Article from A World To Win News Service.
While violent deaths of poor blacks are still very
common in South Africa, where the gap between rich and poor is one of the highest
on the planet, this was a massacre by special forces very likely acting
on orders from the top of the African-National Congress-led (ANC) state in a
planned military-style operation.
What
happened at Marikana?
The
previous week, on 10 August, a contingent of miners marched to the local office
of the National Union of Mineworkers in Marikana to demand that the NUM take up
their call for a strike. These workers, mainly men, work 800 to 1,000 meters
underground and earn between 4,000 and 6,000 South African rand (ZAR) ($480 to
$730 U.S.D.) net per month. Their primary demand was a wage increase to 12,500
ZAR ($1400) a month gross, but years of exploitation, dangerous working
conditions, very poor living conditions and frustration all combined to erupt in
the form of a wildcat strike.
The NUM
rebuffed them, reportedly by insisting they return to work and go through the
proper collective bargaining procedures under its auspices. Later many
eyewitnesses described in detail how several armed NUM officials came out of
their offices to break up the march and fired on the workers, killing two of
them. From there tensions escalated and so did the strike.
The
national SA police spokesman announced that 16 August was going to be
"D-day". Lonmin's representative constantly repeated on TV that the
strike was illegal and the company wouldn't meet with "criminals".
Heavily armed special forces and regular
police – backed up by 62 armoured vehicles set up a razor wire barrier
in front of the largest hill. As the miners came down, apparently planning to
return to the settlement, police opened fire with automatic weapons amid a
cloud of tear gas that partially obscured their assault. In a matter of
minutes, 34 miners lay dead.
In
addition to the murdered miners, more than 80 were injured and 279 were
arrested, 150 of whom said they were beaten in custody.
Originally
the conflict in Marikana was presented as just a turf war between rival unions,
but as the story began to unravel, not just the repression but the politics of
the ANC and its national trade union confederation (COSATU, which includes the
National Union of Mineworkers) came under attack.
Because
NUM, the dominant union in the mines since the ANC took power, did not support
the miners' strike, the workers quickly cast aside NUM's authority. As a
result, a section of its membership shifted to the independent Association of
Mineworkers and Construction Union (AMCU) and refused to talk to NUM.
Initially
murder charges were brought against the arrested miners, employing an old
apartheid "common purpose" law under which they were held responsible
for the deaths of their own comrades at the hands of the police, but the
National Prosecuting Authority quickly dropped them after a national and international
outcry. In some cities as well as in the Rustenburg area solidarity
demonstrations were held.
The imperialist mine owners and the ANC led-state
South
Africa's mines are and always have been a key artery to the imperialist world.
Exploitation of minerals and the forced harnessing of black labour to work the
mines through accelerated land dispossession and colonial tax laws began back
in the 1860s with the discovery of gold and diamonds. Platinum was discovered
only in the 1920s in the Northwest. Three giant mining corporations – Anglo
Platinum (Amplats),** Lonmin and Impala Platinum (Implats) operate dozens of
shafts in the Northwest Province, where 80 percent of the world's platinum is
mined.
These
groups mainly comprising international capital have added a few hand-picked
black businessmen and women to their boards.
Who sits
on their (Lonmin) board as a "non-executive" director? Cyril
Ramaphosa, a long-standing ANC "comrade" and prominent member of its
National Executive Committee, its highest leading organ. As a representative of
the bridge between the ANC and the private sector, he was a top contender to
become the ANC's presidential candidate in 2009 before Jacob Zuma was chosen
instead. Ramaphosa used to head up the NUM and helped build the COSATU
federation under the ANC's wing. He became one of South Africa's handful of
black super-rich, derogatorily called "Black Diamonds" created
through the Black Economic Empowerment programme that aimed to promote
black-owned businesses.
So behind
the Marikana massacre, you can connect the dots of the kind of populist
bourgeois democracy that reliably serves imperialist interests and national
capitalists alike (some black, but mostly still white): brutal repression
carried out by the state's special police forces; ANC political leaders with
direct financial interests in mining; ANC-led unions fighting with independent
ones and trying to dissuade mineworkers from striking for higher wages while
signing a "peace agreement" with management (which most strikers refused
to recognize)...
The
political cracks in the ANC's rule are widening and its true nature as servants
of the parasitic capitalist class has been made more visible to many. As one
observer commented, "People see COSATU-ANC as part of the same system that
is oppressing them and are protecting the capitalist interests. Not just in the
mines. Those people have become oppressors themselves. It's taken a number of
years for people to see it but as time moves on, the interests of these black
capitalists will also become clearer to them."
Since the massacre… twelve thousand striking
workers from four Anglo Platinum mines in Rustenburg have been out for seven
weeks and are still refusing to return without a hefty wage increase. In an
effort to get tough, to "draw a line in the sand" and break miners'
will and expectations after the Lonmin deal, management dismissed them all,
before offering to reinstate them later in the month; some speculate that this
is to wipe out benefits built-up and avoid severance pay. Strikers marched on
NUM offices to withdraw their membership and on 30 October instead of returning
to work they built barricades with rocks, logs and burning tyres, blocking fire
engines and confronting a police helicopter, water cannons and several armoured
vehicles. A power sub-station was set on fire at the Khuseleka shaft in
Rustenburg and the NUM office was also targeted.
"We won't go to work until we get what we want", one miner said. "Our kids have been shot at, our families have been
terrorised and brutalised, but we are not going back to work."
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