South Africa's Civil Progress

"The policemen who killed those people are not in custody, not even one of them.  This is madness.
"The whole world saw the policemen kill those people."  Julius Malema, former leader of ANC youth wing

Mr. Malema's credibility and motivation is often suspect, but on this occasion he's quite right.  Not one of the police responsible for the shooting and killing of 34 South African striking uranium miners, and the wounding of an additional 78 miners has been arrested.  Nor will they be.  For they are not held to be guilty of anything, actually. 

In fact, the government of President Zuma's governing African National Congress has chosen to resurrect an obscure and discredited law whereby they have charged the striking miners themselves, with killing other strikers.  All 270 miners who were taken into custody and who suffered physical mistreatment have been charged with the murders of their 34 striking colleagues.

 Six of the miners who have been charged remain in hospital still being treated for gunshot wounds.  "It's the police who were shooting, but they were under attack by the protesters, who were armed, so today the 270 accused are charged with the murders" said National Prosecuting Authority spokesman Frank Lesenyego.

During the opposition days of the African National Congress, as a national liberation movement struggling to obtain freedom for South Africa from the apartheid regime of Boer-based white South Africa, it accused the white minority government of using an arcane Roman-Dutch common purpose law to perversely make victims of a crime its charged perpetrators.

And it is this common purpose law which was discharged when the African National Congress came to power after the downfall of Apartheid under the writing of a new constitution for South Africa.  And it is this law that has been taken out of well-deserved retirement by a government that does not want to take responsibility for its actions. 

The arrested miners accuse police of beating them with batons and fists, kicking and slapping them to force confessions from them and the revelations of names of those who had hacked two police officers to death in a violent week preceding the strike and the shootings that followed.  The strikers are members of a new, militant union, one not allied with government and the British-owned uranium mine.

The issue was their demand for fair wages.  They were demanding a minimum wage of 12,500 rand ($1,560), as opposed to their take-home pay of 5,500 rand ($688) annually.  The striking miners were armed with clubs, machetes and one gun was rumoured to be in the possession of a miner who had taken it from one of the murdered policemen.

When they charged police, after the police had tried to put a halt to their charge with water cannons, stun grenades, tear gas and rubber bullets, the police opened fire with live ammunition.  Most of the miners had attempted to flee the deadly assault, and those who were killed were mostly shot in the back.  Autopsies confirmed that many of them had sustained mortal wounds at their backs.

These police killings are held to be the most serious display of state-sponsored violence since the downfall of the apartheid regime.  In the eighteen years since the ANC has been in power not very much has changed in the squalid poverty conditions of the people of South Africa.  Violent crime has increased, unemployment is rampant, housing shortages, poor health and education services mark the advance of the wealthiest country in Africa.