Miners Charged With Murdering Themselves in South Africa

State prosecutors investigating the police massacre of 34 striking miners use an apartheid-era law to charge 270 arrested miners with murdering their colleagues

AFP / Getty Images

Police gather around fallen miners after they opened fire during clashes near the Lonmin platinum mine in Marikana, South Africa, on Aug. 16, 2012

The decision late Thursday by South Africa?s state prosecutors to use a notorious apartheid-era law to charge 270 striking miners with the murder of 34 of their colleagues ? men who were actually shot dead by the police, as recorded by numerous television crews ? marks a bizarre new low in a bloody scandal that threatens to strip the country?s postapartheid state of what remains of its moral authority. National Prosecuting Authority (NPA) spokesman Frank Lesenyego announced??34 counts of murder have been laid against the 270 accused? over the shooting by armed police of 34 fellow miners at the Lonmin platinum mine at Marikana in northern South Africa on Aug. 16. The miners, who walked out the week before in a protest over pay, which rapidly deteriorated into a violent turf war between two rival unions,?were being charged under a law dating back to 1956 known as??common purpose,? said Lesenyego, in which members of a crowd present when a crime is committed can be prosecuted for incitement. In other words: the state says the miners provoked the police to kill them.

(PHOTOS: The Bloody Scenes at Marikana)

The law was used as a catchall by South Africa?s white supremacist apartheid regime to convict black antiapartheid leaders for, say, leading a march or demonstration where some crime was committed. Its application against the miners is, according to renegade youth leader Julius Malema, expelled from the ruling African National Congress (ANC) this year: ?Madness.?The policemen who killed those people are not in custody, not even one of them.? In a Twitter message, the head of the Congress of South African Trade Unions, Zwelinzima Vavi, called the state?s actions ?bizarre? and something that ?could not be described through words.? In an online commentary,?South African legal expert Pierre de Vos also described the charges ?bizarre and shocking? and added they amounted to ?a flagrant abuse of the criminal justice system, probably?in an effort to protect the police and/or politicians.?

The NPA?s decision came hours after the publication of an investigation by Pulitzer Prize?winning South African photographer Greg Marinovich in which he suggested that at least 14 of the 34 dead miners had not been killed in the volley of automatic fire captured by television crews on Aug. 16. Marinovich?s pictures showed a series of gullies and passageways between a group of large boulders nearby where state forensic teams had marked the position of 14 bodies ? gullies that, as Marinovich reported, seemed too narrow to allow for the possibility of anything but close-range executions. The journalist also quoted a number of eyewitnesses who corroborated his interpretation of events, saying that after the initial killings, police had moved into the boulders and shot or run over an indeterminate number of protesting miners.

(MORE: After Marikana, How Social Inequality Can Unravel South Africa?s Success)

With?25% unemployment, widespread poverty, inequality that has actually increased since apartheid, epidemic violent crime and the world?s biggest HIV/AIDS population ? affecting 10% of South Africa?s population of 50 million ? South Africa today is all too aware that what came after Nelson Mandela and the ANC defeated apartheid in 1994 turned out to be something of an anticlimax. But the?Marikana massacre has laid bare in unprecedented and extraordinary fashion the depth of the failings of the ANC state. One legacy of?Mandela?s righteousness and the ANC?s victory over white racism has been electoral invulnerability. The party has won five general elections in a row and as a result, its critics say, is immune to criticism or accountability and ? thus untouchable ? indulges itself?in an orgy of self-enrichment and criminal arrogance.?Until Marikana, many of those critics appeared to be hysterical maximalists or even apartheid apologists, refusing to see any good in the ANC and all too often lowering the national debate to little more than a shouting match between recidivist racists.

The state?s stunningly awful performance at Marikana ? shooting protesters that it might have pacified with tear gas or rubber bullets; then the police?s insistence that it had done nothing wrong; then President Jacob Zuma?s careful avoidance of singling out anyone for blame; and now prosecutors? contention that the miners somehow murdered themselves ? suggests the ANC?s harshest critics may have been underestimating the problem. Whether that eventually translates to the ballot box is an open question: South Africa is two years away from a fresh general election. But unless it does, or the ANC believes it might, South Africa will continue to exist in a kind of democratic twilight: a country where one of the world?s most progressive constitutions guarantees its citizens all the rights they could wish for on paper, but where, without the punishment of the ballot box,?that turns out to mean grotesquely little in practice.

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/time/topstories/~3/iI71exWIcmA/

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