Around 700 activists were taking part in a march to protest the slow progress of the rollout of antiretrovirals in the country’s Eastern Cape Province when the police opened fire. Forty people were injured, and 10 treated for gunshot wounds.
“The police started beating people … then shooting at them,” TAC deputy chairwoman Sipho Mthati told reporters. “It really was excessive force — it’s not like they were burning tyres or throwing stones, it was a peaceful protest in a hospital.”
The protest march was called to highlight the need for greater access to antiretroviral drugs in the province. TAC says that while 2000 people are in urgent need of treatment, only 200 are receiving it and fewer than 10 people have been put on treatment since the start of the year.
A police spokesman said that the demonstration was broken up at the request of hospital administrators when the demonstrators entered wards, and described the response as “minimum force”.
The shooting was condemned by the New York-based organisation Human Rights Watch. “It’s a shocking irony that people demonstrating for essential medicines should be met with rubber bullets and teargas,” said the group’s spokesman Jonathan Cohen.
The US-based AIDS Healthcare Foundation also condemned the attack, which it said was the first of kind anywhere in the world, comparing them to the brutality of South Africa’s former apartheid regime.
— Reuters, Aidsmap
