Pretoria - A senior Lonmin employee admitted he was causally connected to the deaths of 44 people in Marikana in 2012, the Farlam Commission of Inquiry heard on Wednesday.
“You, acting on behalf of Lonmin, were party to two important events which are possibly causally connected to the deaths of 44
people,” said Dali Mpofu, for the miners injured and arrested in the August 2012 strike, to former Lonmin chief commercial officer Albert Jamieson.
Mpofu said the one event was Lonmin's refusal to speak to the strikers about their wage demands.
“Do you accept that?” he asked.
“Yes,” Jamieson replied.
The second event was that Jamieson was “emphatic in the crusade to change the characterisation in what I call the chain of political pressure,” said Mpofu.
He was referring to Jamieson's insistence that the strike was criminal and not a labour dispute.
“I was emphatic in that, yes,” Jamieson agreed.
Earlier, Mpofu criticised Jamieson for this.
“It was the characterisation of the situation there as criminal that led to the deaths of these people. You were the person that was obsessed with changing the characterisation,” Mpofu said.
Jamieson responded: “There was no further reason to characterise it as criminal because the police were on site.”
He said the issue was to sustain the 800-strong police force at Marikana.
The commission is investigating the deaths of 44 people during unrest near Lonmin's Marikana mine.
Police opened fire on a group of mostly striking mineworkers, killing 34 of them on August 16, 2012. Around 70 people were injured and more than 200 were arrested. Police claimed they were trying to disperse and disarm them.
Ten people, including two policemen and two Lonmin security guards, were killed in the preceding week.
Sapa