Reports have repeatedly surfaced about Mozambican women and children being sold into forced servitude or sexual bondage in South Africa by Mozambican smugglers. The significant rise in open prostitution in South Africa since liberalization of morality laws in the s also raises concerns about the trafficking of women into South Africa for purposes of forced sexual labor. In addition to these formal structures, informal community structures are in existence to "aid" these agencies in tracking down and arresting undocumented migrants.
Most South African police stations play at least a contributory role in tracking down and arresting undocumented migrants during their ordinary duties. In urban centers with large numbers of undocumented migrants, such as Johannesburg, arrest records suggest that tracking down undocumented migrants is one of the major occupations of many police officers.
Frequently, undocumented migrants are arrested in order to boost arrest figures. For example, when the Johannesburg police announced in June that they had arrested 11, suspects in recent crime sweeps as part of a high-density crime operation, a closer reading revealed that 5, of those arrested were undocumented immigrants. By the time of our investigation, at least fourteen such ITUs were operating in South Africa, mostly in major urban areas and in areas with high concentrations of undocumented migrants such as the border area with Mozambique.
In addition to the ITUs, there exists a national Aliens Investigation Unit which concentrates on the organized inflow of undocumented migrants into South Africa and certain wide-spread fraudulent practices associated with the issuing of false documents. The Department of Home Affairs also identifies and arrests undocumented migrants, although it focuses mostly on processing the suspected undocumented migrants detained by the police and army. Human Rights Watch interviewed a number of persons who had been arrested on the street by officials from the Department of Home Affairs, while police officials at Johannesburg Central police station confirmed that persons are detained directly by the Department of Home Affairs at their offices at 15 Market Street in Johannesburg.
The director of admissions and migrants control confirmed that the Department of Home Affairs itself traces and arrests suspected undocumented migrants. One company, comprising an estimated soldiers, is constantly deployed on the Mozambican border. The army also uses mobile vehicle control points as well as road blocks to inspect vehicles and intercept undocumented migrants as they make their way to urban centers.
The fence runs for sixty-three kilometers between the Swaziland border and the South African border town of Komatipoort.
Take the PTE Academic test in or nearby Komatipoort
Constructed in and turned on in August , the fence was ostensibly created to prevent anti-apartheid guerrillas from the ANC and other liberation movements from infiltrating South Africa via Mozambique. The fence consists of six coils of ten-foot-high razor wire and ten electrified cables, each capable of carrying 3, volts. The fence itself is divided into eleven sections, with each section serviced by a substation and a generator to boost the current.
Current levels can be set at two levels: lethal and non-lethal. It is estimated that more than one hundred people were killed from electrocution by the fence between its turn-on date and February , when the South African authorities reported that the current on the fence was turned down to non-lethal levels and that the current was switched off from time to time.
The use of a lower, non-lethal, current brings its own problems, with people "sticking" to the fence on occasion. Maria Macamo lives in Machava, outside Mozambique's capital city Maputo. She threw wet mud at the fence, and when she did not see any sparks, she assumed that it would be safe to cross through a passage dug underneath the fence by border jumpers.
However, while attempting to pass underneath the fence, she accidentally touched some of the wires and got stuck to the fence, unable to move from the fence until a fellow Mozambican pulled her off. Her left arm was badly scarred, and she told us that she had lost most of the strength in that arm. Unable to perform many forms of physical labor, she now tries to eke out a living selling cashew nuts in Maputo. Maputo's Central Hospital confirms that it receives a number of cases each year of people injured by the border fence, but it does not keep records.
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In addition to these formal structures, an increasing number of informal structures are also playing a role in tracing and arresting undocumented migrants. This development follows an August speech by Minister of Home Affairs Buthelezi in which he called upon the South African public to help his department curb the influx of foreigners by reporting suspected undocumented migrants. According to a resident of Soweto, the Department of Home Affairs has similarly attempted to get the public involved in tracking down undocumented migrants:.
There has been a document issued by the Department of Home Affairs urging the locals to report any Mozambican to the police. It was sort of an underhanded activity, and they were not up-front about it since it was not an official document. But I know it was a police number you had to dial to. There was an unclear Home Affairs seal, and it indicated the reward was fifty rands [U. Senior police officials at Yeoville and Hillbrow confirmed that the public is encouraged to call "crime stop" numbers to report undocumented migrants, and that they regularly trace undocumented migrants this way.
Desmond Lockey M. In addition to general involvement of the public, anti-immigrant community structures are also playing an increasingly active role in the detection of undocumented migrants.
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For example, the African Chamber of Hawkers and Independent Businessmen ACHIB , one of the hawker organizations involved in organizing violent protests against foreign hawkers, has established structures to prevent undocumented migrants from hawking. ACHIB has divided Johannesburg into hawking blocks, and has appointed "block committees" in each hawking block to identify undocumented migrants, place them under "community arrest," and hand them over to the police.
Abuses Committed During Detection and Arrest. All structures involved in the detection, tracing and arrest of undocumented migrants were accused of abuse by the persons interviewed by Human Rights Watch. One of the most common complaints was the arbitrary mechanisms used to identify suspected undocumented migrants for arrest.
The tactics used by the Internal Tracing Units were described in one study:. The internal tracing units of the [South African Police Service] have become adept at spotting an illegal In trying to establish whether a suspect is an illegal sic or not, members of the internal tracing units focus on a number of aspects.
One of these is language: accent, the pronouncement of certain words. Some are asked what nationality they are and if they reply "Sud" African this is a dead give-away for a Mozambican, while Malawians tend to pronounce the letter "r" as "errow". In Durban many claim to be Zulu but speak very little. Some of those arrested as undocumented migrants are found with home-made phrase books in their pockets.
Often they are unable to answer simple questions in Zulu or are caught out if asked who the Zulu king is.
Njovu Kruger Game Lodge, Komatipoort
Often the reply is "Mandela. Appearance is another factor in trying to establish whether a suspect is illegal--hairstyle, type of clothing worn as well as actual physical appearance. In the case of Mozambicans a dead give-away is the vaccination mark on the lower left forearm. Some Mozambicans, knowing this, have taken to either self-mutilation cutting out the vaccination mark , having a tattoo put over it, only wearing long-sleeved shirts and never rolling up the sleeves, or wearing a watch halfway up the arm to cover the mark.
Despite an appearance of objectivity, the indicators used are in fact arbitrary and based upon overly generalized stereotypes. The reliance on these indicators results in the wrongful identification and arrest of a large number of South African citizens as undocumented migrants. Equally troubling is the fact that the identification strategies focus exclusively on black persons, although there are a large number of non-black persons who overstay their visas in South Africa.
In fact, during our entire investigation, all persons we saw in detention were black including Indian and Pakistani detainees. Human Rights Watch interviewed a significant number of persons who were in detention after being wrongfully identified as undocumented migrants.
Benneth Mabaso, awaiting deportation at Komatipoort police station, related to us how he had lived in South Africa his entire life, but had received a Mozambican inoculation mark during a visit to Mozambique with his Mozambican father. A week before our visit, soldiers had destroyed his ID document because he had an inoculation mark:. The soldiers destroyed my ID document a week before. They looked at my inoculation mark and told me my ID was false and ripped it up. They said I couldn't be South African with a mark. Mabaso was traveling to a South African town near the Mozambican border to arrange the funeral for his sister who had recently died, but instead found himself being deported to Mozambique.
Zephaniah Mabaso unrelated to Benneth Mabaso was awaiting deportation at Komatipoort police station. He claimed to be a South African citizen, and showed us a copy of his ID, claiming he kept the original at home out of fear that it would be destroyed by officials. He had received an inoculation during a visit to Mozambique with his mother, and now "wherever I go, I get arrested.
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He told Human Rights Watch how he had been detained because he had a Swaziland inoculation mark, even though he had an ID book on his person. He explained that he had grown up near the Mozambican border and had been inoculated on a visit to relatives in Swaziland. Ethnic groups in border areas can often be found on both sides of the border: Shangaans live in both South Africa and Mozambique, and Swazis live in both South Africa and Swaziland.
Cross-border traffic is frequent, and special procedures even exist to facilitate border crossings for people living in border areas. Under these circumstances, procedures that rely heavily on identifying marks such as inoculation scars often victimize local populations. The standards used for identifying undocumented migrants are often absurd. A newspaper report relates the story of a man who was arrested because, according to the arresting officer, "he walked like a foreigner.
Despite this enormous margin of error, police and the Department of Home Affairs continue to use arbitrary identification marks when arresting suspected illegal immigrants. A "foreign" appearance can mean frequent harassment by police officers. A recent newspaper account described the experience of a Zimbabwean woman legally in South Africa who was arrested three times within an hour in the city center of Johannesburg. The magnitude of the problem of mistaken identification is perhaps best told by the statistics obtained by Human Rights Watch at the Lindela private detention camp and discussed in greater detail in the Lindela section of this report.
Our calculations based on the data obtained suggest that as many as one of out five persons detained by the police on suspicion of being an undocumented migrant is later released after proving his or her identity as a South African citizen or a lawful resident. Detainees in the Gauteng area are brought to the Lindela detention facility by officials from the Department of Home Affairs as well as by police officials. Lindela has permission from the Department of Home Affairs to pick up suspected migrants being detained at certain police stations, such as the Sophiatown Police Station formerly Newlands Police Station.
According to Lindela officials, a large number of detainees brought to the facility by police officials are released prior to intake into Lindela because they were able to satisfy the Department of Home Affairs officials at Lindela that they were South African citizens or were lawfully residing in South Africa. Human Rights Watch witnessed the release of one such person, Robert Mhlambi, during our November 24, , visit to Lindela.
Mhlambi, aged twenty-nine, was traveling in a van with other construction workers to his job site when the van was stopped by police officers from Booysen Police Station.