BEIJING — One after another, the bodies have kept coming. By Tuesday night, rescuers had pulled 59 dead miners from the snow-covered rubble. They expect to find more.
April 2, 2013
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| Rescuers on Saturday headed to the disaster site to search through debris at a gold mine after a mudslide in the Gyama Valley in Tibet on Friday buried 83 people. |
The deaths have thrown a spotlight on the Gyama mine, one of the largest and most contentious in Tibet. Hailed by the central government in Beijing as a flagship project, the copper, gold and molybdenum mining operation is hated by many Tibetans, who are furious at the environmental degradation it and other mines have caused on the Tibetan plateau.
“This was not a natural but a man-made disaster,” said Woeser, a Tibetan social critic who has written about the Gyama mine. “For locals, it says loud and clear how crazy the mining has become there.”
Official news reports have not explained the immediate cause of the avalanche. The Tibet regional propaganda office said in a statement on Wednesday that weather conditions were behind the landslide. The debris covered nearly two miles and totaled two million cubic meters, the news reports said.
Mining on the Tibetan plateau is crucial to the Communist Party’s plans for maintaining economic growth across China. Metals and minerals — including copper and gold, and the lithium used in batteries of electronic devices — are abundant across the region, and mining there has greatly expanded in recent years. The surge in mining, aided in part by the opening in 2006 of the train across Qinghai Province to Lhasa, the Tibetan capital, has drawn investment even from Western companies.
As a result, protests have flared across the plateau. One rally against a project in Markham County by about 1,000 Tibetans in August ended with the fatal shooting of a man by security forces, according to a Human Rights Watch researcher and Radio Free Asia.
For Chinese leaders, discussion of mining in Tibet is politically delicate. When word first emerged of the disaster at Gyama, 40 miles northeast of Lhasa, the Tibetan capital, propaganda officials ordered Chinese news organizations not to send journalists and to publish reports only from Xinhua, the state news agency, or government sources, according to China Digital Times, a group in Berkeley, Calif., that tracks the Chinese news media. Foreign journalists have long been barred from traveling independently to central Tibet.
Nicholas Bequelin, an Asia researcher at Human Rights Watch, said mining is “one of the trigger points in Sino-Tibetan relations these days” because it violates “the place that mountains and sacred mountains have in the Tibetan worldview.”
The Gyama Valley is a revered site. It was the birthplace in the seventh century of Songtsen Gampo, the first king of the Tibetan empire. Prominent monks have come from Gyama, and pilgrims have traditionally flocked to the area to see its holy mountains, caves, shrines and rock paintings. Now, much of that is cut off because of the mining.
“Tibetans are hurt; it’s a huge blow to their souls,” Woeser said. “Their spiritual hopes have been taken away.”
Ethnic discrimination plays a role in the outrage. The mines in Tibet generally belong to large state-owned enterprises based in eastern China, and they mostly bring in ethnic Han managers and workers, shutting Tibetans out. Of the 83 miners buried by the Gyama avalanche last week, only two were Tibetan, according to news reports.
But it is environmental destruction that most worries Tibetans. Scientists have documented significant problems brought by the ravages of the Gyama mine, which belongs to China Gold International Resources Corporation, a company based in Vancouver, British Columbia, that is a unit of the state-owned China National Gold Group.
A paper published in 2010 by Science of the Total Environment, a journal, discussed the impact of mining activities on the surface water in the valley, including on streams that feed the Lhasa River. The researchers found elevated concentrations of six metals in the surface water and streambeds in the middle and upper reaches of the valley. These “pose a considerably high risk to the local environment,” according to a summary; meanwhile, pools of heavy metals were “a great potential threat to downstream water users.”
Establishing the mine at Gyama resulted in the relocation of nomads who had roamed the valley and grazed their animals there. The forced settlement of nomads is a policy that Communist Party officials have been pushing for years in many parts of Tibet, despite the widespread resentment it causes.
Woeser wrote in 2010 that 100 nomad families had had to relocate because of the Gyama mine. Some locals have been herded into a government-built village.
“They’re unhappy,” Mr. Bequelin said. “It’s been presented to them as a legal obligation.”
The Tibet propaganda office said Wednesday in response to earlier faxed questions from this newspaper that Tibet's "ecological environment is fragile," and so the regional government pays "great attention to environmental protection work during the exploitation of mineral resources." That includes conducting environmental impact reviews, doing safety assessments and enforcing environmental laws, it said. The Beijing headquarters of China National Gold Group had no comment for this article.
(source: NYtimes)
