Mon, Sep 18, 2006 page6

• After calm spell, South Africa's `taxi wars' rage anew

  • NY TIMES SERVICE
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  When the gunmen materialized out of a downpour on a Friday evening last month, weapons crackling, the taxi owner tried to run.

  "Unfortunately," he said, "I was late."

  The taxi owner is 54, and propped in a chair beside his bed at Groote Schuur Hospital in Cape Town. The seven bullet wounds in his legs are shrouded in a blanket. He may yet lose a foot, but he has other worries.

  "Do not put my name on any paper," he said. "If I see my name, I will hold you responsible for my death."

  After a few years of relative calm, this nation's so-called taxi wars have flared up again in earnest. In the last two decades, thousands of South African taxi owners, drivers and passengers have been killed and many more have been wounded in one of the strangest guerrilla wars to bedevil any nation. The combatants are rival cartels that control thousands of low-cost minibuses, or "combis," that haul a large share of South Africa's urban commuters and much of the nation's intercity traffic.

  Combi drivers are mostly poor, and competition is fierce. Many operate illegally, and even legitimate ones may poach others' routes to grab as many fares as possible.

  The cartels have fought for years over control of lucrative routes and the drivers who serve them. In upscale Cape Town and poor suburbs like Khayelitsha, a vast sprawl of small homes and shanties, taxi violence has claimed about 25 lives this year and stirred a growing political outcry.

  The Friday ambush, at a taxi stand in a Khayelitsha neighborhood called Kuwait, left one taxi owner, Khonzani Mono, dead and seven people wounded.

  Violence here is the worst, but the taxi wars are a national problem. In the last 18 months, taxi shootouts have also occurred in Johannesburg and Durban. Last year, three taxi operators were killed in rural Eastern Cape Province, their Toyota sprayed with 40 bullets as they drove to a meeting to discuss taxi routes.

  Indisputably, control of routes is at the core of the violence. The latest surge in Cape Peninsula killings, for example, can be traced to the opening of a shopping mall near Kraaifontein, a Cape Town suburb, which employs many workers from Khayelitsha, in the south.

  South Africa's apartheid government deregulated the combis in 1987, prompting thousands of poor blacks to leap into the business. But as competition soared, apartheid agents fomented violence among drivers, hoping to sow discord that would slow the drive toward liberation. They succeeded; the early violence killed a number of liberation leaders, sharpened political divisions among blacks and destroyed entire black neighborhoods.

  After apartheid ended in 1994, the violence acquired a life of its own. Lacking government regulation, taxi owners banded into groups, and the groups mushroomed into cartels, using gangland tactics to expand their turf.

  More than 2,000 people died as a result of taxi-related violence during the 1990s, according to official statistics.

  Unofficially, the toll may be much higher, said Jackie Dugard, a senior researcher at the Center for Applied Legal Studies at the University of the Witwatersrand and an expert on the taxi wars.

  South Africa's new government, she said, was powerless to bring the taxi cartels to heel.

  "The industry actually requires a lot of coordination," she said. "You need to be able to disperse the right kinds of taxis to the right places, and there are peak and nonpeak hours. Where the state doesn't control it, other bodies are likely to."
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