South African Police open fire on protesting Miners.

Excellent collection of footage showing clearly from all known sources (except police helicopter) how those seconds transpired.

www.iol.co.za... dence-shows-miners-shot-first-1.1366853#.UDNt6mymDTo

reply to post by KaelemJamesIf they could overthrow the police, well...


I would just like to respond to a single point you made, can you imagine any situation where
anyone would overthrow the police in this country without a popular uprising? Irrespective of this
tragedy and all its political and social implications. Everything we've seen has just shown
a 30+, hastily and randomly armed group confront a fairly decently trained force
equipped with well maintained, modern firearms (as well as AK 74's, I spotted at least one AR14/15,
a few FN's .) Taking into account the heavily armored APC's that are designed for use in urban areas, we've created a police force we both rely on and defend, and can never oppose whatever political or economic
system we face, appartheid or neo-liberal, neo-conservative or corporate capitalist, or the communists ?

reply to post by DelegateZero88

Well generally the police in SA are not considered well trained.

However considerable amounts of civilians have some military training e.g. from MK or Inkatha, or the SADF.

Non-lethal weapons like rubber bullets have recently been under discussion, and some on the radio say they are in disuse.
Water-canons are expensive, and usually not sufficient.
www.timeslive.co.za...

It could be that the police have some highly trained groups, but generally they are seen as incapable of even securing a police station.
Many (but certainly not all) are also corrupt, and thousands of official and confiscated firearms go missing, for example.

Here many blame it on a lack of police training.

I did not say I considered them well trained, I said they were decently trained, in as far as I can discern
using small arms and basic small squad tactics, I don't consider them a well trained police force.
Semantics, I know, but there is a difference.

In reference to your non -lethal weapon comment-

the TECOM Technology Symposium in 1997 concluded on non-lethal weapons: "Determining the target effects on personnel is the greatest challenge to the testing community," primarily because "the potential of injury and death severely limits human tests." However, "directed energy weapons that target the central nervous system and cause neurophysiological disorders" may violate the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons of 1980.

en.wikipedia.org...

Designing weapons that are intended to cause pain and hurt people, and are deemed morally justifiable,
will always lead to torture. Just my opinion

Protests spill over to other S African mines

www.aljazeera.com...

I'm sorry, we were all hopelessly wrong and deluded as to why this all happened.

We covered the fact that a muti man made them bulletproof, but his muti failed because they killed the rabbit.

www.news24.com... hooting-20120825

"The traditional healer warned all of us several times on the day not to kill the rabbit but some among us decided to chase it around the hill and killed it," mineworker Khabo Khabo told the newspaper.

The medicine man had reportedly promised the workers that police guns would malfunction when they faced them if they followed his instructions and took his muti.

It was the rabbit's fault .....

On a more serious note, i can think of no single person more deserving of blame than this muti man. No sane person would have attacked those cops, only people who believe they are bulletproof would have done that.

The decision by the South African authorities to charge 270 workers with the murder of 34 of their colleagues who were shot dead by police is politically controversial.

www.bbc.co.uk...

And the ANC mismanagement continues.

This is getting surreal.

dailymaverick.co.za... /2012-08-30-the-murder-fields-of-marikana-the-cold-murder-fields-of-marikana

Other letters denote equally morbid scenarios. J and H died alongside each other. They, too, had no route of escape and had to have been shot at close range.

“Most people then called for us to get off the mountain, and as we were coming down, the shooting began. Most people who were shot near the kraal were trying to get into the settlement; the blood we saw is theirs. We ran in the other direction, as it was impossible now to make it through the bullets.

“We ran until we got to the meeting spot and watched the incidents at the koppie. Two helicopters landed; soldiers and police surrounded the area. We never saw anyone coming out of the koppie.”

The soldiers he refers to were, in fact, part of the police task team dressed in camouflage uniforms, brought to the scene in a brown military vehicle. Asked about this, Themba said he believed people were hiding at the koppie, and police went in and killed them.

This happened at the same time as the main "barrage" of gunfire, and was NOT covered by the media. And this really does change everything .... i wish it wasn't true, but something inside says that something really bad went down, and even the shocking footage was only a "nicer" face of what happened behind the scenes.

It suggests that the ANC govt is actually more frightened than we realise, that the instability runs so deep that the ANC wanted to stamp their authority over all miners. This has clearly backfired, but in the fallout i don't see anyone paying for this, even charging the survivors with the murder of their friends is macabre and double think of the most gruesome nature.