Pretoria - A senior Lonmin employee had to defend calling Marikana strikers “faceless”, at the Farlam Commission of Inquiry on Monday.
“Strikers refused to give Lonmin their identities and one of the speakers was an employee of a contractor of Lonmin. (That's) why I used this word 'faceless',” said Barnard Mokwena, who was Lonmin's executive president of human capital and external affairs at the time of a strike in 2012.
“The conventional way of meeting demands in a structured way was not being used,” he said.
Mokwena made the comment during a meeting with senior police officials during the 2012 strike.
The commission's chairman, retired judge Ian Farlam asked Mokwena if the police would have understood his statement in that way.
“Probably they would not have understood that, chair,” Mokwena conceded.
Association of Mineworkers and Construction Union lawyer Heidi Barnes said the national police commissioner of the time, Riah Phiyega, had understood the statement to mean that the strikers were not Lonmin employees.
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