'People laughed as robbers died'

Johannesburg - The South African government's continued failure to bring crime under control is leading a growing number of citizens to start taking the law into their own hands, often with deadly results.

"It is sometimes justifiable," says Frits Kreil, who runs a self-styled "community policing forum" in Johannesburg's northern Randburg suburb.

"People are fed up with crime and resort to killing to protect their lives and those of their loved ones."

In one of the latest such incidents, three members of an armed gang were killed when a local at a pub in the suburb of Emmarentia opened fire as they robbed and pistol-whipped customers earlier this month.

The locals raised their glasses as the robbers lay dying and then rang the police. As one of the drinkers told the Beeld newspaper: "They died slowly, we all stood and laughed."

While reluctant to give their names, regulars at the pub voiced few regrets about the incident to AFP after the shooting.

"We cannot live our lives in fear any more," said one. "Whenever we feel threatened or attacked, we shoot and call the police later."

The feeling that summoning the police is pointless is widespread in one of the world's most crime-ridden countries. More than half a million burglaries or robberies were reported last year while 18 528 people were murdered.

Kriel said that he would neither "criticise nor condone" the practice of opening fire before calling the police but acknowledged that it went on.

"Citizens feel they live in danger, and sometimes waiting for cops is a huge time delay," he said.

While the white middle-class can afford to invest in hi-tech security systems in order to prevent their homes being targeted, residents in the black townships cannot afford such luxuries.

Austin Dube, who runs a scheme similar to Kriel's in the Alexandra township, said his fellow neighbourhood patrollers had more trust from the local community than the regular police.

"We get complaints and also realise that the police do not respond in time to emergency calls because they use cars for their own purposes," said Dube.

"This promotes the idea of people dealing with criminals their own way. They are fed up," he added.

The police and government both claim that they are beginning to make inroads into the crime rate but analysts say that people are feeling as unsafe as ever.

"The reason citizens respond the way they do is because they have lost confidence not only in the police but the whole criminal justice system," said Antoinette Louw of the Pretoria-based Institute for Security Studies (ISS).

"More often than not, people are told there are no (police) vehicles, or personnel. That is why they take the law into their own hands," she added.

The first signs of South Africans taking the law into their own hands was seen in the late 1990s when kangaroo courts began springing up, particularly in rural areas.

When a group of street vendors caught up with an armed robber soon after he raided a garage in Durban this week, they beat him so badly that he needed life-saving treatment in hospital.

Two suspected rapists were killed in the same city several weeks ago when a mob dragged them from a police car and stoned them to death shortly after their arrest.

National police spokesperson Phuti Setati said taking the law into one's own hands was "not allowed, and will never be tolerated."

"We do not encourage people to go around taking the law into their own hands. Instead if possible, we encourage them to effect citizen's arrest and call the police," he told AFP.

A Warning For America From South Africa

By Gemma Meyer (Gemma Meyer is the pseudonym of a South African journalist. She and her husband, a former conservative member of parliament, still reside in South Africa.)

People used to say that South Africa was 20 years behind the rest of the Western world. Television, for example, came late to South Africa (but so did pornography and the gay rights movement).

Today, however, South Africa may be the grim model of the future Western world, for events in America reveal trends chillingly similar to those that destroyed our country.

America's structures are Western. Your Congress, your lobbying groups, your free speech, and the way ordinary Americans either get involved or ignore politics are peculiarly Western, not the way most of the world operates. But the fact that only about a third of Americans deem it important to vote is horrifying in light of how close you are to losing your Western character.

Writing letters to the press, manning stands at county fairs, hosting fund-raising dinners, attending rallies, setting up conferences, writing your Congressman - that is what you know, and what you are comfortable with. Those are the political methods you've created for yourselves to keep your country on track and to ensure political accountability.

But woe to you if - or more likely, when - the rules change. White Americans may soon find themselves unable or unwilling to stand up to challenge the new political methods that will be the inevitable result of the ethnic metamorphosis now taking place in America. Unable to cope with the new rules of the game - violence, mob riots, intimidation through accusations of racism, demands for proportionality based on racial numbers, and all the other social and political weapons used by the have-nots to bludgeon treasure and power from the haves - Americans, like others before them, will no doubt cave in. They will compromise away their independence and ultimately their way of life.

That is exactly what happened in South Africa. I know, because I was there and I saw it happen.

Faced with revolution in the streets, strikes, civil unrest and the sheer terror and murder practiced by Nelson Mandela's African National Congress (ANC), the white government simply capitulated in order to achieve "peace."

Westerners need peace. They need order and stability. They are builders and planners. But what we got was the peace of the grave for our society.

The Third World is different - different peoples with different pasts and different cultures. Yet Westerners continue to mistake the psychology of the Third World and its peoples. Sierra Leone and Zimbabwe are perfect examples of those mistakes. Sierra Leone is in perpetual civil war, and Zimbabwe - once the thriving, stable Rhodesia - is looting the very people (the white men) who feed the country. Yet Westerners do not admit that the same kind of savagery could come to America when enough immigrants of the right type assert themselves. The fact is, Americans are sitting ducks for Third World exploitation of the Western conscience of compassion.

Those in the West who forced South Africa to surrender to the ANC and its leaders did not consider Africa to be the dangerous, corrupt, and savage place it is now in Zimbabwe and South Africa. Those Western politicians now have a similar problem looming on their own doorsteps: the demand for power and treasure from the non-Western peoples inside the realm.

It is already too late for South Africa, but not for America if enough people strengthen their spine and take on the race terrorists, the armies of the "politically correct" and, most dangerous of all, the craven politicians who believe "compassionate conservatism" will buy them a few more votes, a few more days of peace.

White South Africans, you should remember, have been in that part of Africa for the same amount of time whites have inhabited North America; yet ultimately South Africans voted for their own suicide. We are not so very different from you.

We lost our country through skillful propaganda, pressure from abroad (not least from the U.S.A.), unrelenting charges of "oppression" and "racism," and the shrewd assessment by African tyrants that the white man has many Achilles' heels, the most significant of which are his compassion, his belief in the "equality of man," and his "love your neighbor" philosophy - none of which are part of the Third World's history.

The mainline churches played a big role in the demise of Western influence throughout Africa, too; especially in South Africa. Today's tyrants were yesterday's mission-school proteges. Many dictators in Africa were men of the cloth. They knew their clerical collars would deflect criticism and obfuscate their real aims, which had nothing whatever to do with the "brotherhood of man."

Other tyrants, like the infamous Idi Amin, were trained and schooled by the whites themselves, at Oxford, Cambridge, and Harvard. After receiving the best from the West, they unleashed a resentful bloodlust against their benefactors.

From what I have seen and read thus far, I fear Americans will capitulate just as we did. Americans are, generally, a soft lot. They don't want to quarrel or obstruct the claims of those who believe they were wronged. They like peace and quiet, and they want to compromise and be nice.

A television program that aired in South Africa showed a town meeting somewhere in Southern California where people met to complain about falling standards in the schools. Whites who politely spoke at the meeting clearly resented the influx of Mexican immigrants into their community. When a handful of Chicanos at the back of the hall shouted and waved their hands at them, the whites simply shrunk back into their seats rather than tell the noisemakers to shut up. They didn't want to quarrel.

In America, the courts are still the final arbiters of society's laws. But what will happen when your future majority refuses to abide by court rulings - as in Zimbabwe. What will happen when the new majority says the judges are racists, and that they refuse to acknowledge "white man's justice"? What will happen when the courts are filled with their people, or their sympathizers? In California, Proposition 187 has already been overturned.

What will you do when the future non-white majority decides to change the names of streets and cities? What will you do when they no longer want to use money that carries the portraits of old, dead white "racists" and slave owners? Will you cave in, like you did on flying the Confederate flag? What about the national anthem? Your official language?

Don't laugh. When the "majority" took over in South Africa, the first targets were our national symbols.

In another generation, America may well face what Africa is now experiencing - invasions of private land by the "have-nots;" the decline in health care quality; roads and buildings in disrepair; the banishment of your history from the education of the young; the revolutionization of your justice system.

In South Africa today, only 9 percent of murderers end up in jail. Court dockets are regularly purchased and simply disappear. Magistrates can be bribed as can the prison authorities, making escapes commonplace. Vehicle and airplane licenses are regularly purchased, and forged school and university certificates are routine.

What would you think of the ritual slaughter of animals in your neighbor's backyard? How do you clean up the blood and entrails that litter your suburban streets? How do you feel about the practice of witchcraft, in which the parts of young girls and boys are needed for "medicinal" purposes? How do you react to the burning of witches?

Don't laugh. All that is quite common in South Africa today.

Don't imagine that government officials caught with their fingers in the till will be punished. Excuses - like the need to overcome generations of white racism - will be found to exonerate the guilty.

In fact, known criminals will be voted into office because of a racial solidarity among the majority that doesn't exist among the whites. When Ian Smith of the old Rhodesia tried to stand up to the world, white South African politicians were among the Westerners pressuring him to surrender.

When Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe murders his political opponents, ignores unfavorable court decisions, terrorizes the population and siphons off millions from the state treasury for himself and his friends, South Africa's new President Thabo Mbeki holds his hand and declares his support. That just happened a few weeks ago.

Your tax dollars will go to those who don't earn and don't pay. In South Africa, organizations that used to have access to state funds such as old age homes, the arts, and veterans' services, are simply abandoned.

What will happen is that Western structures in America will be either destroyed from without, or transformed from within, used to suit the goals of the new rulers. And they will reign either through terror, as in Zimbabwe today, or exert other corrupt pressures to obtain, or buy votes. Once power is in the hands of aliens, don't expect loyalty or devotion to principle from those whose jobs are at stake. One of the most surprising and tragic components of the disaster in South Africa is how many previously anti-ANC whites simply moved to the other side.

Once you lose social, cultural, and political dominance, there is no getting it back again.

Unfortunately, your habits and values work against you. You cannot fight terror and street mobs with letters to your Congressmen. You cannot fight accusations of racism with prayer meetings. You cannot appeal to the goodness of your fellow man when the fellow man despises you for your weaknesses and hacks off the arms and legs of his political opponents.

To survive, Americans must never lose the power they now enjoy to people from alien cultures. Above all, don't put yourselves to the test of fighting only when your backs are against the wall. You will probably fail.

Millions around the world want your good life. But make no mistake: They care not for the high-minded ideals of Thomas Jefferson and George Washington, and your Constitution. What they want are your posessions, your power, and your status.

And they already know that their allies among you, the "human rights activists," the skillful lawyers and the left-wing politicians will fight for them, and not for you. They will exploit your compassion and your Christian charity, and your good will.

They have studied you, Mr. and Mrs. America, and they know your weaknesses well.

They know what to do.

Do you?

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