All eyes on volatile province

Reports of two deaths from politically motivated violence in South Africa's volatile KwaZulu-Natal province were not an indication that next month's elections would be marred by widespread conflict, said analyst Paul Graham.

Graham, executive director of the Institute for Democracy in South Africa (IDASA), said while it would be "foolhardy to say that ... some individuals are not going to get injured, the nature of the state has changed, so that you are unlikely to get the kind of unrestrained violence that was present during the 1980s and 1990s".

News reports said two people were killed and several injured over the weekend in different parts of KwaZulu-Natal, on the east coast of the country.

The province has been a hotbed of political violence for years, as the ruling African National Congress (ANC) and the Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP) - traditionally strong in KwaZulu-Natal due to its ethnic Zulu bias - battled for control.

South Africa's Independent Newspapers reported on Monday that an IFP rally in Folweni, south of commercial city of Durban, turned ugly when an ANC supporter was shot. Two ANC members were also allegedly beaten up and have opened a case of assault.

In a separate incident, an ANC activist and his wife were killed in the KwaNokweja area in the southern part of KwaZulu-Natal.

The Independent Electoral Commission had no comment on these incidents, a spokeswoman told IRIN.

Graham said the behaviour of the police was commendable. "The fact that they did operate in a non-partisan way to enable these rallies to go forward and keep people apart, suggests we are in a very different place than in we were in the 1990s, when police were clearly complicit in the violence," he noted. It was thus "very hard to see how it can degenerate into the kind of internecine war we had in those days".

"I was there [in KwaZulu-Natal] during that time, and people who are [now] afraid are underestimating the extent to which the state was fomenting that violence. It was not just the ANC and IFP [fighting each other], the state was involved and implicated deeply - that's not the case anymore," Graham added.