South Africa’s authorities have removed beggars, homeless people and street hawkers from areas where they may come into contact with visitors to the soccer World Cup, civil rights groups said.
Hundreds of poor families have been moved from downtown Cape Town and surrounding suburbs to Blikkiesdorp, a shanty town 16 kilometers (10 miles) away, over the past six months, Ashraf Cassiem, coordinator of the Western Cape Anti-Eviction Campaign, said June 8. In Johannesburg, dozens of blind beggars have been arrested and told to leave the streets since May, said Selvan Chetty, deputy director of the Solidarity Peace Trust.
“As we’ve got closer to the World Cup, we’ve had increasing reports that people are being removed,” Chetty said yesterday in a phone interview from Durban. “In order to impress our foreign visitors, we tend to try and hide the poor people on our streets, even if it is a fact of life.”
The first soccer World Cup to be hosted in Africa opens in Johannesburg tomorrow. Over the past six years, South Africa’s government spent 43 billion rand ($5.5 billion) building stadiums and infrastructure to attract investors and tourists and try to shed an image of a country plagued by violent crime and racial tension.
Authorities in Cape Town and Johannesburg, which hosts both the opening and final matches, denied they had policies to remove people from the streets.
‘Clean-Up Campaign’
“Nobody is being moved against their will,” Kylie Hatton, a spokeswoman for the city of Cape Town, said in a June 8 interview. “There is no policy to remove people from the city streets as a clean-up campaign for the World Cup.”
“It can never happen in Johannesburg,” city spokesman Gabu Tugwana said in a phone interview yesterday. “People who do that are going against policy and need to be investigated.”
John Zimbande, a blind Zimbabwean who has been begging in Johannesburg for a year, said he and his younger brother Walter, who guides him, had been arrested six times since early May. The two earn 50 rand on a good day, he said.
Police “forced us into a car and took us away for the whole day,” Zimbande said in an interview yesterday. “They said: ‘Our visitors don’t want to see you.’ I’ll still try go out because I won’t survive otherwise.”
As many as 3 million Zimbabweans live in South Africa illegally, most of them economic refugees from a decade-long recession in their home country.
Johannesburg and Cape Town by-laws forbid hindering traffic on roads. The rules, which previously were loosely observed, have been used to drive beggars away, said Chetty, whose organization assists Zimbabweans in South Africa.
“People have been picked up by police in the past, but it has risen quite drastically now,” he said.
More than half the 1,700 families who live in Blikkiesdorp, which means ‘tin can town’ in the Afrikaans language, “are here because of the World Cup,” said Jane Roberts, a resident of the settlement and an Anti-Eviction Campaign coordinator.
Hundreds of poor families have been moved from downtown Cape Town and surrounding suburbs to Blikkiesdorp, a shanty town 16 kilometers (10 miles) away, over the past six months, Ashraf Cassiem, coordinator of the Western Cape Anti-Eviction Campaign, said June 8. In Johannesburg, dozens of blind beggars have been arrested and told to leave the streets since May, said Selvan Chetty, deputy director of the Solidarity Peace Trust.
“As we’ve got closer to the World Cup, we’ve had increasing reports that people are being removed,” Chetty said yesterday in a phone interview from Durban. “In order to impress our foreign visitors, we tend to try and hide the poor people on our streets, even if it is a fact of life.”
The first soccer World Cup to be hosted in Africa opens in Johannesburg tomorrow. Over the past six years, South Africa’s government spent 43 billion rand ($5.5 billion) building stadiums and infrastructure to attract investors and tourists and try to shed an image of a country plagued by violent crime and racial tension.
Authorities in Cape Town and Johannesburg, which hosts both the opening and final matches, denied they had policies to remove people from the streets.
‘Clean-Up Campaign’
“Nobody is being moved against their will,” Kylie Hatton, a spokeswoman for the city of Cape Town, said in a June 8 interview. “There is no policy to remove people from the city streets as a clean-up campaign for the World Cup.”
“It can never happen in Johannesburg,” city spokesman Gabu Tugwana said in a phone interview yesterday. “People who do that are going against policy and need to be investigated.”
John Zimbande, a blind Zimbabwean who has been begging in Johannesburg for a year, said he and his younger brother Walter, who guides him, had been arrested six times since early May. The two earn 50 rand on a good day, he said.
Police “forced us into a car and took us away for the whole day,” Zimbande said in an interview yesterday. “They said: ‘Our visitors don’t want to see you.’ I’ll still try go out because I won’t survive otherwise.”
As many as 3 million Zimbabweans live in South Africa illegally, most of them economic refugees from a decade-long recession in their home country.
Johannesburg and Cape Town by-laws forbid hindering traffic on roads. The rules, which previously were loosely observed, have been used to drive beggars away, said Chetty, whose organization assists Zimbabweans in South Africa.
“People have been picked up by police in the past, but it has risen quite drastically now,” he said.
More than half the 1,700 families who live in Blikkiesdorp, which means ‘tin can town’ in the Afrikaans language, “are here because of the World Cup,” said Jane Roberts, a resident of the settlement and an Anti-Eviction Campaign coordinator.
- Bloomberg Businessweek
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