https://www.cbc.ca/radio/asithappens/
Illegal mining is a ‘very complicated problem’ that needs more than a police crackdown to fix, says advocate
For weeks, police have been stationed at the opening of an abandoned gold mine in South Africa, trying to smoke out the people illegally working deep inside. Since the standoff began, more than 1,000 miners have emerged to face arrest, one decomposing body has been recovered, and community members have gone to court to ensure their loved ones underground continue to get food and water.
It’s not clear how many miners are still underground in Stilfontein, in the country’s North West province. Police say they number in the hundreds. But community members say there are thousands of people below, either unwilling to come out and face arrest, or too frail to get out on their own.
“It’s a waiting game at this point,” Busi Thabane, an expert on South African mining, told As It Happens host Nil Köksal. Thabane is the general manager of the Bench Marks Foundation, a corporate watchdog that researches the impacts of mining on communities in South Africa. She says the standoff is just the latest culmination of decades-long tensions around illegal mining in South Africa, a dangerous industry run mostly by criminal syndicates who employ people who are desperate for work.
For the rest of this article: https://www.cbc.ca/radio/asithappens/south-africa-mine-standoff-1.7389931