(NEXSTAR) – The South African government has cut off supplies to an estimated 4,000 people participating in an illegal mining operation in the town of Stilfontein.
Officials are hoping the strategy will force the workers out of the mineshaft and to the surface, where they will be arrested.
“We are not sending help to criminals. We are going to smoke them out. They will come out,” Khumbudzo Ntshavheni, the Minister in the Presidency of South Africa, told reporters on Wednesday, per the Associated Press. “Criminals are not to be helped. We didn’t send them there.”
Over 1,000 people have already been arrested at South African mines this month as part of the police force’s “Close the Hole” operations, according to reports.
Speaking with the Agence France-Presse, a police spokesperson said that several of the miners who surfaced this week were “dehydrated and a bit hungry and weak.”
They were then given to paramedics before they were arrested, the spokesperson said.
Illegal miners in South Africa’s old mining towns — or zama-zama, as they’re called — are often said to come from neighboring countries. It’s also common for them to spend months underground in harsh, hot conditions while working, a local doctor who sometimes treats the miners told The New Yorker in 2023.
“I think they all go through hell,” the doctor told the outlet.
But police and locals say the miners also bring violent crime to the area and have been known to have armed clashes with rival mining operations, the Associated Press reported.
Still, some volunteers were seen providing water and food to the workers in the closed mine this week, urging them to regain enough strength to climb out, the AFP said.
