Both the company that now owns the mine and the Canadian government say the story is a fabrication. They say the miners were illegal squatters, their evictions were peaceful and there were no burials. They pile up an impressive stack of boxes, three-inch binders and videotaped evidence to support their version of events.
The stakes are high. Between ten and fourteen million ounces of gold lie under that disputed ground. Barrick Gold—which acquired Sutton Resources and thus the mine in 1999—is not responsible for whatever happened in 1996. But as the current owners of the site, the company has inherited the story.
Barrick is a powerful, well-connected multinational. George Bush Senior and Brian Mulroney have sat on its board of directors, which also includes some of U of T’s largest private donors. Barrick’s founder and chairman Peter Munk gave $6.4 million to build the impressive Munk Centre. Joseph Rotman, who has sat on Barrick’s board since inception, gave $15 million to U of T’s School of Management—now also named after him. He also sits on U of T’s Governing Council, its top decision-making body, while Marshall Cohen sits on Barrick’s board and chairs York University’s Board of Governors.
The change in the mine’s ownership, and the six years that have passed, have not quelled the dispute. The evidence that has surfaced since—ranging from a firestorm of memos and reports to disputed photographs and videos which may show the dead bodies of exhumed peasant miners—has inspired human rights lawyer Tundu Lissu to lead a growing number who say an independent inquiry is the only way to put this matter to rest.
The Gold Rush
Mustafa Taslima was one of the lucky ones. Or at least he should have been. He owned two small gold mines at Bulyanhulu, which provided him with steady income in a country where half the inhabitants still live in desperate poverty. But in the summer of 1996 Taslima’s two sons, Ibrahim and Hamdani, were allegedly buried alive in the mines where they worked. They are, at the very least, missing.
Taslima and his fellow small-scale miners were likely overjoyed when they came upon the gold. Tanzania is the fourth-poorest country in the world. Forty per cent of its children under five are malnourished—seven per cent classified as “wasting”—and nearly one in 10 children dies at birth. Average life expectancy is 50 years, a full 27 years below the developed world’s average.
If there were people in need of a lucky break, they were here. And in 1976, they got it—when small-scale miners struck gold at Bulyanhulu. Peasants slowly streamed to the area until 1990, when a central bank decision to buy their gold no-questions-asked triggered a gold rush. Just three years later, small-scale miners were selling $40 million dollars of gold to the central bank each year.
Government policy said the miners should be “encouraged and supported with proper tools and markets for their products.” The Small-Scale Miners Association petitioned the government for title to the Bulyanhulu mines in October, 1993.
But the official sanction was not to last. The government was under intense pressure from the International Monetary Fund (IMF). In 1994, the international lending agency withheld hundreds of millions in loans until its demands for market reforms were met. These included dramatically opening the largely peasant-run mining sector to foreign investment and ownership.
It was around this time that a mining company supported by the Canadian government also decided to pursue what lay under the ground in Bulyanhulu.
Click here to read Problems with the Locals
