.::: FLTI :::.

South Africa - August 14, 2023

11 years after the Marikana massacre
We keep fighting for justice:
No justice, no peace!

August 16 is a day that mourns the entire South African working class and the entire continent as well as the entire black movement in the US and Europe.
It is that on that day in 2012, 34 miners in Marikana were massacred by the transnationals of Anglo American (Amplats) and London Mining Company (Lonmin) with their police hitmen, the Stalinist treacherous union bureaucracy of COSATU and the ANC government. They dealt one of the hardest blows to the South African working class since their fight against apartheid. It is that the mine workers who were treated as slaves, in terrible living conditions, with miserable wages, “dared” to ask for a decent wage of 12,500 Rands and carried out a general strike for 90 days.
This combat of the Marikana miners concentrated the demand and the cry of the entire black South African labor movement and the entire region: DECENT WAGE AND WORK FOR ALL. They confronted the transnationals that plunder wealth and their lackey governments that keep a few crumbs of the enormous profits that imperialism makes with the theft of natural wealth.

Today, as yesterday, in Marikana, we keep on fighting for the same demands

11 years after the Marikana massacre, we continue living our hardships; they even got worse and the most pressing demands are not solved, while the transnational companies continue with the brutal looting.
And there is no justice: all the murderers of our 34 martyrs are still free. Even if we are deceived that we will get it at the hands of the South African government, when the current president Cyril Ramaphosa, was the manager of those enslaver mining companies and was the one who commanded that massacre. They want to make us believe that through the justice ministry, investigating what happened in Marikana, pressing charges we will get the justice, as Malema says, the lawyer candidate of EFF in the upcoming elections. Let’s not be fool by them, this is just electoral campaign. We cannot let the massacre of the Marikana martyrs to be used for some votes!
A decade of struggle shows this is a true scam. Justice will come from the fight together with our brothers in deep Africa.
We don’t forgive, we don’t forget, we don’t reconcile with Marikana's murderers!
It is imperialism and its transnationals the ones that plunder our resources and steal all our wealth, leaving us in misery! Those responsible for our hardship and massacres are the transnationals, the IMF, and their local managers of the ANC government supported by the SACP and COSATU.
And they are the same ones who close the doors of Europe and massacre us when we flee our decimated, hungry, persecuted countries, trying to reach Europe. So far this year they have allowed nearly 441 immigrants to drown in the Mediterranean and from 2014 to now it is estimated that 20,000 drowned according to the UN International Organization for Immigrants.

We will only get justice with the working class struggle

As we have done for 11 years, we are with the widows of the Marikana martyrs and the miners who continue fighting for justice up to today, and the best tribute we can pay to our martyrs is to defeat the transnational corporations that plunder our wealth, put an end to misery, hunger, unemployment.
The working class and exploited masses have to take the resolution of all their problems into their own hands. As we have been doing in tens of strikes, as that of March or the ones the taxi drivers are doing now. But our unions took us over and over to impotence and division, not only inside the country but with our brothers of the countries of the region.
Out with the treacherous Stalinist union bureaucracies that support the ANC government! It is necessary to set up committees of the unemployed, factory committees and the millions of Zimbabwean immigrant workers, and of the entire region, centralizing together with the student movement.
Expropriation without payment and under workers' control of the transnationals, Anglo American, the mines, the land and the banks and the companies of these new rich blacks! General strike to confront the transnationals and their government!
Out with the ANC government of Ramaphosa, the murderer of Marikana!

Against imperialism and its servants, a unified struggle with our insurgent class brothers and sisters in the whole Africa

Today, our allies on the continent are the exploited from Senegal, Zimbabwe, Kenya, Niger, Nigeria, Angola who rise up against their slaveholders. Let's fight together to expel the imperialism that plunders our nations! Out with the IMF!

It is that we have the same enemy. The same fight in all of southern Africa against the transnationals that plunder our continent and their governments of millionaire black bourgeoisie in a sea of black slaves!

We have an advanced battalion in the metropolis. Let’s fight together with the black movement in France and all of Europe, where they are treated the same as in their countries of origin, and together with our Black Lives Matter brothers in the US, where they are killed by the US empire. That is why the workers' organizations of the imperialist countries have to raise the demands of the immigrants in the first place because they have to free their class brothers: OPEN THE BORDERS, DOCUMENTS, WORK AND A DECENT LIFE FOR EVERYONE.

One single struggle at the north and the south of the Mediterranean Sea and at both sides of the Atlantic Ocean!

International Workers League of Zimbabwe (WIL)

Marikana Strike 2012

Massacre at the hands of the ANC police, the mining companies and the CP