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The ANC Youth League in the Western Cape welcomes the revolutionary decision by the Cape Town based Trauma Centre to terminate its links with the controversial security company, G4S.
 
G4S runs Israel's illegal detention, torture and incarceration of Palestinian political prisoners and this, together with G4S's complicity in the torture allegations at Mangaung were the reasons provided by the Trauma Centre for terminating their G4S contract. The Trauma Centre is the first South African entity to join the global boycott against G4S. We are proud that the Western Cape has set the precedent.
 
The ANC Youth League with various students, academics and workers protested on 12 March this year against G4S at the University of Cape. The protest was against both, G4S abuse and exploitation of workers at UCT but also G4S's complicity in Israeli apartheid and oppression of Palestinians.
 
The ANC Youth League in the Western Cape will be consulting with the UCT Palestine Solidarity Forum, the UCT South African Students Congress, UCT Young Communist League and the UCT ANC Youth League branches together with BDS South Africa in the coming weeks to escalate the boycott of G4S campaign at UCT as well as at Stellenbosch (another university that contracts with G4S).
 
Our universities belong to us, the young people, and we are the deciders of what companies our institutions of higher learning should contract with. Services such as security should be undertaken by the university and should not be outsourced, particularly to companies that are complicit in imperialist oppression and apartheid.
 
Companies like G4S were successfully targeted and boycotted during Apartheid in South Africa and now a similar international isolation of Israel through the Palestinian-led boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) campaign is currently underway. In the 1980s the boycott worked against Apartheid South Africa, and it is now working against Apartheid Israel.
 
The BDS campaign seeks to hold Israel (and international companies involved in Israel) accountable to international law. The international isolation of Israel it is hoped will lead to the necessary conditions for a just peace to be negotiated - similar to what occurred in South Africa.