Xenophobia - Paper

Danelle Rossouw CMY3705 Assignment 02

43779689

CONTENTS 1. Introduction…………………………………………………………………………………………………………. 2 2. Xenophobia in South Africa………………………………………………………………………………….2-3 3. Analyses of the attacks………………………………………………………………………………………….3 4. Roots of Xenophobia……………………………………………………………………………………………4-5 5. Solutions……………………………………………………………………………………………………………….5 6. Conclusion…………………………………………………………………………………………………………….5 7. Bibliography………………………………………………………………………………………………………….6 8. Appendix A……………………………………………………………………………………………………………7

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Danelle Rossouw CMY3705 Assignment 02

43779689

Introduction One dictionary definition of Xenophobia is an unreasonable fear, distrust, or hatred of strangers, foreigners, or anything perceived as foreign or different. Xenophobia can manifest itself in several ways in a country-victimization by police, brutal assaults, murders, ethnic cleansing in an area, mass expulsion from the country. Despite a lack of directly comparable data, xenophobia in South Africa is perceived to have significantly increased after the installation of a democratic government in 1994. Xenophobia in South Africa Claims that South Africans were becoming increasingly antagonistic towards foreign citizens began to surface in the mid 1990s. Violent attacks on non-South African traders erupted on the sidewalks of Johannesburg in 1996 and assaults on foreign citizens became increasingly common in a number of cities. This culminated in 1998 with the death of three foreign citizens on a moving train at the hands of a group of South Africans returning from a rally of the unemployed in Pretoria. Human Rights Watch, the international human rights monitoring organization, conducted a South African field investigation in 1998 and concluded: South Africa has become increasingly xenophobic in recent years, with a large percentage of South Africans perceiving foreigners -especially, almost exclusively black foreigners as a direct threat to their future economic...