South Africa accused of ‘horrific’ crackdown as 78 bodies pulled from mine

The Democratic Alliance, the second-biggest party in the governing coalition, calls for an independent inquiry.

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

Police said on Wednesday they have ended a rescue operation and believe they have brought out all the survivors and retrieved all the bodies from the abandoned mine near Stilfontein, southwest of Johannesburg.

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

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

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

In August, police stopped food and water supplies from being taken down the discontinued mine to force people to the surface where they could be arrested. In December, a court ruled that volunteers could send down essential aid for the miners. A rescue operation was finally agreed to last week.

“Our mandate was to combat criminality and that is exactly what we’ve been doing,” Athlenda Mathe, the national spokesperson for the South African police, told journalists 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.

But civil rights groups say the government’s weeks-long refusal to stage a rescue mission effectively left miners to die of starvation or dehydration.

“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.

On Wednesday, the Democratic Alliance, the second-biggest party in the governing coalition, said that the situation had got “badly out of hand” and called for an independent inquiry.

Police said 1,576 miners had got out by their own means between August and the start of the rescue operation. All were arrested and 121 of them have already been deported, they said.

‘Incredibly distressing’

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

She said that “had the state listened to the calls of the community sooner … it could have prevented the loss of a lot of lives.”

For its part, the South African government has said the continuing siege at Stilfontein is necessary to fight illegal mining, which Mining Minister Gwede Mantashe described as “a war on the economy”.

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

“It’s a criminal activity. It’s an attack on our economy by foreign nationals in the main,” Mantashe said, speaking at the site on Tuesday.