The
massacre of 34 platinum miners at Marikana in South Africa on August 16, 2012,
shown in detail in a remarkable
documentary film Miners Shot Down that
has recently been screened by Al Jazeera, was a pure event of class warfare
that sends us reaching as far back as a century or more for meaningful
comparisons.
Anyone who doubts that has only to consider one amazing fact
revealed by the concentrated footage of the event unveiled by filmmaker Rehad Desai. On the morning of the day of the
massacre the forces of law and order, confronting strikers who were not
occupying company property or blocking any roads, turned up not only with a deployment of 648
police, 4,000 rounds of ammunition, truckloads of barbed wire, and a fleet of
armoured vehicles, but, even more strikingly, with four vans from the mortuary
services, in other words, with their hearses ready to receive the bodies of the
men the police must have intended to
kill.
This kind of response to a strike recalls such events as the brutal
Homestead strike in the United States in June, 1892, when Andrew Carnegie,
whose name has passed into history mostly as a philanthropist, surrounded one
of his steel mills with a wall and towers from behind which his armed forces
were able to pick off any workers giving trouble. On that occasion the purpose
was not only to beat the strike, but to destroy the union, which was totally
achieved after a prolonged struggle in which nine workers and seven members of
the private Pinkerton army of occupying scabs were killed. It ended after four
months when, with only 192 out of 3,800 strikers left, a vote was taken to return to work for lower wages than they had
when they went on strike, thus beginning a movement of de-unionization that
spread across the country and went on for several years. This was a momentous
event in the struggle for human rights; and the Marikana massacre promises to
become a similar beacon of shame in the modern struggle for the rights of
workers in the fast-developing industries of the developing world.
Marikana is an event that has opened the eyes of all those of
us who had looked to the African National Congress as an enlightened
government. It certainly started out that way when its great leader Nelson
Mandela emerged from 27 years in prison
to somehow snatch governance of South Africa
from the vicious white minority whose lunatic doctrine of apartheid had imposed
a rule of iron on the black majority for nearly half a century. His new
government was pledged to socialistic methods of reducing inequality and
poverty, improving living standards and the like. But Mandela was convinced
when he went to the Davos meeting of capitalism’s “masters of the universe” to
change his movement into one that supported capitalism and all its works. And Marikana has shown decisively that in jettisoning
his movement’s commitment to collective welfare achieved through democratic
socialism, he had also exposed his nation to the iron rule of capitalism, which
is that the bottom line, profit, and money,counts above everything else.
The irony of Marikana is compounded by the part played in it
by one of the heroes of the ANC resistance, Cyril Ramaphosa, a vigorous union
leader who, by 2012, had transformed himself into a multimillionaire
businessman with multiple directorships, one of which was in the Lonmin company
whose mine was struck by the discontented workers. These workers, in fact, were
so disaffected by the lack of progress under their new government, that they
accused the very union formed and created by Ramaphosa, the National Union of
Mineworkers (NUM), which had once been a leader of the class struggle in South
Africa, of being in the pocket of the mine-owners, and betraying their cause.
The strike therefore, was what is classified in the West as a
wildcat strike. Lonmin employed 28,000
workers, but the NUM had lost so much support among them that a rival union, the
Association of Mineworkers and Construction Union
(AMCU), had been successfully recruiting among them.
When the miners first went on strike the company told them it
would send them a paper containing its offer, but various spokesmen for the
union said they did not want papers because “we cannot read. We want to meet
them face-to-face. We are not educated, that is why we are working at the rock
face. We cannot read papers.” The company representative advanced towards the
strikers in an armoured car, but was not permitted by the police to get out of it.
The company demanded the strikers give up their weapons before negotiations
could begin. The workers said they were prepared to do that --- “we are only
carrying these things --- indicating a spear, machetes and such weapons ---
“because the police are shooting at us” --- but they wanted to be escorted to
the safety of a nearby hillock --- referred to as “the mountain” by the
strikers, which was common land, not owned by either side, where they would
surrender their weapons. For a time it
seemed the company was ready to concede that, but suddenly a phone call was
made to the Deputy Commissioner of Police, and after that a new, harsher tone was
adopted to the strikers. Who made that
phone call later became a question the strikers were hoping the later
Commission of Inquiry could sort out, because whoever it was seemed to be
pulling the strings behind these events.
In the first two days of minor skirmishes , 10 people were
killed, including two police officers and two security guards (and, of course
six miners). The refusal to negotiate
did not deter the strikers who turned up again, covering almost the entire face
of the mountain on the third and final day, to confront a police and security
service armed to the teeth and evidently willing and perhaps even anxious to
use their armaments. The leader of the rival AMCU union had taken a hand on the
side of the strikers, and, seeing how things were deteriorating, he suggested
the strikers, who had advanced beyond the mountain, should retreat and get out
of there while the going was good. Mr. Desai has dug up footage showing almost the
whole of the action during the confrontation. The strikers began to move away,
crouching as they walked for fear of being shot, moving in an orderly fashion
towards the mountain, when they were met by a volley of fire that brought them
to a halt. Many fell, the firing continued, and the film shows police picking
over the bodies, pulling them like sacks of potatoes this way and that, perhaps
themselves in confusion after the deadly confrontation. In this exchange, 17 strikers were killed,
many of them apparently shot at a range of 300 feet or more. One witness tells the filmmaker, however,
that not only were ambulances denied entry to the scene for more than an hour,
but the police continued to hunt strikers for the twenty minutes after the
first massacre. This gave rise to two Scenes of Action, as one might say, 17 miners
having been killed at each of them, and some 78 other people were wounded.
Towards the end of the month the film shows the Commissioner
of Police announcing to the assembled policemen that they had upheld the ideals
of responsible policing. And soon after the events 250 miners were arrested and
charged with “public violence”, later elevated to charges of murder. This
charge induced, even in the Minister of Justice, "a
sense of shock, panic and confusion. I have requested the acting National
Director of Public Prosecutions to furnish me with a report explaining the
rationale behind such a decision." No police or officials were arrested or charged with
anything, and on September 2 all the murder charges were dropped and the
detainees released by September 6. This
occurred after a law firm representing the detained men wrote an open letter to
President Jacob Zuma threatening to file an urgent petition with the High Court
if he did not order release of the detained men. "It
is inconceivable that the South African state, of which you are the head, and
any of its various public representatives, officials and citizens, can
genuinely and honestly believe or even suspect that our clients murdered their
own colleagues and in some cases, their own relatives," the lawyers wrote.
A month later a mediator announced that the strikers had
accepted a 22 per cent pay increase, an unheard of increase to any wage packet
for workers in South Africa at the time.
An official commission of inquiry was established, expected
to do its work in four months, but that has taken more than two years, and the
report, although presented to the President, has not yet been released to the
public.
As for Cyril Ramaphosa’s part in the events, the film quotes
him as having told the security authorities that what they were facing was not
a labour dispute, but “a criminal event” and urging that strong measures be
taken against the illegal strike.
A Wikipedia website on the massacre
states that during the hearings before the
Marikana Commission, “it emerged that Lonmin management solicited…Ramaphosa, to
coordinate ‘concomitant action’ against ‘criminal’ protesters and (he) is seen
by many as therefore being responsible for the massacre.”
After these events, Ramaphosa was elected deputy
leader of ANC, subsequently deputy-president of the republic, and has again
become described as South Africa’s “leader-in-waiting,” as he was before being
beaten to the job by Thabo Mbeki. He is estimated to have a personal fortun of
anything between $500 and $700 million.
So it would appear that almost all the elements of
classic class warfare were present in this event --- unprovoked police
aggression, overkill in police response, stern authority against poorly
educated victims, targets chosen just because they were poor workers, apostasy
and betrayal among former leaders of the strikers, massive, unsustainable
response to the event from the justice system ---- except that the miners
eventually won their pay rise.
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