Category Archives: Massacre on Nkaneng Hill

SACSIS: On the Third Force

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http://www.sacsis.org.za/site/article/1456

On the Third Force

Richard Pithouse

The National Union of Mineworkers has informed us that workers organising their own strikes are being covertly ‘manipulated’ and their strikes and protests ‘orchestrated’ by ‘dark forces’ and other ‘elements’ that amount, of course, to another manifestation of the infamous ‘third force’. ‘Backward’ and even ‘sinister’ beliefs in magic consequent to the rural origin of many of the workers are, we’ve been told by an array of elite actors, including the Communist Party, central to this manipulation. Frans Baleni, horrified at the insurgent power of self-organisation, has not just informed us that his union is trying to “narrow the demands” and persuade workers to “return to work”. He has also called for “the real force behind the upheavals” to be “unearthed” by the state on the grounds that “It is completely untrue [that] the workers are responsible” for the ongoing revolt.

Neither Baleni nor anyone else demanding a witch-hunt to penetrate the depths of an elaborate conspiracy and dig up the real source of the miners’ rebellion seems able to realise that they’re on a hunt for nothing other than their own paranoid fantasies. And we’ve yet to see a statement pointing out that there is no part of society in which people don’t look towards some sort of magic to strengthen themselves against the vicissitudes of life. Middle class people are, for instance, often fanatically wedded to all kinds of belief in magic ranging from prosperity cults organised, oddly enough, in the name of a Palestinian carpenter who scorned wealth to various kinds of quackery, the fantasy that the possession of commodities can miraculously transform us at the level of our essential being and actual belief in concepts as entirely divorced from reality as the fiction that we inhabit an ongoing ‘national democratic revolution’, that there could be a ‘Zuma moment’ to match the ‘Lula moment’ or that ‘the free market’ could liberate us all.

Many aspects of the ANC’s vertiginous decline are, indeed, ‘alien tendencies’ to the ANC as it has existed at certain points in the past. But paranoia about ‘sinister forces’ covertly manipulating popular action has a long history in the party. During the struggle Steve Biko was, notoriously, presented as a CIA agent and dissent in the ANC’s camps was automatically ascribed to traitors working for the apartheid state. Of course the Cold War was full of intrigue and conspiracy and the apartheid state was a third force supporting Inkatha in its war on the ANC. But the ANC’s history of having to operate amidst genuine intrigue does not mean that every time ordinary people challenge the party they are the unthinking dupes of some conspiracy.

Since its assent to power the ANC has, in striking continuity with apartheid and colonial discourses, frequently named the white agitator as the sinister Svengali manipulating ordinarily deferent people into rebellion. The white agitator is frequently assumed to have all sorts of fantastical powers. He (and it appears to always be a he) has sometimes been presented as hoping to bring back apartheid and at other times has been presented as an agent of foreign governments ‘hell-bent on destabilizing the ANC’. Baseless allegations about the covert manipulation of other political parties, and, on occasion, imagined ethnic plots, have also been used to explain away popular dissent as a conspiracy on the part of a rival elite. But now it seems that responsibility for the rebellion across the platinum belt is being ascribed to Julius Malema and the factional battles in the ANC.

The ANC has no monopoly on a paranoid worldview founded on a systemic inability to grasp that workers and other poor people have precisely the same capacity for political thought and agency as all other people. The tendency to respond to popular organisation via the paranoid lens of a moral panic in search of a folk-devil is a general feature of our elite public sphere. The DA, for instance, has blamed drug dealers and the ANC Youth League for protests in Cape Town that are clearly both self-organised and genuinely popular. Some NGOs have invented their own folk-devils to explain their lack of influence over popular politics and to delegitimate popular organisation. And various factions of the left outside of the ANC have shown themselves entirely unable to think about popular politics organised both independently of the ANC and outside of their control without recourse to their own, and equally fantastical, version of the white agitator thesis.

These realities mean that while the particular form of the paranoia that follows the ANC’s inability to comprehend popular political agency is certainly inflected by its experience of the struggle, the Cold War and, of course, the enduring Stalinism of the SACP, it is in no way a unique phenomenon. On the contrary it is typical of elite politics across the political spectrum and across a wide variety of organisational forms from political parties to NGOs, the media and the academy. This is consequent to the fact that we live in a class society where elites undertake bruising battles against each other, sometimes in the name of poor, but share an investment in the ongoing manufacture of a fundamentally irrational ‘common sense’ in which the full and equal humanity of oppressed people is denied. It is this shared paranoia at the prospect of people effectively considered as barbarians entering, and thereby desecrating, the hallowed ground of the terrain on which elites conduct their battles and negotiations that explains why some of what Blade Nzimande says about self-organised political action is no different to what the business press says about it.

This is hardly unique to our time and place. Any cursory study of the historical record reveals a tremendous wealth of examples of people whose humanity and equal capacity for political thought and action was denied by all the experts of the day but who, nonetheless, succeeded in providing the most practical refutations of the irrationality of that consensus. From the slave rebellion against ancient Rome led by Spartacus, to the rebellion of the Zanj slaves in ninth century Iraq, the Peasant’s Revolt in fourteenth century England, the rebellion of Haitian slaves just over two hundred years ago and the anti-colonial revolts people considered as sub-human, as incapable of effective independent thought and action, have constantly demonstrated that it is the various hypotheses of a graduated humanity, rather than the people whose full humanity is denied, that are truly irrational. But even in defeat elites have frequently been unwilling to accept the very concrete evidence before them and have instead ascribed the material refutation of their assumptions of superiority to conspiracy. And it has frequently been assumed that conspiracy is animated by diabolical or irrational forces. There was, it was said, Devil worship behind the peasants’ revolt in England, evil African rituals at the heart of the Haitian Revolution, religious outrage at gunpowder cartridges greased with pig and cow fat that inspired the Indian Rebellion and sinister rituals and manipulation rather than, say, the demand for land and freedom, behind the Mau Mau rebellion in Kenya.

The ANC’s own history during the struggle is not, as it likes to pretend, one of an enlightened political elite leading a nation to freedom from above. On the contrary the party was frequently alienated from popular initiative when it first emerged and, in fact, often hostile to it. In many cases the party was only able to draw new sequences of popular dissent into the fold, and to enable them to function as a source of renewal, after they had already proved their power in action. This is broadly true of the women’s riot in Cato Manor in Durban in 1956, the Pondo Revolt in 1960, the Durban strikes of 1973 and the Soweto uprising of 1976. But since it captured the state it has lost the capacity to be renewed by absorbing popular political initiative, which it has consistently seen as illegitimate irrespective of the degree to which it is lawful.

It is inevitable that all kinds of people are going to show up in the wake of a successful mobilisation. They may range from demagogues to activists, academics, journalists, NGOs and churches. Many will be opportunists of various sorts looking for a constituency to conscript, materially or discursively, into their own projects. Others will just want to make a quick splash for themselves before moving on. But some will be genuinely interested in understanding and perhaps communicating what is happening and some will be genuinely interested in negotiating solidarity. What ever their intentions people higher up the class hierarchy are likely to get more media attention then the people whose political initiative they are responding to.

But the fact that people have shown up after a moment of insurgent popular action hardly means that they orchestrated it. And if people do decide to form alliances across the social divisions that usually mark our society they have, irrespective of whether or not someone like Frans Baleni approves, every right to do so in a democracy. The idea that it is automatically dubious and even ‘sinister’ for workers and other poor people to make their own decisions about who to form alliances with is, to say the least, paternalistic, paranoid, anti-democratic and, in many cases, rooted in a barely masked desire to keep oppressed people in their place. Of course popular action, on its own or in alliance with other forces, may or may not take a democratic or progressive form but that is a different question.

South Africa Slum Dwellers, in U.S., Condemn Marikana Massacre

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http://blackagendareport.com/content/listen-black-agenda-radio-progressive-radio-network-glen-ford-and-nellie-bailey-%E2%80%93-week-oct-1

South Africa Slum Dwellers, in U.S., Condemn Marikana Massacre

“We need to take a stand, because what the miners were fighting for is just,” said Mnikelo Ndabankulu, spokesperson for the South African grassroots organization Abahlali baseMjondolo, which means “People Who Live in Shacks” in the Zulu language. At least 34 workers were shot dead by police at the Marikana platinum mine, in August. Ndabankulu’s group has also been harshly suppressed by authorities. “South Africa is a protesting state,” he said. If police were allowed to shoot everyone who protests, “the country would be left with only police and rich people.” Abahlali baseMjondolo members are on a tour of U.S. cities.

Click here to visit the page where you can listen to this interview.

Daily Maverick: Marikana prequel: NUM and the murders that started it all

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Please visit the Daily Maverick site to see the version of the article with a map and with hyperlinks.

http://dailymaverick.co.za/opinionista/2012-10-12-marikana-prequel-num-and-the-murders-that-started-it-all

Marikana prequel: NUM and the murders that started it all

by Jared Sacks

The coverage of the Marikana massacre seems to start with the mass killings of 16 August. But that’s not where, or how the violence started, and it wasn’t rivalry between unions, either. Rewind a few days and prepare for goosebumps: you’ll find a web of conspiracy around two murders which were not reported in the media and ended in no arrests, but scared the living daylights out of the workers before the weeks of horror started.

Because the Marikana Massacre marked a turning point in the history of our country, I went to the small mining town in the North West. I wanted to know what truly happened and what it meant for the future of our so-called democracy. I hoped my trip would enable me to answer some of the burning questions left obfuscated by media, government and civil society campaigns alike.

It seemed it would be difficult, if not impossible, to uncover the cause of the violence at a distance from Marikana because of the complete failure of most media outlets to ask the right questions of the right people. Professor Jane Duncan of Rhodes University has found that journalists rarely interviewed independent mineworkers or residents of Marikana, preferring to quote “official sources” such as unions, Lonmin or the police. Moreover, my experience of previous incidents of repression in South Africa had taught me that such sources are often unreliable, as they have a lot to lose by telling the truth.

Through my investigations I found that, contrary to many media reports, inter-union rivalry was not the immediate cause of the violence. In fact, a significant cause of the violence can be laid squarely on the National Union of Mineworkers and their murder of two of their own NUM members – which until 2 October remained unreported.

Meeting the community

After meeting a community member (whose family did not consist of direct employees of Lonmin) in Johannesburg, I spent a week at the end of September living in the massive Nkaneng shack settlement in the township of Wonderkop. Together, Nkaneng and Wonderkop dwarf Marikana itself, housing the vast majority of the area’s mineworkers. Yet almost all the roads there remain unpaved, and residents are forced to go all the way to the “city centre” for most of their needs. Geographically and socio-economically, Wonderkop is the bastard stepchild of the Marikana municipality, further marginalised by Lonmin, whose corporate social responsibility initiatives remain unnoticeable.

During my visit, I spoke to Lonmin workers who had participated in the strike and others who were not active strikers. I interviewed the wives and children of the miners and I also sat down with unemployed and self-employed residents who did not have family members working at Lonmin.

I began to piece together a more detailed and shocking timeline of the strike and how it eventually degenerated into the horrifying footage played out for the whole world to see.

Revelation

Perhaps the most striking thing I heard repeatedly in Wonderkop was the near-complete hatred that all residents, regardless of their connection to the strike, had towards the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM).

I had assumed that within Wonderkop there would be a divide between supporters of NUM and those that had jumped ship to their smaller non-Cosatu affiliated rival, the Association of Mineworkers and Construction Union (AMCU). I assumed there would at least be a significant minority of residents who blamed the strikers for instigating the killings and felt that NUM still remained a relevant and credible force among Lonmin workers.

And yet every single person that I spoke to, without fail, blamed NUM for starting the violence and reneging on its responsibility to represent the workers. This was the case even when people I interviewed expressed dislike for the strikers and their own subsequent acts of brutality. Almost everyone felt more hatred towards NUM than they did towards Lonmin, the police or even the Zuma administration.

Alternative timeline: how the strike began

On Wednesday 8 August, some rock drill operators (RDOs) from various Lonmin mines had a mass meeting demanding a significant salary increase. The NUM leaders present categorically refused to support the strike, despite the union’s stated mission to promote and represent the interests of its members. On the following day (Women’s Day – a holiday for the workers), thousands of RDOs from all Lonmin mines met at the Lonmin-owned football stadium, adjacent to the settlement, where they agreed to approach Lonmin management directly, as NUM was refusing to represent them.

According to Xolani*, an active striker from Lonmin’s Karee mine, RDOs “came together as workers, not as a union.” As the large majority of the workers at the assembly were NUM members, the AMCU was unrepresented at this meeting.

On the morning of Friday the 10th, workers assembled and marched to the offices of Lonmin management. David, a Lonmin mine geologist I interviewed (who was returning from work and was not then part of the strike), decided to join the striking RDOs to see what was going on. David told me that management refused to speak to the workers, who were assembled peacefully, and told them to go back to the NUM leadership.

Xolani and a few other participants in the march corroborated this. He explained that security had tried to stop the march and that after a long wait, the general manager of the mine came out and then went back in to fetch a NUM leader. After waiting for almost an hour, the NUM leader came out and reprimanded the workers, saying they would not get anything without going through the union.

As a result of Lonmin and NUM’s refusal to meet with the workers, more than 3,000 RDOs and other miners decided to go on strike and refused to clock in that evening. This was a wildcat strike organised directly by workers, without any union representation.

11 August: March on NUM

At approximately 07:00 on Saturday, workers, still primarily RDOs, decided to go to the main offices of NUM in Wonderkop and present union leadership with a memorandum. It is important to note that the NUM offices are also the offices of the ANC and SACP in Wonderkop. They are manned by the top five NUM branch leaders from all the Lonmin mines in Marikana. These leaders are senior to shop-stewards and are elected to their position by workers for a period of three years. Interestingly, David explained to me that they get their normal worker’s salary plus a huge bonus of R14,000 per month from Lonmin. They are therefore accountable to management. Both the NUM leaders and Lonmin are “happy with this arrangement”.

As strikers were by and large NUM members, they were naturally angry that their own union refused to listen to them. The memorandum demanded that NUM represent them in their call for a R12,500 minimum wage for all miners. NUM’s stated raison d’être is, after all, to be a democratic organisation that represents its members.

Julius, an RDO from Lesotho employed at Lonmin since 2008, explained that, as a NUM member, he was hoping the memorandum would convince union leaders of the significance of their wage demands.

Only a handful of AMCU members were present during that march, as many workers from the Karee mine, where AMCU already had a membership presence, was far away and not yet participating in significant numbers in the strike. Xolani, one of the few AMCU members present that day, said this protest was really a case of NUM members rebelling against their own leadership, not a case of inter-union rivalry.

The first murders, ‘a different account’

Once striking RDOs were about 100-150 metres away from the NUM office, eyewitnesses, both participants in the march and informal traders in and around a nearby taxi rank, reported without exception that “top five” NUM leaders and other shop stewards, between 15 and 20 in all, came out of the office and began shooting at the protesting strikers somewhere in the vicinity of the Wonderkop taxi rank.

Some strikers I interviewed claimed the NUM leaders first threw rocks at them before the shooting started. Others said they were attacked from two different angles of the taxi rank. There is also a discrepancy as to just how many guns were in the possession of the leadership that came out of the NUM office (reports range from between five and 15 firearms).

Despite those discrepancies, the strikers and other witnesses – without exception – claim NUM personnel shot at the protesters without warning or provocation. The miners were clearly ambushed by their union representatives. From that point on, the miners marching towards the NUM office, primarily NUM members, ran in many directions: back along the road in which they had come, through the nearby bond houses and through Lonmin-owned hostel properties. They later re-assembled at Lonmin’s football stadium, deciding there for the sake of safety to move to the nearby koppie, a small hilltop uniquely placed on public land between Wonderkop, Marikana and the various Lonmin mines. Protesters seem to have made no attempt to defend themselves, and there seem to have been no further clashes for the rest of the day.

John, a non-striking Lonmin worker, saw two bodies of strikers not far from the NUM office as he returned home from work. One was lying dead by the bus stop in the taxi rank, the other was just outside the workers’ hostel. The range of people I interviewed corroborated the location of the two dead bodies, but it was extremely difficult to confirm the names of the dead strikers as neither Lonmin nor the police have confirmed that any deaths occurred on the 11th. Neither have they released any substantive information about what happened on that day.

However, one person I interviewed provided me with the following new names not released by the Independent Police Investigative Directorate: S. Gwadidi from the Roeland Shaft and Tobias Tshivilika from New Mine Shaft. Both were reportedly RDOs and also NUM members.

I was not able to assess if these names were correct or if any other people were injured during this shooting on the 11 August.

Everyone I interviewed agreed on this general timeline of the murders: two deaths at the very beginning of the violence, followed by a subsequent eight deaths and a number of injuries during the following three days, from Sunday, 12 August until Tuesday, 14 August.

It started out as a peaceful strike

I wanted to find out when and why the workers began to arm themselves, and so asked a wide range of residents in Wonderkop why and when striking workers began carrying traditional items such as sticks, knobkerries and pangas.

The consensus, with one exception, was that the strikers went to their homes to fetch their traditional weapons on Saturday, 11 August, after the murder of two strikers. In the words of David, who was present at the march (but still not yet on strike himself), “people decided to arm themselves (after the first two murders) in self-defence”. Xolani and Julius support this assertion: they had nothing in their hands during the march.

Some women leaders from the South African National Civic Organisation (Sanco), a body aligned to the ANC, SACP and Cosatu, agreed that the miners only took up arms in self-defence after their members were murdered by NUM officials. Many of the informal traders and bystanders at the scene of the NUM shooting were hesitant to speak to me. Yet, after I assured them that they would remain anonymous, all, without exception, said the violence on that day came from the people working in the NUM office. When I asked some young men playing draughts who killed whom, they merely pointed in the direction of the NUM office, saying it was “them”. By all accounts the strikers were unarmed that morning when they marched to their own union office.

Misrepresentations

When I returned from my visit to Marikana, I began searching through all the mainstream and alternative media reports I could find. After reading hundreds of articles, I found none that mentioned the incident on the 11th. Until the Farlam Commission recently interviewed a worker about the events on that day, not a single media report had acknowledged that the first deaths occurred on the 11 August rather than on the 12th.

A single early South African Press Association story placed the first two shootings on the evening of 10 August. But that was all. That story contradicts other mainstream media reports and does not corroborate what people say on the ground. It seems most likely that the reporting is mistaken and those four people mentioned in the article were actually shot on the morning of the 11th during the march on NUM offices, and that two of them later died.

The only other possible explanations for the lack of reporting on the incident would be either (a) that the murders on the 11th did not take place at all, and that everyone I have interviewed were somehow lying or (b) there is some kind of cover-up of the murders of Mr. Gwadidi and Mr. Tshivilika – both unlikely conclusions.

All the other articles I’ve read have told a completely different story: that the first deaths occurred on Sunday, 12 August. These include two of the security guards in the daytime and two other miners in the evening (see for instance, articles: here, here, here, here, here and here.

It is as if no one outside Marikana knows that two people were murdered in broad daylight at the busy Wonderkop taxi rank. This is strange, except when one considers that no one in Wonderkop/Marikana has access to the media except for NUM, Lonmin and the South African Police Service (SAPS). The media, not present in Marikana until later in the week, were relying on these three official bodies for their entire investigation. Not a single community member or worker was actually interviewed during the first few days of the strike.

As Professor Jane Duncan’s analysis of the media coverage of the Marikana Massacre from 13 to 22 August has shown, only 3% of articles about the events included interviews with workers themselves rather than “official” institutions such as government, SAPS, Lonmin, NUM and AMCU. With one exception, journalists that did actually speak to workers were only interested in asking questions about muthi.

What this means is that no eyewitnesses were contacted by journalists and, when a few were eventually contacted (mostly after the 16 August) they focused primarily on the more recent massacre and overlooked the original cause of the violence.

Causes and responsibilities

Many analysts and academics with easy access to the elite public sphere place the root cause for the Lonmin strike and the subsequent violence on the deprivation and exploitation meted out each and every day on RDOs and other miners all over South Africa. Greg Marinovich’s recent interviews with Lonmin RDOs have done a lot to illuminate the lives and working conditions in the mines.

I found, however, that NUM’s actions, undemocratically refusing to represent its own workers and siding instead with Lonmin management in the wage dispute, were a significant contributor to the violence. Even more disturbing, NUM saw its own workers as enemies from within – an uneducated and unthinking mass to be controlled and managed rather than served.

This is why NUM leaders such as Frans Baleni think it is impossible for workers to organise themselves without a “third force” acting from behind the scenes. My interviews have shown quite clearly that workers were acting by and for themselves, regardless of union affiliation, in rebellion against their own union leadership. They were their own leaders.

The paranoid and delusional fear that NUM members were being “remote controlled” by outsiders set on “destroying the union” may have been what led its leadership at Lonmin to respond irrationally and violently to the striker’s peaceful march on the NUM office.

Police response

The police did nothing in response to the two deaths on 11 August. No one was arrested that day, nor was anyone interrogated. This was despite the fact that many strikers present during the murders assert they can identify at least some of their assailants. Xolani, for instance, named two of the shop stewards, one from the Training Centre and one from the fourth shaft in Wonderkop. Others pointed out the Lonmin “Top Five”, one of whom seems to have now been assassinated.

I asked David if he thought there might have been an alternative to the violence if the police had arrested the murderers on that fateful day. He replied, “I think it would be different if police had arrested NUM…if you don’t arrest anybody, then it seems like you are protecting them.”

Whether or not police could have uncovered the full story on that day, the act of doing nothing left workers with the perception that they were isolated. “Worker, you are on your own” could be their rephrasing of Bantu Steve Biko’s famous words. If one is standing unarmed and vulnerable against armoured vehicles, guns and the full might of the South African state, then, as workers may have put it when meeting on top of the now infamous koppie on the afternoon of 11 August: It’s time to get ready for war.

*Not his real name. Because of the recent spate of murders targeting NUM leaders in Marikana, the names of everyone interviewed for this article have been changed, though their real names are known to the author.

SACSIS: Abuses of Force During Public Order Policing Operations

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http://www.sacsis.org.za/site/article/1455

The Road to Marikana: Abuses of Force During Public Order Policing Operations

by David Bruce

During apartheid some of the most notorious instances of police brutality were the killings of demonstrators involved in peaceful protests. It therefore made sense that one of the issues that received concerted attention during the police reform process of the 1990s was public order policing.

An important initial step in this regard was the introduction of new legislation. The Regulation of Gatherings Act, in fact, came into force in January 1994 prior to the formal transition to democracy. A special Standing Order ‘on crowd management during gatherings and demonstrations’ was eventually also adopted by the South African Police Service (SAPS) in 2002. These documents were intended to entrench a policy framework in terms of which the primary role of public order police was to support the right of members of the public to assemble and demonstrate.

In post 1994 South Africa, the right to freedom of assembly and freedom of expression is entrenched in the Constitution. But though the Constitution protects the rights of members of the public to protest ‘peacefully and unarmed’ it must be acknowledged that between them the Constitutional, legislative and policy provisions are somewhat blurry in some respects. This applies in particular to demonstrations where there is violence, including violence against property, by demonstrators.

Section 9(2)(d) of the Regulation of Gatherings Act, for instance, appears to authorise the use of firearms or other weapons ‘to protect against’ not only death or serious injury, but also ‘destruction or serious damage to property’. Section 11(4)(c) of the public order policy, on the other hand, provides that rubber bullets ‘may only be used to disperse a crowd in extreme circumstances. But though one might argue about what constitutes ‘extreme circumstances’, and when, if ever, these include the destruction of property, there is far less ambiguity about the fact that they may only be used when ‘less forceful methods have proved to be ineffective’.

Along with legislation and policy a major investment was also initially made, with substantial foreign assistance, in transforming the apartheid “riot police” into public order policing (POP) units. A new training curriculum was developed and implemented and formal management and command structures were introduced.

Ironically, simultaneously with the development of this specialized capacity, there was an apparent decline in the need for it. By the early years of the new millennium it seemed that the specialised public order policing capacity that had been created was something of an over-investment. Though there were a large number of demonstrations the vast majority of them were entirely peaceful. In order to support their right to freedom of assembly all the police needed to do was provide a couple of police vehicles and a handful of ordinary police officers as a formal escort. As a result public order units started to be used, in support of station-based police, in crime combating operations. The intensive work that had been done on equipping them to deal with complex, and potentially violent, public order situations, would, from this point on, no longer be sustained.

From roughly July 2004 onwards South Africa experienced a series of community and labour demonstrations that involved significant levels of violence. These included sporadic protests against the provision of housing, service delivery and local council corruption, a municipal workers’ strike in July – August 2005, various protests over the demarcation of provincial boundaries, and a major strike of security guards over April–June 2006. This pattern of violent protest has continued up to the present.

Though some strikes included a number of killings, in community protests violence on the part of protestors was largely confined to attacks on property. The major exceptions to this rule were acts of collective violence that were motivated by xenophobia, or took on a xenophobic dimension. Most notably in May 2008, 62 people were killed in a series of riots by mobs that targeted people who were believed to be foreigners from other African countries.

Notwithstanding this dramatic increase in violent demonstrations there was no significant increase in killings by police during demonstrations. Over roughly five years, between the beginning of 2000 and the end of 2004, four people were killed by police during demonstrations. Three of these deaths did take place in 2004 but two of these occurred during an operation by the Ekurhuleni metro police and one of the local sheriff’s offices. Two more people were killed in 2006 and one in 2008. Notwithstanding the horrific violence that was involved no people were killed by the SAPS during the xenophobic attacks of May 2008 with police in fact being accused of being deliberately tardy in their response. Two people were also killed during a demonstration in Thandakukhanya township near Piet Retief in Mpumalanga in 2009. One was allegedly shot by a traffic police officer and the other by a private security guard.

There was something of an escalation in 2010, with three people killed by police in that year. These included a 46 year-old grandmother, Priscilla Sukhai, in Daveyton in May and a schoolgirl, Anna Nokele in Welkom, in September 2010. But then something very dramatic happened.

During a period of less than five months, from the middle of February 2011 to the beginning of June eleven people were killed in demonstrations. These included two young children who were allegedly drowned as they tried to escape from police who were firing at a township demonstration in Boipelo, 300 kilometres southwest of Johannesburg. The other nine deaths appear to have been a direct consequence of the adoption by the SAPS of brutal new methods for dealing with public protests.

These methods involved the use of live ammunition in some instances. They also involved direct firing of rubber bullets at demonstrators. There is some indication that the new strategy involved the targeting of leaders or other people playing a prominent role in the demonstrations. Whilst at the time it was widely believed that it was a freak incident, the killing of Andries Tatane on April 13 2011 was part of this pattern of killing.

Where rubber bullets are fired directly at close range they are highly likely to be lethal. Rather than being fired directly they are intended to be used as ‘skip fire ammunition’. It is for instance rubber bullets that the International Association of Chiefs of Police is referring to when it says in its policy on ‘civil disturbances’ that “Skip-fired projectiles and munitions or similar devices designed for non-directional non-target-specific use may be used in civil disturbances where life is in jeopardy.”

The new SAPS approach first came to public attention during a police operation in Wesselton, near Ermelo, in mid-February 2011. Violent protests that included the blockading of access routes to the township by the burning of tyres, the smashing of traffic lights and road signs, and stoning of a police vehicle had started on Monday the 14th of February. Two people were killed, apparently as a result of police action, during the demonstration.

Though the exact circumstances of the deaths are not entirely clear, according to an Agence France-Presse report, police acknowledged that they fired rubber bullets at protesters and that they ‘shot live ammunition into walls as a warning’ allegedly after demonstrators opened fire at the security forces. It was presumably the live ammunition that accounted for the death of Bongani Mathebula. According to his mother, “he was walking back home from a traditional healer’s surgery when he was caught in the crossfire of police shooting at rioters.”

Accounts from residents painted a deeply disturbing picture of police action on Wednesday the 16th when the community protest had already died down. According to residents the police imposed a curfew in the township punishing people who were on the streets by shooting them with rubber bullets or sjambokking them. A cell phone video clip showed a young man rolling on the ground while being followed by armed police, one of whom is perched on the police vehicle’s bonnet. According to the man who captured the footage on his cell phone “the youngster in the clip was coming from the nearby shops with a female friend when he was summoned to the officers’ vehicle, questioned and allegedly shot at several times with rubber bullets. He was then forced to roll on the dusty street for a considerable distance.” According to a Mail & Guardian report, the man who captured the footage also said, “They didn’t want anybody on the streets that day. That guy wasn’t the only one [who was assaulted]. A lot of people were being ejected from shops and forced to roll on the ground. The police were also conducting door-to-door raids.”

Live ammunition also appears to have accounted for the death of a young woman, Dimakatso Kgaswane, who was one of two people killed by police during a protest on May 31, 2011 in Tlokweng in North West province. According to a press report, police used live ammunition to disperse protesters who set alight a tavern and a police minibus. The protest was against ritual killing and perceived police inability to solve cases in the area.

Whilst live ammunition may have accounted for the death of Bongani Mathebula and Dimakatso Kgaswane, it is more likely that Petros Msiza, who died on the 3rd of March 2011, was killed by rubber bullets. According to a press report, Msiza was killed during violence that erupted “when city law enforcers refused to allow South African Municipal Workers Union (Samwu) members, who had gathered at the Tshwane Metro bus depot, to march through the city.

The precursor to the increase in killings in 2011 appears to have been the re-establishment of Operational Response Services (ORS) as a full division within the SAPS. Though it had previously been a full division, by 2010 ORS was a sub-component of the SAPS Crime Prevention division. In January 2011 the then ORS head was transferred to assume the position of provincial commission of the Western Cape. ORS was then re-established as a full SAPS division and a new divisional commissioner, Lieutenant General Malewa, appointed as its head. In addition to the public order units, ORS included a number of paramilitary units including the Special Task Force, National Intervention Unit and Tactical Response Teams.

In some respects the new SAPS methods preceded the re-establishment of ORS as a full division. In July 2009 SAPS members fired rubber bullets at people at close range during an operation in response to protests in Balfour in Mpumalanga. The report of a ‘quick response’ study published in September that year describes, and includes photographs of, “a 15 year-old boy who had been shot 10 times by rubber bullets at close range. The boy had also suffered a severe head injury allegedly from being struck on the back of his head with the butt of a gun.”

According to the report, “The research team also met a woman who had recently given birth and who had been shot in the stomach at close range by a rubber bullet while, according to her, hiding under her bed when a police officer demanded to know who had blocked the road with stones.” An accompanying photograph indicates that, in this case, ‘close range’ meant a distance of less than one metre.

Violent policing methods appear to have had the backing of senior politicians. Addressing 280 mayors and municipal managers at a meeting in October 2009, for instance, President Jacob Zuma said, “I wish to take this opportunity to state without any ambiguity: this government will not tolerate the destruction of property, the violence and the intimidation that often accompanies protests.”

Zuma’s remarks were made notwithstanding consistent evidence that violent protests generally followed successive unsuccessful attempts by people in communities to have their grievances heard and attended to.

Though heavy-handed police actions were a characteristic of some protests prior to 2011, the re-establishment of ORS as a full division in January 2011 appears to have marked a radical departure. The division’s creation was, it seems, accompanied by the idea, that once police had a pretext for using force, they could dispense with principals of minimum force, and use as much force as they wanted to.

But in the aftermath of the political furore that followed the Andries Tatane killing, at a summit against police killings, on 8 July 2012, Minister of Police, Nathi Mthethwa announced a reversal of this policy. He told the summit that while there was a ‘need to use maximum force against violent criminals’ police should use ‘minimum force in dealing with fellow citizens.’

This speech appears to have heralded a reversal of the ORS approach to the policing of demonstrations. Between July 2012 and the Marikana massacre 13 months later, there has apparently been only one killing. In July 2012 a 14-year-old boy died of a gunshot wound during a protest in Folweni Township near Durban.

But, in addition to the massive use of live ammunition, direct firing of rubber bullets was also brought back into use during the police operation at Marikana on 16 August. This brutal use of ammunition that is supposed to be used non-lethally has now apparently taken another life following a police crackdown in Marikana’s Nkaneng township on the weekend of the 15th and 16th of September. ANC councillor Pauline Masuhlo died in hospital on Wednesday 19th of September. She was allegedly shot by police. Her family believe that she died as a result of a rubber bullet lodged for three days in her leg, close to the knee.

Notwithstanding the consistent evidence that police continuously use excessive force, our political leaders continue to lay the blame for violence on demonstrators.

SABC: Marikana and the problem of pack journalism

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Please visit the SABC site to see the pie chart that was published with this important story.

http://www.sabc.co.za/news/a/00f7e0804cfe58899b00bf76c8dbd3db/Marikana-and-the-problem-of-pack-journalism-20120710

Marikana and the problem of pack journalism

The televised images of armed miners rushing towards the police in Marikana on the 16th August, and the police opening fire on the miners, will haunt South Africans for many years to come.

Reporting from behind the police line in relative safety, journalists presented to the world images that on the surface of things vindicated the police’s view of events, namely that they shot in self-defence.But subsequent academic, journalistic and eyewitness accounts have called this narrative into question, with evidence having emerged of a second ‘kill site’ where miners were allegedly killed in a far more premeditated fashion by the police.

Journalists were not present at this site. This alternative narrative emerged after miners were interviewed by the University of Johannesburg and subsequently by the Daily Maverick. Up to that point, journalists had completely missed this alternative account.

Hopefully, the truth will emerge from the Farlam Commission of Enquiry. But how did the media fare in reporting on the massacre, and how has it assisted the public to build their own understanding of what happened and its significance?. Why did journalists miss such a crucial dimension of the Marikana story, which called into question very fundamentally the official version of events?

In an initial attempt to answer this question, a representative sample of printed newspaper articles provided by News Monitor via Media Tenor, for the dates 13 – 22 August were analysed for their sources of information: 153 articles in total.

Most miners were interviewed in relation to the stories alleging that the miners had used muti to defend themselves against the police’s bullets, as well as the miners’ working and living conditions.

The source analysis included people and organisations who were quoted directly, or who clearly provided information that formed part of the basis of the article (such as Lonmin annual reports or a report released shortly before the massacre by the Benchmarks Foundation). Many articles had several sources.

Of the 3 percent of miners who were interviewed independently of the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) and the Association of Mineworkers and Construction Union (AMCU), only one worker was quoted speaking about what actually happened during the massacre, and he said the police shot first. Most miners were interviewed in relation to the stories alleging that the miners had used muti to defend themselves against the police’s bullets, as well as the miners’ working and living conditions.

So in other words, of all 153 articles, only one showed any attempt by a journalist to obtain an account from a worker about their version of events. There is scant evidence of journalists having asked the miners the simplest and most basic of questions, namely ‘what happened’?

A more comprehensive analysis of the media coverage over this period is being planned, but so far, it appears that it was only after the Maverick coverage that many journalists realised that the miners actually had a story to tell, independently of the unions or any other organised formation. Journalists seemed to assume that by having interviewed the unions, they had somehow ‘covered’ the miners’ story; an incorrect assumption, as many miners who initiated and sustained the strike action did not feel represented by either union.

This initial sample of the press coverage during the week of the massacre raises some serious, unavoidable questions, about the state of South Africa journalism, which likes to portray itself as the watchdog of the powerful, and on behalf of the powerless.

However, the bureaucratic and social organisation of news in contemporary media organisations often leads to journalists prioritising the dominant groups in society. It is not coincidental that, apart from being a representation of journalistic sources, the pie chart also mirrors quite accurately where the power lies in society. Those with the most power and money have the biggest voice.

In fast-paced newsrooms, where journalists are required to meet more and more deadlines, it is tempting to rely on sources of information that are more readily obtainable and have been validated by other media, while avoiding sources that are less ‘trusted’ and require more validation. Known as ‘pack journalism’, these tendencies can give journalism a sameness that reduces diversity of voices.

The most easily validated sources are likely to be organisations with the resources to maintain a constant flow of information to the media, such as government agencies, big business and ‘think tanks’. Organisations or individuals representing working class or unemployed interests are likely to be less well resourced and lack the capacity to communicate proactively, which can lead to them dropping under the journalist’s radar.

Many media organisations have dedicated business reporters or even publications. Yet there are hardly any labour reporters anymore; this beat has practically disappeared from newsrooms, which makes it even more likely that workers’ perspectives will be sidelined.

Journalists pride themselves on their independence. Yet if the first week of reporting on the Marikana conflict is anything to go by, many journalists allowed themselves to become mouthpieces of the rich and powerful, reproducing the official versions of events, and silencing the voices of the workers as rational, thinking beings with their own stories to tell.

Such reporting is an indictment on journalism and all that it stands for. It does not help society understand the scale of the social unrest gripping the country, the levels of police violence in response, and overall, the extent of the drift towards outright state repression. A society can ill-afford to sleepwalk through a period in history when it risks collapsing under the weight of its own internal contradictions.

When the Daily Maverick’s Greg Marinovich was interviewed about his stories on the massacre, he was asked what advice he would give to journalists to improve their reporting, and his response was simply to ‘…go take peoples’ stories’. If journalists are to rise to the task of reflecting accurately the most troubled period in South Africa’s post-apartheid history, then journalists should take this advice seriously. If they do not, then they will continue to fail South Africa.