A (Cyanide) Taste for GoldA (Cyanide) Taste for Gold 12 June 2003 Romania’s Apuseni Mountains are ‘heaven on earth,’ but some experts say a planned gold-mining operation will transform the area into a ‘cyanide hell on earth.’ by Dumitru Balaci BUCHAREST, Romania--“They will carry away the gold, while we will carry the burden of the devastation its exploitation will bring to our villages,” Viorel Sicoe, the mayor of Campeni, a small mountain town of 9,000 in central Romania, told TOL in a May interview. Sicoe was talking about the largest gold and silver deposit discovered in Europe to date, to be mined in an open-pit operation by a company 80 percent owned by Canada’s Gabriel Resources Ltd. The Toronto-listed company promises its investors that exploitation will begin in Romania in the fourth quarter of 2006 at an impressive rate of return of 20.4 percent. The company plans to mine 533,000 ounces (15.11 kilograms) of gold a year at a total cash cost of $152 per ounce, over a period of 16 and a half years. Though the numbers indeed look golden, the Romanian scientific community is up in arms over what it predicts will be an environmental disaster of unprecedented magnitude on the populated Apuseni Mountains. “It will be a cyanide-induced Chernobyl,” Dan Berindei, a historian and member of the Romanian Academy of Sciences, told TOL in mid-May. The company plans to operate four open pits--each one turning mountains into holes 300 to 400 meters (some 980 to 1,300 feet) deep--and to process the ore with cyanide in an artificial lake spanning nearly 600 hectares (1,500 acres) and located behind a 180-meter-high rock dam. Another 2,200 hectares of land will be cleared of trees to make room for the gold exploitation. As far as the use of cyanide is concerned, little thought has been given to the people who call the Apuseni Mountains--a subgroup of the Western Carpathians--home. The Apuseni Mountain inhabitants live in villages scattered about the mountaintops--locales that made it impossible for even the communist regime to strip them of their properties and herd them off by force into agricultural cooperatives, as happened to Romanians living in the lowlands 50 years ago. Here stands the cradle of Romanian civilization, dating back 2,000 years, from whence resistance and enlightenment sprang, time and again, over centuries of conquer-and-rule by various empires. But today, the gold rush is so far winning out over resistance. This is “heaven on earth,” says Mayor Sicoe, speaking of the rich wildlife and unspoiled scenery in the communities bordering the eastern side of the Apuseni Mountains National Park, home to the breathtaking Scarisoara ice cave. “We planned to cash in on the beauty surrounding us and the love Westerners have for unspoiled nature, and started to upgrade the infrastructure for tourism. Now we stand in limbo and wait for disaster to strike,” said Sicoe. The mayor says that the people of nearby Rosia Montana, village of some 4,000 that will have to be partly relocated for the gold exploitation, understand what the long-term consequences will be for the region. Those that accept the compensation package from Rosia Montana Gold Corporation are waiving the option to have their homes rebuilt somewhere else in the vicinity, and prefer to relocate farther away. “But what are we to do?” asked Sicoe, in Campeni. “We are only a few hilltops away [some 8 kilometers, or 5 miles] from the future mining operation, and yet too close to not see the end coming near for us.” IF IT CAN’T FLY, IT WILL DIE “The end will come sooner rather than later for the Apuseni Mountains if the planned operation is not stopped in its tracks,” Mircea Sandulescu, a geologist and member of the Romanian Academy of Sciences, said in a mid-May interview. The feeble feasibility planning ignores too many unknown factors for the exploitation to be deemed safe from a geological standpoint, says Sandulescu. First of all, the dam is to be built from rock quarried on site, and not from concrete. “Thus, it will be hard to stabilize the dam not only mechanically, but also chemically: Who knows if the cyanide in the lake behind the dam will not dissolve the rocks altogether? Besides, cyanide will definitely dissolve other heavy elements that form the rocks, all with deadly consequences for the water supply to the communities downstream,” said Sandulescu. Furthermore, Sandulescu points out that the geological structure in the region will make it likely that the large-scale controlled explosions used in open mining could induce low-depth seismic moves, which in turn could weaken the dam, which will overlook an entire inhabited valley. In the winter of 2000, after one night of heavy rain, a cyanide-filled pond measuring some 6 hectares spilled over at Baia Mare in northwestern Romania. The contaminated water, used by the Australian company Esmeralda for extracting gold, reached major rivers in four European countries. Headlines across the continent called it the worst damage to the environment since the Chernobyl nuclear meltdown. The Baia Mare cyanide-filled pond was 100 times smaller than the lake to take shape in central Romania. The over 2,000 hectares of land that is to be cleared to make room for the exploitation also means that all wildlife that cannot fly will die, says Sandulescu. “This will be a desert in the making, with a huge poisonous lake in its middle, where climate changes will occur,” he said. Cyanide evaporates at 35 to 40 degrees Celsius (95 to 104 Fahrenheit)--no rarity even in the Romanian mountains--and is likely to be carried away into streams of water to form more deadly cyanhidric compounds. Indeed, as Romanian scientists assembled in a special session in early March warned, the open-pit mining at Rosia Montana will bring about environmental devastation on a huge scale. And the region’s archaeological heritage will also incur huge losses. Hundreds of nearly mile-long mine galleries dating back to the Roman Empire have never been explored, while the few that have been have yielded a precious harvest of wax tablets of Roman accountancy, which document and shed new light on day-to-day life in the Roman Empire. The Romanian Academy of Sciences says that only four hectares of land have been fully explored by archaeologists in Rosia Montana. To the horror of scientists, archaeologists, and others, the Culture Ministry itself declared the some 2,000 hectares of land free for industrial exploitation, spokesman Bogdan Bruma said in a recent interview. That piece of news left historian Dan Berindei gasping: “How can the ministry say the land is free for exploitation from an archaeological standpoint when we’ve only scratched a tiny bit of the whole area?” THE GLITTER OF GOLD The final feasibility study conducted this year confirmed that 7.63 million ounces (216,300 kilograms) of gold are to be found at Rosia Montana, Rosia Montana Gold Corporation officials said on 14 May. But it’s not Romania that stands to benefit from the huge returns from the gold mining. According to the agreement, Romania will get only 2 percent in royalties from the future exploitation. One of the arguments offered by the mining operation’s supporters is that new jobs will be created in the economically depressed region. “The Rosia Montana Mine Project is designed to restore vitality to the region through economic development at the local, regional, and national levels with the creation of jobs and the generation of revenues for the private sector and government,” claims the company’s website. However, the long-term jobs will not exceed 500, experts say. As Mayor Sicoe points out, the same 500 jobs in the region could be offered by an environmentally friendly business already operating there, such as the Montana Furniture factory. Alexandru Costea, the manager of Montana Furniture, says he could raise his work force by 500 jobs immediately had he been granted the same tax waivers as the gold-mining operation. Rosia Montana Gold Corporation enjoys a 10-year value-added tax (VAT) waiver for manufacturing or production activity, as well as import and export duty holidays and corporate tax holidays, and has been granted indemnity against environmental damages caused by previous owners. Some say the vested interests of Romanian officials are at stake, pointing out that Rosia Montana Gold Corporation employs relatives of county council members and priests, and even the daughter of the Alba County prefect. The company spokesperson confirmed that relatives of high-ranking officials are indeed employed by the company, and that a company owned by the prefect’s daughter was a subcontractor for Rosia Montana. But Rosia Montana Gold Corporation spokesperson Dana Golea denies the company had any intent to shape the views of the decision-makers in the region. In a telephone interview, she said that the company would never go against the will of the people for the benefit of a few connected officials. “There is no mystery or bad intent on our part,” said Golea. “We are just one of the few employers in the region, and that’s all there is to it.” THE GOLDEN HORSEMEN The members of the Romanian and international scientific communities, Greenpeace environmental activists, and local residents in the nongovernmental Alburnus Maior organization all fear that striking gold will mean disaster. For the past 10 months they have held protests in both Rosia Montana and in Bucharest. In December last year, Greenpeace released a report conducted by the University of Vienna showing that the project is in violation of European Union regulations, and that the possible involuntary resettlement of residents in Rosia Montana goes against the Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights. “We plead with the Romanian parliament to be reasonable enough not to give permission for this socially and environmentally unacceptable project in Rosia Montana,” said Greenpeace campaigner Herwig Schuster. According to the Vienna legal experts, the use of cyanide in open basins is against the EU groundwater directive, which demands zero emissions for very toxic substances, including cyanide. The report also says that the planning method of the project infringes on the European Council directive on the assessment of the effects of projects on the environment. “The Rosia Montana mining project will become a problem for Romania’s future EU membership,” warned Schuster. But according to the Rosia Montana Gold Corporation website, the project is “consistent with the social, economic, and environmental objectives of the community, Romanian government [and] Europe Union directives, and World Bank/IFC policies and guidelines.” On the occasion of the Vienna report’s release, some 50 Greenpeace activists from Romania, Austria, Slovakia, the Czech Republic, Holland, the United Kingdom, and Hungary protested in Bucharest, placing banners reading “Stop the cyanide mining project in Rosia Montana” and “Don’t risk EU membership” in front of the Arc de Triomphe. Police ended the demonstration and fined the group a total of $2,000 for holding unlicensed protests. But the protests aroused the concern of Prime Minister Adrian Nastase, who publicly expressed his skepticism about the project’s soundness. Though Nastase’s skepticism was welcomed, he has been criticized for paying lip service to the growing popular dissent, rather than showing a true willingness to halt the project. Following media reports and the vocal protest of the Romanian Academy of Sciences, a Romanian parliamentary investigative subcommittee was set up. Though the subcomittee’s findings had not yet been made public by early June, Nastase has since become more vocal about his skepticism. On 5 June, Agence France Presse quoted Nastase as saying that the open-pit mining project entails far too many risks. “It must be clearly stated that this project is not a priority for us, and that the risks to the environment are very high,” Nastase said during a meeting with environmental activists. “The authorities should have the courage to state their opinion even if they will upset the representatives of the company.” Spokespersons for the ministries of industry, natural resources, and environment did not respond to TOL’s requests for their updated views on the Rosia Montana mining project. The last time the Industry Ministry was heard from on the matter, it mocked the Romanian Academy of Sciences, saying in a press release that it “respected the scientists’ learned opinions too much to not ponder for a long while what answer to give.” In the meantime, media reports have consistently portrayed Minister Dan Ioan Popescu as an enthusiastic supporter of the plan. The local environmental authorities, however, say that no permission has yet been granted for the Rosia Montana project, as the company has not completed the required paperwork. The handing over of an “environment pass” by the authorities would give the final green light for mining to start, Dimitrie Clepan, chief inspector with the Alba County Environment Authority, said in a telephone interview. And the residents of Rosia Montana now know that the granting of the environmental bill of health will mean forced relocation in some cases. Ana Radulescu, a 78-year-old from Rosia Montana, says she’s willing to fight the corporation as long as she’s alive. “I don’t have many options here. I plan to stay put while I am alive, but they will scoop me out and move me away when they relocate me to the cemetery. How can you fight them from the next world?” she asked. Dumitru Balaci is TOL’s correspondent in Bucharest. We want your feedback. 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