Trapped Miners Resort to Cannibalism After Police Withold Aid

The two survivors speak quietly as they recount how emaciated miners broke the ultimate taboo to avoid dying of hunger.  Trapped nearly a mile beneath the earth after police blocked their food and water, one recalled how his colleagues resorted to cannibalism.  “They cut parts of legs, arms, and ribs for sustenance. They decided it was their only remaining option for survival,” the man, who declined to be named, told reporters.

His claims echo similar accounts slowly emerging from a mining disaster which has shocked but also divided South Africa. While he and his colleague insist they did not take part, they were forced into their own desperate acts, eating cockroaches after running out of food.

Last week rescuers retrieved 78 bodies and 246 survivors from abandoned shafts of one of the country’s deepest mines.  The deaths came in a lengthy stand-off between police and illegal miners who make a risky living by trespassing in disused gold mines to eke out what is left of the deposits.

In August, police began blocking food and water from entering the old Buffelsfontein Gold Mine near Stilfontein in the North West province of South Africa, to try to force hundreds of illegal prospectors back to the surface. 

Illegal mining is common and the government has taken a popular hard line on what it says are highly organized and ruthless criminal gangs behind the business.  Police said it was too dangerous to enter the warren of old workings to confront armed criminal gangs, and instead they would stop supplies to “smoke them out”.  As the stand-off continued, the authorities maintained that the miners were able to make their way out, but were resisting in order to avoid arrest and deportation. More than 1,300 did return to the surface and appeared in court.

Yet as the months wore on, unions and local people said large numbers of others were actually trapped or too weak to get out, and needed to be rescued.  Courts eventually ordered the authorities to provide humanitarian aid and employ a mining rescue company to bring up the remainder.  Images of scores of body bags being hauled to the surface and skeletal miners emerging into the light have now prompted accusations that the police committed a “massacre”.