SA police fire rubber bullets, teargas at miners

police and blocking roads after apparently setting fire to a power sub-station at the mine in north-western Rustenburg.
Many others also failed to clock in due to intimidation from colleagues, unions said.
Police said the workers had blocked fire engines from the sub-station, which was set alight in a pre-dawn attack.
Thousands of Amplats workers who were sacked early this month for going on an illegal strike were given an option of returning to work yesterday morning if they wanted their jobs back.
The deal was brokered in negotiations last week by the main National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) and two other like-minded unions in talks with Amplats.
Amplats was unable to give figures for the number of workers who had returned, but it was clear that a sizable number of workers refused to go back to work until their pay demands are met.
“We are six weeks on strike, we can’t go back to work empty-handed,” workers representative Siphamandla Makhanya said, confirming clashes between workers and police.
“There is a lot of shooting and things like that today.”
Police told AFP the Amplats power sub-station was set ablaze around 0200 GMT and “approximately a thousand or so strong people tried to barricade the police and fire brigade from getting there.
“Since then we have been having clashes with this group of people,” said the police spokesman, adding that the strikers were trying to block roads and are hurling rocks at the police around the informal settlement of Nkaneng, where many workers live.
One policeman was hit and wounded by a stone thrown by the strikers.
“Workers that wanted to go to work were blocked, have been intimidated, one shaft was burnt at Anglo platinum,” NUM spokesman Lesiba Seshoka told AFP.
“Those that don’t want to go to work have a right to but they must leave those that want to go to work, to go to work.”
Amplats, the world’s number one platinum producer, had agreed to rehire the workers after six weeks of strikes that have shuttered its mines.
The global miner gave the workers until yesterday to return on existing wage agreements but with a US$230 one-off allowance if they did so.
But some striking workers were adamant they would not be persuaded to return to the underground until there’s some form of pay rise. — AFP.