JOHANNESBURG: South African police and army units held a parade Wednesday involving helicopters, K-9 dog units and officers on motorcycles in a show of force ahead of expected protests around this weekend’s Group of 20 world leaders summit in Johannesburg.
South Africa has deployed 3,500 extra police officers and put the army on standby under its National Joint Operational and Intelligence Structure — a body that brings police, army and intelligence services together under one command to provide security for major events.
Deputy national commissioner for policing Lt. Gen. Tebello Mosikili told reporters Tuesday that authorities were expecting protests in Johannesburg and other major South African cities.
“We will allow that right (to protest) to be exercised,” she said. “But within the proper directives and proper confines of the law.”
South African police said they have designated specific areas for protesters to gather near the summit venue, an exhibition center next to the country’s biggest soccer stadium. The head of Airports Company South Africa, which runs the main international airports, said it had set up “speakers’ corners” in airports where protesters would be “kindly” taken by security if they stage demonstrations when world leaders arrive.
The two-day summit opens on Saturday and is expected to attract leaders and top diplomats from more than 40 countries as well as global institutions like the United Nations, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the World Trade Organization.
Protests planned
Demonstrations are expected from anti-capitalists, climate activists, women’s rights campaigners, anti-migrant groups and others, some of which are raising South Africa’s own problems with poverty and inequality.
A trade union representing members of South Africa’s Afrikaner white minority has already stoked controversy by putting up billboards around Johannesburg that say: “Welcome to the most RACE-REGULATED country in the world.” One of the boards was taken down by city authorities, prompting the Afrikaner trade union, Solidarity, to threaten legal action.
The billboards are in reference to South Africa’s affirmative action laws that advance opportunities for Black people and have become part of a diplomatic fallout between South Africa and the United States.
US President Donald Trump won’t attend the G20 summit in a boycott over his claims that South Africa’s Black-led government is pursuing racist, anti-white policies and violently persecuting its Afrikaner minority. Trump’s claims have been widely rejected as baseless, but the US government boycott threatens to undermine the first G20 summit in Africa.
Other groups hope to use the opportunity to draw attention to a myriad of issues.
The Women for Change advocacy group is calling for a national shutdown on Friday, the eve of the summit. It is asking women to boycott work on the day in protest at South Africa’s extremely high rates of violence against women and femicide.
“Because until South Africa stops burying a woman every 2.5 hours, the G20 cannot speak of growth and progress,” Women for Change said.
A South African anti-immigration group will protest against the joblessness and poverty in the country, its leader said, with South Africa’s 31 percent unemployment rate one of the highest in the world.
A coalition of groups protesting against climate change and wealth inequality have organized an alternative summit in another part of Johannesburg starting on Thursday, saying the G20 gathering is “for the rich.”
Cleanup efforts
Authorities in Johannesburg have also embarked on a major clear-up and repair operation ahead of the summit to tackle some of the broken-down infrastructure that plagues South Africa’s biggest city.
South African President Cyril Ramaphosa joined the effort last week, when he threw on a pair of green overalls and helped with some of the work in the township of Soweto just a few miles from where the summit will be held.
The multi-million-dollar operation for a two-day meeting of politicians has been viewed with cynicism by many in Johannesburg who have become accustomed to broken streetlights, cracked and potholed roads and deteriorating services that lead to water and electricity blackouts.
“Us hosting this G20, I don’t really think it’s going to be beneficial for South Africans, for the ordinary South Africans. It’s just a way to waste money, if I can say,” Johannesburg resident Lerato Lelusa said.
South Africa deploys 3,500 extra police officers and braces for protests around the G20 summit
https://arab.news/r6ruq
South Africa deploys 3,500 extra police officers and braces for protests around the G20 summit
- Demonstrations are expected from anti-capitalists, climate activists, women’s rights campaigners, anti-migrant groups and others, some of which are raising South Africa’s own problems with poverty and inequality
After nearly 7 weeks and many rumors, Bolivia’s ex-leader reappears in his stronghold
- Morales was Bolivia’s first Indigenous president who served from 2006 until his fraught 2019 ouster and subsequent self-exile
- He dismissed rumors fueled by local politicians and fanned by social media that he would try to flee the country
LA PAZ: Bolivia’s long-serving socialist former leader, Evo Morales, reappeared Thursday in his political stronghold of the tropics after almost seven weeks of unexplained absence, endorsing candidates for upcoming regional elections and quieting rumors he had fled the country in the wake of the US seizure of his ally, Venezuela’s ex-President Nicolás Maduro.
The weeks of hand-wringing over Morales’ fate showed how little the Andean country knows about what’s happening in the remote Chapare region, where the former president has spent the past year evading an arrest warrant on human trafficking charges, and how vulnerable it is to fears about US President Donald Trump’s potential future foreign escapades.
The media outlet of Morales’ coca-growing union, Radio Kawsachun Coca, released footage of Morales smiling in dark sunglasses as he arrived via tractor at a stadium in the central Bolivian town of Chimoré to address his supporters.
Morales, Bolivia’s first Indigenous president who served from 2006 until his fraught 2019 ouster and subsequent self-exile, explained that he had come down with chikungunya, a mosquito-borne ailment with no treatment that causes fever and severe joint pain, and suffered complications that “caught me by surprise.”
“Take care of yourselves against chikungunya — it is serious,” the 66-year-old Morales said, appearing markedly more frail than in past appearances.
He dismissed rumors fueled by local politicians and fanned by social media that he would try to flee the country, vowing to remain in Bolivia despite the threat of arrest under conservative President Rodrigo Paz, whose election last October ended nearly two decades of rule by Morales’ Movement Toward Socialism party.
“Some media said, ‘Evo is going to leave, Evo is going to flee.’ I said clearly: I am not going to leave. I will stay with the people to defend the homeland,” he said.
Paz’s revival of diplomatic ties with the US and recent efforts to bring back the Drug Enforcement Administration — some 17 years after Morales expelled American anti-drug agents from the Andean country while cozying up to China, Russia, Cuba and Iran — have rattled the coca-growing region that serves as Morales’ bastion of support.
Paz on Thursday confirmed that he would meet Trump in Miami on March 7 for a summit convening politically aligned Latin American leaders as the Trump administration seeks to counter Chinese influence and assert US dominance in the region.
Before proclaiming the candidates he would endorse in Bolivia’s municipal and regional elections next month, Morales launched into a lengthy speech reminiscent of his once-frequent diatribes against US imperialism.
“This is geopolitical propaganda on an international scale,” he said of Trump’s bid to revive the Monroe Doctrine from 1823 in order to reassert American dominance in the Western Hemisphere. “They want to eliminate every left-wing party in Latin America.”
