The City of Cape Town has acted to round up homeless people from suburbs across Cape Town and forcibly remove them to giant tents erected on a remote sports field in Strandfontein – in conditions that can only be described as a concentration camp. This, “to protect them from coronavirus”. Residents of Strandfontein and organisations working with street people have expressed grave concerns about the suitability of the site, and the morality of the DA-led City’s actions. By the time the first group of the city’s homeless detainees arrived at the heavily guarded sports ground, autumn rain had already reduced the area to a muddy cess-pit.
"Cape Town’s homeless thousands are being forcibly removed and interned in a muddy camp in Strandfontein"
Henry Pietersen was forced onto a bus in Sea Point, where he has lived on the streets for 30 years. He carried a small bag of belongings he managed to grab before being “removed”. He is originally from Ashton, and pleaded with GOOD Secretary-General Brett Herron to help him go back to his family in Ashton rather than be held at this remote, cold and wet homeless people camp. Many homeless people said they felt the City had been waging a war against them for the past year, harassing and arresting them, and damaging or losing their possessions.
Now, the coronavirus had given the City the opportunity it wanted, to take forceful action and dump them far away and out of sight. In Bothasig, street people with pets were forced to abandon them, leaving community activists running around trying to round up pets and find homes for them. According to a law enforcement officer at the site, who did not want us to publish his name, approximately 2000 people were brought in on Day One of the operation. Some had already escaped through the fence, he said. He admitted to having mixed feelings about stopping them, “because they are people, too, you know”. The DA-led city government is making a big mistake treating homeless people in this way. Its policies are old-fashioned, anti-poor and doomed to fail. As we have seen with its mismanagement of the refugees squatting in central Cape Town, the City is creating a long-term problem for itself, at the cost of vulnerable people, Herron said.
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