While not responsible for whatever happened at the mine in 1996, Barrick Gold inherited the Bulyanhulu story when they acquired the mine in 1999.
Kent Thomson, legal counsel for Barrick Gold, has travelled to Tanzania to investigate the alleged burials at Bulyanhulu. After accumulating substantial documentation and 14 hours of videotaped interviews with officials, shaft inspectors and others involved in the evictions, he is convinced that the alleged deaths never took place.
Barrick Gold is not impressed with the accusations surrounding the events at a site they now own. They firmly hold that they are false accusations, contrived by miners at the site and organizations and individuals with a political agenda.
The company is sensitive about how it is perceived. Vince Borg, Barrick’s VP Communications, said they exemplify a good corporate citizen. Barrick says they have employed 1,000 people with an annual direct payroll of $15 million US, spent $7 million US on job training, and $6.4 million US on the construction of 600 homes and the building of a clinic and dispensary serving 20,000 people in Shinyanga.
They also gain billions from their projects. Barrick’s potential life of mine gross revenue at Bulyanhulu could be as high as $3 billion, given the current price of gold.
Barrick stands by their research, which does not find one person who says there were burials or that the eviction process was chaotic. “My instructions were to go out and speak to people, ask them questions, find the truth to the extent that I possibly could, ferret out the contemporaneous documents, review the videotapes and look at the videotapes with the people who understood what was happening there, and to draw my own conclusions,” said Kent Thomson. “And that’s what I did.”
Interviews on the videotape were done by Thomson, and took place in Kahama Mining offices at Dar es Salaam and Bulyanhulu. Mining Watch Canada thinks the evidence collected by Barrick is insubstantial.
“What’s striking about the video interviews is that first off, Kahama brought all the people there for the interviews, they’re done in a Kahama office, the translator is a Kahama manager, and so it’s not done in a way that I think would stand up in any court,” said representative Joan Kuyek.
Barrick firmly believes their massive collection of evidence is valid, and that it shows no burials took place. The Canadian government agrees.
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