Former South African cricketer Pat Symcox and a Dutch sports journalist both warned this weekend that South Africa was far too dangerous to hold the WC2010 in.

SA cricketer Pat Symcox made the comment that SA should ‘give back the WC2010 event’ after the murder of former Austrian soccer player Peter Burgstaller on the Pennington golf estate near Durban last Friday.

• Two brothers appeared in the Scottburgh Magistrate’s Court for the golf-club killing and mugging. Simon (22) and Mthokozisi (25) Msomi were remanded for a later bail application hearing and a third arrested appeared in the Umzinto Magistrate’s Court last Monday.

• A local Sunday newspaper quoted Symcox as saying that ‘the SA  government should deal with crime or else cancel the hosting of the 2010 Soccer World Cup.’ He was further quoted as saying that ‘it is clear that the FIFA delegation, businessmen or ordinary holidaymakers were not safe in this country”.

• Two FIFA delegates also were mugged in Durban this past weekend.

http://www.sabcnews.com/south_africa/crime1justice/0,2172,160122,00.html

And a leading Dutch sports journalist, in Durban for the WC2010 draw, agreed with Symcox.
The Dutch journalist writing in the “Nijnatten” column for the Algemeen Dagblad daily, commented that ‘the entire circus of the football world was located securely on a small site sized only a couple of hundred square metres - easy to protect and exactly in the area where the Hilton Hotel and the Convention Centre are located.

“Inside the hotel the King Sepp Blatter was residing as the chairman of FIFA with his court in close attendance….’

“Outside the sirens could be heard going on and on. It’s like that in all major cities, sirens blaring away, but in Durban it feels ominously different somehow. More threatening. A brief visit like this cannot determine the exact extent of the security problems here, however, the thought that a World Cup is going to be held in South Africa does not fill me with great cheer,” he writes.

“Strikers in Durban, Cape Town and Nelspruit refused until just recently to continue building the WC stadia because their families were expecting a poor Christmas. These construction workers are just the vanguard of the estimated 4-million people who live in the most dire, empoverished circumstances imaginable in SA,” he writes.

“Locals also said there were ‘an extraordinarily large number of policemen in Durban and other kinds of security forces on the streets during the WC 2010 draw. Nothing was allowed to go wrong during the weekend of the ‘‘preliminary draw’.

“Foreigners weren’t allowed to be placed at risk. So they were advised to not walk alone along the boulevard facing the Indian Ocean.

“And that’s also why so many street-urchins were transported to their townships or even farther away. Poverty and aggression had to be barred from the street scenery of Durban,” the sports journalist writes.

“So it was a very embarrassing incident that an Austrian ex-footballer was found murdered at the 12th hole of the Selborne Hotel ’s golf course.
“The 43-year-old Austrian was shot in the chest. He was robbed of all his belongings.”

“The local Sunday Tribune newspaper quoted the chairman of the Selborne Golf Club, the ex- top cricketer Pat Symcox, as saying:

“Our government as a criminality problem which must be solved urgently.If they cannot solve this problem, they must return the organisation of WC2010 (to FIFA). This shooting on our golfcourse proves that foreigners aren’t safe here.”

The Dutch sports journalist comments that “Symcox’s words, spoken by a local resident who has the right to speak with authority, did make the news media.

“However his words, together with the news about the murder, were drowned in the overwhelming publicity surrounding the draw event, the stadia, the World Cup, and Africa’s chances…”

And, judging from the responses by Dutch readers on his blog, they all agree that South Africa should never have been awarded the WC2010 venue.

Writes T. Oosterveld of Amsterdam

“This WC should never have been granted to Africa. The country is not only incapable of organising such an event, but much worse is that hundreds of thousands of football tourists, with lots of money in their pockets, are being let lose in a criminal jungle.”

Writes “Piet” of Doorn:

‘The crime statistics in cities such as Durban and Johannesburg guarantee that large numbers of soccer fans will be returned in boxes. One must also realise that to secure the surrounding areas of the stadia venues, cops will probably have to be withdrawn from other regions where they are needed to maintain law and order.”

Another guy writing under the name “Targetman’ said  he’d been there once and ‘felt like a bag of money on legs. The differences between rich and poor are so vast. Football tourists must be informed very well before they go. They must not think that they are being protected by FIFA and thus will not be harmed. With that attitude it would be seriously dangerous to go and incidents will occur.’

“Dirk” of Arkel writes:

“The stadium where the eight finals are being played is very close to Soweto and another one near Johannesburg where 7 games are being played near the deadly-dangerous inner-city area of Hillbrow. Now those are the exact places where whites should never go because you would be pretty obvious there.

“The WC is being held in those places because the government wants to prove a point to the rest of Africa but the population will pay the price later.”

Another fan noted that since the tickets are ‘unaffordable’ for the vast number of South Africans, local sponsors give large numbers of free tickets to poor local blacks who then are dumped into the stadia with t-shirt handouts. It’s already happening with the cricket games’, he warned.

Henk Lamers of Gouda writes:

“It is totally irrelevant where the stadia are located. Just Google ‘crime in South Africa” and you will see that the murder rates are the highest in the world with two murders an hour. Johannesburg is called the murder capital of the world. Small wonder that banks and offices are disappearing from the inner city.’

More here: http://www.ad.nl/columns/nijnatten/article1851034.ece

More here : http://www.thetimes.co.za/News/Article.aspx?id=737659

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