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Monday, February 17, 2025

Standoff in South Africa ends with 87 miners dead and anger over police’s ‘smoke them out’ tactics

by

Newsdesk
32 days ago
20250116
A miner is transported on a stretcher by rescue workers after he was rescued from below ground in an abandoned gold mine in Stilfontein, South Africa, Tuesday, Jan. 14, 2025. (AP Photo/Themba Hadebe)

A miner is transported on a stretcher by rescue workers after he was rescued from below ground in an abandoned gold mine in Stilfontein, South Africa, Tuesday, Jan. 14, 2025. (AP Photo/Themba Hadebe)

Themba Hadebe

The death toll in a month­s­long stand­off be­tween po­lice and min­ers trapped while work­ing il­le­gal­ly in an aban­doned gold mine in South Africa has risen to at least 87, po­lice said Thurs­day. Au­thor­i­ties faced grow­ing anger and a pos­si­ble in­ves­ti­ga­tion over their ini­tial re­fusal to help the min­ers and in­stead “smoke them out” by cut­ting off their food sup­plies.

Na­tion­al po­lice spokesper­son Ath­len­da Mathe said that 78 bod­ies were re­trieved in a court-or­dered res­cue op­er­a­tion, with 246 sur­vivors al­so pulled out from deep un­der­ground since the op­er­a­tion be­gan on Mon­day. Mathe said nine oth­er bod­ies had been re­cov­ered be­fore the res­cue op­er­a­tion, with­out giv­ing de­tails.

Com­mu­ni­ty groups launched their own res­cue at­tempts when au­thor­i­ties said last year they would not help the hun­dreds of min­ers be­cause they were “crim­i­nals.”

The min­ers are sus­pect­ed to have died of star­va­tion and de­hy­dra­tion, al­though no caus­es of death have been re­leased.

South African au­thor­i­ties have been fierce­ly crit­i­cized for cut­ting off food and sup­plies to the min­ers in the Buf­fels­fontein Gold Mine last year. That tac­tic to “smoke them out,” as de­scribed by a promi­nent Cab­i­net min­is­ter, was con­demned by one of South Africa’s biggest trade unions.

Po­lice and the mine own­ers were al­so ac­cused of tak­ing away ropes and dis­man­tling a pul­ley sys­tem the min­ers used to en­ter the mine and send sup­plies down from the sur­face.

A court or­dered au­thor­i­ties last year to al­low food and wa­ter to be sent down to the min­ers, while an­oth­er court rul­ing last week forced them to launch a res­cue op­er­a­tion.

Many say the un­fold­ing dis­as­ter un­der­ground was clear weeks ago, when com­mu­ni­ty mem­bers spo­rad­i­cal­ly pulled de­com­pos­ing bod­ies out of the mine, some with notes at­tached plead­ing for food to be sent down.

“If the po­lice had act­ed ear­li­er, we would not be in this sit­u­a­tion, with bod­ies pil­ing up,” said Jo­hannes Qankase, a lo­cal com­mu­ni­ty leader. “It is a dis­grace for a con­sti­tu­tion­al democ­ra­cy like ours. Some­body needs to ac­count for what has hap­pened here.”

South Africa’s sec­ond biggest po­lit­i­cal par­ty, which is part of a gov­ern­ment coali­tion, called for Pres­i­dent Cyril Ramaphosa to es­tab­lish an in­de­pen­dent in­quiry to find out “why the sit­u­a­tion was al­lowed to get so bad­ly out of hand.”

“The scale of the dis­as­ter un­der­ground at Buf­fels­fontein is rapid­ly prov­ing to be as bad as feared,” the De­mo­c­ra­t­ic Al­liance par­ty said.

Au­thor­i­ties now be­lieve that near­ly 2,000 min­ers were work­ing il­le­gal­ly in the mine near the town of Stil­fontein, south­west of Jo­han­nes­burg, since Au­gust last year. Most of them resur­faced on their own over the last few months, po­lice said, and all the sur­vivors have been ar­rest­ed, even as some emerged this week bad­ly ema­ci­at­ed and bare­ly able to walk to wait­ing am­bu­lances.

A con­voy of mor­tu­ary vans ar­rived at the mine to car­ry away the bod­ies.

Mathe said at least 13 chil­dren had al­so come out of the mine be­fore the of­fi­cial res­cue op­er­a­tion.

Po­lice an­nounced Wednes­day that they were end­ing the op­er­a­tion af­ter three days and be­lieved no one else was un­der­ground. To be sure, a cam­era was sent down Thurs­day in a cage that was used to pull out sur­vivors and bod­ies.

Two vol­un­teer res­cuers from the com­mu­ni­ty had gone down in the small cage dur­ing the res­cue op­er­a­tion to help min­ers as au­thor­i­ties re­fused to al­low any of­fi­cial res­cue per­son­nel to go in­to the shaft be­cause it was too dan­ger­ous.

“It has been a tough few days, there were many peo­ple who (we) saved but I still feel bad for those whose fam­i­ly mem­bers came out in body bags,” said Mand­la Charles, one of the vol­un­teer res­cuers. “We did all we could.” The two vol­un­teers were be­ing of­fered trau­ma coun­selling, po­lice said.

The mine is one of the deep­est in South Africa and is a maze of tun­nels and lev­els and has sev­er­al shafts lead­ing in­to it. The min­ers were work­ing up to 2.5 kilo­me­ters (1.5 miles) un­der­ground in dif­fer­ent groups.

Po­lice have main­tained that the min­ers were able to come out through sev­er­al shafts but re­fused out of fear of be­ing ar­rest­ed. That’s been dis­put­ed by groups rep­re­sent­ing the min­ers, who say hun­dreds were trapped and left starv­ing in dark and damp con­di­tions with de­com­pos­ing bod­ies around them.

Po­lice Min­is­ter Sen­zo Mchunu de­nied in an in­ter­view with a na­tion­al TV sta­tion that the po­lice were re­spon­si­ble for any star­va­tion and said they had al­lowed food to go down.

The ini­tial po­lice op­er­a­tion last year to force the min­ers to come out and give them­selves up for ar­rest was part of a larg­er na­tion­wide clam­p­down on il­le­gal min­ing called Vala Um­go­di, or Close the Hole. Il­le­gal min­ing is of­ten in the news in South Africa and a ma­jor prob­lem for au­thor­i­ties as large groups go in­to mines that have been shut down to ex­tract left­over de­posits.

Gold-rich South Africa has an es­ti­mat­ed 6,000 aban­doned or closed mines.

The il­lic­it min­ers, known as “za­ma za­mas” — “hus­tlers” or “chancers” in the Zu­lu lan­guage — are usu­al­ly armed and part of crim­i­nal syn­di­cates, the gov­ern­ment says, and they rob South Africa of more than $1 bil­lion a year in gold de­posits. They are of­ten un­doc­u­ment­ed for­eign na­tion­als and au­thor­i­ties said that the vast ma­jor­i­ty who came out of the Buf­fels­fontein mine were from Mozam­bique, Zim­bab­we and Lesotho, and were in South Africa il­le­gal­ly.

Po­lice said they seized gold, ex­plo­sives, firearms and more than $2 mil­lion in cash from the min­ers and have de­fend­ed their hard­line ap­proach.

“By pro­vid­ing food, wa­ter and ne­ces­si­ties to these il­le­gal min­ers, it would be the po­lice en­ter­tain­ing and al­low­ing crim­i­nal­i­ty to thrive,” Mathe said Wednes­day.

But the South African Fed­er­a­tion of Trade Unions ques­tioned the gov­ern­ment’s hu­man­i­ty and how it could “al­low any­one — be they cit­i­zens or un­doc­u­ment­ed im­mi­grants — to starve to death in the depths of the earth.”

While the po­lice op­er­a­tion has been con­demned by civic groups, the dis­as­ter hasn’t pro­voked a strong out­pour­ing of anger across South Africa, where the most­ly for­eign za­ma za­mas have long been con­sid­ered un­wel­come in a coun­try that al­ready strug­gles with high rates of vi­o­lent crime.

STIL­FONTEIN, South Africa (AP)

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