Mbeki urges calm after South Africa mob attacks

President Thabo Mbeki made an impassioned appeal for South Africans to respect the dignity of foreigners as calls grew on Tuesday for troops to be sent in to stamp out xenophobic violence.

The flare-up in the Johannesburg region, now believed to have claimed the lives of 23 people and displaced thousands, has badly stretched police resources in one of the world's most crime-ridden cities.

While the overall situation appeared Tuesday to have calmed down slightly, tension was palpable in many townships where mobs armed with axes and machetes could still be seen roaming the streets.

"Citizens from other countries on the African continent and beyond are as human as we are and deserve to be treated with respect and dignity," said the South African leader, who spent much of the whites-only apartheid era as an exiled guest of neighbouring states.

He said South Africa was bound together with other Africans and was not "an island seperate from the rest of the continent".

In his statement, Mbeki vowed police would get "to the root of the anarchy" and "respond with the requisite measures" against perpetrators.

But the country's biggest labour union and main rights body said the situation now was so serious that the army needed to be deployed.

Many South Africans have blamed immigrants for high levels of crime and unemployment. An estimated three million Zimbabweans are believed to have crossed into South Africa to escape the economic meltdown in their homeland.

Thousands of people have been displaced in the violence which first erupted in the Alexandra township on Monday last week before spreading to other areas of the city.