South Africa
Soweto bombs blamed on white extremists

afrol News, 30 October - At least one person was killed and another seriously injured as nine bombs went of in South Africa's Soweto. While no person or group has claimed responsibility for the attack, police and civil society operate with the working theory of a right-wing assault on the country's black majority rule. 

South African police say nine bombs had exploded, one after the other, across the township. Soweto, forming part of Johannesburg, has an almost exclusively black population. Several of the bombs had targeted the communication between Soweto and Johannesburg. Others had exploded close to a mosque and an Islamic school. 

Reports suggest that a 42-year old woman was killed when debris hit her shack in the Protea South informal settlement while asleep with her husband. The 51-year-old husband was said to be in a stable condition at a local hospital after sustaining head injuries. Other grave injuries were not reported.

The terrorist attack was almost immediately linked to right-wing extremists by government spokesmen and by civil society. Police inquiries went directly towards the known rightist environments in the country.

South African Minister of Safety and Security, Charles Nqakula, and Minister of Intelligence, Lindiwe Sisulu, immediately left their government offices and went to the scene of the terrorist act in Soweto. There, they personally took the media on a tour of the scenes of the blasts and made no secret about the suspected right-wing perpetrators. 

Also President Thabo Mbeki, speaking at a media conference today in Cape Town, had no doubt of the right-wing link. Although not blaming the racist right wing directly, President Mbeki said that information the security forces had gathered about a handful of people was that they intended to "conduct a campaign to destabilise the country, increase a sense of uncertainty and create a climate for political change with bolder actions."

- The actions this morning, he said, "were consistent with the information the security forces had gathered about the actions of certain people who had intended to introduce a terrorist campaign in the country."

The President further said it was important to understand that the handful of people responsible for the bombings were "a common enemy of all South Africans, black and white," and that they would certainly fail in their efforts to intimidate millions of people.

The country's leading trade union, COSATU, joined the state officials and in a statement released today said it was "not hard to conclude that this is part of the resurgent right-wing assault on our democracy." Also the trade unionists did not want to let into intimidation.

COSATU, the largest mass democratic formation in the country representing nearly two million members of South Africa's working class, said it "would like to warn the right wing that there is no extent to which we will not go to defend the democratic revolution. The workers of this country will fight and defeat any attempt to re-impose white supremacist rule in our country." 

No one yet has claimed responsibility for the terrorist attack, but South Africa's National Police Commissioner, Jackie Selebi, said two white men were reported acting suspiciously near a petrol station where one bomb was defused. "We think we know who did this," Mr Selebi stated.

The Police Commissioner however had more bad news. He expected that there existed "many more bombs" than those nine that had exploded in Soweto this morning.

Sources: Based on SA govt, Cosatu, press reports and afrol archives

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