'We will smoke them out': South Africa seeks arrest of illegal miners hiding underground

Nov. 14 (UPI) -- Authorities in South Africa have cut off supplies to nearly 4,000 illegal gold miners hiding underground, as the government is making an effort to "smoke them out" and arrest them, officials announced Thursday.

The miners have been in a shaft in Stilfontein, in the North West province, for about a month and have refused to cooperate with authorities.

"We are going to smoke them out. They will come out. We are not sending help to criminals. Criminals are not to be helped -- they are to be persecuted [sic]," Minister in the Presidency Khumbudzo Ntshavheni said on Wednesday, the BBC reported.

Some of the miners are undocumented migrants and have come from neighboring Lesotho and Mozambique. Known as "zama zama," which translates to "take a chance" in Zulu, they operate in abandoned mines in the mineral-rich country hoping to find traces of gold left behind by commercial mining operations.

Some commercial mining companies have closed in recent years, leaving behind the abandoned mines and laying off workers who have gone back underground illegally to scavenge for gold they can sell on the black market.

With supplies cut off, conditions underground are said to be deteriorating and dire, Busi Thabane, from Benchmarks Foundation, a charity which monitors corporations in South Africa, told the BBC's NewsDay program.

"It is no longer about illegal miners," she said. "This is a humanitarian crisis."

Some spend months in the mines. A small, underground economy has developed around the miners, selling food, cigarettes and other things they need. Police report being hesitant to enter the mines for fear of being shot.

Illegal mining costs South Africa hundreds millions of dollars a year in lost gold sales, officials have said.