Around the gaping shaft of a disused minelol646, the South African police on Saturday waited to pounce on anyone trying to escape to the surface.

Their siege has gone on for weeks, trying to flush out hundreds of men accused of illegal mining in an abandoned gold mine, where they are now camped out near Stilfontein, in South Africa’s North West Province. Officers have cut off the miners’ supply of water and food, guarded every known exit and pulled up or cut ropes used to ferry supplies underground, according to images distributed by the police.

Now, they wait for the bedraggled miners, who some South Africans fear are dying of hunger and thirst, to turn themselves in.

“We are not sending help to criminals. We are going to smoke them out,” a minister in the president’s office, Khumbudzo Ntshavheni, said in a news conference on Wednesday. “Criminals are not to be helped, they are to be persecuted.”

The siege tactics, part of national crackdown on illegal mining, have ignited a debate in South Africa about upholding human rights protected by the Constitution and efforts to fight crime in a country with high rates of lawlessness. It has also renewed attention to mining’s dark legacy in South Africa, and the common but dangerous practice of illegal mining, driven by soaring unemployment.

Two more miners resurfaced on Saturday, joining others who have trickled out in recent days, a police spokeswoman, Brig. Athlenda Mathe, said. The police say that as many as 400 miners could still be underground, adding that some are also believed to be armed. The authorities have said they will not risk officers’ lives by sending them down the warren of tunnels.

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