Poverty keeps families from South Africa deaths probe

RUSTENBURG: Poverty and distance kept victims' families away when an inquiry opened in South Africa on Monday to unravel how 46 people were killed in a mine strike in the worst bloodbath since the end of apartheid.

Commission chair Judge Ian Farlam asked family members to stand as their loved ones' names were read out to open the Marikana

Commission of Inquiry in the Rustenburg Civic Centre northwest of Johannesburg.

But no one stood while commissioner Bantubonke Tokota solemnly read down the list, all 46, one-by-one.

No wailing, only silence.

Police shot dead 34 of these on August 16, when the group of illegal strikers ran down a hill where they had been gathering, armed with machetes, sticks and metal rods, at London-based Lonmin's platinum mine.

Now the victims' families are too poor and live too far to attend the hearings into the worst police violence since white minority rule, which ended in 1994.

"Why don't you see anyone of them here? They're not here. They are in the rural areas," said Advocate Dumisa Ntsebeza, who represents the families of 20 victims.

"They were not told by this commission or anyone else that an inquiry would take place," he told the Marikana Commission of Inquiry, asking for the state to provide for the impoverished families from far-flung Eastern Cape province, home to many victims, to attend the inquiry.

The commission later conceded to arrange "that families attend hearings that affect them."

Lawyers for the parties, government officials, unions and journalists stood in a minute of silence, paying tribute to the mineworkers, policemen, union worker and municipal councillor who died in the strike, which started August 10 and ended September 20.

President Jacob Zuma announced the inquiry shortly after the police shooting, and the government funded burials of miners in their home regions across the country, as well as in Lesotho and Swaziland for immigrant workers.

The three-person commission, comprising Farlam, Tokota and Advocate Pingla Hemraj, sat on a raised platform on a stage, flanked by the evidence-leading team on their right and lawyers for interested partners to their left.

"Our country weeps at this tragedy and we owe it to those concerned that we do our work as expeditiously as possible," said Farlam while opening proceedings, which have four months to wrap up its work.

The commission much resembled the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), set up in 1996 by Nelson Mandela, the country's first black president, to investigate the torture and killings of activists during apartheid. Ntsebeza even used to be the TRC's head investigator.

But the Marikana Inquiry was the first into post-apartheid police brutality in a democratic South Africa, and this time authorities were the African National Congress government, the former liberation movement.

Another famous lawyer was George Bizos, defence advocate in the treason trial that sent Mandela to jail for 28 years in 1964.

Bizos acts for some victims' families and legal organisations, but his first client was the Constitution, he told Judge Farlam, "because it respects the fundamental right to life."

Yet absent were weeping and mourning families, in an ironic reminder of the dire conditions mineworkers live in one of the world's leading mining countries, earning a pittance while working for big multinationals.

They could not afford to travel to, or live, where their loved ones fell.