Word: africa
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...South Africa in Crisis The recent spate of xenophobic violence in South Africa [June 2] is shocking and embarrassing to witness. Apart from the official reasons given, the problem boils down to "have and have not." Many South Africans - those who have built a life with the fruits of their labor - have suffered heavy losses through violence and theft. The criminals are said to be opportunists and not necessarily part of an organized group, but the relative inefficiency with which the government dealt with the violence poses the question: How long before mobs turn on the middle and upper income...
...recent incidents of xenophobia in South Africa not only reveal the brutality of some criminals, they also show the government's difficulties in fighting poverty. Although South Africa's economy has been growing constantly, people in the townships - especially migrant workers from Zimbabwe - do not really benefit. I wonder whether the attacks will impact on South Africa's staging of the 2010 World Cup. Adrian Lobe, STUTTGART, GERMANY...
...Globalization might be creating rich countries with poor people," economist Joseph Stiglitz has noted. That is apparent in South Africa, whose postapartheid government adopted an open-market economy that drew cheers from Wall Street and the international banking community and helped achieve an impressive, steady annual economic growth rate of 4-5%. But that growth has done little to reverse inequality or dangerously high levels of unemployment. In November last year, the South African Institute of Race Relations estimated 4.2 million South Africans were living on $1 a day in 2005, up from 1.9 million in 1996, two years after...
...long truck ride through a desert or a dangerous boat ride across open sea, globalization is often much less forgiving. Millions of people every year seek to migrate, legally and illegally, from poor countries, either to the industrialized world or to more prosperous developing countries such as South Africa. But the poor in the developing world are determined not to diminish the little they have by sharing it with foreign migrants and, like many in the rich world, are erecting barriers to outsiders settling in their midst...
...Along with the growing cosmopolitanism of the wealthy and the professionals of the new economy, globalization has been accompanied by a surge in xenophobia. The phenomenon may have taken a graphically violent form in South Africa recently, but even in Europe the surge of populist xenophobia since the 1990s has propelled previously fringe groups such as the British National Party, Jean-Marie Le Pen's National Front in France, neo-Nazis in Germany and the assassinated Pim Fortuyn's eponymous party in the Netherlands into the political mainstream. Last October, the Swiss People's Party won the largest single share...