One year has passed since the so-called “rescue operation” at Shaft 11 was concluded. Ninety-three people were officially confirmed dead. No one has been held accountable. No minister has resigned. No criminal prosecutions have followed. No meaningful process resembling justice has emerged.

What remains is not silence, but something more disturbing: a carefully managed forgetting.

The events at Stilfontein were not an accident. They were not the unavoidable consequence of criminality. They were the foreseeable outcome of a deliberate state operation, executed with full knowledge of its human cost, and later insulated from accountability by the very institutions meant to defend constitutional democracy.

Starvation as State Practice

Evidence before the South African Human Rights Commission has made one fact unavoidable: miners trapped underground at Shaft 11 died of starvation. 

Food, water, and medication were deliberately cut off as part of Operation Vala Umgodi. The state’s own affidavits, public statements, and conduct confirm that starvation was used as a method to force people to surface. When they could not surface, because of depth, collapse, flooding, illness, or physical exhaustion, the tactic did not change. The bodies accumulated instead.

Starvation as a policing tool is not law enforcement. It is collective punishment. Under both South African constitutional law and international humanitarian law, it is unlawful.

An Operation Without Intelligence

Equally damning is what the operation was not.

Despite repeated claims that the crackdown targeted criminal syndicates, no credible intelligence has ever been produced identifying syndicate leadership, command structures, or financial beneficiaries. No kingpins were arrested. No networks dismantled. No upstream financiers exposed.

Instead, the operation proceeded blindly, without verified information about who was underground, how many people were trapped, their medical condition, or whether exit routes were viable. Police acted not on intelligence, but on instruction. And those instructions flowed from the Department of Mineral and Petroleum Resources.

This is not speculation. It is borne out by evidence before the SAHRC itself.

NATJOINTS, the Minerals Council, and State–Corporate Convergence

Perhaps most disturbing is what has emerged about governance structures behind the operation.

The Minerals Council of South Africa, representing mining capital, was part of the NATJOINTS structure that authorised and coordinated Operation Vala Umgodi. This is not a neutral fact. It raises a profound constitutional question: how did an industry body with direct commercial interests come to sit inside a national security structure overseeing a lethal police operation?

This convergence of corporate power, security governance, and executive authority is not incidental. It speaks to a deeper political economy in which the lives of informal, poor, and largely black miners are treated as disposable obstacles to mineral control.

Ministers Who Will Not Account

A year later, key ministers are still avoiding the request by the SAHRC to appear before the Commission to account for their decisions. Parliament has not compelled their testimony. The Madlanga Commission has not investigated their conduct despite testimony linking events at Stilfontein to criminal syndicates connected to the Minister of Police and despite repeated requests by Mining Affected Communities United in Action (MACUA).

The credible allegations, presented to parliament and the Madlanga commission has never been investigated, that the Minister of Police met with individuals linked to criminal syndicates at his official residence during the Stilfontein operation. If true, this would collapse the state’s entire narrative of crime-fighting. Yet Parliament has chosen silence over scrutiny.

The Murder of Paps Lethoko

The failure of accountability does not end underground.

The murder of Paps Lethoko, an activist, artisanal miner and witness to the events around Stilfontein, has never been meaningfully linked by police or the SAHRC to the massacre that preceded it. This refusal to connect political violence to its context is itself a form of erasure. It signals to communities that those who speak, organise, or expose state violence do so at their own peril.

A Society That Looked Away

Perhaps the most painful truth is not institutional but social.

Outside of affected communities, a handful of civil society organisations, and families of the dead, South African society largely washed its hands of the massacre. Media attention waned. Moral urgency dissipated. The dead were quietly reclassified as criminals rather than victims.

This collective turning away has left a deep scar, not only on Stilfontein, but on the ethical fabric of the country. It implicates the Cabinet of President Ramaphosa, the police, the SAHRC, Parliament, and a civil society that too often performs outrage selectively.

Justice Abroad When Justice at Home Fails

South Africa speaks eloquently on the international stage about human rights, international law, and crimes against humanity. But credibility is hollow when justice is exported while impunity is protected at home.

If our institutions are unwilling or unable to pursue accountability for the deliberate starvation of 93 people; if ministers can defy oversight without consequence; if state violence against the poor is normalised rather than prosecuted, then the question is no longer whether international mechanisms are appropriate.

The question is whether they are necessary.

International law is clear: widespread or systematic acts that intentionally inflict conditions of life calculated to bring about destruction may constitute crimes against humanity. What happened at Shaft 11 demands to be assessed against that standard, not rhetorically, but legally.

This Must Not Be Buried

Shaft 11 is not just a physical place. It is a moral indictment.

If this massacre is allowed to disappear into the deep, dark tunnels of bureaucratic delay and public amnesia, then we will have learned nothing from Marikana, except how to make state violence quieter, slower, and easier to deny.

One year later, the dead still wait.

Justice delayed here is not merely justice denied. It is justice abandoned.

And that is something no constitutional democracy should survive.

* Christopher Rutledge is a South African human rights activist and the Executive Director of Mining Affected Communities United in Action Advice Office, and part of a national network representing communities impacted by mining.

** The views expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of IOL or Independent Media. 

Source link