Partisan Defense Committee Press Release

1 September 2012

Partisan Defense Committee P.O. Box 99, Canal Street Station, New York, NY 10013

E-mail: partisandefense@earthlink.net   www.partisandefense.org

Contact: (212) 406-4252

Protest Against Massacre of South African Strikers

On August 30, some one hundred trade unionists, students and leftists protested outside the South African Consulate in New York in response to the August 16 massacre of 34 striking South African miners at the Lonmin Platinum-run Marikana mine northwest of Johannesburg, South Africa. The Partisan Defense Committee (PDC) initiated this united-front protest with the demands:

Protest Massacre of South African Strikers!
Free Jailed Miners—Drop All Charges!
Victory to the Striking Miners!

Participants at the protest included Kevin Harrington from the Transport Workers Union Local 100, members of the New York chapter of the Coalition of Black Trade Unionists, Spartacist League supporters and anti-police brutality activist Matthew Swaye of Stop Stop & Frisk. Other endorsers of this demonstration included union officials from the National Union of Rail, Maritime and Transport Workers in Britain, International Longshore and Warehouse Union Local 21, International Longshoremen’s Association Local 1422, Wisconsin’s South Central Federation of Labor and United Auto Workers Civil and Human Rights Chicago Chapter. Many of the trade unionists who endorsed this protest come from industries and unions that have been under attack here in the U.S.

The South African cops of the Tripartite Alliance government, made up of the African National Congress (ANC), the South African Communist Party (SACP) and the COSATU trade union federation, perpetrated this slaughter—one of the worst in South African history. Now the South African government is resurrecting an apartheid-era law to charge 270 miners with the murder of their own comrades. Drop all charges! Victory to the striking miners! For international workers solidarity with the South African miners!

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The PDC is a class-struggle, non-sectarian legal and social defense organization which champions cases and causes in the interest of the whole of the working people. This purpose is in accordance with the political views of the Spartacist League.