15th September, 2012
MARIKANA, South Africa (AFP) – South African police on Saturday fired rubber bullets at protesters and seized weapons from worker hostels at platinum giant Lonmin in a crackdown on mining sector unrest.
Soldiers were also deployed as back-up in the troubled Rustenburg platinum belt where militant protests have forced several mine closures since police gunned down 34 people last month at Lonmin’s Marikana mine.
The troops had been sent in to Marikana as back-up at the request of the police, Brigadier General Xolani Mabanga told AFP. But the police were leading the operation, he added.
Forces moved into Marikana less than 24 hours after the government announced a security clampdown on the unrest, which has forced three leading producers to halt mines on the world’s richest platinum deposits.
Soldiers helped with the police’s cordon and search operation, said Mabanga.
With no more than 150 military personnel on the ground they were not there to maintain law and order or for riot control, he added.
Five hundred police officers, assisted by the army, raided hostels at Lonmin’s mine at 2:00 am (0000 GMT) seizing piles of metal rods, machetes and sticks.
Later that morning, police fired tear gas to disperse gathering protesters. There were clashes as workers regrouped and threw stones at officers amid the shacks opposite the mine.
Plumes of black smoke had poured into the sky from burning tyres which workers used as barricades along with large rocks dragged across the dirt roads inside the humble settlement. But the area was calm by the afternoon.
This was the biggest show of force since officers shot dead 34 miners on August 16, the worst police bloodshed since democracy in 1994, which sparked comparisons to the apartheid-era brutality of the white-minority regime.
A mediator in Lonmin’s wage talks warned that the crackdown could lead to a “complete revolt across the platinum belt”.
“Government must be crazy believing that, what to me resembles an apartheid-era crackdown, can succeed,” said Bishop Jo Seoka, president of the South African Council of Churches.
“We must not forget that such crackdowns in the past led to more resistance,” he added.