[For Chinese leaders,
discussion of mining in Tibet is politically delicate. When word first emerged
of the disaster at Gyama, propaganda officials ordered Chinese news
organizations not to send journalists to the site and to publish reports only
from Xinhua, the state news agency, or authoritative 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.]
By Edward Wong
 |
Color China Photo, via Associated Press
Rescuers marched to a site northeast of Lhasa, where an avalanche
of rock and mud tumbled down the valley walls and wiped out
a mining camp.
|
BEIJING —
One after another, the bodies have kept coming. By Tuesday, rescuers had pulled
54 dead miners from the snow-covered rubble. They expect 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 as “a mining miracle.” Now, the site in eastern Tibet has also become
one of the nation’s worst recent mining disasters. On Friday, an avalanche of
rock and mud tumbled down the walls of the Gyama Valley and wiped out a mining
camp, burying 83 people. Many are still missing and presumed dead.
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, molybdenum and
gold 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 debris covered
nearly two miles and totaled two million cubic meters, the reports said.
Mining on the Tibetan
plateau is crucial to the Communist Party’s plans for maintaining economic
growth. 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.
For Chinese leaders,
discussion of mining in Tibet is politically delicate. When word first emerged
of the disaster at Gyama, propaganda officials ordered Chinese news
organizations not to send journalists to the site and to publish reports only
from Xinhua, the state news agency, or authoritative 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 tensions have
played into the outrage over mining. Most of the mines in Tibet 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 official news
reports.
Environmental concerns,
though, have dominated. Scientists have documented significant problems brought
by ravages of the Gyama mine, which belongs to China Gold International Resources
Corp., 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 been forced 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 publicity office of
the Tibet Autonomous Region and the headquarters of China National Gold Group
had no comment for this article.
For decades, the Gyama
valley had been the site of small mining operations that on occasion set off
protests by locals concerned about the environment. About 2006, officials
banned private mining and moved in state-owned companies to establish
large-scale operations. China Gold International Resources got the rights to
mine in Gyama; a subsidiary, Tibet Huatailong Mining Development, began
construction in 2008 and operations in 2010.
Last August, Xinhua ran
a story under the headline “A Mining Miracle” that said “the scene has been
transformed, replaced with a panorama of lush green trees and grasslands, new
roads and infrastructure, and cleaner mining facilities, giving the local
people a better life.”
The report said that
over three years, Huatailong had discovered five million tons of copper,
530,000 tons of molybdenum and 135 tons of gold, among other metals. Xinhua
reported last Saturday that the total initial investment in the mine was nearly
$560 million.
Local people have been protesting
the new mine for at least four years. A large protest by about 1,000 Tibetans
in August ended with a man’s being shot dead by security forces, according to a
Human Rights Watch researcher and Radio Free Asia.
“There have been a
number of incidents where people have taken a quite radical stance,” Mr.
Bequelin said.
In 2009, the mining
company used villagers’ water because of a drought, which led to protests by
the locals and the detentions of many villagers by the police, according to
Woeser. The next year, there were rallies by
Tibetans and supporters of Tibet outside the company headquarters in Vancouver.
One Tibetan
environmental scholar in Canada, Tashi Tsering, has been tracking the changes
to the landscape of Gyama by using Google Earth. Images posted on his blog,Tibetan Plateau,
show huge open-pit mines, a processing plant at the confluence of two major
rivers, and mountainsides marred by webs of dirt roads. He wrote: “China now
wants to voraciously exploit the mineral resources of Tibet and other areas
such as Xinjiang to meet its skyrocketing domestic demands. China needs to
create an independent resource base, and Tibet is key in achieving that goal.”
Patrick Zuo and Amy Qin contributed research.
