let the necklasing commence...
Posted on 03/18/2009 5:47:47 PM PDT by Tailgunner Joe
JACOB Zuma, a certainty to become South Africa's new head of state in four weeks' time, yesterday urged citizens to take the law into their own hands if they got hold of suspected criminals.
The speech, one of the most dangerously irresponsible by a senior leader in recent years, raised the spectre of a return to the 1980s and early 1990s, when instant justice and summary executions were dispensed by township mobs.
"If citizens get hold of criminals, they must not be blamed if they have taken the law into their own hands," Mr Zuma, leader of the African National Congress (ANC), told thousands of party supporters at an election rally in a stadium at Bakenberg in the far north of South Africa near the Limpopo River.
South Africa will host the football World Cup Finals next year, with hundreds of thousands of supporters expected to attend from abroad, yet its rate of violent crime – one of the highest in the world – continues to climb, despite pledges from the government to take the problem in hand.
The most common form of execution in the black townships, in the final years of apartheid, was "necklacing" – jamming a rubber tyre filled with petrol around a victim's chest and arms, and setting it on fire. Victims took up to 20 minutes to die.
Necklacing sentences were handed down against alleged criminals by "people's courts" established in black townships to circumvent the apartheid judicial system. Necklacing was also used to punish members of the black community who were perceived as collaborators with the apartheid regime, such as policemen and their relatives.
Mr Zuma, 65, barnstorming around the country in advance of the fourth post-apartheid all-race poll on 22 April, told his supporters at Bakenberg that criminals enjoyed "too many rights". Some of their rights should be scrapped because "law-abiding citizens are living in fear of crimes".
On the day that all the country's newspapers reported that plans were being made to drop charges against Mr Zuma of corruption, fraud, racketeering, tax evasion and money laundering in connection with South Africa's graft-ridden, multi-billion-pound arms deal with European weapons manufacturers, he said that bail conditions for suspected criminals must be tightened.
"We cannot allow criminals to live among us on the basis of technicalities," he told the cheering crowd.
A decision to drop the charges against Mr Zuma could boost the ANC, which is facing its greatest challenge since apartheid ended in 1994, but cause outrage among opponents.
A meeting of the National Prosecuting Authority was taking place last night in Pretoria on whether or not to abandon the Zuma prosecution.
Tlali Tlali, an NPA spokesman, said: "The matter is under consideration. We will announce our decision when we are ready to do so."
His trial is due to begin in August, by when he is likely to be four months into his four-year term as state president.
Mr Zuma's lawyers have submitted arguments that the charges were part of a political conspiracy against him by Thabo Mbeki, the former president, who was toppled from power last September.
An interim head of state, Kgalema Motlanthe, was appointed pending the general election in April.
The ANC is expected to win the election with a much reduced majority.
Winnie Madikizela-Mandela, the former wife of Nelson Mandela, is fifth on the ANC election list and is expected to be one of Mr Zuma's top ministers.
She also encouraged necklace murders, telling a rally in one infamous 1986 speech: "We have no guns. We have only stones, boxes of matches and petrol.
"Together, hand in hand, with our boxes of matches and our necklaces, we shall liberate this country."
The headline led me to believe it was a story about Obama and AIG!! Wow!
“JACOB Zuma, a certainty to become South Africa’s new head of state in four weeks’ time, yesterday urged citizens to take the law into their own hands if they got hold of suspected criminals.”
Didn’t Barney Frank express similar sentiments today?
Ditto.
He’s blowing smoke. The criminals run South Africa now.
South Africa is now approaching the model of Somalia. The great cities of Pretoria, Johannesburg and Durban are now virtually run by criminal gangs. Law enforcement is outmanned and outgunned and private security firms now have to perform military type operations to take back blocks of apartment buildings that have been seized and occupied by criminal gangs. Ironically the leaders of many of these gangs are illegals from other parts of Africa, mainly Nigerians.
In most of the townships there is no law enforcement presence and the people there long ago decided to take the law into their own hands. What has happened to this once rich and powerful country is nothing less than a descent into barbarism.
“The headline led me to believe it was a story about Obama and AIG!!”
It is, almost.
I love it when two commies fight each other.
let the necklasing commence...
[cue Weezer]
“When I was younger
“I used to tip presidents for fun, yeah
“Actually I didn’t do that
“’Cause I didn’t want the president to be sad...”
Say what you will about past regimes, but the Boers and British were competent.
Coming soon to a US neighborhood near you.
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