Cyril Ramaphosa, the president of South Africa, deployed more than 500 soldiers to the port city of Durban on Tuesday, a week after a foreign national was brutally beaten to death there during an anti-immigrant protest.
Durban has been plagued by months of anti-immigrant violence, with protesters setting cars ablaze, looting foreign-owned shops and terrorizing refugees seeking help at immigration offices.
The latest wave of violence was sparked by the nation’s top court striking down a procedural barrier that had kept undocumented migrants from claiming asylum if certain conditions are not met.
In a statement on Monday, Mr. Ramaphosa attributed the violence in Durban to misinformation about the court ruling. The decision, announced in July, had been misrepresented in some quarters to mean that all undocumented immigrants in South Africa would be granted citizenship, jobs and voting rights.
The court’s ruling struck down a provision that prevented immigrants from seeking an asylum claim if they had entered South Africa illegally or failed to report their arrival within the required five-day period. It ruled that all asylum claims must first be assessed on the merits.
The soldiers are scheduled to support the South African police under “Operation Prosper,” a joint security initiative announced by the president earlier this year. The operation is aimed at combating serious crime, restoring law and order and stabilizing volatile areas in South Africa.
Tens of thousands of migrants have already fled South Africa in recent months to escape the violence, in one of the largest mass exoduses in years. Many had come to the nation seeking opportunity in Africa’s largest economy. But anti-immigrant groups in South Africa say public services are overburdened by foreigners and that there are not enough jobs to go around.
The government has previously said that immigration laws must be enforced by authorized state institutions, and that members of the public may not take the law into their own hands by threatening or attacking foreign nationals.
The police in Durban have launched a murder investigation into the foreign national who was killed during the protest last week. A police account of the attack said that two men appeared to break away from a group of protesters and approached the victim, who was then assaulted by about 50 people.
The nation’s Human Rights Commission has condemned the killing, stressing that “disagreements about immigration, unemployment, crime or access to public services cannot justify violence against anyone.”
Anti-immigration protests are expected to intensify as the country heads to local government elections on November 4. The army deployment is expected to end in November, at an estimated cost of $2 million.
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