“We are not sending help to criminals. We are going to smoke them out.”
South African police surrounded an abandoned gold mine, cut off food and water to hundreds of trapped illegal miners, and waited. 87 people died underground of starvation and dehydration. A government minister said the quiet part out loud about “smoking them out.” The miners were mostly undocumented foreign nationals working for criminal syndicates in conditions a mining engineer described as “Dante’s inferno, two kilometres underground.” That they were breaking the law does not make what happened anything less than state-sanctioned killing by neglect.