South Africa still struggles with murders - the homicide rate may be down, but 51 people are killed daily

Associated Press:

Ten-year-old Marissa Naidoo, who was kidnapped from her primary school, murdered and stuffed in a suitcase, was buried Wednesday as the government released statistics showing that 51 South Africans are killed in an average day.

Marissa's murder, by a man who fooled teachers that he was a family acquaintance, sent shock waves through this crime-hardened nation.

Safety and Security Minister Charles Nqakula prefaced his introduction of the annual police report by grieving publicly with parents "forced to weep when the lives of their loved ones are taken away under dastardly conditions."

"For a long time to come, we are going to be losing people in South Africa in that fashion," Nqakula lamented.

Eleven years after the advent of multiracial democracy, South Africa remains one of the world's most crime-ridden societies, a legacy of years of violent suppression during the apartheid era.

How on earth can a system of government that ended over a decade ago be responsible for ongoing crime in South Africa? Here is a breakdown of the crime statistics:

The police report said that 18,793 people were murdered in the fiscal year April 2004 to March 2005, down 5.2 percent from the 19,824 reported the previous year.

The report said there were 24,516 attempted murders -- down 18.5 percent on 2003/2004. Police officials said this was largely thanks to a government amnesty which persuaded people to surrender some 90,000 unlicensed firearms.

Reported rape rose by 4.5 percent to 55,114 cases, and indecent assault was also higher than the previous year.

Nqakula said this was partly due to the fact that increasing numbers of women felt sufficient confidence in the police to report the crime -- even though the reported cases are still believed to be the tip of the iceberg.

Here is how South Africa's crime rates compare to other countries:

At the birth of its new democracy in 1994, South Africa had the world's highest homicide rate of 67 per 100,000 -- largely as a result of murders in the country's impoverished and overcrowded townships.

The rate fell to 40 per 100,000 in 2004, behind Colombia at 67 per 100,000 and Jamaica at 59 per 100,000.

But this compares to rates of some 6 per 100,000 in the United States and 3 per 100,000 in Britain, according to figures from the international police organization Interpol.

"South Africa is really off the scale compared to most other countries," said Anton De Plessis, head of the crime and justice program at the Institute for Security Studies.

But he cautioned that many developing countries -- including violent societies such as Somalia and Afghanistan -- do not report their crime figures to Interpol and so the published statistics do not reflect international reality.

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