By Nellie Peyton and Bhargav Acharya, Reuters
South African Police Service officers during a rescue operation to retrieve illegal miners from an abandoned gold shaft. Photo: CHRISTIAN VELCICH / AFP
At least 78 dead bodies have been pulled from an illegal 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.
Hundreds more people are feared trapped 2 km below the surface of the mine at Stilfontein, southwest of Johannesburg, with rescuers scrambling to haul them out alive or dead in a court-ordered rescue operation that began on Monday.
A total of 216 survivors, some of them emaciated and disorientated, have been brought to the surface and immediately arrested for illegal mining and immigration.
The South African Federation of Trade Unions accused the state of allowing the men "to starve to death in the depths of the earth".
"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," it said in a statement.
Mametlwe Sebei, a trade union leader who has been trying to help the miners, said police had begun attempting to force the miners up to the surface in August by removing a pulley system used to deliver food and water supplies to them.
Sebei said some miners had died crawling through flooded tunnels in an attempt to reach shafts that would have allowed them to climb out.
Police said 1576 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.
"We've never blocked any shafts. We've never blocked anyone from coming out," said Athlenda Mathe, national spokesperson for the South African police, speaking at the site.
"Our mandate was to combat criminality and that is exactly what we've been doing," she said.
"By providing food, water and necessities to these illegal miners it would be the police entertaining and allowing criminality to thrive."
The death toll makes the crackdown on the Stilfontein mine one of the deadliest on miners in recent South African history.
'Taking a chance'
Illegal mining is common in parts of gold-rich South Africa. Typically, undocumented miners known as zama zamas - from an isiZulu expression for "taking a chance" - move into mines abandoned by commercial miners and seek to extract whatever is left. Some are under the control of violent criminal gangs.
Most of the miners at Stilfontein were from Mozambique, though some also came from Zimbabwe and Lesotho. Only 21 of them were South Africans, police said.
As the death toll has mounted, so has criticism of the authorities, though the government has defended the siege as part of a necessary crackdown on illegal mining.
"It's a criminal activity. It's an attack on our economy by foreign nationals in the main," Mining Minister Gwede Mantashe said at the site on Tuesday. He has said illegal mining cost South Africa over US$3 billion last year.
But the Democratic Alliance, the second-biggest party in the ruling coalition led by the African National Congress, said on Wednesday the crackdown at the mine had got "badly out of hand" and called for an independent inquiry.
A court ruled in December that volunteers should be allowed to send essential supplies down to the miners, and a separate ruling last week ordered the state to launch the rescue.
None of the rescued survivors were hospitalised and all were taken into police custody.
"If you come out and you are able to walk they take you straight to the cells," said Mzukisi Jam, a civil society activist, who has been at the site throughout the rescue operation.
Only two of the bodies have been identified and claimed by their families, said Mathe.
Rescue efforts were in their third day on Wednesday, with a red cylindrical metal cage being lowered into the mine to extract survivors and corpses. The cage can hold about a dozen people or dead bodies at once.
Mannas Fourie, CEO of a private rescue firm involved in the operation, told Johannesburg's Radio 702 that each round trip took up to 45 minutes.
"If you stand at the sides you can see the bodies being taken out of the cage and it's incredibly distressing," said Jessica Lawrence of civil rights group Lawyers for Human Rights, who was at the scene.
- Reuters
