South Africa: Over 30 killed as police fire on striking miners

South African police officers killed more than 30 miners who charged them on Thursday at a Lonmin PLC platinum mine. The shootings are one of the worst in South Africa since the end of the apartheid era. The South Africa Police Service defended officers' actions, saying in a statement that they were attacked by the group. President Jacob Zuma on Friday called for an official inquiry. The editor of the weekly Catholic newpaper The Southern Cross, Günther Simmermacher, said the mining industry in South Africa has always been plagued by violence.

“Violence at strikes is a fairly common feature in South Africa, especially in the last few years,” said Günther Simmermacher, editor of The Southern Cross, a catholic weekly newspaper. “In part, the violence is rooted in old attitudes of the struggle against Apartheid, when mass action was necessary. In other ways, militancy can also be linked to the conditions of employment and the social problems that surround it. That is especially so in the mines, when workers are coming from areas which are far away.”

Günther Simmermacher told Vatican Radio the conditions of migrant workers in South Africa has been a social justice issue for a long time.

“It suggests that this is not going to be the last such confrontation, although we hope, of course, in the future there’s not going to be live munitions shot at each other,” he said.

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