IS S. AFRICAN POLICE TO BLAME FOR MINER DEATHS?

A months-long operation by South African authorities to end illegal artisanal mining at an abandoned gold mine in the town of Stilfontein, southwest of the commercial capital Johannesburg, came to a tragic end on 16 January, when rescuers pulled out 78 bodies from the two-kilometre-deep mine.

Nine other bodies had already been retrieved in the days and weeks leading up to the four-day operation.

According to survivors and civil-society organisations, the men starved to death after authorities blocked food from reaching them in an attempt to 'smoke them out,' as per the words of one South African minister.

The survivors have told harrowing tales of eating toilet paper mixed with toothpaste, cockroaches and, in extreme cases, the flesh of dead fellow miners.

High unemployment levels and poverty have, in recent years, driven tens of thousands of men (South Africans and foreign migrants alike) to scavenge for gold in mines abandoned by mining firms that deemed them no longer viable commercially.