NPA press release
Justice for the murder of Bazooka Rhadebe
Nineteen days after the murder of Berta Cáceres, world known Honduras activist for her fight against dams, Bazooka Rhadebe has been murdered with eight bullets in his head in front of his 15 years old son.
Bazooka was Amadiba Crisis Committee chairman, elected by its community to fight the Australian company MRC project to extract titanium from the dunes and beaches in the Amadiba region of the Wild Coast, Eastern Cape, South Africa. The sand would be extracted in Xolobeni 20 meter deep, which would destroy the Amadiba ancestral lands and way of life.
Bazooka Rhadebe’s murder comes after a series of intimidations including gunshots. Those suspected of these gunshots have been released by the police. The better known activists have had to leave their villages and move to Port Edward in the nearby KwaZulu Natal province and must drive hours to visit their communities.
The murders of Berta Cárceres et Bazooka Rhadebe share many characteristics: two communities which try to protect their territories against deadly projects, two companies which not only intimidate their opponents but do not hesitate to use hitmen to eliminate them physically, and finally two corrupt governments which support these companies, police forces which do not protect their citizens but on the contrary harass them, protect the murderers and even triy to blame members of the suffering communities. The ANC in which the South African people had put so much hope, now shows its level of corruption and its mafia like nature.
The NPA wishes to express its solidarity with the Bazooka Rhadebe’s family and with the members of the Amadiba community. The MRC management must be arrested and account for their actions, all mining projects on the Wild Coast, probably the best preserved coastline of the country must be abandoned and the people of the province, who have suffered so much during the apartheid when it was still called Transkei, must become masters of their future.
NPA, Montreuil
2016-03-25