South Africa winds up relief camp for foreigners

Government-operated temporary shelters for foreign nationals displaced by xenophobic violence in Johannesburg have now been closed, officials have told Al Jazeera.

Zweli Dlamini, a spokesperson for the Ekurhuleni Metropolitan Municipality, said late on Saturday that local leaders in affected communities had assured authorities that foreign nationals would be secure after a series of meetings between government, police officers and community leaders.



“We only moved them when we were given assurance that their safety is guaranteed,” Dlamini said.

“We started the re-integration process on Thursday and we only had about 128 people left in the camp after that, which we then cleared this morning.”

At least eight people were killed in a wave of xenophobic violence that erupted on March 30 in Durban, the capital of eastern KwaZulu-Natal province.

The violence displaced thousands in the port city before spreading to areas in and around country’s commercial hub, Johannesburg.

Johannesburg’s Primrose camp, which opened on April 16, initially sheltered 400 to 500 people. Later almost 1,000 foreign nationals took refuge here.

In next-door Cleveland, a few hundred more people found respite in a community hall.

In the suburb of Mayfair in Johannesburg, Gift of the Givers, a nongovernmental organisation, is still running a camp that hosts more than 130 displaced people.

(Al Jazeera)