South African police
killed 34 people in a shooting at a mine in North West province, the country's
police chief says.
Officers shot at the
workers who were protesting on Thursday afternoon over pay at the
Lonmin platinum mine in Marikana, some 100km northwest of Johannesburg.
The incident, which
police said was an act of self defence, appears to be one of the bloodiest
police operations since the end of white-minority rule in 1994 in Africa's
biggest economy.
National Police
Commissioner Riah Phiyega, speaking at a news conference on Friday, also said
78 people had been injured and 259 arrested in Thursday's violence.
"The police members
had to employ force to protect themselves from the charging group," she
said.
"This is no time
for blaming, this is not time for finger pointing. It is a time for us to mourn
a sad and dark moment we experience as a country."
But local newspaper
headlines screamed "Bloodbath", "Killing Field" and
"Mine Slaughter", with graphic photographs of heavily armed police
officers walking casually past the bloodied corpses of men lying crumpled in
the dust.
In a front page
editorial, The Sowetan newspaper
questioned what had changed since 1994.
"It has happened in
this country before where the apartheid regime treated black people like
objects," the paper said. "It is continuing in a different guise
now."
Zweli Mnisi, the police
ministry spokesman, said an investigation into the shooting has begun. Labour
unions and political parties, including the ruling ANC, called for an independent
inquiry.
Police investigators and
forensic experts, meanwhile, combed the scene of the shooting, watched by about
100 people on Friday. South African media said that there was no more violence
reported in the area overnight.
'Senseless violence'
Giving their version of
Thursday's violence, police said up to 3,000 striking drill operators
armed with machetes and sticks, and some with firearms, ignored orders to
disperse.
The crowd had charged
at the line of officers, but it remained unclear what prompted this
behaviour, Mnisi, the police spokesman, said.
Witnesses said a water
cannon, stun grenades and tear gas were first used to try and break up the
crowd. The shooting happened after police failed to get the striking miners to
hand over their weapons.
In an
earlier statement, the South African Police Service said its officers were
"viciously attacked by the group, using a variety of weapons, including
firearms. The police, in order to protect their own lives and in self-defence,
were forced to engage the group with force".
The incident, captured
by Reuters photographers, drew condemnation from South
African's main opposition party, the Democratic Alliance, social media users and evoked
comparisons with apartheid-era brutality.
Jacob Zuma, South
Africa's president, cut short a trip to a regional summit in neighbouring
Mozambique to address the crisis.
On Thursday he said he
was "shocked and dismayed at this senseless violence" at the mine.
"We believe there
is enough space in our democratic order for any dispute to be resolved through
dialogue without any breaches of the law or violence," Zuma said in
a statement.
"We call upon the
labour movement and business to work with government to arrest the situation
before it deteriorates any further."
The Sowetan reported on
Thursday that police officers earlier said that negotiations with leaders of
rival labour union Association of Mineworkers and Construction Union (AMCU) had
broken down, leaving no option but to disperse strikers by force.
"Today is
unfortunately D-day," Dennis Adriao, a police spokesman, was quoted
as saying on Thursday.
While the initial
walkout and protest focused on wages, the ensuing violence has been fuelled by
the struggles between the dominant National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) and the
upstart and more radical AMCU.
Disputes between the two
unions escalated into violence earlier this year at another mine.
'Illegal strike'
Roger Phillimore,
Lonmin's chairman, issued a statement on Friday saying the deaths
were deeply regretted. But he emphasised the mine considers it "clearly a
public order rather than a labor relations associated matter".
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