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South Africa has abandoned civilisation

The ANC’s policy of trapping and starving ‘illegal’ miners betrays a contempt for human life.

Norman Lewis

Topics World

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‘Their breath grew shallow, their bodies still. They didn’t die with any great commotion, just a quiet surrender, as if their bodies had finally given up. The hollow, lifeless look in their eyes was a constant reminder of what awaited the rest of us. It was not an illness that killed them. It was starvation. A cruel, drawn-out death that consumed them piece by piece.’

These harrowing words are not from a witness to the conflict in Gaza. Nor are they an account of the Nazi death camps during the Holocaust. No, they are from an affidavit to the South African Constitutional Court by a miner called Clement Moeletsi. Moeletsi was one of hundreds of black miners who were trapped by police in abandoned shafts at Buffelsfontein Gold Mine for two months. Earlier this month, he was rescued by members of the Stilfontein community. Then, he was arrested for mining illegally.

Moeletsi was the victim of a deliberate state policy. In September last year, the South African government, led by the African National Congress (ANC), launched Operation Vala Umgodi, which in Zulu translates as ‘close the hole’. The aim, in the words of a government minister, Khumbudzo Ntshavheni, was to ‘smoke out’ illegal gold miners. The government would do this by cutting off the miners’ supplies and trapping them underground, in an attempt to force them to the surface. In Buffelsfontein, where the shafts are over two kilometres deep, this was a tragedy foretold.

As public concern for the trapped miners mounted, the ANC remained callously indifferent. It argued that these miners, most of whom were immigrants, were acting unlawfully and remained underground of their own volition. ‘We are not sending help to criminals’, Ntshavheni told reporters. This was, apparently, a justifiable action against the rising tide of criminality in South Africa. Illegal mining has thrived in South Africa through small-time pilfering and organised criminal networks, costing the economy billions of rands in lost income and royalties.

But there really is no excuse for the ANC’s cold-blooded treatment of these miners. The miners were trapped for weeks on end before the Pretoria High Court granted an interim order to allow community members and charitable organisations to provide them with food, water and medication. This community-led action ultimately saved Moeletsi. Eventually, further community pressure forced the High Court of South Africa to order the Mine Rescue Services to begin operations to rescue trapped miners. As a result, earlier this month, the surviving 246 miners were finally ‘smoked out’. However, 87 bodies were retrieved in the process.

This tragedy was not a natural disaster. It was the result of a conscious state operation that deliberately trapped hundreds of miners underground, cutting off access to food and water. Moeletsi makes clear in his affidavit that the police never even bothered to provide notice of their operation to those underground; they weren’t given a chance to surrender to the authorities. ‘Had we known about the operation’, he states, ‘we could have planned an evacuation or sought safety in time. Instead, we were left to fend for ourselves in a labyrinth of suffering and death.’ Mzwandile Mkwayi, a volunteer rescuer, told the BBC that the government’s claim, that miners were able to come out at any time but refused to because they feared arrest, was a lie. ‘Those people were desperate for help, they were dying’, he said.

The South African state has blood on its hands, in more ways than one. The lure of finding gold in abandoned mines has been too tempting in a country beset by chronic unemployment and state corruption. As the price of gold has scaled record highs, a swelling army of unemployed men – including many South Africans, but mostly immigrants from Lesotho and Mozambique – have been driven by desperation to take the leap into shafts controlled by criminal gangs. A clash with the state was inevitable.

In criminalising a socioeconomic problem, the post-apartheid ‘Rainbow Nation’ is attempting to hide the shocking fact that it can no longer guarantee or provide the basics of a civilised nation. As the Financial Times points out, incompetence and chronic corruption has resulted in a failure to fix critical infrastructure. This first led to a decade of power outages and now threatens the drinking water supply to South Africa’s biggest city, Johannesburg. Taps have run dry for days at one of Johannesburg’s largest hospitals. Last month, unreliable supplies halted proceedings at the Constitutional Court based in the city. A shocking 25 per cent of state schools and 46 per cent of hospital clinics do not have running water. And with one in three people unemployed, the lives of ordinary South Africans are becoming desperate. This is precisely the kind of desperation that drives the actions of ‘illegal’ miners.

A government that cannot provide drinking water to its people ought to be called out. One that deliberately traps human beings underground and starves them to death is undoubtedly one that warrants global condemnation, if not charges of crimes against humanity. Instead, there has been a deafening silence.

You may recall that South African president Cyril Ramaphosa is the man who, at a BRICS meeting in November 2023, accused Israel of committing war crimes and genocide in Gaza. He qualified these accusations by stating that the ‘deliberate denial of medicine, fuel, food and water to the residents of Gaza is tantamount to genocide’. So, did Ramaphosa commit genocide in the Buffelsfontein Gold Mine?

Of course not. Nor, by these criteria, did Israel. If anything was deliberate about the suffering of the people of Gaza, it was engineered by Hamas, not Israel. Hamas spent billions on developing an underground bunker complex rather than on infrastructure for its citizens, then knowingly locked them out of it and left them to face bombardment by the IDF after the 7 October pogrom. Moreover, it was Hamas that denied ‘medicine, fuel, food and water to the residents of Gaza’. Its militants have shamefully seized aid at gunpoint and hoarded it for themselves. Yet you won’t hear any criticism of Hamas from the ANC, which has long sought to cultivate links with the anti-Semitic terror group. Back in 2015, Hamas leaders held a high-level dialogue with ANC leaders, during which it was proposed that Hamas could open a South African office to strengthen solidarity.

The horror of Stilfontein clarifies the hypocrisy of the ANC. Its condemnation of Israel and, by association, Jews as perpetrators of crimes against humanity is a profoundly cynical masquerade to deflect from failures at home. This is a well-worn path of autocrats and governments losing their authority and legitimacy.

It also speaks to an even more disturbing reality. Namely, that anti-Semitism not only dehumanises the Jews, but also the humanity of anti-Semites as well. The hate that targets the Jews never ends with the Jews. It begins to engulf whole societies, destroying human dignity and freedom.

To paraphrase Primo Levi, to annihilate a people, you must first reduce them to objects, to numbers. In shafts 10 and 11 of the Buffelsfontein Gold Mine in Stilfontein, human beings became ‘illegal miners’, not desperate human beings who had broken the law, but objects unworthy of being rescued, numbers to be kept down by any means necessary.

The South African government is not setting out to destroy a people. But its display of callous indifference to human life shows it has descended into a new moral abyss.

Dr Norman Lewis is a writer and visiting research fellow at MCC Brussels. His Substack is What a Piece of Work is Man!.

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