Police expert under fire
January 22 2013 at 10:30am
POLICE RESPONSE:
Brigadier Zephaniah Mkhwanazi during cross-examination before the Farlam
Commission into the Marikana tragedy in Rustenburg. Picture: Itumeleng English
POLOKO TAU
poloko.tau@inl.co.za
THE Farlam Commission of Inquiry
started on the same note it adjourned on last year – with the police service
being questioned about the Marikana bloodbath.
Public order police expert Brigadier
Zephania Mkhwanazi was in the hotseat yesterday as Advocate Dumisa Ntsebeza SC,
representing the families of the deceased miners, said he believed the police
could have avoided the Marikana tragedy had more officers and a specialist
negotiator been deployed to the area.
Ntsebeza tore into Mkhwanazi’s
admission that there had been between 4 000 and 8 000 public order police
officers in the country, |raising questions about why more public order police
were not deployed from elsewhere.
“There would have been one police
officer to each protester. That place could have been saturated – this is an
operation that could have been under public order police,” Ntsebeza said.
Ntsebeza said police have also failed
to do a public order police analysis which could have determined that the
situation in Marikana was “not a scenario that called for a tactical response
team and automatic rifles”.
He questioned why a hostage negotiator
and not a public order police negotiator was sent in to engage the striking
workers at the mountain.
Ntsebeza also cited the deployment of a
counter-insurgency officer as an operational commander.
“There were no hostages. It was not a
terrorism scenario. It was not a cash-in-transit heist but a situation that
called for a public order police-trained negotiator,” he said.
“A trained public order police
negotiator would have urged the strikers to lay down their weapons. They
brought barbed wire which could potentially cause a stampede. The plan was not
to promote a peaceful gathering.”
Mkhwanazi agreed when Ntsebeza said a
public order police-trained negotiator would not have negotiated with the
strikers from inside a police Nyala.
Ntsebeza also raised concerns that
police did not take video footage of the actual shooting of miners or provide
any such footage to the commission.
“There has been a disturbing absence of
evidence that speaks to what happened on August 16, 2012,” he said.
Ntsebeza said it was possible that
there had been video footage of the actual killings which “could have been
destroyed or deleted, deliberately suppressed”.
In his response, Mkhwanazi said he had
seen some video footage that was obtained from broadcast media. He had only
heard that there was some footage taken by the police but had not seen it.
Ntsebeza, who constantly reminded
Mkhwanazi that he was under oath, took the officer to task on why he did not
ask to see the other footage as part of their review of what happened.
Mkhwanazi said he had assumed police
video footage was going to be viewed at the commission and said he would have
alerted the authorities if he had been aware of any concealed footage.
Ntsebeza also quizzed him on why
standard police procedure, which dictates that video footage of operations must
be taken at all times, had not been adhered to if police had failed to capture
every moment of the “bloodbath”. He said video footage could have been seen in
the police’s internal review of the incident but there was no uncertainty as to
whether such video material had existed or not.
The commission continues.
