have
introduced those techniques because that’s not your maximum force. But you’ll
hear people criticising that, saying these things were used under apartheid”.
Conscious of the publicity fallout from Marikana, the state
has gone into public relations overdrive and attempted to create a narrative
which exonerates and legitimates the actions of the police, partly through
presenting the miners as a deranged mob. But there is little indication that
the massacre will cause a rethink on the project of treating ‘public order’ as
a new form of warfare.