There is something going on in South Africa, so significant that it is the equivalent of Apartheid tragedies, I needed to share it with you. Tension in the country is building. I felt the best way to do this was to post an article to shed more light on the subject and then put in my two cents. The original article can be found here: www.nytimes.com. In my responses, sometimes I get angry. I don't apologize for that. But I don't just get angry, I start thinking of ways to put my anger into action.
South African Official Defends Police Killing of 34
Themba Hadebe/Associated Press
A protest on Friday near the
mine where 34 miners were killed by the police on Thursday in South
Africa’s worst labor-related violence since 1994. More Photos »
By LYDIA POLGREEN
Published: August 17, 2012
MARIKANA, South Africa — South Africa’s police commissioner on Friday defended the actions of officers who opened fire on miners a day earlier
during a wildcat strike at a platinum mine. She said the episode left
34 people dead and 78 wounded, a sharply higher toll than initially
reported.
Police officers surround the bodies of miners after
opening fire on a crowd at the Lonmin platinum mine in South Africa on
Thursday. More Photos »
The strike in Marikana has pitted the country’s
largest mine workers union against a radical upstart union demanding
sharp increases in pay and faster action to improve the grim living and
working standards for miners. More Photos »
The commissioner, Riah Phiyega, described a desperate struggle by the
police to contain the machete-wielding crowd of thousands of angry
miners who broke through two lines of defense, leaving officers with no
choice but to open fire with live ammunition.
“The militant group stormed toward the police firing shots and wielding
dangerous weapons,” Ms. Phiyega said at an emotional news conference
here, using an extensive array of aerial photographs and video to
demonstrate how the violence unfolded. Previous attempts by the
500-strong police force to repel the crowd with rubber bullets, water
cannons and stun grenades had failed, she said.
“This is no time for finger-pointing,” Ms. Phiyega said. “It is a time
for us to mourn the sad and dark moment we experienced as a country.”
It was South Africa’s worst labor-related violence since 1994. The
shootings stunned the nation: front pages of newspapers were plastered
with pictures of dead miners lying in a field above headlines like
“Bloodbath” and “Killing Fields.”
President Jacob Zuma cut
short his trip to neighboring Mozambique for a regional summit meeting
to rush to the site of the bloody protest, 60 miles northwest of
Johannesburg.
“These events are not what we want to see or what we want to become
accustomed to in a democracy that is bound by rule of law,” Mr. Zuma
said in prepared remarks. He announced the formation of a commission of
inquiry to investigate the illegal strike and the response of the
police.
The police retrieved six guns from the protesters, including one that
had been taken from a police officer who was hacked to death by the
workers earlier in the week, Ms. Phiyega said, as well as many machetes,
cudgels and spears.
Miners who escaped the melee gave a very different account of what
happened when the police closed in on the rocky outcropping they had
occupied. A 36-year-old mine employee named Paulos was among the
striking workers on Thursday when the police began encircling the rocky
hill with razor wire.
“They started shooting at us with rubber bullets,” Paulos said. “Then I
saw people were falling and dying for real. I knew then they were proper
bullets.”
He struggled to understand why the police had opened fire with live rounds.
“I never thought this would happen,” he said. “We thought the police were there to protect us.”
Women who said they were wives of missing miners gathered at the site of
the protest, waving wooden sticks and singing protest songs.
“I don’t know where my husband is, whether he is in jail, among the dead
or the injured,” said a woman named Mbalenhle who declined to give her
last name. “Our husbands were only fighting for their rights, but the
police are killing them.”
The shootout followed a tense week of protests by workers at the
platinum mine, owned by Lonmin, a London company. The miners walked off
the job last Friday, demanding that their wages be tripled.
The striking workers are members of a radical labor union that
splintered off from the National Union of Mineworkers, one of the
country’s biggest and oldest unions.
The splinter group claims that the older union, which is closely allied
to the African National Congress, is too cozy with big business and the
political elite.
Frans Baleni, general secretary of the National Union of Mineworkers,
rejected that notion and said the rival union, the Association of Mine
Workers and Construction Union, was giving people false hope, with
tragic consequences.
“You have opportunists who are abusing ignorant workers,” Mr. Baleni said. “We saw the results yesterday.”
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WOAH. When I
opened up that article, the photo literally brought tears to my eyes
and put fear in my heart. That tank like thing next to the people is a
Casspir. These things were parked somewhere hidden until around the time
of the xenophobic attacks of 2008. For goodness sake they were supposed
to be a thing of the past, put on display at the Anti-Apartheid museum
as a symbol of a time of violence gone by. These are the very same
vehicles that made my kids clutch to me and look at me with eyes that
could only have been saying "I don't understand... I'm afraid." Now they
are busting them out and using them against STRIKERS?
Look at Marikana,
on Google Earth's satellite map. The place is a wasteland. Miles and
miles of fields which spend most of the year charred and burned to clear
out the remains of the crops. Miles of electrical wires and towers that
I can assure you, ship their energy far from the source, if you catch
my drift (there were a ridiculous amount of scheduled "power outages" in
my township where the electricity was shut off completely, sometimes
for hours on end... people were told it was part of a green initiative
to save energy, but in reality this really took away from the
productivity of their days). There is a highly crowded township North
West of there, where I'm sure most of the miners live. That could
explain a lot.
Seriously, what do you expect people to do? Of course
they are striking, they are hungry for so much more than food. How can
an environment like that, an informal settlement with little access to
the things humans need to live a quality life (clinics, hospitals,
schools, grocery stores, places to buy clothes, taxi ranks for
transportation) sustain life?! This is an anger that has been building
up for years. It's like apartheid all over again, Africans against
Africans. Why are these Black African police officers not joining in the
strike? Their lives are affected by non-living wages too. I understand
that many people have to think of just doing their jobs to survive, but
if we always have that mentality then we will always let other rule us,
take away from us... well, US! And the Unions who failed to serve their
people... the ones that allegedly gave the strikers false information
that lead them to tragic consequences... if this is true that is the
lowest of lows. That warrants the deepest shame.
Oh yes, let us call the
strikers "militants." Let us justify their DEATHS because they were
supposedly wielding machetes and waving them around... UM HELLO? THEY
WERE PROTECTING THEMSELVES FROM GUNS. With LIVE bullets. Which do you
think is more lethal? At the same time I grieve for the police officers'
lack of solidarity with the miners, I grieve for the miners who may
have attacked police officers, as well. I will not deny that tensions
were running high on both sides but the point is, this is not Ubuntu.
This is not democracy. This is divide and conquer of the different
ethnic groups, classes, and this is some BULLSHIT that is going to keep
happening if this puppet "Black" government for "Black people" doesn't
wake the hell up and employ some Sankofa: look where you've been. Learn
from it and move on.
