South Africa's Marikana miners allege police
brutality
Some of the South African miners killed at the Marikana
mine last month may have been shot by police while trying to surrender,
witnesses told Al Jazeera. The Legal Resource Centre (LRC), a human rights
organisation, has launched an independent investigation into the shootings
that killed 34 protesting workers. Tania Page reports from the Marikana
mine, where she spoke to witnesses of the incident.
South Africa's Police Open Fire on Striking
Miners
August 17, 2012
South African police opened fire on a crowd of striking miners on Thursday,
killing 34 people and leaving a field strewn with bodies in a massacre that
instantly revived memories of the brutality of apartheid. At a press
conference Friday, the South African Police Service claimed its officers had
been under attack by a group of miners armed with machetes, spears and clubs
when they opened fire with automatic weapons into a crowd a few meters away.
They added that 78 strikers had been injured and 259 arrested.
Regardless of whether the police were provoked, the shooting of
demonstrators automatically invoked memories of massacres of protesters
carried out by South African forces under apartheid, which ended in 1994.
Calling for the suspension of all police officers involved pending charges
of murder and/or culpable homicide, the independent think-tank, the South
African Institute for Race Relations, said television reports clearly showed
"that policemen randomly shot into the crowd with rifles and handguns.
There is also evidence of their continuing to shoot after a number of bodies
can be seen dropping and others turning to run." Referring to the security
services' notorious killing of 69 anti-apartheid protesters in March 1960,
it added: "This is reminiscent of the Sharpeville massacre in 1960. What
happened at Lonmin is completely unacceptable."
Lonmin, the world's third largest producer of platinum, shut down its South
African operations on Tuesday after 3,000 workers walked out a week ago,
demanding a tripling of wages. Before Thursday's killings, the strike at the
Lonmin platinum mine in Marikana in northern South Africa had already
claimed 10 lives, including those of two policemen and two security
personnel, in clashes sparked by the rivalry between two rival unions, the
National Union of Mineworkers and the more radical Association of
Mineworkers and Construction Union (AMCU).
