War on Somalis in South Africa

[Futurist]

Port Elizabeth - Aisha Ali Noor, 29, sits on the bed in her dimly lit first-floor apartment on Durban Road in the Port Elizabeth suburb of Korsten. It is 07:30 and outside her window the road is already alive with activity as shop owners and traders load their bakkies with goods from the numerous Somali wholesalers that line both sides of the street.

"I'm afraid all the time," Noor tells GroundUp via a translator. "I don't go out anymore unless I have to. I'm worried I will be killed."

Noor came to South Africa in 2011 after losing both her parents in Somalia. She left four children back home and joined her husband in Port Elizabeth.

In 2014 Noor's husband and his business partner were stabbed to death in front of her in their spaza shop in Motherwell, Port Elizabeth's largest township.

Noor managed to escape, but she says she has been robbed and assaulted "six or seven times" since then. She showed GroundUp a number of police statements and case dockets that support her claims. In the most recent incident, which was reported on February 26, she was so badly beaten that she had to be hospitalised.

According to Fwamba Mukole, manager of Port Elizabeth's Refugee Centre, a United Nations-funded project, Noor's experiences are far from unique in the city, which has an estimated Somali population of around 6 000.

"Robbery of Somalis is happening on an almost daily basis here," says Mukole, "and it's almost always accompanied by serious violence".

Mukole, who arrived as a refugee from the Democratic Republic of Congo and has since married a South African, works closely with a number of refugees and asylum seekers from the local Somali community. He claims that most of the Somalis that come into his office will not even take public transport for fear of being harassed, attacked or robbed.

"It's like they are living in an open prison," he says.

'No one helped us'

Mukole currently shares his offices with Shureim Said, 27, chairperson of a newly-formed Somali NPO called the Integrated Development for Peace Initiative (IDPI), which assists the Refugee Centre as a mediator between the Somali community, many members of whom struggle with English, and hospitals, the police and property owners. IDPI also provides financial assistance to families who have lost their breadwinners in attacks.

Said came to South Africa in 2005. His mother had taken him from Somalia to Dadaab refugee camp in Kenya when he was a small child. Said attended primary school in the camp until his mother died, and then his uncle brought him to South Africa.

He says that in 2008 he was "almost killed" while taking a taxi through Port Elizabeth with his sister. He had asked a fellow passenger to move up because the passenger was sitting too close to his sister and making her feel uncomfortable. The passenger responded by assaulting him.

"Then the taxi driver stopped and joined in, the conductor too, and even the passengers. They were all beating and kicking us. Someone stabbed me in the back. I was crying. My sister was crying. No one helped us."

Amir Sheikh, chairperson of the Somali Community Board, said data gathered by his organisation suggests that more than 100 Somalis are killed in South Africa every year. The number of convictions for these crimes nationally since 2008 is still in single figures.

"The police don't care. Even if you call them, they won't even come. When they hear your voice, that you are a Somalian, they just put the phone down on you. Sometimes when you ask why they don't help, they just ask you why you don't go back home," said Shureim Said, summing up Port Elizabeth's Somali community's relationship with the police.

According to Aden, the violence against Somalis is getting worse, not better.

"If two or three days pass without an attack on Somalis, I'm surprised. We came to South Africa to try to escape a war zone. But we just moved from one war zone to another war zone."

http://www.news24.com/SouthAfrica/News/ ... h-20161025

[gobdoon]

My advice get out of there security and well being of you and your families should be your top priority on the other hand anything that happens to us somalis we deserve it tell me about it we kill each other and ruined our country so we surely need some hard lessons to remind what we lost and destroyed.

[Basra-]

Why would u want to live among adoons? South Africans are the very definition of what an adoon is. This anomaly puzzles me.

[gobdoon]

Madam
Good question , if you dont mind me calling you madam.