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Gangs take over the drugflooded Flats of South Africa

A year after pictures of Muslim vigilantes publicly executing gang leader
Rashaad Staggie were transmitted around the globe, open warfare has broken
on the Cape Flats. As innocents die, the South African police are impotent
in the face of crisis. By Mary Braid

Now was the time to light a candle against the darkness, the vigil
organiser told the hundreds of terrified residents who filled Cape Town's
City Hall.

They came to seek refuge from the violenceridden Cape Flats, home to the
city's poor coloured (mixed race) population. Even as the choir burst into
song and the wax began to drip, the war between gangsters, who control the
Flats, and the Muslim vigilante group Pagad continued, with titfortat
attacks on mosques and alleged drugdealers' homes.

It is more than a year now since the conflict first burst on to our
television screens with the horrific public torching and execution by Pagad
supporters of Rashaad Staggie, 40, who with his twin Rashied headed the
Hard Livings gang.

Since then Pagad has continued its war with the gangsters who flood the
Flats with mandrax, dagga (cannabis) and harder drugs. Once, Pagad
supporters marched in their thousands to the homes of dealers chanting
"Allah is great" and demanding that they leave the neighbourhood. Now they
have become urban guerrillas, turning up, masked, in the dead of night, to
assassinate dealers. They are spurred on by the calls of spiritual leaders
who declare that "the time for killing" has come.

Herman Kriel, premier of the Western Cape, warned recently that Pagad had
become as much a threat to order as the gangs.

In the last few weeks it is the innocents who have died in even greater
numbers than usual. A baby was burned to death in a grenade attack which
also blew off her older brother's leg and badly burned her mother and sister.

Despite Pagad's insistence that it was not responsible for the death and
injuries, police say the vigilantes mistakenly targeted the family; the
local mandrax dealer lived further up the street. In another incident Pagad
beat and shot a man they mistook for a dealer.

If the vigilantes are mishitting, so too are the gangsters. Last week Dr
Mogammat Dharsey was shot dead in his practice surgery. A gang had
apparently assumed that he was a Pagad member just because he had attended
the funeral of a friend who was. Muslim traders are also being killed
because the gangsters believe that they are funding Pagad.

The violence, which has so far been contained to the sandy flats to which
tens of thousands of coloureds were banished during the apartheid years, is
spiralling out of control. It now poses a real threat to South Africa's
blossoming tourist industry.

The government is struggling to find a solution. Last week 300 extra
policemen were promised for the area, although only 70 actually arrived.

Publicly, ministers refuse to negotiate with the gangsters although behind
the scenes talks are going on. This week President Nelson Mandela supported
a decision not to back a local police initiative to hold talks with Pagad.

The African National Congress is suspicious of Pagad, which it claimed has
a wider Islamic agenda, and may be backed by hardline Islamic governments.
The government prefers to focus attention on claims that a Third Force is
inflaming the violence, after a bizarre allegation by a young prisoner this
week that prison officers were allowing inmates out each night to terrorise
the Flats. During the last years of apartheid there were persistent
allegations that a mysterious Third Force was behind much of the violence
in the country,

The trouble is that in this drama none of the main players Pagad, the
gangsters or the police are what they seem to be.

The birth of Pagad has alllowed the gangs to present themselves as victims.
Oncebitter rivals have banded together to form Core (Community Outreach
Forum) and have marched on parliament to demand that the government deal
with them as the creation of a racist past.

Apartheid, according to Rashied Staggie, made the gangsters. "We did it to
survive," claimed Rashied, who argues that dealers will pack up shop if the
government creates employment on the Flats.

>From their local shebeen headquarters, Core adapts Marxist class analysis
to present its members as downtrodden members of the coloured working class
and Pagad as middleclass Islamic intellectuals who have no notion of what
it takes to survive. Playing on the alienation of a coloured population
which believes it was "never white enough for the Nats and now not black
enough for the ANC", Core says that the new government does not care for
the coloured community.

The gangsters' reinvention of themselves is disingenuous. Handsome Staggie,
in designer jeans and mirrored shades, drives around in a flash fourwheel
drive and owns property all over the Cape. Pagad argues, rightly, that the
drug barons have grown rich by inflicting misery on the poor. But it faces
a hard battle for hearts and minds.

Rashied Staggie, labelled as a psychopath in prison, is seen as a
modernday Robin Hood by an ambivalent community. And while Pagad can bring
thousands of ordinary people on to the streets, so too can the gangsters.
"He drives past local schools throwing 10 rand notes to the kids," said one
local community worker. "He pays people's rents and provides local jobs."
Like any prominent businessman he sponsors the local football team.

Staggie can afford the best that money can buy, including, it is rumoured,
public relations consultants. He has taken to speaking at school assemblies
where he tells children that he has given up the drug trade and warns them
to shun the gangs.

Heartwarming stuff, but hogwash according to Pagad's national commander,
Aslam Toefy. "Core is nothing but an organised crime syndicate," he said,
adding that lighting candles is no protection against crime.

Wilfred Scharf, a criminology professor at the University of Cape Town,
concurs that Core, hemmed in by new antigangster laws, is trying to
protect a business which has enjoyed considerable growth since the end of
apartheid opened South Africa up to the international drug trade.

Unfortunately, the expansion came just when the criminal justice system
and the police in particular was in transformation and least able to
cope. The police combating the war on the Flats are hampered by the
corruption that riddles their ranks. Many officers have longstanding ties
with the gangs which were used by both sides during the apartheid years.
"Favours are still owed and information still has to be suppressed,"
Professor Scharf said.

In this mire the government and the honest cops must find some light.
Third Force investigations may not be that outlandish. "It would not
surprise me and I am not a conspiracy theorist," Professor Scharf said.