SOMA, Turkey, May 19 — “This is not something that suddenly happened. I can tell you that there are people here who are dying, people who are injured and it’s all because of money…They send us here like lambs to slaughter. We are not safe doing this job.”
That’s what a surviving coal miner told CNN Turkey about the fire that officials claim killed 301 miners. The actual number will be much higher. He also accused a supervisor of giving the wrong directions to trapped miners, leading them away from the oxygen supply. This fire was not a random accident. It was mass industrial murder.
On May 13, just days after two U.S. coal miners were killed in a collapse in West Virginia, an underground coal fire in Soma knocked out the mine’s elevators and ventilation system, trapping the miners in toxic fumes. It happened during shift change, with 787 miners in the mine. Some of the 301 bodies recovered so far were burned beyond recognition. More are still underground. Many who were rescued may not survive their injuries.
Another miner said of the official numbers, “We are not even counting outsiders who come here as part-time, unregistered workers,” including many youth who turn to the mines due to extreme poverty and the high cost of education.
On April 29, during a hearing in Parliament, the government of Prime Minister Erdogan rejected a call for a safety inspection at the mine. And when he travelled to Soma the day after the explosion, Erdogan told angry mourners and relatives, “Explosions like this in these mines happen all the time.”
Anti-government demonstrations broke out across the country. Student protests in Ankara and Istanbul led up to a one-day strike by the major trade unions on May 15. A march was held in Ankara from the Middle Eastern Technical University to the Energy Ministry.  The marchers erupted in a rock-throwing protest in front of the headquarters of the ruling Justice and Development Party. In Istanbul, there were demonstrations in Taksim Square and young people laid down in the metro station, representing those killed in the mine. A demonstration of thousands was attacked by hundreds of riot police firing tear gas, rubber bullets and water cannons.
As a result of the mass actions of workers and youth, four mining company executives, including the manager, were arrested charged with causing multiple deaths and injuries through negligence.
U.S. Investors Reap Millions
Soma, with a population of around 100,000, is a major center for lignite coal mining. Turkey has rich supplies that are used for domestic power. The Energy Minister recently announced that Turkey would invest $118 billion by 2023 to meet their doubling energy consumption. According to Pieter Verstraete, a Türkiye Burslari Researcher at Bilgi University in Istanbul, these investments have been accompanied with privatization, deregulation and wage-cuts, to keep the mines profitable and attractive mainly to U.S. investors. The average wage for miners is only $500/month.
What these investors also find “attractive” is cutting safety costs, “flexible” work conditions, less training, and subcontracting unskilled and unregistered under-age workers. And it’s not just the privatized mines. A report by the General Miners Union in March 2010 stated that between 2000-2009, there were 25,655 “accidents” in the state-owned mines of the Turkish Coal Corporation (TTK), and that 98 percent could have been prevented with proper training and safety inspections.
Such mining disasters due to bosses’ profiteering at the expense of safety also occur worldwide. In 2010, 29 miners were killed in West Virginia.
But what’s proper to the bosses is anything that generates more profits. Whether its hundreds of miners in Turkey — or more than 1,000 garment workers  buried/burned alive in the factory collapse in Bangladesh, or coal miners in the U.S. —our lives are just the cost of doing business. And as horrible as these numbers are, they pale in the face of those being slaughtered by growing imperialist wars, poverty, and curable disease around the world. The best way to answer these murders is to rebuild the international movement for communist revolution. The truth is, nothing less will do.