adminA YEAR after the killings, and 117 days and 12 000 pages of oral testimony later, what has been learned from the Farlam Commission’s probe of Marikana?
The first and rather uncomfortable realisation so far is that it will be impossible to attribute blame or accountability to the individual police officers who fired their weapons in Marikana on August 16 last year.
The second is that it will be difficult to pin responsibility on the top command or the political leadership of the police, although this question is not yet completely settled.
Third, Marikana mine owner Lonmin, which is yet to present its evidence at the commission, is likely to have a case to answer for its role in the events of the day in which, it has been argued, the company co-operated closely with the police.
And, fourth, the state, which includes the presidency and the minister of police, has demonstrated a shocking callousness to those affected by the event, treating them more as enemies of the state than citizens caught up in a situation they could not have anticipated.
The commission and parties involved will no doubt be annoyed by such premature judgments. But for the wider public, a taking stock at this point can be useful, given the scattered nature of news reporting.
The commission is probably only halfway through the evidence of stage one, which deals with the events of August 16 and the days leading up to it, in which 10 other people died.
The initial intention was that a second phase would then follow, which would look into the deeper sociological causes and conditions in the mining industry.
With the first stage taking as long as it has — it was initially supposed to end after four months — the prospects are diminishing that this stage will even be reached and whether there really will be scene-shifting change in the mining industry flowing out of the commission.
But a good deal about the immediate causes has already been learnt. It is commonly agreed that the 34 killed on August 16 died at the hands of police.
(This is accepted by all except national police commissioner Riah Phiyega, who stunned everyone in her evidence, when she said she did not know at whose hands they had died.)
The question for the commission is whether the police acted lawfully and whether their actions can be described as private defence.
It is also common cause that there were two scenes: the scene at the “big koppie” at Marikana on which the striking mineworkers had been assembled and from which they were dispersed with many shot in a hail of police fire and the “small koppie” to which some workers fled after the initial shooting.
Because it is almost impossible, except perhaps in one or two instances, to match the hundreds of weapons fired with the bodies, the focus of much of the evidence has been on the police plan for the day: was it sensible?
Dali Mpofu, counsel for the “injured and arrested” — the group of about 300 mineworkers who survived the day and have been implicated in events — has argued that it was inevitable that the plan would end in death.
The fact that the police brought special task units armed with machine guns bears out this conclusion, he has said.
In addition, drawing barbed wire around the mineworkers on the koppie so that they had only one avenue of escape, failing to give a proper warning, and not waiting to see where the crowd was headed before opening fire are more of the reasons put to enforce this claim.
While some police officers have been called as witnesses and cross-examined, the police are only beginning to give their evidence now. But the gist of it has been that at scene one, the police believed they were under attack by a mob, which was well-armed and violent, and they fired in self-defence.
At scene two the pattern was different. In contrast to the hail of gunfire that brought people down, the evidence shows death from more targeted gunshots, which the counsel for the relatives of the deceased and Mpofu have argued was a result of the police tactical units “hunting down” mineworkers hiding among rocks and behind trees.
At this scene too, the police have mounted an extremely weak self-defence claim, claiming that they mistook friendly fire by their members, who had gone around the back of the scene, for gunfire coming from the mineworkers.
The police are also in trouble for appearing to have planted weapons on some of the bodies.
Time-stamped photographs presented as evidence show bodies without weapons in their vicinity, while later photographs of the same bodies show weapons.
The question of exactly who gave the orders on the day and how far up the chain of command they can be traced is still unclear.
Phiyega, who was a shocking witness and amply displayed her lack of knowledge of policing on the stand, is also accused of altering her affidavit. — BDlive
Online Reporter