Israelis and Palestinians have fought their worst clash in a year as Israel said it would not stop building in East Jerusalem.

Several South Korean sailors have been killed after a navy ship was hit in a suspected torpedo attack by North Korea.

US President Barack Obama and Russian President Dmitry Medvedev have sealed an agreement on a landmark nuclear arms reduction treaty.

Police in the US are searching for over $100,000 after a security van dropped a bag of cash at a junction in Ohio.

Children walk through a squatter camp for poor white South Africans at Coronation Park in Krugersdorp, March 6, 2010. REUTERS/Finbarr O’Reilly

Sitting in a deck chair at a squatter camp, Ann Leroux, 60, holds a yellowing photo from her daughter’s wedding day.

Snapped not long after Nelson Mandela was elected South Africa’s first black president in 1994, it shows Leroux standing with her Afrikaans husband and their daughter outside their home in Melville, an upscale Johannesburg neighborhood.

Leroux and her husband lived together in the house for 34 years, but when he died 10 years ago, Leroux was bereft. Her father and cousin had also just died.

Leroux took some time off work at the city planning council, where she had been a secretary for 26 years. When she returned a few months later, she no longer had a job, Leroux says.

“They wouldn’t take me back because of the political situation,” she says, looking down at the fading photo.
Leroux eventually had to sell the house then stayed with a succession of friends and family. For the past eight months she has lived in a caravan and a tent shared with seven other people, including her daughter and four grandchildren, at a squatter camp for poor white South Africans.

“Our color here is not the right color now in South Africa,” Leroux says, echoing the complaint of many of the country’s growing number of impoverished whites, most of whom are Afrikaners — descendants of early Dutch and French settlers sometimes referred to as Africa’s “white tribe.”

RISING UNEMPLOYMENT
While most white South Africans still enjoy lives of privilege and relative wealth, the number of poor whites has risen steadily over the past 15 years. White unemployment nearly doubled between 1995 and 2005, according to the country’s Institute for Security Studies.

Seeking to reverse decades of racial inequality, the post-apartheid government introduced affirmative action laws that promote employment for non-whites and favor black-owned businesses. This shift in racial hiring practices coupled with the recent global economic crisis means many white South Africans have fallen on hard times.

At least 450,000 white South Africans, of a total white population of 4.5 million, live below the poverty line and 100,000 are struggling just to survive, according to civil organizations and Solidarity, the country’s largest independent trade union. South Africa’s overall population is about 50 million.

Many poor whites have ended up in places like Krugersdorp’s Coronation Park, a leafy former caravan site beside a water reservoir and a public picnic park frequented by middle-class families at weekends.

Children play on a tire being used to block the entrance to a squatter camp for poor white South Africans at Coronation Park in Krugersdorp, March 6, 2010. REUTERS/Finbarr O’Reilly

Ringed by yellow-brown hills of earth dug up by generations of gold miners, the park was used as a concentration camp for Afrikaners during the Anglo-Boer war at the start of the 20th century. Now it’s home to some 400 white squatters living in cramped tents and caravans and sharing a single ablution block. Cats and dogs roam noisily through the camp, dodging heaps of rubbish, piles of scrap metal and abandoned car parts. Water is heated and food cooked on open camp fires.

Some residents, including three black South Africans, have lived at the camp for several years while others arrived in recent weeks.

“I lived on a farm working as a maintenance man for the last three years, but the farm went bankrupt, so I came here three weeks ago,” says Dennis Boschoff, 38. “If you’re out of work and you haven’t got money, where must you go to? No one wants to help you — this is the only place to go to.”

Friends talk through the window of a one-room hut at a squatter camp for poor white South Africans at Coronation Park in Krugersdorp, March 6, 2010. REUTERS/Finbarr O’Reilly

“REVERSE APARTHEID”
South Africa’s President Jacob Zuma visited a white squatter camp near the capital Pretoria last year ahead of his election.

“I am shocked and surprised by what I have seen. The vast number in black poverty does not mean we must ignore white poverty, which is becoming an embarrassment to talk about,” Zuma said at the time.

White poverty in South Africa is a politically sensitive subject that gets little attention, but it is not new. President Jan Smuts called it the greatest threat to Afrikaner survival in the 1920s. It was initially a rural problem of subsistence farmers and share-croppers, but during the Great Depression many poor whites migrated to cities.

Lukas Gouws, 29, smokes at a squatter camp for poor white South Africans at Coronation Park in Krugersdorp, March 6, 2010. REUTERS/Finbarr O’Reilly

The state’s official tally of poor whites rose from 10,000 in 1890 to 535,000 in 1936. Many were barely literate and almost unemployable.

Apartheid’s system of racial segregation was legislated in 1948 in part to address the issue. The weakest and least educated whites were protected by the civil service and state-owned industries operating as job-creation schemes, guaranteeing even the poorest whites a home and livelihood.

Lukas Gouws tells off a boy for digging up snakes at a squatter camp for poor white South Africans at Coronation Park in Krugersdorp, March 6, 2010. REUTERS/Finbarr O’Reilly

With that economic safety net now gone, South Africa’s unskilled whites find themselves on the wrong side of history, gaining little sympathy from those who perceive them as having profited unfairly during the brutal apartheid years.

Formerly comfortable Afrikaners recently forced to live on the fringes of society see themselves as victims of new “racist laws” and a “reverse-apartheid” that they say puts them at an even greater disadvantage than the millions of poor black South Africans.

A family smokes together during a quiet moment at a squatter camp for poor white South Africans at Coronation Park in Krugersdorp, March 13, 2010. REUTERS/Finbarr O’Reilly

“Blacks get more than whites at the moment. They’re being pulled forward against us. That’s why all of us are here. It’s very unfair because they told us it was going to be equal, but it’s not equal,” says Boschoff.

This feeling of victimization and abandonment by the state has forged at the camp a collective sense of fatalism, isolation and firm reliance on their Calvinist religion. Each of the camp’s ramshackle huts and tents is adorned with religious paraphernalia and an Afrikaans language bible.

Many poor white communities also struggle with alcoholism, violence and abuse.

“When we arrived at this camp there was about 80 per cent alcohol abuse and 60 per cent drug abuse. Now it’s about 8 percent alcohol and 2 per cent drugs,” says Hugo Van Niekerk, 48, who has managed the camp with his wife Irene over the past few years. “We kicked a lot of the worst ones out and the fighting and violence has gone down.”

Van Niekerk, who solicits donations and helps community members find odd jobs, successfully fought an eviction order last year from the municipality, which wanted the site to develop a big screen public viewing area for international football matches. South Africa will host the World Cup football tournament in June.
After losing the eviction case, the municipality cut electricity to the park and tore down fences protecting the camp. The squatters now use small two-stroke generators to power appliances and burn candles at night. Several caravan fires have caused a number of severe burn injuries.

“I would like everybody in a decent house with water and electricity, but the situation we’re in at the moment, it’s not going to turn into a reality,” says Van Niekerk. “We won’t get houses from this government. If we were black maybe yes, but we are white.”

Andre Coetzee, 57, drinks a mug of coffee at a squatter camp for poor white South Africans at Coronation Park in Krugersdorp, March 6, 2010. REUTERS/Finbarr O’Reilly

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