JOHANNESBURG (AFP) — President Thabo Mbeki made an impassioned appeal for South Africans to respect the dignity of foreigners as calls grew on Tuesday for troops to be sent in to stamp out xenophobic violence.
The flare-up in the Johannesburg region, now believed to have claimed the lives of 23 people and displaced thousands, has badly stretched police resources in one of the world's most crime-ridden cities.
While the overall situation appeared Tuesday to have calmed down slightly, tension was palpable in many townships where mobs armed with axes and machetes could still be seen roaming the streets.
"Citizens from other countries on the African continent and beyond are as human as we are and deserve to be treated with respect and dignity," said the South African leader, who spent much of the whites-only apartheid era as an exiled guest of neighbouring states.
He said South Africa was bound together with other Africans and was not "an island seperate from the rest of the continent".
In his statement, Mbeki vowed police would get "to the root of the anarchy" and "respond with the requisite measures" against perpetrators.
But the country's biggest labour union and main rights body said the situation now was so serious that the army needed to be deployed.
"As the days are progressing new areas emerge as hotspots ... Perhaps there is the need to bring in intelligence and try to identify potential areas that may become violent and secure them," Jody Kollapen, chairman of the Human Rights Commission, told AFP.
"We have to look at whether we should at least be willing to talk about whether the army should be deployed. It sounds drastic but we are dealing with a situation that is volatile, that has proven to be highly unpredictable and quite devastating in how it has played out."
The National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) also called for military intervention.
"The state should deploy the army to curb the terrible situation in which poor immigrants and local residents to some extent find themselves" said NUM deputy general secretary Oupa Komane.
The situation in slums around Johannesburg remained tense on Tuesday, with several people injured and another 40 people arrested, bringing the total number of arrests to 297.
In Reiger Park informal settlement where several people were set alight by angry residents on Monday, an AFP photographer saw police fire rubber bullets to disperse a crowd of nearly 400, wielding machetes and sticks, after a tense stand-off.
Police in the inner city dispersed about 200 Nigerians, also carrying machetes and sticks, who were threatening to retaliate and attack South Africans.
Security Minister Charles Nqakula also met with police in the region on Tuesday ahead of a visit to the affected areas.
While the official death toll remained at 22, the SAPA news agency reported another man was killed and several severely assaulted in the Joe Slovo informal settlement.
Many South Africans have blamed immigrants for high levels of crime and unemployment. An estimated three million Zimbabweans are believed to have crossed into South Africa to escape the economic meltdown in their homeland.
Thousands of people have been displaced in the violence which first erupted in the Alexandra township on Monday last week before spreading to other areas of the city.
In response for the calls for the military to be deployed national police spokeswoman Sally De Beer said the police had an "extremely cooperative relationship with (the military) so if we feel the need to call on them we would not hesitate to do so."
"At the moment we have deployed four platoons of the National Intervention Unit. It is a unit that has more specialised training that is usually deployed in medium to high risk situations," she told AFP.
The premier of Gauteng province, which includes Johannesburg and Pretoria, said police should assess the situation and decide whether or not to deploy the army.
"We welcome the decision to deploy additional police in affected areas in the province. I hope this will go a long way to bringing the situation under control without having to involve the army," said Mbhazima Shilowa.
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