South African Miners Strike at Fear

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Greg Marinovich is an award-winning photojournalist and filmmaker from South Africa. As a member of the famed “Bang-Bang Club” - which included Kevin Carter, Ken Oosterbroek and Joao Silva - he chronicled his homeland's rocky transition from apartheid to democracy. His photo of a suspected spy being hacked and burned alive by suppor ters of the African National Congress earned Mr. Marinovich the Pulitzer Prize for spot news photography in 1991. He recently spent several weeks investigating a brutal clash in August when security forces killed 34 miners who had gone out on a wildcat strike.

WONDERKOP, Marikana, South Africa - Tholakele (Bhele) Dlunga was impassive as he pulled the plastic shopping bag over his head to reveal the torture he had endured. His hands did not tremble as he mimicked how police officers clamped their hands over his nose and mouth when they thought he was somehow managing to get enough air to breathe despite the black bag.

That was just a hint of the beatings and torture that would last for five days.

Mr. Dlunga is a rock-drill operator at the Lonmin platinum mine in Marikana, in South Africa's North West Province. He is also one of the ad hoc strike committee members elected by miners who had rejected the established unions as ineffective and corrupt in their de alings with Lonmin's management. More important, he was a key witness to the events leading to Aug. 16, when the police shot 112 of the wildcat strikers, killing 34.

That clash - dubbed the Marikana massacre - was a grim watershed for South Africa's teenage democracy, coming 18 years after Nelson Mandela took over as the first post-apartheid president. The hated and politically burdened police force was supposed to have been transformed from a force of repression into the protectors of the constitution and human rights.

In a flashback to the old days, five plainclothes police officers broke down the door to Mr. Dlunga's one-room shack around 5:30 in the morning on Oct. 25. After suffocating and beating him, they found the pistol that he kept next to his television. Mr. Dlunga claims he had not used the pistol, but kept it, fearing for his safety in the dangerous mining settlement.

Arrested on charges of possessing an unlicensed weapon, they hauled him off t o several different police stations, where the torture continued as his interrogators sought to learn the whereabouts of other strikers and their leaders. After six days, he posted bail and was released.

A judicial commission was appointed by South Africa's president, Jacob G. Zuma, to investigate the violence in August, even though ministers within the ruling African National Congress have backed the police, who said they fired in self-defense after being attacked by heavily armed strikers.

The miners had gone on strike for fair wages and reasonable work conditions. Some of them broke the law. A few among the thousands who went on strike did indeed kill people. Several implicated in those murders have been in police custody since before the Marikana massacre.

Still, the events have only confirmed fears that the police have gradually regressed into a tool of oppression. Residents of impoverished communities speak of late-night raids by the “intervention unit” following street protests against corrupt local governments that fail to meet basic needs for water, sanitation and electricity. The raids are brutal, with alleged ringleaders beaten, tortured and on occasion, killed.

The various state security agencies are said to support political factions within the ruling A.N.C, with key figures regularly purged. E-mails have emerged that appear to show former unionists and a current A.N.C. executive committee member Cyril Ramaphosa - a billionaire who owns some 9 percent of Lonmin through Shanduka, a company he founded - tried to influence the state to intervene in the labor dispute.

After 1994, the ruling party has increasingly close links to mining and other corporations, with several top members being deployed to businesses through state rules on black ownership of companies.

The massacre at Marikana was not hidden, but played out in plain sight of local and international television crews. It shocked the na tion - yet the outcry was initially muted, even among South Africa's robust civil society organizations. The official police line was that the heavily armed miners had charged at officers when they attempted to disarm them, and had fired in self-defense.

Yet out of sight of the journalists, another tactical response team hunted down fleeing miners, some of whom where shot at close range while trying to surrender. Fourteen of the 34 dead were shot in the back. Dozens of surviving miners have made statements saying that some police went among the miners who lay on the ground, checking if they were alive, and finishing off some who were not yet dead.

The Farlam Commission of Inquiry - which began on Oct. 22 - has been hearing opening statements by counsel for the police, unions, Lonmin and relatives of the dead. At the same time, police have been arresting the strike leaders on charges that seem to change daily. They have been shuffled from police station to police station, to thwart lawyers looking for them.

Advocate Dali Mpofu's team, which represents more than 300 miners and their families, including 78 of the wounded miners, secured the release of nine of the jailed leaders by posting bail. Some of the leaders had spent up to 14 days in custody. Four of them had been severely tortured.

Anele Zonke, 26, was among the leaders arrested on Oct. 23 by plainclothes police officers. Now free, he arrived at Mr. Dlunga's shack looking dazed, his face trembling. As he sat down on a backless plastic chair, he seemed pained. Mr. Zonke, too, had been beaten and suffocated, though he tried to gloss over the details of his torture.

Mr. Dlunga gently prompted him.

During his ordeal, he admitted, he lost control of his bowels and soiled his pants. Unable to get clean clothes from the police, he washed his trousers in the basin and was left naked, waiting for them to dry. He did not wash his underpants, but kept them to pre sent as evidence when he and other jailed miners bring assault charges against the police.

When he finally appeared before a magistrate - inexplicably charged with the murder of 34 men the police have already admitted to shooting - he wore no underwear. Mr. Zonke was likely being charged under a law known as “common purpose,” in which members of a crowd can be prosecuted as accomplices to a crime. The doctrine was used to arrest over 270 survivors of the massacre.

Though a magistrate recently threw the charges out,  police rearrested Mr. Zonke outside the courtroom. He could not say exactly what he was charged with. “Murder and a few other crimes,” he stammered uncertainly. He cannot say whose murder he was being charged with.

Mr. Zonke is not a well man; he cannot control his bowels. He has pain deep inside his abdomen, and squirmed as he sat. The torture he suffered has left him withdrawn and ashamed, because he was rendered powerless and at the mercy of his tormentors. He is also ashamed that he gave the police answers to many of their questions. Besides Mr. Zonke and Mr. Dlunga, two strike leaders, Xolani Ndzudzu and “Rasta” Thembele Sohadi, were also tortured.

Elite soldiers and spies are trained to survive torture, not resist it. They know it's simply a matter of when you will break down under extreme duress. These miners have not undergone that kind of conditioning, and were at the mercy of men clearly versed in savagery.

It is clear that the police are abusing their power to intimidate and terrify the miners, who are expected to be important witnesses against them in the Farlam Commission.

The miners are scared. They fear the police and the consequences of speaking out. Yet they have spoken.

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Pictures of the Day: New York and Elsewhere

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Photos from New York, Gaza, Turkey and Spain.

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Journalism Ethics and the Ethicist

Given the fast-moving and utterly weird story of the former general, the biographer, the shirtless F.B.I. agent, the other woman and the other general, you may not remember that just a few days ago an intriguing rumor was circulating about The New York Times Magazine column known as the Ethicist.

Without any evidence, many prominent media outlets â€" from The Atlantic Wire to New York magazine - were speculating that Paula Broadwell's husband was the person who had written a letter to that weekly advice column last summer, concerned about his wife's extramarital affair with David H. Petraeus, the former general and now former C.I.A. director.

Twitter was abuzz, too. How delicious, the notion went, that a situation so fraught with high-level figures would have been treated in an advice column to a newspaper months before.

Then came a definitive-sounding Twitter message from the magazine's editor, Hugo Lindgren. The rumor had be en fact-checked and it was false, he said. This was duly sent around the globe in further Twitter messages, and the rumor died a relatively quiet death.

Some readers (and a blogger for The New Republic) have questioned this move. One reader, Lou Kramberg, was among them. He wrote to me:

A New York Times editor has denied that a letter to the Ethicist last summer was sent by the husband of the woman accused of having an affair with General Petraeus. The sender requested that his name be withheld and it was withheld by the Ethicist. Let us assume that the letter was indeed sent by another husband and let us suppose that a similar incident occurs in the future. Only this time, the letter writer is indeed the husband of the accused woman. Any response other than a false denial would be in violation of the wishes of the writer to have their name withheld. Wouldn't it have been better in the Petraeus situation for The Times to have stated that they would no t ask the Ethicist who wrote the letter as a matter of confidentiality and leave it at that?

As Jeff Winkler wrote online for The New Republic:

Did the editor reveal exactly who the person in the July 13 column was? No. But he did reveal who it wasn't. That seems like a deal breaker of the trust that reader-submitters have when writing to advice columnists. Unless the advisee expressly offers details about their life, it seems the adviser should have no comment on any such matters. Even if the detail is a non-revelation, it's still a revelation. And, without putting too fine a point on it, the non-announcement sets a terrible precedent. Should a similar situation involving the anonymity of advice column patients happen again, people will demand confirmation of identity - and assume that the editor's silence means they are on the right track.

I asked both Mr. Lindgren and The Times's standards editor, Philip B. Corbett, about the denial. Both said that the decision was a carefully considered one, and one that they had discussed with Dean Baquet, a managing editor.

“The point of my denial on Twitter was to provide accurate information,” Mr. Lindgren said. “There was a great deal of speculation out there that this letter had been written by Paula Broadwell's husband, and since we had good reason to believe that wasn't true, I said so.”

As for what might happen in the future, both editors said that it's hard to address a hypothetical situation.

“We'd do our best to provide accurate information while respecting the confidentiality of those to whom it has been promised,” Mr. Lindgren said.

Mr. Corbett said: “It's tricky. This is an unusual situation and it's difficult to extrapolate.”

There are competing journalistic values here. Accuracy is important. So is confidentiality.

Does this in any way suggest that The Times won't protect its news sou rces? No. A person who writes to an advice columnist expects not to have his or her name revealed but is, as Mr. Corbett noted, “not a confidential source in the classic sense.”

The editors did not reveal an identity, or make any promises about what they would do in a future situation.

They chose to quell a rumor for the sake of accuracy, and without breaking trust with the letter-writer.

It's a close call. The opposing argument has merit, particularly because the editors' decision may seem to set a precedent. But, given the specifics of this situation, I think that Times editors made a reasonable decision.

Once Upon a Time in Tabernas

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Clint Eastwood's bizarre debate with an empty chair at the Republican National Convention left many puzzled over the actor's legacy. Will his cameo as a political gunslinger overshadow the star who rose to fame as the raspy-voiced, lone hero of spaghetti westerns?

But the Spanish photographer Alvaro Deprit had a more essential question: whatever happened to the barren landscapes that were the backdrop to the strange, forgotten world of the Italian filmmaker Sergio Leone? His films with Mr. Eastwood - “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly,” “A Fistful of Dollars,” “For a Few Dollars More” and “Once Upon a Time in the West” - defined a new genre and became wildly popular the world over.

“Everyone in my generation was born with those movies,” said Mr. Deprit, during a phone interview from his home in Rome. “They always remain in our collective imagination.”

Alvaro Deprit Left, a stuntman for a Luna Park show. Right, an actress at a saloon.

For a month and a half last winter, Mr. Deprit lived in southeastern Spain's Tabernas Desert and photographed the lo cations where European directors like Mr. Leone filmed their movies, mainly because the desert resembled the American West - dry, rugged, dusty - and because it required a comparatively lower budget.

Mr. Deprit, 35, who is from Madrid, said a strong sense of fiction and nostalgia pervades the Tabernas Desert today. His photographs are part record, part homage. They are his attempt to capture the surreal quality of a forsaken film location inhabited by people bound to a way of life that has long since ended.

“The feeling you get is of a world which is disappearing,” he said. “It's a bit melancholy.”

Three studios - Fort Bravo, Mini Hollywood and Western Leone - still sit in the middle of that desert, although they are no longer frequented by the likes of Mr. Eastwood. To the contrary, Mr. Deprit said, the studios have morphed into theme parks and tourist destinations, and have become something of a parody of their former selves.

Throughout the 1960s and 70s, the Tabernas Desert was a hive of cinematic activity. Hundreds of spaghetti westerns were shot there and, for a while, the desolate landscape was awash in gunslinging, gravelly-voiced actors looking for treasure, bandits or revenge.

But after two decades of movie making, Tabernas was abandoned as a film location. Today, for a fee, tourists can wander among the old sets - many built by Mr. Leone and renovated by a hotel chain - or visit the cinema and wagon museums. One theme park offers daily “western shows” in which actors stage a gunfight in the town square, hang an outlaw near the sheriff's office, and dance the Cancan in the Yellow Rose Saloon. There is also a zoo, a restaurant and souvenir shop.

According to Mr. Deprit, 35, many of the people still living in Tabernas today are actors and stuntmen left over from Mr. Leone's time. Like Laurence Burton, a member of the Blackfoot Indian Nation in Canada (below), they stayed behind long after t he film crews disappeared, hoping to find work in the tourism industry that thrived briefly, and then declined as the economy soured.

Times are tough for those actors, Mr. Deprit said. Many still dress like the cowboys they played in the movies. Some are aging and others struggle with alcoholism. In any case, it's hard to find work when you're no longer nimble enough to jump on and off a galloping horse.

Alvaro Deprit Lawrence Burton, a member of the Blackfoot Indian Nation in Canada. Long after the film crews vacated, Mr. Burton remained, living in a hut in the desert.

“It's not just a set,” Mr. Deprit said. “There are people that live there. They remind you all the time about the old times, the golden times, when many m ovies were made there.”

But those memories cannot trump the area's reality: even the tourists who visit the area seem disappointed.

“They arrive there and realize that it's a sort of an improvised show,” Mr. Deprit said. “There are a couple of gunshots and that's it. It's quite superficial.”

For Mr. Deprit, documenting the fading film industry in Tabernas is part of an ongoing project about the Andalusia region in Spain. The area is changing quickly, he said, listing the economic crisis and the erosion of traditional lifestyles as evidence.

Sifting through Mr. Deprit's photographs does feel like exploring a place fading into its afterlife. Nonetheless, fans of Mr. Leone's films may still hear a familiar soundtrack playing in the background: the clip-clop of horse hooves, a swinging saloon door, rapid gunfire and then, a high lonely whistle echoing across the desert.

Alvaro Deprit Tourists on the old set of “For a Few Dollars More.”

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Pictures of the Day: Turkey and Elsewhere

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Photos from Turkey, Golan Heights, Myanmar and Japan.

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As Mark Thompson Starts New Job, the BBC\'s Implosion Is Felt in New York

When Mark Thompson started his job on Monday as president and chief executive of The New York Times Company, a British television network was there to capture the moment.

Responding to a shouted question, Mr. Thompson stopped briefly, standing under The Times's logo, to say on camera that he's very saddened by the events at the BBC, which is imploding in the aftermath of a child sex-abuse scandal and cover-up. And he repeated that nothing that has happened there, where he was director general and editor in chief, for the past eight years, should have an impact on his mission at The New York Times.

I wrote on this topic on Oct. 23, urging The Times to report aggressively on Mr. Thompson's role in the BBC's troubles. On Oct. 25, I noted that such an effort was already under way. Times top editors had sent Matthew Purdy, the head of The Times's investigative reporting team, to London to join the efforts of bureau reporters there and media reporters in New York.

Since that time, more than a dozen staff-written articles have appeared in The Times, most notably one by Mr. Purdy on Nov. 5 on the Business Day front, with the headline “As Scandal Flared, BBC's Leaders Missed Red Flags.”

I've been reading them carefully, as I have everything on this subject from other news organizations. Although Mr. Thompson's role is on the business side of The Times, his tenure here cannot help but have a profound, if indirect, effect on its journalism.

My conclusion is that The Times has pulled no punches in reporting on Mr. Thompson's role and on the wider BBC story. And that's not always easy.

I asked Mr. Purdy about the difficulties of reporting on a story that involves one's own employer. He said:

Obviously there are all sorts of potential sensitivities and complications when writing about your own company. And this story had an extra level of complication since it was a bout events that happened elsewhere but involved our incoming C.E.O. But I put all that aside and reported it like any other story. I did not see it as an internal investigation, since the Jimmy Savile case didn't happen at The Times, or The Times's official take on Mark Thompson, but as a story that tried to explored what Thompson did or didn't do as the Savile scandal unfolded and also to put it in the context of his time as director general of the BBC.

Mr. Purdy told me that there was “a lot of interest” from top editors like Jill Abramson and Dean Baquet but “no interference.” Mr. Purdy declined to comment on whether his reporting is concluded, but said The Times is clearly continuing to cover the events at the BBC.

What was turned up? Nothing close to a smoking gun â€" certainly no evidence or even a hint that Mr. Thompson pulled the plug on or covered up an investigation.

Most notable were two conclusions:

â€" That, as ed itor in chief, as well as director general â€" Mr. Thompson probably should have known what was happening within his organization, and that he had multiple opportunities to gain that knowledge. A Times story that appeared in the Oct. 25 print edition quoted a former BBC producer and current member of Parliament, Roger Gale, saying that Mr. Thompson was well paid “to, apparently, not know what was going on under his own roof.”

â€" That Mr. Thompson's depiction of when and how he learned about the “NewsNight” investigation has “evolved.” That is, he started out saying he had no knowledge about a pulled NewsNight investigation of claims about Mr. Savile's child abuse; he later said that he had heard something about it, but never pursued deeper knowledge of it.

I asked The Times's publisher, Arthur Sulzberger Jr., on Monday if he believed his newspaper had reported thoroughly and well on Mr. Thompson.

“Absolutely,” he wrote in an e-mail. “ Mark thinks so, too, by the way.”

Nothing in that reporting changed his mind; his support for Mr. Thompson has not wavered and continued in an e-mail to Times staff members Monday.

Mr. Sulzberger wrote:

We welcome him at a time of tremendous change and challenge, which must be met with equal focus and innovation. Mark will lead us as we continue our digital transformation, bolster our international growth, drive our productivity and introduce new technologies that will help us become better storytellers and enrich the experience for our readers and viewers. That is what he did as director general of the BBC.

The challenges at The Times are very real, as they are throughout journalism. Failing to meet them could damage one of the world's great news organizations at a critical time. It's safe to say that everyone here â€" from The Times's board of directors to the mail clerks - hopes that Mr. Sulzberger's faith in Mr. Thomp son will be rewarded.

But here's the twist: The same global and digital media explosion that Mr. Thompson must lead has conspired to shrink the universe. Even as Mr. Thompson came to work, a headline on The Times's home page described those he left behind: “BBC Fallout Spreads as More Executives Step Aside.”

The world is smaller now. What happens in London reverberates in New York. And the chaos at the BBC â€" in which many of the people Mr. Thompson has supervised stepped aside as recently as this past weekend - feels uncomfortably close to home.

A Question of Color - Answered

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From his street photography in New York to his soft seascapes on Cape Cod, Joel Meyerowitz's pioneering work has been crucial to the acceptance of color photography among curators and collectors. The notion that color was somehow less worthy than black-and-white may seem quaint now, but it was a serious question in the 1960s.

He h as answered that question - and posed new ones over an impressive half-century career that is the subject of “Joel Meyerowitz: Taking My Time,” a two-volume monograph published this month by Phaidon. He addresses the debate in the first volume, with an insert tucked inside titled “A Question of Color.” In it, he published a series of diptychs that contrast almost identical scenes he took in color and black-and-white.

The following essay - which, along with the captions of the slideshow above, has been edited - is from that insert. The images are also currently on exhibit at the Howard Greenberg Gallery in New York and will also be featured in January at the Maison Européenne de la Photographie in Paris. He is also part of a current show in London, “Cartier-Bresson: A Question of Color,” which compares some of Henri Cartier-Bresson's black-and-white images with work by him and other noted color photographers.

We recommend viewing these images in full- screen mode.

From my first moments as a photographer - the very first roll of film, actually - I worked in color and believed in its potential. Why wouldn't I? The world was in color! There was no question about what film to use and, besides, in that passionate first moment of discovering photography I wanted to see what I had made photographs of as fast as I could get them back from the lab.

Of course, at that time I was young and inexperienced and wasn't aware that there was a nagging issue about color in the serious world of photography. Color was thought, back then, to be too commercial, or too much an amateur's material, or too damn colorful. On top of that, it was almost impossible to print it yourself in your own darkroom. Of all of these reservations, only the last was true: processing and printing color was difficult, especially if you were a young photographer without deep resources.

By 1965 I began to carry two cameras every day, one with color f ilm and the other with black-and-white. But I had never tried to make a side-by-side comparison of two nearly identical frames, and by doing that to see for myself which one carried the argument about color to a conclusion that I could be comfortable with. Around that time I read something that John Szarkowski had written in which he said that all that a photograph does is describe what is in front of the camera. That simple statement made me think more seriously about the idea of description and how the accumulation of information in the photograph is its primary state regardless of what else the photograph might seem to be about.

During 1966â€"67 I spent a year in Europe, where I had the opportunity to do just such a test for myself, and when I came back home I was able to examine and analyze these pairings. What I saw was that the color image had more information in it - simple as that! There was much more to see and consider, whereas black-and-white reduced the wor ld to shades of gray. And while that reduction had provided us with more than a hundred years of remarkable images, we were entering a new era and color, for me anyway, seemed to offer a challenge to the conventions that always undermine every medium.

Color film was more demanding - one's exposure had to be perfect since there was little forgiveness, as there was with black-and-white. But it was much more elegant in the way it described things. The sharpness and cohesive quality of the image compelled me to “read” everything in the frame more carefully, as if that small “ping” of color in the distance actually added something to the meaning of the whole frame, and it did. At least when I started thinking about it that way it began the process that then became the way I read and understood my work. I had the sense that colors mean something to each of us, historically as well as in the present moment.

We carry color memories just as we do smell memories (s mell being our purest sense), and they evoke sensations. And from that recognition, we develop our own vocabulary of color responses. Who knows why we choose the colors we live with, or wear, or why one color makes us feel calm and another irritable? But these biases are there for all of us and have played a role in my instinctive responses when I make photographs, and I have trusted that their power underlies and informs all my work. The color and black-and-white pairings that follow suggest some of the ideas that appear as soon as one questions why a photograph should be made in one medium or another.

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