May 24, 2008	Saturday	Jamadi-ul-Awwal 18, 1429

JOHANNESBURG, May 23: South Africa made its first public apology on Friday for anti-immigrant violence that has left more than 40 dead and 17,000 displaced, as unrest spread to seven of the country’s nine provinces.

“We are very much concerned and apologise for all the inconveniences that the incidents have caused,” Deputy President Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka said during a trip to Nigeria.

Although violence in the hotspot of Johannesburg appeared to have been contained by police and the army on Friday, police reported attacks on foreigners for the first time in the coastal city of Cape Town and elsewhere.

The new outbreaks came as the UN refugee agency increased the estimate of the number of displaced people to 17,000, adding that “a very large percentage” of these were Zimbabweans.

Police spokesman for the Cape Town area Billy Jones said a public meeting to address the danger of xenophobia in the Dunoon slum area, 20km north of the coastal city, degenerated into violence on Thursday evening.

“Groups within the crowd started to loot shops owned by Zimbabweans and other foreigners,” he told AFP, saying 500 people had since fled the area to stay in community centres and 15 suspects had been arrested.

Police also reported pockets of overnight unrest in Durban in the KwaZulu Natal region, where an unidentified foreigner was shot, and in North West province where two Pakistanis were stabbed.

Northern-most Limpopo province also saw problems for the first time overnight when a Mozambican man was stabbed and 11 people were arrested, local police told AFP.

Anti-foreigner violence has now been reported in seven of the country’s nine provinces: Free State, Gauteng, Limpopo, Mpumalanga, KwaZulu Natal, North West, and the Western Cape.

Picturesque Cape Town, in the Western Cape, is a major draw for tourists and had thus far been spared the mob violence seen elsewhere.

In Johannesburg, the situation appeared to have been brought under control by police bolstered by specialist units trained in public order and the army.

“It’s quiet,” police spokesman for the Johannesburg area Govindsamy Mariemuthoo told AFP.

For the first time, soldiers were deployed on Johannesburg’s streets on Thursday to help stem the tide of violence that has seen mobs of armed youths attack foreigners in poor areas around the city.

Foreigners in South Africa, many of whom have fled economic meltdown in neighbouring Zimbabwe, are being blamed for sky-high crime rates and depriving locals of jobs.

“We reject the notion that some of the people who are living in South Africa who are not South Africans can be blamed for the problems that we have,” Mlambo-Ngcuka said in Nigeria.

Politicians are however increasingly blaming criminals for the anti-immigrant violence, as well the insanitary conditions and poverty found in slum areas.-—AFP