Death deep in gold's belly

The death toll of criminal miners in a single incident at one of Harmony Gold's Free State shafts has risen to 61, enough, finally, for a nation to take notice of a crime with decades of evil legacy behind it.

Author: Barry Sergeant
Posted: Tuesday , 02 Jun 2009

JOHANNESBURG -

Statements have flown in every direction since Harmony Gold announced on Monday that it had brought to surface 294 "criminal miners" at its Eland shaft in South Africa's Free State province; the debacle extended also to the bodies of 36 (to later rise to at least 61) criminal miners, recovered from the same shaft.

Just as a big aircraft disappearing over the Atlantic will always attract more headlines that individual automobile accidents around the world, violent crime in South Africa apparently needs big numbers before capturing the public's imagination. In this case, there is a cruel and horrible twist: the miners, known as "zama-zamas", who died were victims of an accident of their own would-be enterprise, in the form of an underground fire.

Jaco Kleynhans, spokesman for trade union Solidarity puts it this way: "It is a grey area that nobody wants to touch". This "grey area", around for decades, involves multi layered organised criminal syndicates that each year make fortunes by looting from South African mines, especially those involved in precious metals. The dimensions of the activities were described in detail in an April 2001 report by the Institute for Security Studies, "Theft of precious metals from South African mines and refineries".

The report stated that "it became evident during interviews conducted for the study that there is a general perception in the mining industry that most stolen product sold on the black market ends up in some organised illegal business or syndicate. It is presumed top-level syndicate members, who supply organised criminal dealers, dispose of the largest volume of stolen product".

Yet only this week, the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU) stated baldly, and briefly, as if it was hearing of something new, that it was "shocked and dismayed by the news of the death of 36 ex-miners, who are reported to have been trapped underground at one of the closed shafts at a mine at Welkom. Our affiliate, the NUM [National Union of Mineworkers], is monitoring the situation, and we demand a full investigation into this shocking situation".

In South Africa, this kind of phenomenon is known as a "same old, same old", story. Back in November 2006, the Johannesburg Star reported that: "Kilometers below the ground, in pitch-black mineshafts, police are waging - and winning - an unusual war against armed gangs of pirate gold miners. In six operations in Gauteng and the Free State over the past six months, specially trained police officers have arrested 60 of the rogue gold-diggers.

"The pirates have been known to spend a year underground without surfacing; ‘hijacking' closed-off sections of legitimate mines; plundering them; and providing syndicates with tons of gold to smuggle abroad. Three major international syndicates buying the illegal gold from South Africa have been identified, and the Institute for Security Studies estimates the pirates steal gold-rich ore worth around ZAR 2-billion every year".

On 12 March this year, Harmony announced the arrest of 114 people and the confiscation of goods looted from a number of Harmony mines in South Africa. The items included explosives, cash, gold-bearing materials, mine property and foodstuffs. "Operation Zama", which also involved the South African Police Services, Department of Justice and private security units, was described as "a success and the first of its kind".

While Harmony's operation may have nabbed mostly lower level members of such syndicates, Harmony described its actions as "proactive". Harmony's role reflects the ongoing explosion of, effectively, private sector "policing" units in South Africa, from armed response units that react to house radio alarms to satellite transponders that are virtually compulsory on every new insured vehicle. The onus is increasingly shifted to the private sector as standards of public law enforcement continue to decline.

Operation Zama was "executed over a 10-day period to identify and remove criminal miners from eight of the company's Free State mines". Among the 114 people arrested by the SAPS during the operation, no less than 19 were mine employees; five were employees of Harmony contractors. Harmony took disciplinary action against its employees, by suspending and laying criminal charges against them.

According to experts independent of Operation Zama, one of the key reasons for its success was the focus on stolen explosives materials, which are specially classified. While the possession of "unwrought" gold in South Africa remains unlawful, it has always been difficult to make charges stick. Another aspect of stolen explosives is well known domestically, in the form of dozens upon dozens of "bombings" of automatic teller machines (ATMs), normally in the dead of night.

In its statement on Operation Zama, Harmony politely said that "criminal miners not only pose a clear health and safety hazard to themselves and to Harmony's own employees as a result of their unsafe actions, but they also cost the company through disruption to operations, theft of equipment and material, and the potential loss in production". While the activities of these freelance miners does not quite resemble the 80,000 or so garimpieros who once upon time at Serra Pelada (now owned by Colossus Minerals) staged the biggest gold rush seen in South American history, big risks can mean big rewards, deep below South Africa's surface.

Persistently high gold bullion prices, on the rise since early 2002, have seen the yellow metal become the key target of illegal miners in many countries across the world. There are now at least 30,000 garimpieros working a new discovery at Brazil's Bom Jesus mine on the upper Tapajos River, where working conditions are described in a Reuters article as "subhuman. Local strongmen take the bulk of the profit and enforce their rules with a gun. Disease, prostitution, and environmental destruction abound".

In a statement back in March, Harmony CEO Graham Briggs said that "As part of Harmony's ongoing initiatives to combat this problem we have tightened security at the shaft heads, we conduct frequent spot inspections underground and we have gone to the extent of reducing the amount of food taken underground". This all but confirmed what had long been known about gangs of dangerous men spending long periods underground, high grading select areas.

Times are tougher than for years, raising the levels of risks that indigents are prepared to face. On 24 February, Pan African Resources announced that "trespassers conducting illegal mining activity set a fire on the Consort mine at Barberton, South Africa, on Saturday, 21 February 2009". Unlike the ores mined on the Witwatersrand, the Barberton area hosts greenstones, where gold is often visible to the naked eye. The bodies of at least 20 illegal miners at Consort were later found underground.

Solidarity this week demanded that South Africa's Department of Mining assemble a task team "to investigate the situation regarding illegal miners in South Africa . . . Not only are the illegal miners stealing gold worth millions of rands, but the ensuing accidents are always very severe". According to a statement made by South African president Jacob Zuma during the NUM congress on the weekend, 73 mineworkers have died so far this year. The number refers, of course, to the formal mining sector. The number of criminal miners that have died this year exceeds this figure, from only two known incidents.

Over the past couple of years, South African authorities have taken increasingly extreme measures to enforce safety rules in the formal mining sector, effectively demanding that an entire mine must close down following even a single death of any nature, until a full investigation has been performed. For criminal miners, however, the sky is the limit. South Africa has been mining gold for more than a century, creating countless areas which are now economic, but only when inhuman, low cost, working conditions are deployed.

Despite the widespread calls for "investigations" - a daily occurrence across all sectors of the economy and society in South Africa - mining companies are well organised and proactive. Harmony CEO Graham Briggs this week pointed out that Harmony continues to address the issue of criminal mining "on a daily basis, together with the South African Police Services, the Department of Justice, the National Prosecuting Authority and other affected mining companies."

Prior to the finding of more bodies this week, Harmony stated that it was "not known if other criminal miners have died . . . {Harmony] will not deploy its own employees on underground searches, as the abandoned mining areas where the criminal miners have been active are extremely dangerous". What more does COSATU need to know about criminal miners who do not pay dues to trade unions?