Durban scrapyard burns as residents flee, 19 in court and the asylum directive is already gone

Two houses and a scrapyard burned in and around Durban, several shops were damaged and some of them were looted, and 19 people were arrested over two days of unrest on Thursday and Friday. On Monday the accused appeared in the Durban Magistrate’s Court, where the case was adjourned to October 16. Three of them face attempted murder charges in a separate matter adjourned to October 19 for bail consideration.

As IOL reported on 14 October, residents in the Berea area described their fear as the events unfolded. Their account is the clearest record of what people in the city actually lived through, and it is worth setting out in full.

A 50-year-old single mother of two from Moore Road said she had just returned from work on Friday afternoon when she heard shouting. About ten men broke her electric gate and came into her yard. She said she thought they were going to burn the two vehicles on her property. Her neighbour confronted them, they said they believed foreigners were hiding in her yard, he told them nobody was there, and they left.

Fifteen minutes later she heard the commotion from the fire.

A 49-year-old resident, whose wife and two children were home with him, said the crowd gathered at a scrapyard on Moore Lane, where foreign nationals wash and fix cars, and set it alight. He said they came looking for foreign nationals, found a few and assaulted them, then burned the scrapyard. The flames reached almost two storeys high and the explosions could be heard as the fire reached petrol, oil and the plastic components of cars. The heat was intense enough that his windows were hot to the touch. He and his family could not open them because of the smoke, so they evacuated and stood on the roadside for about an hour while firefighters brought the blaze under control.

Both residents said they intended to increase security on their properties.

KwaZulu-Natal provincial police spokesperson Robert Netshiunda confirmed the arrests, the two burnt houses and the burnt scrapyard, and the damaged and looted shops. He said the majority of those arrested were students, and that intelligence officers and detectives are continuing to search for those responsible for the burning of cars and buildings.

The charges include public violence, malicious injury to property, incitement to commit public violence, and contravening the Regulation of Gatherings Act.

Several questions that the public has a right to have answered are not answered by this record. The names of the accused cannot be published at this stage. The state has not established their immigration or asylum status, so no status is asserted here. Their ages have not been established by the state or the court, so no ages are given. It is not on the record whether any firearm was involved, whether any weapon was recovered, or what identity and status checks police performed after the arrests. Nor does the record state how many people were injured, or how seriously. Where the record is silent, this article says so rather than filling the gap.

The unrest follows a Constitutional Court judgment in July on access to the asylum application process, and a subsequent Home Affairs directive that allowed undocumented foreign nationals to approach asylum reception offices to apply for asylum status. The department has since withdrawn that directive.

The sequence matters. The court opened a route into the asylum system. The department issued a directive giving effect to it. The department then withdrew the directive. The withdrawal is the state’s own act and it came before this weekend’s fires, and it is the clearest thing the department has done in response to the pressure. What Home Affairs has not done, on this record, is say what happens now to the people who were already in the queue, how reception offices are handling applications in the absence of the directive, or what additional capacity, if any, has been placed at those offices. Those questions have been put and the department’s answers are not in this record.

What residents will notice in the days ahead is practical. A burnt scrapyard on Moore Lane is a lost livelihood for the people who washed and fixed cars there. Two families have lost their homes. Shops that were damaged and looted have to reopen or not. The Berea residents who spoke to IOL said they would spend money on security they had not planned to spend, which is the ordinary household cost of a weekend like this one.

The next dated steps are the October 16 appearance in the Durban Magistrate’s Court and the October 19 bail consideration for the three accused facing attempted murder charges. The police search for those responsible for the burning of cars and buildings continues, and Netshiunda has said so on the record.