The South African authorities said on Tuesday that they had pulled dozens of dead miners from a shuttered gold mine where they were working illegally until a blockade during which the police at one point cut off access to food, water and other supplies.
As of Tuesday evening, the police reported recovering 51 bodies and extracting 106 miners who were still alive. The death toll could rise as the government continues the delicate operation, which began on Monday, to get all the miners out.
The authorities moved in after a monthslong standoff that drew criticism from human rights groups but praise from some South Africans, who view illegal miners as dangerous criminals.
It was unclear on Tuesday how many miners remained underground, but activists and the authorities estimated that there could be hundreds.
The blockade of the mine, near Stilfontein, a town about two hours south of Johannesburg, was part of a national campaign to root out illegal miners, who are known locally as Zama Zamas.
In an effort to force the miners near Stilfontein above ground, officers last year began cutting off their supplies by guarding every known access point to the mine and pulling up or severing ropes used to ferry goods underground, images distributed by the police showed.
The recovery operation began this week in the wake of a court challenge filed by a civil society group and amid reports of horrendous conditions in the mine, which is more than a mile deep.
Cellphone video of conditions underground released by an advocacy group, Mining Affected Communities United in Action, showed dozens of dead bodies wrapped in plastic and the bony, emaciated frames of miners who were still alive. The video was taken last week by one of the miners, the organization said.
“Brutal,” said Meshack Mbangula, an activist with the mining group. “Ruthless toward the Zama Zamas and community.”
As the mining industry shrank in South Africa and mine owners began to abandon unprofitable sites, Zama Zamas started digging through what remained, without legal permits.
The miners have drawn heavy criticism from some South Africans, who accuse them of perpetuating criminal networks of illicit metals trading and fueling crime in the areas where they operate. There is also ill will because many of them are undocumented immigrants.
The South African authorities said they believed that the miners near Stilfontein were choosing to stay underground to avoid arrest, a contention disputed by human rights organizations, which said some of the routes out of the mine had been cut off.
“We are not sending help to criminals,” a minister in the president’s office, Khumbudzo Ntshavheni, said at a news conference last year. “We are going to smoke them out. Criminals are not to be helped; they are to be persecuted.”
The controversy surrounding Stilfontein taps into deeper questions about wealth inequality in South Africa and the exploitative history of the mining industry.
Mines were the beating heart of the economy during apartheid, with the Black majority relegated to menial, low-paying labor while white-owned and foreign entities reaped immense profits. Today, that imbalance largely persists. Some Black-owned companies have broken into the industry, but the wealth has generally remained in the hands of a relatively small elite.
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