At least 78 illegal miners have been pulled out dead from a South African mine where police blocked food and water supplies for months in what trade unions described as a “horrific” state crackdown on desperate people trying to eke out a living.
A total of 78 bodies and 166 survivors — some of them emaciated and disorientated — have been hauled out so far in a court-ordered rescue operation that began on Monday, with hundreds more men still stuck two kilometres below the surface in a gold mine at Stilfontein, southwest of Johannesburg.
Police had stopped food and water supplies from being taken into the mine since August until a court ruled in December that volunteers could send down essential aid for the miners, known locally as “zama zamas”.
“Our mandate was to combat criminality and that is exactly what we’ve been doing,” said Athlenda Mathe, national spokesperson for the South African police, speaking at the site. “By providing food, water and necessities to these illegal miners it would be the police entertaining and allowing criminality to thrive,” she said.
The death toll makes the crackdown on the Stilfontein mine one of the deadliest on miners in recent South African history. As the toll has mounted, so has criticism of the police and of the government, which says the siege was part of a much-needed crackdown on illegal mining.
“These miners, many of them undocumented and desperate workers from Mozambique and other Southern African countries, were left to die in one of the most horrific displays of state wilful negligence in recent history,” the South African Federation of Trade Unions said in a statement on Tuesday.
