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

The Democratic Alliance, the second largest party in the governing coalition, is demanding an independent investigation.

At least 78 dead bodies have been recovered from an abandoned gold mine in South Africa where police have cut off food and water for months, in what unions call a “horrendous” crackdown on desperate people trying to make ends meet the life

Police said on Wednesday they have completed a rescue operation and believe they have brought in all survivors and recovered all 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 78 bodies were recovered from the rescue operation that 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 sweep of the mine on Thursday to ensure there were no more survivors or bodies underground.

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

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

“By providing food, water and necessities to these illegal miners, it would be the police having fun and allowing crime to thrive,” he said.

But civil rights groups say the government’s weeks-long refusal to stage a rescue mission has effectively left 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 state neglect in recent history,” the South African Federation of Trade Unions he said in a statement. on tuesday

On Wednesday, the Democratic Alliance, the second largest party in the governing coalition, said the situation was “badly out of hand” and called for an independent inquiry.

The police said that 1,576 miners were rescued by their own means between August and the beginning of the rescue operation. All have been arrested and 121 of them have already been deported, they said.

“Incredibly distressing”

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

She said that “had I listened to the calls of the community sooner … I could have prevented the loss of many lives.”

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

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

“It is a criminal activity. It is an attack on our economy by foreigners in the main,” said Mantashe, speaking on the site on Tuesday.