South African police halted a peaceful march by striking miners without violence a day after firing rubber bullets and tear gas to disperse illegal protesters.
Officers barricaded a main road into Rustenburg, northwest of Johannesburg, and persuaded some 500 miners that their march was illegal and that they should go home.
Yesterday’s protesters from Anglo American Platinum mines wanted to march to Rustenburg police station to demand an end to the violence against strikers. Some carried sticks, but there were none of the machetes, spears and clubs that have marked previous protests for higher wages.
On Saturday, police raided hostels at Lonmin platinum mine and collected homemade weapons. They fired rubber bullets and tear gas to force people into their homes in a crackdown that was condemned by the South African Council of Churches.
Saturday’s show of force follows a government vow to halt illegal protests and disarm strikers who have stopped work at one gold and six platinum mines, helping to destabilize the country’s critical mining sector.
It was the first police action since officers killed 34 miners on Aug. 16 in state violence that shocked the nation.
It was not known how many people were hurt in the violence at the mine of the London-registered firm Lonmin.
Six women were hit by rubber bullets and one was hospitalized as a result, Anglican Bishop Jo Seoka, president of the Council of Churches, reported in a furious statement.
He warned of serious repercussions and said he was holding the government and Lonmin PLC responsible.
“[The] government must be crazy believing that, what to me resembles an apartheid-era crackdown, can succeed,” Seoka said. “We must not forget that such crackdowns in the past led to more resistance and government can ill afford to be seen as the enemy of the people that they put in power.”
Seoka, who also is head of the Bench Marks Foundation that put out a damning report last month about miners’ living and working conditions, said the strike had just cause and was not the work of instigators, as some have suggested.
“The problem will not go away even if this crackdown wins the present battle,” he said. “The ‘war’ between workers who do not receive just remuneration against the enormous amounts of money paid to executives will continue to fester.”
Seoka said the government was destroying four weeks of mediation in which he had taken part. He called for minimal policing of strikers.
Before dawn on Saturday, about 500 officers raided hostels at the Lonmin PLC platinum mine and confiscated homemade machetes, spears, knives and clubs, police spokesman Brigadier Thulani Ngubane said.
A half dozen men were arrested for illegal possession of arms and drugs in those raids, he said. Another six were arrested on Saturday morning.
Officers first fired tear gas at hundreds of miners who refused to disarm at the hill of granite boulders that has become the strikers’ headquarters. 0Police then moved into the Wonderkop shantytown where residents set up barricades of burning tires to try to block the officers from their neighborhood.
A fire caused by a burst gas pipe yesterday spread to several homes and sent a fireball soaring into the sky outside Malaysia’s largest city, injuring more than 100 people. The towering inferno near a gas station in Putra Heights outside Kuala Lumpur was visible for kilometers and lasted for several hours. It happened during a public holiday as Muslims, who are the majority in Malaysia, celebrate the second day of Eid al-Fitr. National oil company Petronas said the fire started at one of its gas pipelines at 8:10am and the affected pipeline was later isolated. Disaster management officials said shutting the
US Vice President J.D. Vance on Friday accused Denmark of not having done enough to protect Greenland, when he visited the strategically placed and resource-rich Danish territory coveted by US President Donald Trump. Vance made his comment during a trip to the Pituffik Space Base in northwestern Greenland, a visit viewed by Copenhagen and Nuuk as a provocation. “Our message to Denmark is very simple: You have not done a good job by the people of Greenland,” Vance told a news conference. “You have under-invested in the people of Greenland, and you have under-invested in the security architecture of this
Japan unveiled a plan on Thursday to evacuate around 120,000 residents and tourists from its southern islets near Taiwan within six days in the event of an “emergency”. The plan was put together as “the security situation surrounding our nation grows severe” and with an “emergency” in mind, the government’s crisis management office said. Exactly what that emergency might be was left unspecified in the plan but it envisages the evacuation of around 120,000 people in five Japanese islets close to Taiwan. China claims Taiwan as part of its territory and has stepped up military pressure in recent years, including
UNREST: The authorities in Turkey arrested 13 Turkish journalists in five days, deported a BBC correspondent and on Thursday arrested a reporter from Sweden Waving flags and chanting slogans, many hundreds of thousands of anti-government demonstrators on Saturday rallied in Istanbul, Turkey, in defence of democracy after the arrest of Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu which sparked Turkey’s worst street unrest in more than a decade. Under a cloudless blue sky, vast crowds gathered in Maltepe on the Asian side of Turkey’s biggest city on the eve of the Eid al-Fitr celebration which started yesterday, marking the end of Ramadan. Ozgur Ozel, chairman of the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), which organized the rally, said there were 2.2 million people in the crowd, but
RSS