Dear Sirs:

Your [The Star's] coverage of recent events has largely obscured both the root cause and the only possible cure for the emergence of a murderous strain of xenophobia in Johannesburg's squatter camps.

Yes, it would be nice if the poor were to develop a culture of tolerance, but it would be nicer still to see someone acknowledging that attacks on foreigners are a direct consequence of the government's failure to control immigration.

We refer here to woefully inadequate policing of borders, rampant corruption at Home Affairs and a tendency on the part of some police to look the other way in return for payoffs. This opened the country to an invasion of illegals who apparently number somewhere between six and 12 million.

Free marketeers argue that immigrants are generally zealous people who expand the economic pie. Africanists say we should tolerate them because their countries supported the anti-apartheid struggle. Illegals themselves tell you they are here only because their homelands are hopeless and broken.

All these arguments are to some extent valid, but they mean nothing to our own armies of the desperate, who are forced to live with the overriding truth of this sad matter: illegal aliens sharpen competition for resources that are already in pitifully short supply, and growing scarcer daily as food and taxi prices rise to unbearable levels. For years, their plaints have been ignored by the ruling class, and now there is a price to pay.

There is a solution. Government should apologize for its historical laxity and crack down savagely on those whose sloth and corruption have allowed this situation to develop. It is too late to turn back the tide, but if government says, this far and no further, the faceless leaders of the anti-foreigner revolt might just be persuaded to bury their axes and pangas.

Yours,

R Malan
Parkview