BEIJING – one after another, the bodies kept coming. on Wednesday, the rescue team had removed 66 dead miners in snow-covered rubble. They hope to find more.
The miners had traveled to a valley on the roof of the world to work in what a state news agency described, last year, como "un milagro minero". Now, project in central Tibet has caused one of the nation's worst recent mining disasters. On Friday, An avalanche of rocks and mud fell down the walls of the Gyama Valley and destroyed a mining camp, burying the 83 personas.
Deaths have shed light on Gyama mine, one of the largest and most controversial in Tibet. Hailed by the central government in Beijing as a flagship project, copper mining operation, gold and molybdenum is hated by many Tibetans, who are furious about the environmental degradation and other mines they have caused on the Tibetan plateau.
"Esto no fue algo natural, sino un desastre hecho por el hombre", Woeser said., a social critic, Tibetan who has written about the Gyama mine. "Para la población local, dice alto y claro en lo que se ha convertido la locura de la minería".
Official media reports have not explained the immediate cause of the avalanche. Tibet's regional porpaganda office said in a statement on Wednesday, that weather conditions were the cause of the events. The debris covers almost two kilometers and amounts to two million cubic meters, press reports say.
mining, on the tibetan plateau, It is crucial to the Communist Party's plans to maintain economic growth throughout China.. Metals and minerals – including copper and gold, and lithium used in electronic device batteries – They are abundant throughout the region, and mining has expanded considerably in recent years. The rise of mining, helped in part by the opening in 2006 by train through Qinghai province to Lhasa, The Tibetan capital, has called for investment even from Western companies.
As a result of this, protests have broken out across the plateau. A demonstration against a project in Markham County, with some 1.000 Tibetans, in August, ended with the shooting death of a man by security forces, according to a researcher for Human Rights Watch and Radio Free Asia.
For Chinese leaders, The discussion of mining in Tibet is politically sensitive. When the news of the Gyama disaster first appeared, a 40 kilometers northeast of Lhasa, The Tibetan capital, Propaganda bureau officials ordered Chinese news organizations not to send journalists and publish reports only from Xinhua, the state news agency, or government sources, China Digital Times tells, a group
and Berkeley, California, that monitors the Chinese media. foreign journalists, for a long time, have been banned from traveling independently to central Tibet.
Nicholas Bequelin, Human Rights Watch Asia Researcher, dijo que la minería es "uno de los puntos de activación de las relaciones sino-tibetanas estos días" porque viola "el lugar que las montañas y las sagradas montañas tienen en la cosmovisión tibetana".
Gyama Valley is a revered site. It was the 7th century birthplace of Songtsen Gampo, the first king of the tibetan empire. Prominent monks have come from Gyama, and pilgrims have traditionally come to the area to see its sacred mountains, caves, temples and cave paintings. Now, much of it has been cut down due to mining.
"Los tibetanos están heridos, es un duro golpe para sus almas", Woeser said.. "Sus esperanzas espirituales se han quitado".
Ethnic discrimination plays a role in the scandal. Mines in Tibet generally belong to large state-owned companies based in eastern China, and most of them bring managers and workers of the Han ethnic group, taking the Tibetans out. Of the 83 miners buried by Gyama avalanche last week, only two were Tibetans, according to press reports.
But it is environmental destruction that worries Tibetans most.. Scientists have documented major problems brought about by the ravages of the Gyama mine, que pertenece a China Gold Resources Corporation International, a Vancouver based company, British Columbia, which is a state-owned unit of China National Gold Group.
An article published in 2010 by Science of the Total Environment magazine, discussed the impact of mining activities on the water surface in the valley, in particular on the streams that feed the Lhasa River. Researchers found elevated concentrations of six metals in surface waters and streams in the middle and upper basin of the valley.. Estos "plantean un riesgo considerablemente alto para el medio ambiente local", according to a summary and, meanwhile, las piscinas de metales pesados son "una gran amenaza potencial para los usuarios de agua río."
The establishment of the mine in Gyama resulted in the relocation of nomads who had roamed the valley and grazed their animals there.. The forced liquidation of nomads is a policy that Communist Party officials have been pushing for years in many parts of Tibet., despite the resentment it causes.
Woeser wrote in 2010 what 100 nomadic families have been displaced by the Gyama mine. Some residents have been forced to move into a government-built town.
"Son infelices", Bequelin said.. "Se les ha presentado a ellos como una obligación legal."
Tibet's propaganda office said Wednesday in response to faxed questions from the newspaper, que el "entorno ecológico del Tíbet es frágil", por lo que el Gobierno regional paga "gran atención a la labor de protección del medio ambiente durante la explotación de los recursos minerales". This includes carrying out environmental impact examinations, conducting safety assessments and enforcing environmental laws, said. China National Gold Group's Beijing headquarters had no comments for this article.
For decades, Gyama Valley had been the site of small mines that had sometimes sparked protests from locals, concerned about the environment. Around the 2006, The authorities banned private mining and moved on state companies to establish large-scale operations. China Gold International Resources obtained mining rights in Gyama, a subsidiary, Tibet Huatailong Mining Development, began to be built in 2008 and the operations were carried out in the 2010.
Last August, Xinhua publicó un artículo bajo el título "Un milagro minero", dijo que "la escena se ha transformado, replaced by a panorama of lush vegetation of trees and grasslands, new roads and infrastructure and clean mining facilities, dando a la gente local a mejor vida".
The report said that in three years Huatailong had discovered five million tons of copper, 530.000 tons of molybdenum and 135 tons of gold. Xinhua reported last Saturday that the total initial investment in the mine was almost 560 million dollars.
Local people have been protesting against the new mine for at least four years. "Ha habido una serie de incidentes en los que la gente ha tomado una postura muy radical", Bequelin said..
in 2009, The mining company used water from the residents due to the drought, which led to protests by the local population and the arrest of many of the residents by the police, according to Woeser. The following year, There were demonstrations by Tibetans and supporters of Tibet outside the company's headquarters in Vancouver.
A Tibetan environmental scholar in Canada, Tashi Tsering, has tracked changes in Gyama's landscape using Google Earth. Images published on his blog of the Tibetan plateau, show huge open pit mines, a processing plant at the confluence of two large rivers and mountain slopes marred by networks of dirt roads. "China ahora quiere explotar vorazmente los recursos de los minerales del Tíbet y otras áreas como Xinjiang, para cumplir con sus exorbitantes exigencias nacionales", wrote. "China necesita crear una base de recursos independiente y el Tíbet es clave para alcanzar esa meta."
