South Africa accused of ‘horrific’ actions as 78 bodies pulled from mine | African Union News

The Democratic Alliance, the second largest party in the ruling coalition, is calling for an independent investigation.

At least 78 dead bodies have been pulled from an abandoned gold mine in South Africa where police have cut off food and water supplies for months, in what unions have called a “horrific” crackdown on desperate people trying to eke out a living.

Police said on Wednesday they had completed a rescue operation and believed they had recovered all survivors and bodies from the abandoned mine near Stilfontein, southwest of Johannesburg.

The surprise announcement came a day after the police minister said the rescue operation was likely to last at least until next week.

Police said 78 bodies had been recovered since the rescue operation began on Monday and more than 240 survivors were rescued from the gold mine two kilometers (1.24 miles) below the surface.

Police said rescuers would conduct a final search of the mine on Thursday to ensure there were no more survivors or bodies underground.

In August, police stopped food and water supplies being taken to the decommissioned mine to force people to the surface where they could be arrested. In December, the court ruled that volunteers can send vital aid to the miners. The rescue operation was finally arranged last week.

“Our mandate was to fight crime and that’s exactly what we were doing,” Athlenda Mathe, national spokeswoman for the South African police, told reporters at the scene.

“By providing food, water and supplies to these illegal miners, the police would be entertained and allow crime to thrive,” she said.

But civil rights groups say the government’s weeks-long refusal to mount a rescue mission has actually led the miners to die of starvation or dehydration.

“These miners, many of them undocumented and desperate workers from Mozambique and other southern African countries, have been left to die in one of the most horrific displays of willful state negligence in recent history,” the South African Federation of Trade Unions said in a statement. on Tuesday.

On Wednesday, the Democratic Alliance, the second largest party in the ruling coalition, said the situation had gotten “badly out of control” and called for an independent investigation.

Police said 1,576 miners had pulled out with their own resources between August and the start of the rescue operation. They have all been arrested, and 121 of them have already been deported, they said.

‘Incredibly disturbing’

“It is increasingly worrying to see how the police handled the situation,” Jessica Lawrence, a human rights lawyer who was at the scene, told Al Jazeera.

She said that “if the state had heeded the community’s calls earlier … it could have prevented the loss of many lives.”

For its part, the South African government said the continuation of the Stilfontein siege was necessary to combat illegal mining, which Mining Minister Gwede Mantashe described as a “war on the economy”.

He estimated that the illegal precious metals trade was worth 60 billion rand ($3.17 billion) in lost sales, taxes and royalties last year.

“It is a criminal activity. It is mainly an attack by foreign nationals on our economy,” Mantashe said while speaking at the venue on Tuesday.