the corner office

There's been two precedents (that I remember) to the SA Govt's stance that cause me not to be surprised at all.

A South African woman (I forget her name) was executed in Botswana after murdering her best friend (your garden variety love triangle basically)

And again in Botswana, a South African was executed after having killed a local policeman.

In both cases, the govts attempts to have these people tried in SA were very feeble and basically amounted to a shrug.

The stance seems to be, if you cross the border and commit a crime, you essentially place yourself at the mercy of the judicial system of the country you're in, so we can't help you. In a certain sense, such as the examples I gave, it seems fair, especially when the evidence is pretty blatant.

In this case however, the evidence is not so cut and dried.

The best they can hope for is that the added publicity will force some semblance of a fair trial. Slim chance though.

I haven't heard about the cop-killing South African, but in the instance of that South African woman (Marietta Bosch), there were some serious doubts as to whether she had committed the crime.

The victim's family were the ones who were campaigning for police to look at the case again (apparently the victim had discovered that her boss was defrauding the company that they both worked for).

Also, the Botswana government just took her one morning and hanged her, not informing her family or giving anyone the chance to say goodbye. That, to me, is just plain dodgy. Why were they so eager to hang her? Would it have hurt not to rush it?

Our government should have intervened (as they should with the mercenaries). A government's responsibility is to look after it's people.

And I won't even go into our government's non-involvement on the Callie and Monique Strijdom issue (2 SA tourists taken hostage by some Indonesian bunch a few years back).

Hi Ronwen, I was still living in Botswana at the time and most of the case coverage I had access to was in the local papers, so admittedly, it may have been skewed (though why the locals should have leant either way is anybody's guess, both the victim and the accused were white South Africans) but the evidence seemed pretty strong. I think the family knew this and would have preferred to have her face a life sentence in SA rather than a hanging.

Not so, Senkwe! The victim's husband became her boyfriend (post murder).

Carte Blanche had a segment on it, and her most staunch supporters (ie saying that she was NOT guilty) were the victim's husband and children.

They were adamant that the victim's boss was involved in some way, especially since he had previously threatened her.

"A government's responsibility is to look after it's people."

Perhaps we'll have the opportunity to discuss this next month, but I personally consider this a very slippery slope. If a government's responsibility is to look after it's people *even outside it's borders*, then you eventually get the foreign policy of the United States, which isn't so desirable.