8/2/08

South Africa to close camps for displaced foreigners: official

JOHANNESBURG (AFP) — South Africa is to close camps set up around Johannesburg and Cape Town for thousands of foreigners displaced in May anti-immigrant attacks, officials said Friday.

Six camps in Gauteng Province, which includes economic capital Johannesburg, housing about 3,000 foreigners, are to be formally closed on August 15, with the remainder due to shut over the following weeks. There are about 4,200 people camped in 45 sites across Western Cape Province in the southeast.

"We would like everybody to be fully reintegrated by September 3," the local director of a disaster management centre in Western Cape, Hildegarde Fast, told AFP.

But that deadline may be shifted in certain camps "because we understand that there might be some very difficult cases: people who do not want to be reintegrated but cannot be repatriated because they come from conflict zones," she said.

Some 16,000 immigrants have already left the camps of the province and a "majority" have been returned home or to alternative zones, she added.

But the fear of becoming targets of fresh attacks lingers.

Since victims of xenophobic attacks began to return to their homes in Western Cape, five foreigners have been killed and seven others injured, the weekly Mail and Guardian reported.

The police confirmed the killing on Tuesday of only one immigrant.

"It is very difficult sometimes to separate what is simply a robbery and what is something specifically motivated by xenophobia," Fast said.

The newspaper also reported cases of racketeers offering immigrants protection.

Foreigners, notably Zimbabweans and Mozambicans, were targeted in May during the wave of the anti-immigrant attacks in which at least 62 were killed and tens of thousands were displaced.

The foreigners were accused of crimes and stealing jobs from South Africans.






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