South Africa: Shooting at mine raises questions

No striking miners will be fired in the week that South Africa officially mourns the killings of 44 men at a platinum mine, including 34 strikers shot by police.

Managers of Lonmin PLC platinum mine had ordered strikers to report for duty by 7 a.m. Tuesday or get fired, even as some family members still were searching for missing loved ones, not knowing whether they were dead or alive among some 250 arrested protesters or in one of the hospitals treating 78 people wounded in the police shootings that shocked the nation.

“The reaction to the shooting . . . has been very strong in South Africa,” says Gunter Simmermacher, the editor of “The Southern Cross,” South Africa’s Catholic weekly. “Calls for calm have generally been falling on deaf ears, and accusations and counter-accusations have been made.”

He said last week’s shooting raise many complex questions, which hopefully will be answered in the inquest on the event. “All these questions, some of them very complex, will certainly form part of the judicial inquest, as well as public debate.”

Simmermacher said that despite the many unanswered questions, “one thing that is clear is that nobody is coming out very well out of all of this. . . . For South Africa, these are certainly very difficult times.”

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