S.African lawyer Bizos likens Marikana shooting to apartheid-era massacre

Prominent rights activist George Bizos Wednesday accused South African police of apartheid-era brutality during an inquiry into the killing of 34 striking miners, after an officer testified he was told to take the blame for the crackdown.

Bizos, who was a close friend and lawyer of Nelson Mandela, said police was using the same excuse to justify the killing as that used following the 1960 Sharpeville Massacre, when apartheid police killed scores of protesters in a blacks-only area outside Johannesburg.

The lawyer drew the parallel while cross-examining air wing commander Salmon Vermaak, who earlier said his superiors had asked him to assume responsibility for the deadly police crackdown at the Marikana mine northwest of Johannesburg in 2012.

“Since Sharpeville there has been a stratagem on police violence against people of not appointing anybody to be in control,” Bizos said.

“This will help them to say we were under attack and we shot in self-defence. In this case there may have been the same stratagem,” he told Vermaak.

Police say they reacted with live ammunition on August 16, 2012, after coming under attack from the few thousand striking miners.

The killing, caught on camera, shocked the world and tarnished the image of the South African police.

Lawyers of the victims have told the inquiry into the incident that at least 14 of the miners were shot in the back, suggesting they were gunned down while fleeing from police.

Bizos’s cross-examination followed Vermaak’s testimony that police lawyers and another commander had told him to take partial blame for the crackdown at one of the hills, called “koppie” in South African English.

“In a consultation with the police legal team, it was mentioned to me that I am going to carry the responsibility for the people that were killed at koppie three,” Vermaak told the inquiry Tuesday.

Senior provincial officer Adriaan Calitz had told him the same, Vermaak testified.

“Where do they base the allegations against me?” he asked.

The officer said the only action plan he knew of was to ring in the miners.

He also broke ranks with the official police line and criticised the force for its intervention during the wage strike at the Lonmin platinum mine that precipitated the crackdown.

“I have raised my concern with the manner in which this protest was handled.

“It was clear to me that there wasn’t much experience. The protests you get in the mines are more violent than the ordinary protests. They fight to their deaths,” he said.