Pages

20091006

Afrikaner poor in forced removals: Krugersdorp

 

Reporter: Adriana Stuijt. October 6 2009.

KRUGERSDORP, KRONINGSPARK -- For the record, I place 3 scanned pages of an article in Afrikaans below, describing the forced-removal threats against a 200-member, empoverished, homeless community of Afrikaners which has been occupying about 10% of a municipal park, Kroningspark for the past six years with their caravans, tents and shanties – but who are now in a face-off with the local ANC-run municipality of Mogale City – the former Krugersdorp, in the gold-mining East-Rand region.

KroningsparkSquattersKrugersdorpFaceForcedRemoval The ANC-regime wants to force these often very frail and impoverished Afrikaners to move to the black squatter camp of Munsieville.  The elders in the Kroningspark camp however are sick, frail pensioned-off mineworkers with lung-diseases who had initially started living in the campsite of Kroningspark, paying fees to the municipality. Amongst them also are their children and grandchildren and other destitute relatives:  45 school-aged children are attending a nearby Afrikaans school. Now most residents cannot afford the campsite fees any more and they also built a small camp for farm-animals such as goats and chickens to provide them with subsistence-food. They also installed a small electricity-generator, begging to buy the fuel for it each month. Their women get up at the crack of dawn to run their communal outdoor kitchen. At the moment, it’s a stand-off because the Afrikaners have obtained a Johannesburg High Court interdict as they are balking at being forcibly removed. They said in their High Court application that their rights were being attacked by this move: their cohesive cultural community would be scattered, the forced move would mean the loss of all their survival tools: namely their few meagre possessions, shacks and livestock and their old-age pensioners, many frail and ill, would probably not survive the move. The court agreed, issuing a successful interdict in the Johannesburg High Court barring Mogale City municipality from attempting any forced removals of this tiny, destitute white community. This sets a precedent for all such communities – but still the threats and animosity against this small group continues.

Internally-displaced Afrikaners’ camps faced with forced removals countrywide:

The ANC-government maintains that before any of these more than 800,000 empoverished, unemployable Afrikaner artisans, teachers, nurses and former officials (130,000 households households are registered with Helping Hand charity at the moment) can even qualify to be placed on their waiting lists for public “HOP” housing, they will first have to go and live in black squatter camps to ‘qualify for registration’...

  And the municipality refuses to move their treasured shanties and caravans and other belongings: these poor people are supposed to only bring their clothes and cooking equipment. Residents balked, saying that all their belongings were survival tools for them, their only earthly possessions – and without these, they would all face certain death in the cold Highveld winters. At Kroningspark, they have the old ablution-blocks and the artificial lake for fresh water: but the municipal spokesmen say these are ‘luxuries’ and if they want reticulation or sewerage facilities, they’ll send a few portaloos.

The Johannesburg High Court agreed with the squatters: recently issuing an interdict to Mogale City council to stop its forced-removal programme of the Afrikaner squatters. However even with this legal precedent, the threats of forced removals still continue for Afrikaner communities like these: many have moved into former campsites and private holiday-resorts which used to be run by the privately-funded Federasie vir Afrikaanse Kultuurverenigings (the Federation of Afrikaans Cultural Organisation) to provide holiday camps for working-class Afrikaner families. Other families have moved into empty government buildings such as schools and even the giant abandoned leprosy-hospital of the Witwatersrand. Keep this in mind: all these people were taxpayers before 1994, and most also were employers of blacks: the average Afrikaner family had at least a gardener and a housekeeper in their employ. Thus hundreds of thousands of blacks have also become unemployed and destitute when these Afrikaners lost their job-rights.

They are terrified:

KroningsparkKrugersdorpSquattersProtestAgaisntForcedRemovalHowever the Kroningspark community is mainly refusing to move out of pure fear: they are terrified – and rightly so – of being targetted by the frequent violence Afrikaners are undergoing each day in South Africa.

A self-reliant community of beggars:

At Kroningspark, this handful of Afrikaners can still protect each other somewhat, although none are of course armed: these destitute Afrikaner pensioners and their families have over the past six years however created a cohesive, reasonably self-reliant community of beggars -- and their women get up each morning at 4am to run their centrally-organised kitchen. Most camp-inmates survive by going out to beg and living off the meagre mining-pensions of their elderly grand/parents, combined. They are all achingly poor, as they have no rights to even apply for state-benefits at all – they do not even  qualify for food-aid from the government, being ‘previously advantaged’, i.e. ‘whites’.  Municipalities maintain their own policies when dealing with the Afrikaner poor: in Port Elizabeth and some municipalities in KwaZulu do provide food-aid to the school-aged children as part of the government ‘s feeding schemes. However in Krugersdorp, they face daily animosity from local council officials.

800,000 out of the 3-million Afrikaners are homeless, destitute and unemployable - The private charity Helping Hand paid for with fees from members of the Solidarity trade union, has set up a programme, wholly reliant on private donations, to try and keep such  communities scattered across South Africa, alive with donated fresh food from the few commercial farms South Africa still has left and annual handouts of coats and blankets. There now are more than 800,000 Afrikaners, but probably many more, living in these conditions says Helping Hand – and South Africa only has 3-million Afrikaners.

Afrikaner Poverty in Wolmer Pretoria - housing project by Solidarity trade union helping hand charity April 2009 And each month, more of even the most skilled Afrikaner artisans lose their homes, are denied jobs under the ANC-laws denying them all access to the labour market -- and have to join this army of destitutes.

Picture: Helping Hand volunteers building shacks for internally-displaced Afrikaner families in Wolmer, April 29 2009.

The Kroningspark community ‘s cohesion also means that they can help protect each other against outside attacks by the many armed youth gangs which roam most of South Africa now, looting, raping and killing at such a rate that more than 1,2-million serious violent crimes were recorded in the latest SAPS statistics.

Many greater-Pretoria and Vaal-triangle smallholdings where such retired Afrikaner workers often live, earning extra income with produce-gardens, such as in Cullinan are under near-nightly attack from such armed gangs. Strangely, hardly anything of value is ever stolen during such organised attacks by these armed youth gangs -- except cellphones with which residents could have called the police. But usually the home-owners are murdered execution-style – the gangs just walk into their bedrooms and gun them down.

 Article was scanned from “ Voorblad “, dated Sept 30 2009, publisher: Freedom Front Plus. The article is headlined:

“In Munsieville our women will be raped”…

AfrikanerSquattersMuncievilleForcedRemovalMay2009

WE AREN’T A BUNCH OF SICK DOGS…

AfrikanerSquatters2MuncievilleForcedRemovalMay2009

we won’t stop fighting – the temporary stand-off:

AfrikSquattersMuncievilleMay2009Page3

 

---------------------------------------------------------

No comments:

Post a Comment

Note: only a member of this blog may post a comment.