South Africa: Congo mercenaries alleged to be intimidating communites
Published by MAC on 2007-11-05
South Africa: Congo mercenaries alleged to be intimidating communites
5th November 2007
The chairperson of Jubilee South Africa alleges that a band of DRCongo mercenaries is being employed to back the illegal designs of a BEE (Black Economic Empowerment) mining company led by two distinguished South Africans.
Under a recent option agreement, Australian junior company, Nkwe Platinum, is now poised to acquire the majority of mining rights.
Could this presage a frightening new development in the war for platinum along South Africa's northwestern Bushveld?
OPEN LETTER TO PRESIDENT THABO MBEKI
Jubilee South Africa
5th November 2007
This letter seeks to forward to you the feeling of outrage I have begun to experience as I read reports about the platinum belt in both the Limpopo and the North West provinces. The kaleidoscope of events currently unfolding in these provinces concerning platinum mining would qualify to make a horror movie were it purely a matter of the imagination. Something sinister is happening in this part of our country.
Apropos of these events, let me state in parenthesis, that matters appear to be entering a critical groove in the historical canvas, where the health of bourgeois democratic rule, such as it may normatively exist, stands in peril. Disturbing as this state of affairs certainly is, I shall not go there. Indeed, in this first letter I shall restrict myself to the abhorrent developments in but one community...The issues I want to bring to your attention in this frightening story are the following:
a) The company called Genorah Pty Ltd has not consulted the residents of the Ga-Ratau area on the matter of prospecting for platinum on their land. This company is led by one Sharif Pandor, husband of the Minister of Education, and Maredi Mphahlele. Both these gentlemen come from distinguished families and they should know better what not to do.
b) Genorah is clearly attempting to force the issue of making its land grab, banking on the fig leaf that a tribal chief, in the manner that such people have always made themselves guilty of perfidy in the past, has authorized them to seize the land of the people. Nothing in the relevant legislation gives any chief such authority. As in earlier times, chiefs have often been corrupted to commit dastardly deeds.
c) When the people have offered resistance to the commission of a series of illegal acts by Genorah, this company has gone ahead to invade the village of Ga-Ratau with a batch of some 30 uniformed mercenaries from the DRC.
If the unhappy history of the Congo has not taught the people of that country anything about the evil ways of mercenary adventures, it would seem to be different in our own country. The tenants expressed in the Regulation of Foreign Military Assistance Act of 1998 clarify how your government wants to express its solidarity with other African lands by outlawing mercenary actions elsewhere on the continent originating from South Africa. Such solidarity is doubly understandable in the context of the African Union.
Indeed, although there has been a blind spot in relation to Iraq, the prompt action when mercenaries threatened to invade Equitorial Guinea is a practical application of this position. If these tenants hold good for South Africa, they certainly should bind every other African country in respect of the rights of South African Citizens.
d) There is yet another even more worrisome prospect in these occurrences. We know already that in such countries as the Philippines and Colombia, rich mining enclaves have been militarized by the private companies operating therein. Are we headed down that same path? Shall we soon see mercenaries and warlords ruling the roost in the mineral-rich Bushveld?
Are we to expect that the sexual harassment, beating and shooting of community members on platinum-rich lands will become the norm. Is this a sign of things to come that certain police commissioners like Chuene appear to be operating under the command of mercenary bosses, and that police officers from further afield can be kicked, beaten and dismissed by mercenaries at will? What lawlessness is this? And in support of what greed?
e) This is not merely a matter of the husband of a Minister and his company having spiralled out of control. It is worse than this. Your government, in the form of the Department of Minerals and Energy, is complicit in these illegal activities. It would appear that the DME has awarded prospecting rights to the company for the whole farm of Ga-Ratau, including the village, in violation of section 104 of the Minerals and Petroleum Resources Development Act, which precludes the awarding of licenses in this fashion in residential areas. The company is drilling inside the village and, to add insult to injury, the mercenary camp has also been illegally imposed on the village.
f) The community wishes to take legal remedy in this matter, but the DME is refusing to give the information required in this regard. The regional manager has promised to furnish confirmation of the prospecting rights, but no documents are forthcoming. There are claims of consultation but the regional manager is unable to avail the report of such consultation.
g) In short, the company is prospecting illegally in the village and mercenaries are physically preventing the community from defending itself. The DME is refusing to apply the law and also refusing to provide information, preventing the community from asserting its legal rights. The way is being paved for the next step of forcibly removing the community to make way for the mining of resources identified in the prospecting exercise, as we have been witnessing since 1994 in many other communities in the province. This outrageous, blatantly exploitative and increasingly brutal activity has to stop!
I therefore demand, in the name of democratic norms, that:
1. The Congolese mercenaries be expelled from the territory of the Republic of South Africa forthwith.
2. The Ambassador from the Democratic Republic of the Congo be advised of the menace posed against the democratic rights of our citizens by motley groups of ex-combatants who come from a wicked history in the Congo basin.
3. The DME be instructed to desist from its blatant and total support of the company at the expense of the community.
4. A regime of proper democratic rule guided by consultation, negotiations and the principles of justice and equity be established in the Bushveld.
At the time of colonial conquest in the 1880's our people were kicked out of the way by both Boer and Briton on the Gold Reef. Similarly apartheid governments never tired of declaring "White Spots" in any area on the Bushveld where other mineral deposits had been found.
Shall your political regime sit in supervision over a similar process on the platinum reef today?
The people of Limpopo and the North West are going through an agony the like of which has always been recorded in any situation where corporate power has not been limited by democratic imperatives. It is time for these kind of things to stop before it is too late!!
Politically Yours
M.P. Giyose
NATIONAL CHAIRPERSON
JUBILEE SOUTH AFRICA
Port Alfred
Tel: 046 624 2557
Cell: 082 350 0361
Email: mpg@telkomsa.net
05 November 2007