Around the gaping shaft of a disused mine, the South African police on Saturday waited to pounce on anyone trying to escape to the surface. Their siege has gone on for weeks, trying to flush out hundreds of men accused of illegal mining in an abandoned gold mine, where they are now camped out near Stilfontein, in South Africa’s North West Province. Now, they wait for the bedraggled miners, who some South Africans fear are dying of hunger and thirst, to turn themselves in. We are going to smoke them out,” a minister in the president’s office, Khumbudzo Ntshavheni, said in a news conference on Wednesday. “Criminals are not to be helped, they are to be persecuted.”

Source: The North Africa Journal November 16, 2024 17:42 UTC