The ANC government has bent over backwards to satisfy its imperialist partners, while its policies
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12 SOCIALIST ACTION SEPTEMBER 2012 have marginalized the poor.
3,000 miners to disarm and disperse, the police began firing tear gas and water cannons to try to get them to leave, witnesses said. In video captured by several news organizations, the police appeared to fire upon a group of workers who charged toward them.”
A look at the news footage on YouTube, however, raises grave questions about the chain of events. We see the police shoot tear gas into an enclosure ringed with razor wire into which the strikers had been herd ed. We then see a group of miners (perhaps a few doz en) run out of the enclosure, apparently fleeing the gas and possibly bullets. The police then mow them down with automatic rifles, shooting hundreds of rounds at the workers until ordered to “cease fire!”
There is no evidence in the footage that the police were forced to defend themselves by force of arms. They clearly outnumbered the group of strikers who ran in their direction. And why would the strikers have charged a superior number of heavily armed police?
For the next half hour, moreover, some news report ers observed police on horseback and in armored cars and helicopters gunning down additional fleeing (or surrendering) workers. These later police assaults appear to have been responsible for most of the casu alties. According to the Johannesburg Star, autopsies have shown that most of the strikers were shot in the back. It is thus out of the question that the massacre could be construed as the action of police officers de fending themselves against an armed provocation.
The Marikana massacre poses additional questions that the mainstream press, police, and politicians all wish to avoid. Why were the police deployed to the isolated area of Marikana in the first place? Why did they have live ammunition? And, most importantly, why is the government intervening in a labor dispute on behalf of the employer? Only truthful answers to these questions can show us who is to blame for this tragic incident.
History can shed light on the situation, particularly the history of the African National Congress (ANC), their politics, their rise to power in the historic 1994 elections, and their track record since then. During the 1980s, demonstrations, boycotts, and strikes en compassed millions of people who were demanding civil rights for the Black population, economic justice, and the end to minority white government. The ANC, which had been formed years earlier as an organiza tion fighting apartheid and for a “non-racial” South Af rica, became the leading force in the movement.
As the mass movement began to reach potentially revolutionary proportions, President F.W. de Klerk be gan to grant concessions in hopes of calming the situ