Police wars and state repression in South Africa

Police wars and state repression in South Africa by Melissa Barton

The World Cup as Pacification

Christopher McMichael, The Con

The 2014 World Cup is not only a jamboree for the world’s premier national football teams, but it is also a showpiece for the repressive power of the state. In conjunction with the deployment of more than 170 000 of the country’s security forces , stadiums will be patrolled by Israeli-made drones, US-manufactured surveillance robots and officers equipped with facial recognition glasses reporting back to surveillance centres. Brazilian forces have also received training from the mercenary firm Blackwater / Academi, notorious for its violence against Iraqis during the US occupation. In April 2013, the Paramount Group, a South African arms manufacturer, announced that it had sold “hand grenade attack protected” armoured vehicles to the state government of Rio de Janeiro for service at the World Cup and 2016 Olympics.

Footsoldiers in a social war: the police, crime and inequality in South Africa

Chris McMichael, Open Democracy

With allegations ranging from torture of suspects to involvement in extrajudicial executions, endemic violence has increasingly characterised the reputation of the national South African Police Service (SAPS), and the various supporting Metropolitan departments organised at the city level. A noted hardening of police attitudes towards the citizenry has been typified by an intensification of the force used against demonstrations, which in many cases has included fatal shootings by officers.

SAPS: South Africa's Wrong Arm of the Law

by Chris McMichael, Think Africa Press

The violent reputation of South African law enforcement is well earned: from the 34 miners shot dead by police at the Marikana mine last August to the death of Andries Tatane – footage of whose fate at the hands police at a protest drew public outrage in 2011 – to many beatings and humiliations which are never reported. It is little wonder then that some feel South Africa’s police force is reviving aspects of its role during apartheid as an “internal army of occupation”.

Hosting the World

by Chris McMichael, 2012

Using the 2010 FIFA World Cup in South Africa as a case study, this paper will explore how security measures for sports mega-events have been steadily militarized with policing operations comparable to war planning. It will be argued that this is representative of the ‘new military urbanism’ in which everyday urban life is rendered as a site of ubiquitous risk leading to the increased diffusion of military tactics and doctrines in policing and policy.

While the interpenetration between urbanism and militarism has often been studied

against the context of the War on Terror, the paper will argue that in the case of South Africa this has primarily been accelerated by a pervasive social fear of violent crime, which has resulted in the securitization of cities, the remilitarization of policing and the intensification of a historical legacy of socio-spatial inequalities. The South African government used the World Cup to ‘rebrand’ the country’s violent international image, while promising that security measures would leave a legacy of safer cities for ordinary South Africans. However, using military urbanism as a conceptual backdrop, the case studies presented in the second part of the paper argue that policing measures were primarily cosmetic and designed to allay the fears of foreign tourists and the national middle class. In practice, security measures pivoted around the enforcement of social control and urban marginalization while serving as a training ground for an increasingly repressive state security apparatus. The paper will conclude with a discussion of how the global crossover between militarism and urbanism threatens to stimulate and rehabilitate deeply entrenched authoritarian tendencies in South Africa.

The South African Police Service and the Public Order War

by Chris McMichael, Think Africa Press

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.

Umshini Wam

by Chris McMichael, Mahlala

“There’ll be civil war, said Johnny. Civil fucking war, that’s what there’ll be. I said, What you think we got now? Not a fucking picture is it?”- GB84, David Peace’s harrowing novel of the 1984-1985 UK Miners’ Strike depicts how the Thatcher government threw the weight of the security state (millions of pounds spent on riot police, intimidation and illegal surveillance) against the National Union of Coal Miners. But as violent as at the Iron Lady’s yearlong campaign against organised labor was, this pales in comparison with the massacre of Marikana on Thursday. 

Lolcat Authoritarianism

by Chris McMichael, Mahala

As Julian Stallabrass recently observed, views about the effects of social networks and other new information technology on politics are deeply polarised. On the one hand, Web 2.0 has been viewed as the greatest tool for human emancipation since the invention of the printing press, given credence by the role played by social networks and smart phones in the Arab Spring and the Occupy protests. Apart from being organisational platforms for coordinating mass action, the examples of Tunisia and Egypt shows how the airing of official dirt over the internet can have ‘real world’ consequences: the revelations contained in the Wikileaks cables were among the catalysts which helped to push popular anger about the Ben Ali and Mubarak regimes onto the streets. But on the other hand, these technologies have also been presented as a tool of containment: a space where people can waste their time on stupid memes and the specialised realms of porno, while continually updating their private movements, feelings and rants in a way that is readily accessible by governments and corporate advertisers alike. A kind of soft, Lolcat authoritarianism.

Green Zone Nation: The South African government’s new growth path

by Christopher McMichael, Open Democracy

In his February State of The Nation Address, South African president Jacob Zuma presented  a new government growth path based on a series of sweeping infrastructural projects, including the creation of five geographically centered development corridors across the country. This has been interpreted as part of an experiment with the Chinese model of state directed capitalism. But while South Africa’s business press has focused on the perceived economic pitfalls of this strategy there has been comparably little discussion of the political and social implications of the government attempting to emulate a regime which has combined a flourishing consumer society with an equally sophisticated police state.

With Enough Bullets...

by Christopher McMichael, Think Africa Press

Ongoing revelations about the alleged ‘death squad’ activities of Durban’s Cato Manor organised crime unit have opened up a police scandal reminiscent of a crime conspiracy novel.

The South African police unit, according to a newspaper investigation last December, has been responsible for a range of extrajudicial assassinations throughout the province of KwaZulu-Natal including the Mexican drug gang-style assault on the SUV of taxi boss Magojela Ndimande in retaliation for the murder of another policeman. Subsequent reports suggested that the unit may have been involved in at least 51 other ‘suspicious’ deaths.

The shock-and-awe of mega sports events

Christopher McMichael, Open Democracy

The overlap between the security measures for major sporting events and contemporary war zones are a striking and increasingly globalised phenomenon. Lest we forget that the Olympics and the FIFA World Cup are ostensibly about sport and not security, London 2012 chairman Lord Coe was recently moved to offer his assurance that the British capital will not be a “siege city” come August. However the presence of warships, surface to air missiles, thousands of military personal and pre-emptive bans on protest suggests otherwise.

Take Back the Common

by Christopher McMichael, Mahala

This Friday communities around the Cape will march from Athlone stadium to Rondebosch commons for a three day ‘occupation’. The aim is a public space to discuss solutions to a range of issues: housing, rent arrears, evictions, political corruption and the ongoing segregation in the city.

The chosen site is loaded with historical symbolism. Used once as a military camp by colonial authorities, it was racially integrated before the mass erasures of the Group Areas act. The community groups that have chosen the commons are asserting the right to reclaim public space in a city that, even more so than the rest of the country, is deeply segregated by race and class.

State of emergency 2.0

by Christopher McMichael, Thought Leader

Last week, a fully armed contingent of South African National Defence Force (SANDF) soldiers were enrolled to perform guard duties at the new Khayelitsha district hospital. The reason for the deployment of combat-ready troops in a civilian environment? To patrol a silent protest by 50 members of the Khayelitsha Development Forum. As constitutional law expert Pierre De Vos has pointed out, such an action may violate constitutional restrictions which reserve the internal usage of the SANDF for exceptional circumstances.

The Cape Town model, state violence and military urbanism

Christopher McMichael, Open Democracy, 5 January 2012

Lead by the pugnacious Helen Zille, the Democratic Alliance is South Africa’s official opposition party and the governing party of the Western Cape, the only one of nine national provinces not under the control of the ruling ANC. Despite recent successes the party has failed to win substantial support among South Africa’s black majority, due to a widespread perception that, notwithstanding its meretricious rhetoric of an ‘ Open Society’, the party remains a bastion of white privilege. Further scepticism has been created by the parties’ aggressively neoliberal policies which propose to reduce the country’s already partial post-apartheid social welfare system . However, the DA is hoping that the increasingly overt internecine fighting with the ANC will alter South Africa’s political landscape to give it a credible chance of becoming the ruling party by the end of the decade. With the ANC beset by corruption scandals, a growing intolerance for political dissent and the seeming inability to robustly tackle growing levels of social inequality, the DA is attempting to position itself as a pragmatic and efficient government in waiting.

Armoured Cities

by Chris McMichael, Mahlala

The last few weeks have shown how quickly a global police state can be mobilized when people stop listening to rulers and attempt to reclaim public space. Hundreds of protesters In Tahir Square demanding an end to the military generals’ highjacking of the Egyptian revolution were shot dead with US-manufactured weapons and dosed with chemical agents. Meanwhile, in a clampdown co-ordinated through the Department of Homeland Security, police departments in 18 US cities attempted to shut down the Occupations with pepper spray and sonic weapons. In the UK, the government announced a blanket ban on protests during the Olympics next year and have proposed a massive increase in their power of ‘pre-emptive arrest’; an attempt to institute legal clampdowns on dissent under the guise of securing the sporting spectacle.

Nine Important Things

by Christopher McMichael, Mahala

I ran as an independent candidate in the local Makana Muncipality elections (Ward 12), a newly demarcated voting zone, including Rhodes University, in May this year. Representing the Students for Social Justice (SSJ), a recently formed non-hierarchical campus-based organisation, supported by the Unemployed Peoples Movement and the Democratic Left Front. On voting day, the DA won. I managed 130 votes. It may not sound like a lot but in actuality a bunch of students, without money or the support of a political party, missed coming second in the election (and beating the ANC) by just 8 votes.

Shit Slinging, the Media and Occupy#South Africa

by Chris McMichael,  Mahala

The local versions of occupywallstreet# were treated by the mainstream SA media as having no bearing on our social context. As if protesting against political and economic elites, who are privatising the future, has no relevance to South Africa. The admittedly small occupations were treated as incomprehensible: lacking a program and painted as the meaningless boutique protests of a spoiled, confused middle class.

Some Thoughts on 'Algeria Unveiled'

by Chris McMichael

In 'Algeria Unveiled' Fanon takes the veil as a starting point for an exploration of the new Algeria that was being created through the revolution. The veil appeared to stir a profound and visceral orientalism on the part of the French occupier. The veil maintained an ambiguous status in the mind of the coloniser. It was read as a convenient confirmation of all the most pernicious stereotypes about Algerians in particular and Arabs in general. It stood as confirmation of Algeria's backwards patriarchy, of its primitive insularity and of the passivity of Algerian women. In turn these features were used to justify the occupation: such people were begging to be colonised.