OFTEN MR MBEKI, ONLY DEATH CAN CURE

THE EVIL THAT MAN DOES

FLATLY rejecting such calls from almost all opposition parties up to and including Dr Mangosuthu's IFP, SA's presumptive new President, Thabo Mbeki, says dogmatically that there "will be no referendum on the death penalty." He need not think the matter will end there. Recent events have given IFP and the rest ample ammunition in their demands for a return to capital punishment as one key solution to the country's seemingly intractable descent into urban terrorism and criminal barbarism. Highlights:

The brutal, high-profile rape of Charlene Smith, a prominent White leftwing journalist whose detailed account of her humiliating ordeal, with accompanying police and medical bumbling, made harrowing reading. Right on top of that came the brutal and repeated rape of a 67 year old top-ranking UN official, an American citizen, at her official UN residence in Pretoria. Other UN officials reported her as being in "deep shock." In a separate incident in the same city an 89-year old woman was viciously attacked, tied up and raped.

In the same period a 56-year old Soweto highschool principal, Gwendoline Jele, was gunned down outside her office by a gang of armed robbers who then stripped the dying woman of her jewellery and fled in her red VW Jetta. Education Department officials were quoted as saying Jele's murder took place because "violence is condoned." On the same day an Edenpark man was shot in an apparent drive-by shooting and died in hospital, while at Montgomery Park a 50-year old man died after being shot in his driveway. In the same week top photojournalist John Rubython was stabbed to death in his home.

In yet another mortifying incident for the SA Government, the Burundi Ambassador, Mr Gedeon Mageti, and his wife were ambushed by armed robbers in the driveway of their official residence at Waterkloof and ordered immediately to get out of their Mercedes-Benz or be shot. Only one week previously Mr Mageti and his driver had been held up at gunpoint at the same spot. On that occasion he was robbed of his brief case, personal papers and cell phone.

All this was just a tiny fraction of the crime toll reported over just a few days, further sickening evidence that SA has indeed become the unsafest place in the world. We here are now in the terrifying situation where murders, many so grotesque in their sadistic cruelty that it makes the eyes pop out, are an almost daily occurrence; where hardened criminals jeer the judiciary in court; where a convicted serial killer can boast that killing for him means "nothing more than ripping up a duvet;"

where the police are attacked and killed in their own police stations; where professional crime has become a multi-billion rand industry, covering crimes ranging from murder and prostitution through to drugs, hijacks, kidnapping, armed robbery, police killings, aggravated rape, protection rackets, assault, muggings, child abuse - you name it, we have it.

Surely to no one's surprise, this long and sustained sequence of outrages has raised support for the death penalty to quite astonishing levels Jody Kollapen, a member of the Human Rights Commission and herself an abolitionist, was recently reported in The Sunday Times as having said that "in 1964 60% of people supported (return to the death penalty). Now it is close to 90%." She is right. Poll after poll shows capital punishment enjoying comprehensive popular support: that a majority of all groups, men, women, Whites, Indians, Coloureds and Blacks today support the ultimate deterrent.

While there can be little doubt that this ANC government has taken pains to massage the violent crime statistics so as to present a more reassuring picture, the reality is that since the ANC/SACP alliance took power in 1994, the country has suffered a probable 130 000/150 000 thousand murders and probably double or more that number or rapes. Inherent cause? The reality has to be faced. Despite all the ANC's cant and humbug about its dedication to "democracy," a democratic culture has not been established in this country. Far from it.

In his seminal work, The Common Law, the great American jurist, Mr Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, wrote: "The first requirement of a sound body of law is that it should correspond with the actual feelings and demands of the community …"

Judge Walsh of the European Court put it this way: "In a democracy the law cannot afford to ignore the moral consensus of the community. If the law is out of touch with the consensus of the community, the law is brought into contempt."

SA. under the ANC/SACP, has become a state more frightened of punishment than of crime, to the point where the views of the predominant millions must be ignored. Inevitable public reaction? People today doubt the ability or even the willingness of the criminal justice system to punish criminals and in so doing protect society. Worse, many today are convinced that as far as this Mandela government is concerned victims - especially White victims - are expendable.