south african police shoot a hundred striking miners

[Col. Crackpot]

Killed 34 of them too. Jesus Fuck...

link

[Flagg]

Jesus fuck is right. I thought they had joined the civilized world.

[D.Turtle]

Killed 34 of them too. Jesus Fuck...

link

Please always post the article.

South African police say they were forced to fire on striking miners, killing 34

South Africa's police were forced to open fire on striking miners with live rounds because they were charged by armed men and compelled to “defend themselves”, the national police chief said on Friday.

Peta Thornycroft in Johannesburg and David Blair

8:49AM BST 17 Aug 2012

Riah Phiyega said that 34 miners were killed on Thursday and another 78 wounded when her officers used “maximum force” near Marikana mine, owned by Lonmin, the London-listed company.

They did so when a gang of “heavily armed” miners rushed towards them, armed with firearms as well as clubs and machetes. “Police retreated and were forced to use maximum force to defend themselves,” said Ms Phiyega.

South Africans have been appalled by the violence, which summons memories of the apartheid era and has been compared with the Sharpeville massacre of 1960. But Ms Phiyega said: “This is no time for blaming, this is no time for finger-pointing. This is a time for us to mourn the sad and dark moment that we experienced as a country.

President Jacob Zuma has left a summit of African leaders and travelled back to South Africa.

Police were called in after thousands of miners gathered at Marikana, about 62 miles north-west of Johannesburg.

Images broadcast by private television station e.tv carried the sound of a barrage of automatic gunfire that ended with police officers shouting: "Cease fire!" By that time, bodies were lying in the dust, some pouring blood. Another image showed some miners, their eyes wide, looking in the distance at heavily armed police officers in riot gear.

It was a harrowing development in a country that had been seen as a model of stability since white rule ended with South Africa's first free elections in 1994. The shooting recalled images of white police firing at anti-apartheid protesters in the 1960s and 1970s, but in this case it was mostly black police firing at black mine workers.

Several commentators said members of the new union, the Association of Mineworkers and Construction Union (AMCU), had guns and other weapons and used them when the shooting began.

Joseph Mathunjwa, the union's president blamed Lonmin, the London-list company which runs the mine, and said the huge National Union of Mineworkers collaborated against the striking workers.

He denied his members played any role in the violence. AMCU does not yet have enough members to be registered as a union.

"This violence involves 2,000 workers but there are more than 20,000 other workers who are suffering from this now," said NUM president Frans Baleni.

Zwelinzima Vavi, General Secretary of the Congress of South African Trade Unions said: "This is the worst news, we have never experienced that kind of massacre before.

"We were not involved with the strike action or the violence.

"This violence has been running in those mines since January, it was sparked by some rivalry.

"The National Union of Mineworkers has been established for many, many years, and is always engaged in wage negotiations, including last year.

"A new union arrived and made fresh demands for a 200 percent increase in wages for certain categories of workers, and those demands were very attractive to many.

"So this union started to recruit very aggressively and violence was meted out against NUM.

"Every day a body was found in the squatter camps around the mine, and the police had been ineffective in picking people up who did that violence."

Mr Vavi said the dead picked up in the squatter camps were usually workers associated with NUM.

Helen Zille, Democratic Alliance leader said: "This is an absolute tragedy, the worst we have had in a democratic South Africa. We need an independent inquiry and there is a clear picture from our TV screens of what happened."

[weemadando]

That's similar to the first report I heard (about 24 hours ago), the second one I heard (about 12 hours ago) involved the police herding the strikers into a razor wire enclosure, blocking them in with armoured vehicles and then firing. Both reports were carried by the same news service (ABC NewsRadio).

I'd guess that the truth is somewhere in the middle. The police were probably working to contain/kettle the crowd in such a prepared area and then got rushed.

It's a pretty shitty situation all around though.

[Col. Crackpot]

That's similar to the first report I heard (about 24 hours ago), the second one I heard (about 12 hours ago) involved the police herding the strikers into a razor wire enclosure, blocking them in with armoured vehicles and then firing. Both reports were carried by the same news service (ABC NewsRadio).

I'd guess that the truth is somewhere in the middle. The police were probably working to contain/kettle the crowd in such a prepared area and then got rushed.

It's a pretty shitty situation all around though.

Shitty? The police shot over a hundred people at a labor action with fucking assault rifles, If that happened in a Western country it would bring down the government.

[Flagg]

Sounds like a goddamned firing squad.

[weemadando]

Sounds like a goddamned firing squad.

If you've got a crowd of 3000+ (as reported) charging you with machetes, spears and clubs? It might have been a firing squad, but there's every chance the police would have been overrun (and who knows what then) had they not fired.

[Mr Bean]

Okay here is from what I have pieced together reading the reports the chain of events, some of this stuff come direct from the AP story most if it direct from the South Africa press accounts as people are already talking and being interviewed.

A large angry crowd of miners backed up against the natural slope of a some what steep and rocky hill, well armed with improvised melee weaponry and actual melee weaponry along with home made petrol bombs (sounded just like they had rags, cans of gasoline and maybe the odd t-shirt, there were not stacked and packed Molotov cocktails or anything, just cans of gasoline for nearby generators).

The cops then committed a by the numbers fuckup where they blocked the protestors in without an easy escape round in a half semi circle police line. Then taunts were exchanged, a few rocks throw and this part is not clear what set things off if the cops moved forward, someone threw a petrol bomb... regardless what appears to have happen was that tear gas was fired in response to something or for the hell of it so says the cops and protestors respectively and they fucked up the shots, putting the tear gas in the rear ranks not the front ranks.

So now your armed, your eyes heart a little as the wind is blowing the teargas mostly away from you and you have thirty or forty people yelling in pain and push forward where you are in the front ranks can do nothing but get pushed forward due to the press of people. Suddenly someone takes off running decides to charge the cops to get away from the tear gas and the shooting starts. Miners say they heard and order to fire, cops don't say anything but reports say it was one person opening up they all open up and this is not in that much dispute this was not a volley and then stop, they all emptied their clips into the crowd reloaded and some fired again. It's unclear if this was necessary or if it even happened, the fact the first gunfire was until it went click is not in dispute but reloading and firing into the still milling crowd might or might not have happened, it might be people opening fire late convincing the miners it was a second round of gunfire.

Note the cops admit they had started stringing barbed wire to encircle the crowd another classic fuck up as they started not with the side the police were guarding but along the sides so again if you wanted to charge anywhere but directly forward it's into barbed wire then into cops.

I'm not going to get into why the cops were armed they way there were, why this procedure, was it deliberate or an accident, TL:DR is that the cops closed off all escape routes for the Miners except directly through the center of the cops line then tried to disperse the crowd not leaving anywhere for it to go except through the cops. It might be they had orders to leave a side open but some low level Sergent grabs some extra wire and starts stringing it and shuts that idea down because he wants it between him and the three thousand machete wielding protestors. Who knows, regardless this was an armed mob that charged the police but the only way out of the teargas was through the cops because the other routes out were shut down by natural terrain and barbed wire.

[weemadando]

Completely cutting them off is a valid (and regularly used) tactic - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kettling

Leaving them an out is fine if you want to redirect a protest, but if you want to end it and then try to sort through them to find the leaders, then isolating them entirely is the obvious play.

*edit* Also - from what I've seen, it's not like this was a built up area where you can leave an exit and then channel them away down streets using roadblocks and other forces - this looked to be a relatively open area where giving people an exit would have let them disperse and re-form.

[Grumman]

Completely cutting them off is a valid (and regularly used) tactic - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kettling
Leaving them an out is fine if you want to redirect a protest, but if you want to end it and then try to sort through them to find the leaders, then isolating them entirely is the obvious play.

Only if you don't threaten the ones that are standing where you want them to stand. If they were cut off by the terrain from the rear, the sides by barbed wire, the front by police and the centre by tear gas, that's just fucking stupid.

To use the kettle analogy, you can't seal the kettle unless you know the pressure is low enough to be contained. Seal the kettle entirely and then heat it up by firing tear gas into the crowd, and the kettle will burst.

[Col. Crackpot]

Completely cutting them off is a valid (and regularly used) tactic - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kettling

Leaving them an out is fine if you want to redirect a protest, but if you want to end it and then try to sort through them to find the leaders, then isolating them entirely is the obvious play.

*edit* Also - from what I've seen, it's not like this was a built up area where you can leave an exit and then channel them away down streets using roadblocks and other forces - this looked to be a relatively open area where giving people an exit would have let them disperse and re-form.

Great thinking. Lets remember that the next time Wall Street is occupied.

[Mr Bean]

Completely cutting them off is a valid (and regularly used) tactic - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kettling

Leaving them an out is fine if you want to redirect a protest, but if you want to end it and then try to sort through them to find the leaders, then isolating them entirely is the obvious play.

*edit* Also - from what I've seen, it's not like this was a built up area where you can leave an exit and then channel them away down streets using roadblocks and other forces - this looked to be a relatively open area where giving people an exit would have let them disperse and re-form.

You missed something in that piece you quoted.

It involves the formation of large cordons of police officers who then move to contain a crowd within a limited area. Protesters are left only one choice of exit, determined by the police, or are completely prevented from leaving.

The second form where you leave them no exit is exactly the kind of situation that leads to massacres and stampedes. What Wiki does not cover is the fact that when you do a complete encirclement your doing it to hold them there not to make sure none can escape. The G8 protests area classic example of total encirclement tactics. The G8 leaders are meeting somewhere, the protestors plan to march on the building so the police shut down all paths to the building, channel the protestors and then block the routes out. Then they are held there for X number of hours with the police holding the line and beating back any attempt to push it with water cannons, rubber bullets and tear gas dropped between the cops and the crowd.

What you do not do is fire the tear gas directly into the crowd which changes them from a large number of confined humans to a angry mob pretty much instantly. Think about it Weemando, you've completely surrounded a crowd then blocked all the exits out and now they are firing into the crowd with tear gas.. where are they going to disperse to? Can you think of a logical way if you trap a few thousand people in an enclosed area how they are going to disperse? No in order to disperse a crowd you MUST leave an exit open for people to be funneled through away from the cops which lets most people calm down and give up protesting for the day, especially if their clothes are soaked in tear gas.

[weemadando]

Perhaps you missed the point in my post where I was saying that maybe they DIDN'T want them to disperse, but instead were trying to control/subdue them.

After all, if you've got two factions of striking miners trying to beat the shit out of each other, taking out entirely out of play, rather than just "dispersing" them (in an open area where they can reform and continue) would have been the preferred play.

It's one thing to block a series of streets and force a G20 protest to direct in a direction you don't want them to go, but another thing entirely to try and control rival mobs in the open.

THis is all theoretical still and we'll see what the reports end up saying about the location and chain of events.

[Mr Bean]

Perhaps you missed the point in my post where I was saying that maybe they DIDN'T want them to disperse, but instead were trying to control/subdue them.

If that were trued then they failed their objective the instant they threw tear gas into the crowd you would agree.

After all, if you've got two factions of striking miners trying to beat the shit out of each other, taking out entirely out of play, rather than just "dispersing" them (in an open area where they can reform and continue) would have been the preferred play.

Dispersing a crowd is not just about breaking up the crowd it's about also about spreading it out. For example had they had an exit to funnel into the cops could have aimed to take out (Via bullets, batons and tear gas) the ringleaders or the just the stragglers and arrest them meaning instead of a 3,000 armed crowd now you have a 2700 person crowd and maybe some of the remaining 2.7k decide not to show up to protest the next day.

The cops should have been happy, they had two objectives... one break up the demonstrations, two move them away from the mine. That sounds tailor made for blocking off stuff near the mine then giving them a route to flee to while driving the protestors forward with rubber bullets, teargas and batons. Throw down some barbed wire and if they reform hey they are not right by the mine the next time are they making containment even easier.

It's one thing to block a series of streets and force a G20 protest to direct in a direction you don't want them to go, but another thing entirely to try and control rival mobs in the open.

It was not flatland, there were steep hills the mine itself and surrounding buildings and refuse pits that allowed funneling.

THis is all theoretical still and we'll see what the reports end up saying about the location and chain of events.

This is in the end correct both sides of this discussion are based off preliminary information and report, we should expect something by next Thursday as far as an initial finding with a full report by the middle of next month as the PM himself is sitting on this one and telling the relevant departments to drop all other business to focus on this until it's done.