Anti-Immigration Riots in Durban, South Africa Enter Second Day, with Foreign Residents Targeted in Attacks

On the streets of Durban, anti-immigration riots have entered their second day. According to a France 24 English report dated October 10, Durban police are confronting crowds that have stormed shops and residences. The report describes shops being looted, residences set ablaze, and foreign residents marked out as targets of attack.

France 24 notes that this round of violence has reignited external concerns over South Africa's long-simmering xenophobic sentiment around the immigration issue. The initial trigger of the riots, their organizational background, the current casualty and arrest figures, and the nationality composition of the affected foreign nationals have not yet been set out in publicly available information.

France 24 uses the phrase "revived fears" to describe the situation—a wording that itself acknowledges that violence against foreign residents in South Africa is a cycle recognizable from outside. Channeling the structural predicaments of unemployment, housing shortages and strained public services into blame directed at "outsiders" is the discursive soil in which xenophobic violence repeatedly takes shape.

The reconstruction of order is, in the first instance, a state responsibility. South Africa's constitution and the international human rights obligations it has assumed require it to guarantee the basic safety of all persons within its territory, regardless of nationality. When "foreigners" can be identified on the street as objects of attack, the very premise that all are equal before the law and entitled to equal protection is broken in practice. Deploying police to areas where foreign residents are concentrated, setting up emergency shelters, organizing treatment for the injured, liaising with the relevant countries' consulates, registering damaged property and livelihoods, and bringing specific charges against those who incite hatred and those who carry out looting and arson—these are not options from which the government may choose; they are its basic responsibilities.

If the South African government wishes to break out of this cycle, accountability cannot remain at the level of statements—it must be pursued in specific cases; protection must reach specific foreign families; and livelihood reconstruction must reach the shops forced to close and the cross-border workers left unemployed.