SACP STATEMENT ON CONTINUED KILLINGS OF NUM MEMBERS

The SACP is saddened and outraged by the ongoing and senseless killings of NUM shopstewards and their families or relatives. These barbaric acts, as we have said, are aimed at weakening and destroying the NUM in particular and Cosatu.

Clearly what has been camouflaged as legitimate workers demands and protest in the mining sector has now been hijacked by regressive forces, just like the way apartheid did, to try and eliminate the NUM and its basic unit, the branch. To use violence to mobilize workers away from their organization must be strongly condemned. Over a period of time the SACP has been warning of an existence of a lumpen tendency that is prepared to do anything, including these senseless killings, to assume power in society. Unless all progressive forces stand up and unite, the gains of the working class will be reversed.

The SACP calls on the state to act without haste to stop this bloodbath in Marikana and elsewhere. We also call upon employers to take responsibility for these developments as it is their own dangerous and opportunistic actions in trying to weaken the NUM that has led to this situation.

Once more the SACP calls upon COSATU and all its affiliates to unite against this counter-revolutionary offensive.

Statement issued by the SACP, October 8 2012

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