The violence in South Africa, principally against refugees from Zimbabwe, which in a fortnight has seen 40 people killed and upward of 25,000 displaced is deplorable. Common humanity demands that these unfortunate people who have fled the economic deprivation and political oppression of Robert Mugabe’s regime be offered a safe refuge instead of violence.

There are an estimated five million illegal emigrants in South Africa, three million of them from Zimbabwe. The rest are largely economic migrants from Malawi and Mozambique. There is likewise little official provision for the care and welfare of these refugees. Therefore, they eke out a living, often by selling their labor at below the already low rates paid to South Africa’s own poor. In such disorganized circumstances, it is hardly surprising that locals are angry and resentful. However, the brutal violence that they have resorted to initially in Johannesburg, and now this week in Cape Town against illegal immigrants, is inexcusable.

In the final analysis, the blame for this bloodletting lies at the door of President Thabo Mbeki’s government and for two distinct reasons. The first stems from the almost complete failure to recognize that there was a Zimbabwean refugee problem that needed to be addressed before it brought tensions among South Africa’s poor to the present dangerous pitch. As with HIV/AIDS, Mbeki seems to have imagined that if the situation were ignored for long enough, it would go away.

Yet at the same time South Africa has continued its softly, softly approach to the Mugabe government in Zimbabwe. This has served to reinforce the economic failure and embolden the ruling ZANU-PF to use even greater repressive measures to cling on to power — despite popular opinion and collapsing finances.

Now whatever the merits of Mbeki’s refusal to back UK-led neocolonialist calls to abandon Mugabe and drive him from power — and until the stolen presidential election, there had been merits — the South African government should have realized that it could not sustain the Zimbabwean regime without, at the same time, making provision for the human consequences of this policy — in other words, the tidal wave of jobless refugees from Zimbabwe’s economic chaos.

Now South Africa suffers the triple obloquy of supporting a politically and financially bankrupt Mugabe regime while allowing helpless Zimbabwean refugees on its soil to become the victims of poor South Africans who have been jilted of the economic benefits that the ANC government always promised them. Blaming the anti-refugee violence on sinister “third forces”, as it has done, only darkens the shadow hanging over Mbeki’s administration. The ANC government has failed, not only because of badly thought-out policies and parlous administration, but also morally, because in the apartheid era, many of its own people were themselves political refugees in neighboring countries.