South Africa deployed troops on Tuesday to areas recently hit by the surge in anti-immigrant attacks that has claimed seven lives and exposed the government’s inability to stop the violence.
Soldiers were sent to support the police in Alexandra, a poor, predominantly black township in Johannesburg where South African men were photographed fatally stabbing a Mozambican man over the weekend. A couple from Zimbabwe suffered injuries from a shooting in Alexandra on Monday night.
Though the township had otherwise quieted down the past two nights, the government made a show of dispatching the army there on Tuesday, perhaps stung by growing criticism that its slowness in responding to this wave of violence had helped it spread.
“We come in as the last resort,” Nosiviwe Mapisa-Nqakula, the defense minister, told reporters at a news conference in Alexandra. “The army will serve as a deterrent.”
Ms. Mapisa-Nqakula added, “This is not too late; this is just the right time.”
Attacks against immigrants — mostly Africans from neighboring countries who live, and often run small businesses, in areas populated by impoverished South Africans — began about two weeks ago in the southern city Durban.
In recent years, as a weak economy has squeezed the poor in South Africa, frustrated young men have periodically leveled their anger at African immigrants. Troops were also deployed in 2008 when a wave of anti-immigrant violence killed more than 60 foreigners in Johannesburg’s townships.
The authorities said the latest unrest was incited by xenophobic comments made by influential figures from the Durban area, including Goodwill Zwelithini, the king of the Zulus, the country’s largest ethnic group, as well as President Jacob G. Zuma’s eldest son, Edward.
“We ask foreign nationals to pack their belongings and go back to their countries,” the king was quoted as saying last month.
The king later said that his comments were part of what he called a broad criticism of lawlessness in South Africa.
The president, who has not commented on the remarks made by his son or the king, spoke out against the violence on Thursday, but only after it had spread to Johannesburg, the country’s largest city. On Saturday, swelling criticism of his lack of leadership forced Mr. Zuma to cancel an official trip to Indonesia at the last minute.
A vast township that extends a few miles east of Johannesburg’s wealthiest suburb, Alexandra includes modest, middle-class stretches, but also sections of shacks with only rudimentary plumbing.
Unemployment among young men there and similar townships is estimated at more than 40 percent. Those with jobs in Alexandra are frequently employed in the low-paying service sector, often in the gleaming malls in the nearby suburbs.
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