REPORTS from Syria by Jordanian journalists allege that it was Prince Bandar bin Sultan of Saudi Arabia who distributed those chemical weapons to the Syrian rebels.( Here he is shown with that other unrepentant terrorist)
If true, it indicates the chemical attack in Damascus to have been a false-flag operation by the American war business.
This would be entirely in keeping with Prince Bandar’s history of organising the Afghan mujahideen in the 1980s, the Iran-Contra weapons exchanges, Libya in 2011, the suppression of the Shia uprising in Bahrain, Saudi support for the coup d’etat in Egypt and support for Syrian rebels.
Other reports confirm that Prince Bandar also went to see Russian President Vladimir Putin last month and offered to buy $15bn worth of Russian weapons provided Mr Putin abandoned Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. Mr Putin gave him short shrift.
Prince Bandar was not only the Saudi ambassador in Washington for 22 years and friends of Ronald Reagan and the Bush family, but he also negotiated the 1985 £43bn Al-Yamamah weapons deal with Margaret Thatcher, which Tony Blair renewed in 2007 with the Al-Salaam weapons deal.
When the British Serious Fraud Office investigated the bribes which BAE Systems paid him, Prince Bandar allegedly threatened blood in the streets of London.
Mr Blair squelched the investigation citing “national security.” The Guardian newspaper revealed a couple of months later how BAE with collusion of the British government had laundered bribes to Prince Bandar of over £1bn through Riggs Bank in Washington DC and other US banks.
Most importantly, Prince Bandar and Ms Thatcher negotiated the Al-Yamamah deal under the British Official Secrets Act, meaning that it cannot be investigated in Britain.
Saudi Arabia ships thousands of barrels per day of oil consigned to the Bank of England, which is then distributed to Shell and BP.
Over the years a surplus has developed, which is guesstimated to be worth over $150bn. Its purpose is a) to guarantee British and US support for the Saudi royal family against domestic insurrection and b) to fund covert destabilisation of resource-rich countries in Asia and Africa under the guise of the war on terror.
Having targeted Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, Yemen, Somalia, Libya and other countries over the years, Syria and Egypt are Prince Bandar’s current targets. When will SA be targeted by the American and British “war business” given our country’s mineral wealth?
Saudi Arabia made lavish donations to the African National Congress. Prince Bandar was also the only foreigner present at Nelson Mandela’s secret wedding to Graca Machel, and was a frequent visitor to SA when the arms deal was being negotiated.
Johnny Burger (standing, right) with his fellow accused Wilhelm Treurnicht in the Ashton Magistrate’s Court. Photo: Cape Times.
As more facts surface regarding the owner of Rietvallei wine farm, Mr. Johnny Burger, who had been driven to suicide by anti-racists and the media, the so-called perpetrator is starting to look more and more like a victim.
In a glowing letter published in the Boland Gazette, a local newspaper in the Cape, a young Coloured woman recounts how the winemaker donated money to further her studies in America. At the time her father was a worker on the farm who was treated with warmth and fairness by the same man accused by Rapport of “beating a young Coloured boy into epilepsy”.
We reproduce the letter here:
The ‘Oom Johnny’ that I knew…
by Meriza Lakey
The first time I met Johnny Burger, or Oom Johnny, as I called him, I was an embarrassed teenage girl. My father, who passed away four years ago, was a builder and worked for Oom Johnny for close to a decade.
After matric, I was determined to travel overseas and made the necessary arrangements to go to America. These plans were a little bit ambitious for a coloured, Afrikaans girl from a small wine community within the Western Cape. One Friday afternoon, my father told me to hop into his old, rickety bakkie and we drove off to Rietvallei to see Johnny Burger.
At the farm, my father introduced me to Oom Johnny and I remember meeting the tallest man I had ever seen in my life. My father was a pretty tall man himself, but Oom Johnny towered over him like a city skyscraper. My father explained to him that this was the daughter who was leaving for New York soon and if he, Oom Johnny, didn’t have a few extra ‘dollars’ to give to me.
As a teenager, this completely caught me off-guard and I thought I could’ve just died. I remember poking my father in the hip and smiling shyly, as to say that we don’t need any ‘hold-outs’. I was a proud teenage girl embarrassed at everything that my father did or say. Oom Johnny just smiled, walked over to his cabinet and drew 200 American dollars out of his drawer. I was shocked at how easily he gave the money, almost like an investment, in me.
My father loved him, that’s why he worked for him for over a decade. He always came home with some story of what “Johnny Burger said” or what “Johnny Burger did”. I smile now at how Oom Johnny was never known as just “Johnny”, his name was always followed by his surname and it’s like I can see my father saying it right now. Oom Johnny was also the first to offer advice when we found out about my father’s cancer.
I remember visiting Rietvallei again after I came back from America. Oom Johnny spoke to me in English and I replied in my ‘newly-acquired’ American accent, much to his and my father’s amusement. I remember him looking at me and I remember seeing the same look in his eyes, as I saw in my own father’s eyes; that of a proud father.
I can only tell you of the Johnny Burger I knew. I wanted to write this tribute to Oom Johnny, as my father would have wanted me to do. I can speak only of what I know and what he did for me and my family. And if that is testament to the kind of man he was, then to me, that was a great man.
South Africa’s multiracial and multicultural society is exploding into a never-ending Kulturkampf or American-style culture war. Anti-racists are the new racists, spreading intolerance and even violence ahead of them with a megaphone, figuratively speaking. During the court appearance of a wine farmer, Mr Johnny Burger, the crowd in the Cape had been swept up into a lynch mob threatening to kill him on the spot. Police had to use pepper spray and a stun grenade to disperse them. Shades of the Ku Klux Klan? Except here the Klansmen are anti-racists.
Anti-racist intolerance is growing in leaps and bounds. In another recent incident, it led to the unfortunate resignation from Pretoria University of one of our praag columnists after Dr Piet Croucamp from the University of Johannesburg had accused her of hate speech. As I have commented elsewhere in an Afrikaans column:
“The media group Naspers and a small group of academics acting in bad faith and attacking others in the name of race, mostly for personal reasons, represent a danger to freedom of speech in South Africa.”
This afternoon I got an email from a friend saying that Mr Burger’s case reminded him of the notorius “Black Circuit” of the early nineteenth century. At the time a 1000 Cape farmers had to appear before a roving court to answer to trumped-up charges of murder, rape and assault. In the end, no-one was convicted and it was found that colonial English missionaries had colluded with local Khoi-San tribesmen to falsely accuse farmers of heinous crimes.
Contrary to our law, Mr Burger, accused of assaulting a Coloured child, was presumed guilty until his innocence could be proven. Two days ago, the Cape Times newspaper wrote about the case of Flippie Engelbrecht, the child concerned: “Those who brought the case to court charged that after the assault Engelbrecht had lost his sight, had epileptic fits, and because of this had rolled into a fire and suffered terrible burns, losing his hands.” In yesterday’s Cape Times, headlined Questions surround Flippie’s assault, “new evidence” came to light in the form of medical records showing that Flippie Engelbrecht had reported a “swelling on the side of his face”, which may have been a tumour, causing his epileptic fits and other medical problems. The same medical records contradict some of the dates advanced by the victim. However, in the meantime the wine farmer had committed suicide after his life and his business had been ruined by hysterical anti-racists pursuing him in the media, both traditional and social, led by the radical, Afrikaner-hating ex-lawyer (who was struck off the record as an attorney after dubious business deals and bankruptcy), Carina Papenfus.
So here we have two incidences of whites being subjected to histrionic public campaigns by so-called “liberal” anti-racists whose objectives have more in common with the Spanish Inquisition than with advancing the precepts of liberalism. Freedom of speech and even academic freedom in South Africa have been casualties of these campaigns, not to mention the two white victims, one committing suicide and another resigning her post and leaving the country, presumably for fear of being further persecuted.
Our universities are no longer places of learning but over-politicised shrines to political correctness and obtuse hatreds that are seemingly ignited by throwing a switch.
Volumes have been written on the cultural, linguistic, racial, anthropological, ethnic, ideological and religious divisions of South African society and I do not wish to dwell on the obvious. What concerns me more, is the apparent descent of people with nominal university qualifications into this kind of racial street fighting. They wield race and the word “racist” like a Cape Flats gangster brandishes his knife. Not so long ago, twelve schools had to be closed in that area as a result of gang activity and Mrs Helen Zille, the premier of the Western Cape, was calling for the army to be brought in to stabilise Manenberg.
Yet, ostensibly, we have more to fear from the pseudo-intellectual gangsters than from the drug-dealing, turf-warring criminals of the Cape Flats. Their influence on public discourse is far more insidious and destructive of the last vestiges of civilisation that remain in South Africa. They are intolerant zealots such as are to be found throughout history, wherever religious wars or ethnic conflicts have ignited and blazed.
Except for the Sunday paper Rapport, no-one seems to take Papenfus seriously. She waged a slanderous email and Twitter campaign against the hapless winemaker, apparently threatening and cajoling his customers into ceasing to order from him, with the intention of ruining his business and his life. Ms. Papenfus is a kind of cyber thug that replicates the intimidation tactics of petty gangsters in the public sphere. After all, as any mafioso or racketeer knows, a small business may be ruined by hitting one or two of its weak spots. Although she must have studied at one time for a degree or diploma, she has no intellectual pretensions. Her creed is simple: harass the whites. And being white and Afrikaans herself, but an ANC member, it is a case of être plus royaliste que le roi.
Papenfus is dangerous, but easily understood. The other two zealots who pounced upon the soft-spoken Pretoria woman philosopher, occupy positions of institutional power. Croucamp is a lecturer at the University of Johannesburg in political science and frequently appears on talk shows, both on radio and on television, wearing his trademark blue bandana. Schutte writes a column in the Mail & Guardian newspaper which is also avidly read by the “tenured radicals” at South Africa’s more than twenty universities.
Schutte was due to debate Croucamp’s victim on the topic: “‘Do white people have an obligation to withdraw from the public sphere?’ But as she stated in a subsequent column: “I am obviously not going to validate Louise Mabille’s hate speech by actually debating with her. Rather I will end by saying that she has presented a shining example of how whites should not participate in the public arena. It is a good thing that Louise Mabille has handed in her resignation and that the University of Pretoria has accepted it.”
From Rhodes University, we have already had an opinion by Dr Samantha Vice that all whites, i.e. everyone of European descent, should take some form of vow to remain silent in public. So white guilt leads to the ultimate form of self-censorship, public silence.
Elsewhere, Ms Gillian Schutte describes herself, somewhat pretentiously, as a “feminist-neopagan-post-structuralist-deconstructionist-socialist” and she apparently has a Master’s degree in creative writing from the University of the Witwatersrand.
The one thing we can already deduce is that the mob outside the Cape courtroom who wanted to lynch Mr Burger at least believed in some form of dialogue. They were screaming, hurling abuse and gesticulating. With police intervention and protection, one could still call it communication.
Croucamp and Schutte want to reduce us to silence, however. Theirs is the monologue of totalitarianism, of censorship, of “There is only one truth and it is mine”. They pontificate in the name of power, the corrupt power that is ruling, nay, pillaging, South Africa.
It is therefore ironic that Schutte should describe herself as a “post-structuralist-deconstructionist”. Does she even know what she is referring to? The very basis of any “deconstruction” is the existence of more than one meaning, even the uncertainty, indetermination and radical plurality of meanings. Just over ten years ago a small group of us Afrikaner thinkers had a private seminar with Jacques Derrida, the father of deconstruction, at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales on the boulevard de Raspail in Paris. I remember Derrida as a modest, soft-spoken, amiable figure who reminisced about his single visit to South Africa. He liked Potchefstroom and even told me that “Heidegger would have felt at home there”. Derrida was full of gentle irony, self-doubt and respect for others, even the Other, as he so often termed it in his more political writings.
Schutte, by contrast, is a third-world ideologue, possessed by a terrible certainty. She has more in common with Robert Mugabe or Idi Amin than Jacques Derrida. Like so many others strutting about our campuses today, she has no real culture but the fad of the moment. The more politically correct such fads are, the better. Her meretricious pseudo-intellectualism has all the charm of Winnie Mandela’s expensive sunglasses and jewellery, being the brash expression of a corrupt and power-hungry soul. Ideas are but slogans, brands, to market yourself to another kind of mob to the one that wanted to lynch the Cape winemaker.
I have often thought that South Africa today has much in common with Nero’s Rome. Our country has become murderous, corrupt and decadent. Innocence has died. Approximately a thousand children are raped every day, including babies, and nobody says a word. Or if they broach the subject, they are immediately reduced to silence, given the ritual knife for disembowelling themselves. Schutte’s smug satisfaction (“It is a good thing that Louise Mabille has handed in her resignation and that the University of Pretoria has accepted it”) may be deconstructed to reveal two things: Schadenfreude and a paradoxical expectation of honour in others.
There is no English word for Schadenfreude, hence the German loanword that is universally used. However, the Afrikaans (and Dutch) term leedvermaak expresses the same thing, with a few more connotations (“signifieds” for post-structuralists) thrown in. The other day I tweeted in Afrikaans, something to the effect that leedvermaak is the apotheosis of journalism in South Africa. Vermaak also means entertainment, hence the misery of others, their travails amid hysterical accusations, calumny and vilification provide entertainment. Anti-racist Blitzkrieg, either on the vineyards of the Cape or on the campus of Pretoria University, therefore feeds the sensationalist mainstream media machine, sated on the blood of murder victims.
Celebrity “businessman” Kenny Kunene
Due to the surfeit of murders in South Africa, people are becoming bored with news of another killing, no matter how ruthless and macabre. Celebrity murder, such as the Oscar Pistorius case, is still news, but not even serial killings elicit much attention. In a society as utterly cruel and corrupt as ours, we are in desperate need of frivolity, such as the camp antics of that incorrigible clown in drag, Pieter-Dirk Uys, or Kenny Kunene’s parties where guests eat sushi off the bodies of bikini-clad ladies.
South Africa is profoundly amoral. It lacks a moral or ethical code to define right and wrong. Someone like Baudrillard would say that this “lack”, in a psychoanalytical sense, creates a need for a kind of pseudo-ethics, a moral simulacrum.
This is where anti-racism comes in. Anti-racism is the simulacrum of our lost moral code. It is no coincidence that the objectionable sentence in Louise Mabille’s column contained references to both Calvinism and baby rape, the former marking the overtly Christian morality of the old South Africa and the latter epitomising the radical “freedom from all scruples” that characterises the new South Africa.
In this respect, Gillian Schutte, despite her evidently defective grasp of some basic philosophical and literary concepts, understands the “new amorality” well. In one of her “feminist” videos, a rape victim explains that the “cure” for the shame attached to having been raped, is to join the so-called “slutwalk”, ardently recommended by Ms. Schutte. By self-identifying as a slut, a woman is freed from the fear of rape and “forced sex” as it is euphemistically called. Miracle cures are to be found everywhere in South Africa, peddled by immigrant Nigerian pastors and indigenous witchdoctors alike. Not to forget the infamous “virgin cleansing myth” by which one may be cured of HIV-Aids by raping a virgin, including an infant, and which Louise Mabille alluded to in her column.
Gillian Schutte is also a champion of the word “cunt” which, according to her, should become part of our everyday discourse. As she puts it,
“When women finally reclaim and speak this word, its full potential will be released and women will repossess their collective cunt-power and rise up against misogyny and patriarchy with the absolute intent of ending it.”
Amid the universal amorality and Neronic decadence of South Africa, Schutte is clutching at ethical straws, more precisely: pubic hairs. Instead of simply affirming and enjoying the slutwalk, she opts for the simulacrum of the good, which has now turned out to be the “collective cunt-power” of women.
But there is no “good” anymore. South Africa is really living according to the famous maxim from Dostoyevsky’s Brothers Karamazov: “If there is no God, then everything is permitted.” As I intimated the other day, SA really stands for “Sadists’ Apocalypse”. Eighteenth-century French literature, specifically the writings of the Marquis de Sade, is all that we have to remotely begin to understand our baby rapists and farm murderers.
Apart from Gillian Schutte’s “cunt-power”, the other pseudo-morality that people desperately cling to is anti-racism. In our sadistic universe where nothing is wrong, some people imagine that racism is the one remaining sin. You may kill, rape, bribe, lie and steal, more or less with impunity, but uttering the word “Bantu” will earn you the opprobrium of polite society, that society which is now reappropriating the magical power of four-letter words.
The simulacrum of sin is transgression of anti-racist etiquette. That alone awakens some form of long-lost moral response which is delivered with predictable ecclesiastical ritual: denunciation, excommunication, prohibition, censorship. From the TV studio did Schutte, the high priestess of atavistic cunt-power and pagan ritual, deliver her sermon against what Orwell called thoughtcrime: “racist” thoughts and suspicions, including the mere mention of “baby rape”, which is a proven and documented phenomenon in this country.
Did Johnny Burger, the Cape winemaker, commit suicide to save his honour? In a country where “trial by media” and populist passions have come to influence courts and the judicial system, Burger probably correctly surmised that he would not receive a fair trial. His suicide reminds me of the death of the patrician Latin author Petronius who, having got wind of Nero’s henchmen being sent to kill him, preferred taking his own life while drinking wine and having musicians perform for him.
Thanks to Carina Papenfus’s hate campaign, no-one will ever drink Burger’s wine again.
Similarly to Burger, Louise Mabille fell upon her own sword and resigned. Understandably, there is despair and pessimism among the remaining class of thinking people in South Africa. We are outnumbered and outscreamed by those who are playing for the gallery.
However, notwithstanding samurai customs, there are other ways of saving one’s honour. On these shores, we have the example of the bittereinder, of someone fighting to the very, bitter end, against all odds.
Are we ready for that thankless struggle, knowing full well that we shall face calumny all the way? If reason be dead, can thought or the mind still withstand the mob, baying for our blood?
Expose entrenched racism as it manifests in contemporary South Africa but don’t assume your authority to equate (“all but small dissident groups of alternative”) Afrikaners with white supremacy. It was the British that united all of South Africa as the political entity we know today, just over 100 years ago, after they showed zero white solidarity towards the Afrikaners and just before they passed the Natives Land Act of 1913. It only needed a name when the NP came to power: Apartheid wasn’t conceived in a vacuum.
Furthermore, dressing the experience of whiteness in a costume of irrational racial hatred that sprang from thin air might impress your Elizabethan audiences in the enchanted forest (for whom Englishness may have been the only conceivable “default”) but it will do nothing towards our understanding of how things came to be the way they are, which is crucial for reconciliation in this country and all over the world.
Playing the brutish white off against the helpless black conjures up images of a 19th-century representation of “Bongo bongo land” and your call on “us whites” to unite in our collective white guilt is just outright supremacist. Welcome to the African renaissance. It isn’t up to “us whites” anymore. – Guest on Mail & Guardian
The “Us” of this column’s title needs no explaining. The “Them,” however, does. We the American people are up against an entity far more sinister than the traditional, inchoate enemy – terrorism – around which we are instructed to unite in purpose.
The debate over whether to strafe Syria or to stay out of that country pits us against the military-congressional-industrial complex, whose interests run counter to ours.
According to a Washington Post-ABC News poll, “Nearly six in 10 [of ‘us’] oppose missile strikes in light of the U.S. government’s determination that Syria used chemical weapons against its own people. Democrats and Republicans alike oppose strikes by double digit margins, and there is deep opposition among every political and demographic group in the survey. Political independents are among the most clearly opposed, with 66 percent saying they are against military action.”
Yet at the behest of Mr. Obama, who had drawn that red line in the sand – ran his mouth off and needed to save presidential face – Secretary of State John Kerry, Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel and Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. Martin Dempsey convened on Capitol Hill to argue against the wishes of Americans and for a “strategic” strike on Syria, a country that poses no imminent danger to “us.”
Offering near-meaningless opposition to the power of the president were our representatives in both Houses – Houses that, to paraphrase Edmund Burke, were “designed as a control for the people,” but have become a control “upon the people.” The latter failed to speak on behalf of the Great Unwashed – which is how they look upon us – delivering self-aggrandizing disquisitions instead.
How seriously do these dangerous war-gamers take “us”?
Sen. Ron Johnson, the Republican from Wisconsin, who, so far, has done the right thing in voting against the lobbing of Tomahawk cruise missiles at Syria, in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, nevertheless told Fox News’ Greta Van Susteren that if his constituents came out against the strike, he would vote his conscience and merely consider their wishes.
How considerate of him! You elect a representative believing he’s aligned with certain principles, only to discover that so vast are the powers he’s been granted, that you cannot hope to sway him once he arrives on Mount Olympus. Johnson’s attitude also encapsulates the theatre of the absurd alluded to by Sen. Rand Paul, whereby, after the puppets in the Houses get to say their piece, the presidential veto puts paid to all delusions of a democratic decision-making process.
Prominent among a new breed of military man turned lawmaker to stalk the people’s House is Illinois Republican Rep. Adam Kinzinger. A “veteran of the military” who still serves as a military pilot in the National Guard is how Kinzinger bills himself. War weary though he purports to be, Kinzinger is not. The verbally flatulent representative from Illinois loved it when his ilk flew sorties over the Old Stable Iraq and seeks a repeat performance over Syria. He appears to see no limits to the role the U.S. should play in rolling back evil around the world, out of “the goodness of our heart.” Yes, the constitutional principle Rep. Kinzinger invokes to justify war against the wishes and interests of the American people is “The Goodness of Our Heart” Clause.
But then, a “Global Force for Good” is how the Navy promises to fulfill “The Goodness of Our Heart” Clause of the U.S. Constitution, on its frightful, promotional website. You see, members of the U.S. military do not regard themselves as defenders of the realm – unless by “realm” one means empire. They’ve been brainwashed to be foot soldiers for the federal government, whenever, wherever.
The magnificent Robert E. Lee, on the other hand, had it right. To this American hero, local was beautiful. Gen. Lee saw himself as a Virginian first. Rep. Kinzinger is a Syrian first.
Baseless too is the idea that someone who’s seen war will be especially judicious in sending others to war. John McCain had suffered in war and has not stopped advocating for it ever since. John Kerry voted to go into Iraq. Ditto Chuck Hagel. Both are veterans. Both are itching to “send a message” to Syria, despite Kerry’s earlier admission, in his “remarks on the alleged Syria chemical attack,” that Ban Ki-moon and assorted sources were clueless as to who was doing what in Syria.
“There is no clear indication that there is an imminent threat to the United States from Syria,” stressed Republican Rep. Jeff Duncan, pointing out that no other signatory to the convention against the use of chemical weapons has joined the U.S. in banging the tom-tom for war.
Indeed, a refrain repeated during this week’s hearing was that Assad’s alleged chemical-weapon use posed a threat to our troops. Only if they continue globetrotting!
What Duncan said next is especially poignant. Unlike Sen. Johnson, Duncan had consulted his constituents in South Carolina. Of the hundreds of emails his office had received, not one was in support of Uncle Sam killing more Syrians just because the factions in that country are killing one another. To a letter, Duncan’s South Carolinian bosses, down to the eighth-graders among them, told Duncan, “No! Don’t get involved in the civil war in Syria.”
Three minutes into his address to the House Foreign Affairs Committee’s hearing on Syria, Rep. Duncan made another pivotal point: An administration so eager to mire the U.S. in Syria had refused to galvanize the same resources to rescue four brave Americans who fought for their lives in Benghazi.
And here’s the rub. Here’s what American patriots must understand. The “estimable” men arguing for war in both Houses and before them are not on the people’s side. Never will be. For they do not accept that a just government’s duty is to its own citizens first.
Assuming for the sake of argument that lobbing long-range, air-to-surface missiles at Syria will enhance Syrian liberties – the Deciders stateside do not accept that distinguish we must between the right of the people the world over to be free and our obligation to free them.
We have a solemn [negative] duty not to violate the rights of foreigners everywhere to life, liberty and property. But we have no duty to uphold their rights. Why? Because the ostensible upholding of the negative rights of the world’s citizens involves compromising the negative liberties of Americans – our lives, our liberties and our livelihoods.
By this imperative, Kerry, Hagel, Dempsey, Kinzinger, the senior Republican flake from Arizona, the junior Jeff Flake from the same state, will never abide. This is why it is “us” against “them” on Syria and all else.
Power was restored in Lawley and Lenasia South on Friday while other parts of Johannesburg could be left in the dark over the weekend, City Power said.
“It will take a maximum of two to three days to restore power to all effected areas,” City Power said.
It gave the same prediction on Thursday, but on Friday stressed that on-going work would see suburbs gradually restored over this period.
The power supply to parts of the West Rand and northern Johannesburg was disrupted when a few hundred City Power staff downed tools on Wednesday afternoon. City Power said the strike was not union-led.
The workers were unhappy about a new shift system the power distributor was implementing.
It was believed that the striking workers had sabotaged the infrastructure causing the widespread blackouts, which impacted on traffic flow and affected some businesses’ operations.
One substation appeared to have been tampered with and at another the power equipment appeared to have been manually put down.
Police were investigating and security guards had been appointed to watch the stations.
City Power was using contractors to try and fix the problems.
It said that electricity had not yet been restored to Houghton Estate, where former president Nelson Mandela is recuperating, in a medical facility set up at his home, after his discharge from hospital at the weekend.
City Power provided a back-up generator to the vicinity of Mandela’s home on Wednesday night, and this remained in place on Friday morning.
City Power’s engineering operations director Louis Pieterse said in an interview on Radio 702 on Friday that the new shift system, which sparked the strike, was intended to cut costs associated with overtime.
“Seventy-eight percent of the year falls outside normal working hours,” he said.
As overtime was expensive. City Power believed that the funds saved through implementing a shift system could be better used, for example more people could be employed.
Pieterse said workers were not yet ready to negotiate on the matter.
“If staff were willing to talk, we could get to a solution.”
On Thursday, Democratic Alliance spokesman on infrastructure services in Johannesburg Denis Hunt said City Power’s new shift system would result in a decrease in workers’ take-home pay.
He also raised concerns that City Power was understaffed.
“The members of the DA sitting in the section 79 oversight committee have for months drawn attention to the perilously low level of staffing at City Power, in many areas being below the full complement by 50 percent and more.
“… In a market where competing for skills has become the norm and finding qualified people willing to work in these conditions is difficult, to introduce a working structure which reduces what the workers have come to expect is suicidal.”
Hunt said the power problems could lead to economic losses in the city.
On Thursday afternoon, power had been restored to the Hursthill and Mayfair substations which supply Auckland Park, Bosmont, Crosby, Emmarentia, Mayfair, Northcliff, Rosebank, Riverlea and the Westdene areas; and to the Cydna and Alexandra and Gresswold substations which supply Athol, Alexandra, Bramley, Hyde Park, Melrose, Riverpark, Tsutsumani and the Wynberg areas.
On Friday morning, however, City Power said the supply to residents’ homes in areas such as Northcliff was yet to be restored, despite progress towards this having been made. – Sapa
World powers on Thursday discussed the Syria crisis over dinner at the G20 summit but failed to bridge their deeply entrenched divisions over a US push for military action against President Bashar al-Assad’s regime.
As tensions over the Syrian conflict threatened to torpedo the working schedule of the G20 summit outside Saint Petersburg, host Vladimir Putin made a last-minute announcement for participants to air their views over dinner.
But rather than seeking a genuine breakthrough, the leaders took turns over three hours to reiterate their own positions on the issue in 10-minute speeches, a diplomatic source close to the talks told AFP.
“The G20 has just now finished the dinner session at which the divisions about Syria were confirmed,” Italian Prime Minister Enrico Letta, who attended the dinner, said in a comment on his official Twitter feed.
Russia has led the opposition to US-led military action against the Syrian President Bashar al-Assad over a chemical attack on August 21 outside Damascus, which Washington says was perpetrated by the regime.
In New York, the US envoy to the United Nations accused Russia of holding the UN Security Council hostage, while British Prime Minister David Cameron said London had fresh evidence of chemical weapons use.
In a new bid for a peaceful solution for Syria, the UN announced that its special envoy Lakhdar Brahimi would attend meetings at the two-day summit to push for peace talks.
“Providing more arms to either side is not the answer. There is no military solution,” the UN quoted Ban as telling the G20 leaders at the dinner hosted by Putin.
Russia meanwhile said Syria’s Foreign Minister Walid Muallem would travel to Moscow on Monday as Obama seeks to convince US lawmakers to approve military action.
A French diplomatic source said the closed-door dinner, hosted by Putin at the luxurious imperial palace of Peterhof outside Saint Petersburg, was not meant to secure a deal.
“The objective was an exchange between the top world leaders and not to come to an agreement” on the crisis, said the source.
Following the dinner, which ended at around 1:00 am (2100 GMT), the leaders of the world’s top emerging and developed nations were treated to a rendition of a abridged version of the opera “La Traviata”.
Putin and Obama put on a show of smiles for the cameras as they shook hands just before the summit got under way on the shores of the Gulf of Finland.
— ‘War cannot solve the problem’ —
Syria’s allies remained unmoved by Obama’s push.
Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei called allegations of an August 21 chemical weapons attack by the regime a “pretext” to launch strikes against the country, and pledged to support Damascus “until the end”.
According to US intelligence, more than 1,400 people living in rebel-held suburbs of Damascus were killed in the strike, which involved the use of sarin nerve gas.
“We have just been looking at some samples taken from Damascus in the Porton Down laboratory in Britain which further shows the use of chemical weapons in that Damascus suburb,” Cameron told BBC TV from the G20 summit.
A British source told AFP that a soil and cloth sample taken from the site of the alleged chemical attack in the Syrian capital “has tested positive for sarin”.
Beyond convincing Russia, Obama has a tough sell ahead elsewhere. China — another veto-wielding Security Council member — has already expressed its “grave concerns” over unilateral military strikes.
A political solution is the only way to end the Syria crisis, a senior Chinese official said on Thursday, warning world powers to be “highly prudent” over the issue.
“War cannot solve the problem in Syria,” Chinese delegation spokesman Qin Gang told reporters at the G20.
Pope Francis added his voice to the calls for a peaceful solution to the Syria crisis, warning against the “futile pursuit of a military solution”.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel has repeatedly ruled out her country’s participation in any US-led military strike against Assad’s regime, while the British parliament has also rejected the idea.
EU president Herman van Rompuy said while the Damascus chemical attack was “a crime against humanity” there was “no military solution to the Syrian conflict”.
While no formal bilateral sit-down meeting is planned between Obama and Putin, a White House official suggested there would likely be some kind of more informal conversation.
With Russia expected to use its UN Security Council veto to block any military action, US ambassador to the United Nations Samantha Power on Thursday accused Russia of holding the UN Security Council “hostage” over the Syria crisis.
Western military action against Syria had looked imminent last week, but Obama deferred the move and is seeking backing from Congress when it resumes sitting next week.
Since British lawmakers voted down a bid for strikes against the regime, Washington has found a firm partner in France.
Now in its third year, the popular uprising against the Assad regime has cost more than 100,000 lives. – AFP
Spaced out along St. Petersburg’s main thoroughfare, about a dozen human rights activists staged individual protests to attract the attention of leaders of the world’s biggest economies to human rights violations in Russia.
Activist Iosiph Skakovsky said they held individual protests because mass protests are often banned or disrupted by police.
Activist Natalya Tsymbalova was protesting “discrimination of sexual minorities, falsification of elections, pressure on NGOs, violation of the freedom of public assembly.”
Her handmade poster said that Russian President Vladimir Putin’s claim that gays are not discriminated against was a lie. “There is discrimination. Speak out for Russia!”
A new Russian law banning gay propaganda aimed at minors has drawn international criticism.
Police checked the documents of individual protesters but did not interfere in their actions. – AP
Suspected Taliban militants shot dead the Indian author Sushmita Banerjee, writer of a popular book about her dramatic escape from the Taliban in the 90s, in eastern Afghan province of Paktika on Wednesday night, police said on Thursday.
“We found her bullet riddled body near Madrassa on the outskirts of Sharan city (provincial capital) this morning,” provincial police chief Dawlat Khan Zadran told AFP, confirming earlier reports from Indian media. – AFP
Al-Qaida-linked rebels have launched an assault on a regime-held Christian village in the densely populated west of Syria and new clashes erupted near the capital, Damascus – part of a brutal battle of attrition each side believes it can win despite more than two years of deadlock.
As the world focused on possible U.S. military action against Syria, rebels commandeered a mountaintop hotel in the village of Maaloula and shelled the community below Wednesday, said a nun, speaking by phone from a convent in the village. She spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of reprisals.
The attack came hours before a Senate panel voted to give President Barack Obama authority to use military force against Syria – the first time lawmakers have voted to allow military action since the October 2002 votes authorizing the invasion of Iraq.
The measure, which cleared the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on a 10-7 vote, was altered at the last minute to support “decisive changes to the present military balance of power” in Syria’s civil war, though it ruled out U.S. combat operations on the ground. It was expected to reach the full Senate floor next week.
The Syria conflict, which began with a popular uprising in March 2011, has been stalemated, and it’s not clear if U.S. military strikes over the regime’s alleged chemical weapons use would change that. Obama has said he seeks limited pinpoint action to deter future chemical attacks, not regime change.
Obama has been lobbying for international and domestic support for punishing President Bashar Assad’s regime, which the U.S. says fired rockets loaded with the nerve agent sarin on rebel-held areas near Damascus before dawn on Aug. 21, killing hundreds of civilians.
So far, however, he has won little international backing for action. Among major allies, only France has offered publicly to join the U.S. in a strike.
In a parliament debate, France’s Prime Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault made a passionate appeal for intervention in Syria, placing the blame for the alleged chemical attack on Assad and warning that inaction could let him carry out more atrocities.
The debate ended without a vote since President Francois Hollande can order a military operation without one.
Obama has called chemical weapons use a “red line,” and top administration officials argued before the Senate on Tuesday that Assad would take inaction by Washington as a license for further brutality against his people. The fighting has killed more than 100,000 Syrians and uprooted nearly 7 million from their homes.
During a visit to Sweden on Wednesday, Obama said a red line had been drawn by countries around the world that have backed a long-standing ban on chemical weapons. “I didn’t set a red line, the world set a red line,” he said.
With the Syria debate in Congress in full swing, questions arose around the administration’s assurances. It’s not clear, critics said, how the U.S. could expect to deliver surgical strikes in Syria’s chaotic battlefield or predict the repercussions, including possible Assad regime reprisals against Syria’s neighbors.
The civil war in Syria hit a stalemate almost from the start. The rebels control much of the countryside in the north, east and south, but the regime is hanging on to most urban centers in the west, where the majority of Syrians live.
Within that deadlock, each side has consolidated control over certain areas, said Peter Harling, a Syria expert at the International Crisis Group think tank.
Momentum “is always shifting enough for both sides to be able to convince themselves that victory is ultimately feasible,” he said. “In practice, both sides are stuck and can achieve very little militarily.”
The dawn assault on the predominantly Christian village of Maaloula was carried out by rebels from the al-Qaida-linked Jabhat al-Nusra group, according to a Syrian government official and the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, an anti-regime group.
At the start of the attack, an al-Nusra fighter blew himself up at a regime checkpoint at the entrance to the village, said the Observatory, which collects information from a network of anti-regime activists.
The suicide attack was followed by fighting between the rebels and regime forces, the Observatory and a nun in the village said. Eventually, the rebels seized the checkpoint, disabled two tanks and an armored personnel carrier and killed eight regime soldiers in fighting, the British-based group said.
The nun said the rebels took over the Safir hotel atop a mountain overlooking the village and fired shells at it from there. “It’s a war. It has been going from 6 a.m. in the morning,” she said.
Some 80 people from the village took refuge in the convent, which houses 13 nuns and 27 orphans, she said.
A Syrian government official confirmed the assault and said the military was trying to repel the rebels. He spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to give official statements.
Maaloula, a mountain village some 40 miles (60 kilometers) northeast of Damascus, is home to about 2,000 residents, some of whom still speak a version of Aramaic, the ancient language of biblical times believed to have been spoken by Jesus.
The four-decade iron rule of the Assad clan over Syria has long rested on support from the country’s ethnic and religious minorities, including Christians, Shiite Muslims and Kurds. The Assad family and key regime figures are Alawites, followers of an offshoot of Shiite Islam, while most rebels and their supporters are Sunni Muslims.
In fighting in Damascus, a mortar shell fired by rebels hit a sports hall, killing a member of the national tae kwon do team, 27-year-old Mohammed Ali Neimeh, the state news agency SANA said. Neimeh had been training for an upcoming Islamic Solidarity Tournament in Indonesia this week.
Rebels and regime forces also clashed on the outskirts of the capital, according to amateur video. In the Daraya district, several fighters fired assault rifles from behind an earthen embankment. Smoke rose from the neighborhood of Barzek after the shelling.
There were new signs of rivalry among rebel groups that have been fragmented from the start. The two main camps are the Western-backed Free Syrian Army, which portrays itself as the largest fighting group, and jihadist fighters, including thousands from outside Syria, who have become increasingly dominant, particularly in the north and sparsely populated east.
Among the jihadists, there have been several splits in recent months, particularly between those loyal to commanders in Syria and those who pledge allegiance to al-Qaida-linked groups in Iraq.
In an amateur video posted online Wednesday, a foreign fighter was seen standing among other bearded men who he says have come to Syria from Russia and the Caucasus to wage jihad, or holy war.
“Our brigade is called the Mujahedin of the Caucasus and the Levant, and we have our brothers from all over the world with us,” he said in halting Russian translated into Arabic. He said his men had broken away from one of the jihadi blocs, known as ISIS, and that the group is also “independent from Jabhat al-Nusra and others.” – AP
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Associated Press writer Albert Aji in Damascus contributed to this report.
A former Soweto police reservist accused of promising people jobs in exchange for money has been arrested, Gauteng police said on Wednesday.
The 39-year-old man was taken into custody on Tuesday night after one of the people who paid him R5000 opened a case, said Warrant Officer Kay Makhubela.
“He recruited unemployed people promising them jobs in the SA Police Service,” he said.
The man who reported him to police had paid him R5000 as a “recruitment fee”.
He would appear in the Protea Magistrate’s Court on Thursday on charges of theft under false pretences, said Makhubela. – Sapa
A police constable and an SA Revenue Service (Sars) employee were arrested for allegedly stealing drugs at the Lebombo border post on Wednesday, Mpumalanga police said.
“The policeman searched a taxi from Mozambique while its driver went to stamp his passport, and found a washing powder, plastic [container] stacked with cocaine estimated at [a street value of] more than R3 million,” said Colonel Leonard Hlathi.
The officer allegedly called an off-duty Sars employee who took the drugs to his home.
A police operation was already underway in response to a tip-off about the taxi entering the country, and this led to the policeman’s arrest.
“After the constable’s arrest, he took us to the other suspect’s home where he freely handed the drugs over and was arrested.”
The police later arrested the taxi driver.
They would all appear in the Komatipoort Magistrate’s Court on Thursday. – Sapa
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