14 Black Miners Killed in S. African Violence

Fourteen black miners were killed in weekend fighting between rival groups as South Africa’s political violence spread to the country’s economically vital gold mines, authorities reported Monday.

Eleven men died in clashes Sunday night at the giant Vaal Reefs Gold Mine, near Klerksdorp, about 100 miles southwest of Johannesburg, where more than 200 supporters of the National Union of Mineworkers battled an equal number of other miners critical of the union’s militant leadership, according to company and union sources. More than 20 miners were injured before mine security personnel restored order.

Two union stewards were slain at Vaal Reefs on Saturday night, the sources said, and a beer garden at the mine’s No. 1 shaft was firebombed Friday night.

5,000 Miners Stay Out

An even bigger clash appeared likely Monday morning when 5,000 of Vaal Reefs’ 45,000 miners did not go to work, armed themselves with homemade weapons and threatened to resume the fight. But, after a meeting with Anglo American Corp. officials and union leaders, members of both groups returned to their hostel. The mine was described as tense Monday night.

Another miner was killed Sunday at Kinross Gold Mine, about 100 miles southeast of Johannesburg, when about 200 union members returning from a meeting clashed with non-union miners, also numbering about 200. A number of miners were injured, according to the union, and one union official was reportedly arrested.

Tshidiso Mothuti, a union organizer, said that miners had gathered in a nearby black township to discuss a range of grievances. As they returned to the mine, a shot was fired at the buses carrying union members, Mothuti said, setting off the fighting between those who attended the meeting and supported the union and those who did not.

Marcel Golding, a spokesman for the Mineworkers’ Union, said that mine security personnel and other employees were among those attacking the union members. He accused the mine operator, General Mining Union Corp., of “using its repressive apparatus” in an attempt to break the union. A company spokesman rejected the charge and said that mine security personnel had intervened only to halt the fighting between the rival groups of miners.

Kinross has been tense since the deaths there of 177 miners, all but five of them black, in an underground fire earlier this year. The union has accused the company of ignoring safety procedures in pursuit of increased production and higher profits.

At a third gold mine, a five-day-old fire that management has attributed to sabotage by union members continues to rage about a mile and a half underground while engineers attempt to seal off the affected areas with cement and pump water into them to put out the fire.

Management of Gold Fields of South Africa, the country’s third-largest mining house, said that, even if the engineers succeed, the Kloof Gold Mine’s production, which is down 20% from its daily average of about $880,000, will not be restored fully for several weeks.

Kloof Mine, which is west of Johannesburg, is one of seven managed by Gold Fields where the union won the right from an industrial court Monday to hold a strike ballot. Most of the country’s other mining companies agreed to pay increases of roughly 20% to black miners, but Gold Fields refused to accept the compromise figure or to continue negotiations with the Mineworkers’ Union.

The large-scale violence at Vaal Reefs apparently was touched off by union stewards’ efforts to enforce a boycott of the beer garden in a show of strength in a series of disputes, including one over liquor prices, with Anglo American Corp., the mine’s operator and the largest and most liberal of South Africa’s mining houses.

Other miners objected to the forced closure of the beer garden and tavern, a center of social life for the miners who live away from their families all but one month each year. Eight of the dead, including the stewards, were members of the National Union of Mineworkers.

An underlying issue is the militancy of the union’s leadership and its increasing involvement in broader political activities. Management and government officials have sharply criticized the Mineworkers’ Union recently for its tough anti-apartheid stands and accused union leaders of going beyond the mandate they have from the miners to negotiate higher pay and better working conditions.

Although South Africa’s mining industry, the largest source of the country’s wealth, has been hit by strikes and violence several times over the past 2 1/2 years, it has been spared most of the political unrest.

But several mining company officials expressed concern Monday that this may now be changing and that the industry, in the words of one, “will discover that we are not insulated from the rest of the country and from political developments nationwide.”