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To: E. Charters who wrote (19937)	12/29/2003 8:26:08 PM
From: sea_urchin	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 81177

Mr Charters > Is this racial stuff, i.e. the killing of whites, or is is just societal breakdown generally and not racially motivated per se? I would say neither. It isn't societal breakdown because the violence mainly happens in those parts of the population which one could hardly say are part of "society". In fact, although about 44 million people live in SA, I would consider that "society", as you call it, involves maybe half of those. Without any doubt most crimes are not racially motivated. In fact, in the past ten years, crimes which one could perhaps say were racially motivated, ie the killing of white farmers, accounted for fewer than 2000 murders. This is not a trivial number, by no means, but hardly a "mass murder" of whites. The government denies there was a racial motivation to these crimes but I'm not so sure. It's my feeling that many were revenge killings because they were so brutal. Furthermore, land ownership/occupancy in SA is a very contentious issue particularly since most of the land is owned by whites. Anyway, one does not hear much about farm murders these days, except on the internet. guardian.co.uk africancrisis.org As an aside, I live in Johannesburg, the "Murder Capital" of the world. From time to time, usually because an insect walks over one of the infra-red sensors, my radio alarm goes off and the armed, rapid-response guys appear at my house looking for an intruder. I occasionally go out and talk to them and usually ask them about the crime in the area and invariably, certainly for the past few years, they tell me that things are "very quiet". In fact, one seldom hears about a murder of a white person in Johannesburg although I'm not denying that there are and, without any doubt, there have been many in the past. Hijacking is, however, still quite common. If you are interested in getting the "feel" of crime in SA, generally, here's a "tongue-in-cheek" series of articles written by a SAn girl and published in a Russian blog: exile.ru It's actually my feeling that crime, certainly in Johannesburg, is on the wain. This is not because of the police or because the criminals are reforming, but because they are dying --- of AIDS. Most of the criminals are unemployed and come from areas of no sanitation, no hygiene, endemic malnutrition and disease etc etc and I think they have been amongst the first to die in the epidemic. In fact, one seldom sees "stray" blacks wandering about in the suburbs like one used to. There are, today, many non-SAn blacks living in SA, eg from Nigeria, Congo, Zimbabwe, Mozambique and much of the crime is attributed to syndicates in which these people are involved.