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March 25, 2002
In January 2001, local South Africans forcefully evicted a group of Angolans
and Namibians from two squatter camps near Cape Town. The squatters’
houses and belongings were destroyed, even though several of the squatters
were married to South African citizens and/or had valid residence permits;
some had even been naturalized. While those evicted sought refuge at the
police station, the local municipality looked for organizations that could
assist in addressing the crisis. Eventually, the municipality sought out
the Centre for Conflict Resolution (CCR), an independent nongovernmental
organization in Cape Town, to intervene and facilitate a lasting solution
to the conflict.
The intervention team, comprising staff from CCR’s Mediation and
Training Services project and the Human Rights and Conflict Management
Programme (HRCMP), realized that resolving the conflict in this squatter
area required employing both a conflict resolution perspective
and a human rights perspective. An exclusive human rights point of view
would fail to engage the needs, fears, and interests that caused the reluctance
of the local residents to accept the “foreigners” in their
midst. Focusing narrowly on the fears of the South African residents,
however, would give insufficient consideration to the rights of the Angolans
and Namibians. An integrated approach was necessary to reconcile the needs
and interests of the parties within parameters laid down by the South
African Constitution and the law, and to raise rights awareness among
the parties.
Our intervention was not easy. The local residents were reluctant to
accept the idea that the conflict related to issues of rights. The South
African residents did not talk in terms of rights: “rights”
were a foreign notion to them. They talked about such issues as the lack
of employment, infrastructure and housing, the police presence in the
area, and how the “foreigners” might take their jobs. Emphasizing
their own socioeconomic plight, they were not receptive to the notion
that the “foreigners” had rights. Raising rights concerns
in relation to this conflict revealed that xenophobia was a major underlying
cause of tension. The South Africans vehemently rejected the idea that
their actions were motivated even in part by xenophobia; in their view,
the sole problem was the squatters’ alleged criminal activities.
The South Africans threatened to leave the mediation process if the issue
of xenophobia was not dropped.
Our intervention team decided to focus on the needs and interests of
both parties rather than to confront the South Africans. We framed the
issue of xenophobia in terms of the concerns of the parties to the conflict,
slowly building an understanding among the South African residents about
the rights of the Angolans and Namibians living in the settlements. Grounding
a conflict resolution approach in the experiences of community members—by
discussing issues important to them, such as housing, development, employment,
and safety—proved to be an effective (if slow!) way of addressing
human rights concerns. It also helped the locals understand the moral
and legal ramifications of their actions in evicting the “foreigners.”
Typically, human rights actors in South Africa take an adversarial stance
in addressing human rights violations. This practice stems from the country’s
past, when rights were denied and confrontation was understood to be the
only way to challenge injustice. As this case demonstrates, conflict management
skills were instrumental in conveying the meaning and relevance of human
rights to the parties in conflict. In our work with human rights actors,
we find that exposing rights activists to conflict management can greatly
help to build their confidence in raising awareness of rights and addressing
conflicts over rights because they learn how to negotiate over rights
in terms of people’s interests.
The HRCMP has found that linking human rights and peace work requires
different approaches at different times. For training purposes we have
learned to target actors in each field separately. Human rights actors
generally need to develop their capacity to deal with conflict in a constructive
manner while doing human rights work. Conflict management practitioners,
by contrast, need to develop an understanding of the meaning and value
of human rights for their work and to gain the ability to identify human
rights violations. They need to be familiar with various constitutional
and legislative frameworks and must be able to conduct their interventions
in line with the human rights instruments relevant to the context in which
they operate.
While human rights and conflict management audiences may need to be
targeted separately for training, it has become clear that the two groups
need to be brought together when dealing with complex issues such as xenophobia,
land reform, the question of traditional leadership in a constitutional
democracy, and the integration of human rights into peace processes.
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