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In the village of Yambali, May 26, 2024. Photo Juho Valta / AP
EXCLUSIVE INVESTIGATION How did more than 2,000 people die on the morning of May 24 in Papua New Guinea? Blame it on “bad luck”, say all the lazy media: it's a “natural disaster”. Les humanités french online media' exclusive investigation points to the responsibility of a Canadian multinational, which has promoted murder and sexual violence as a model of “governance”. 2,000 people died? After all, they were just Papuans...
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Buried alive. More than 2,000 people (the final toll will not be known for several days... or weeks) were buried by a monstrous landslide on May 24 in the Enga province of Papua New Guinea. “Papua New Guinea is a tropical country, divided along tribal, ethnic and linguistic lines, rich in natural resources but largely underdeveloped, which makes it particularly vulnerable to natural disasters”, came the immediate comment. And the entire media xolrd was quick to pick up on this expression of “natural disaster” with touching unanimity. An inevitability... Blame it on bad luck and rain.
First images after the landslide in the village of Yambali at dawn on May 24, 2024..
It's true that James Marape, the Prime Minister of Papua New Guinea, was quick to lend credence to this theory, blaming “extraordinary rainfall” and meteorological changes for the Yambali landslide. It is also true that the island of Papua New Guinea, with its tropical climate and high seismic risk (in July 1998, an earthquake 25 kilometers off the coast triggered a tsunami that claimed the lives of over 2,500 people and injured thousands), is not immune to such natural disasters. During the rainy season, landslides are not uncommon, but usually without major consequences, even if, last March, torrential rains caused the death of around twenty people in several mountainous and coastal regions of Papua New Guinea. Other countries and regions in the Pacific were similarly affected.
A State marked by the poverty of 10 million inhabitants, largely dependent on the exploitation of its mineral resources (gold, silver, copper, nickel, etc.), Papua New Guinea is particularly vulnerable to climate change and an increasing number in extreme weather events. In a report published in 2021, the World Bank warned of “a very significant increase in disaster risks. (...) These risks are likely to weigh most heavily on the poorest communities. Floods, landslides and coastal inundation are expected to intensify. The population affected by floods and the resulting economic damage are expected to double by 2030", predicted the institution. Since then, what has been done to curb these climate change-related risks? Nothing, or almost nothing. Oh, yes: in July 2023, French President Emmanuel Macron, clearly very proud of himself, stopped off in Papua New Guinea for a video selfie with the Prime Minister to congratulate himself on the fight to preserve forests and biodiversity (1).
Emmanuel Macron with the Prime Minister of Papua New Guinea, James Marape, in July 2023.
Two days after the disaster, the "rescuers" tried, with their bare hands, with a few pieces of wood and shovels,
to remove possible survivors...
Climate change not the only culprit
However, climate change may not be solely responsible for the Yambali disaster...
Several factors can contribute to a landslide. A geological phenomenon, landslides have three main causes: soil type and hygrometry, loading and human activity. The first is the destabilization of land masses by natural forces (snowmelt, abnormally high rainfall, earthquakes, etc.) or human activity (earthworks, vibration, deforestation, exploitation of materials or aquifers, etc.). The presence of underground cavities is the main cause of landslides.
The Porgera gold mine, Papua New Guinea's second largest gold mine, is located some 30 km from the village of Yambali.
This would not be the first time that a mining operation has caused a landslide. For example:
On September 25, 1970, in Mufulira (Zambia), a copper mine (operated by the Anglo-Swiss company Glencore) collapsed underground, causing a massive landslide. 89 miners were killed in the disaster (HERE).
Luming disaster (China, 2020). A landslide was triggered by a molybdenum mining operation in China's Heilongjiang province. The extent of human and material losses remains unknown, as the Chinese government has censored all information on the subject.
Collapse of the Hpakant jade mine (Myanmar, 2020). 174 miners were killed (HERE).
And in the case of gold mines:
In 2012, a massive landslide took place in the Pantukan region (Philippines), affecting several mining sites. Around 25 miners were killed, and many more injured (HERE).
In the collapse of the Brumadinho mining dam (Brazil, 2019), more than 270 people were killed and thousands displaced. The collapse caused massive destruction and severe environmental pollution (HERE).
On April 1, 2017, during the landslide at the Mocoa gold mine (Colombia), dozens of people were killed and several infrastructures destroyed.
In 2020, several miners were buried when the Larimar mine (Dominican Republic) collapsed.
More recently, in February 2024, in the Erzincan province of north-west Turkey, a landslide at a gold mine trapped 9 people. The same mine had hit the headlines in 2022 after a cyanide leak, prompting the authorities to briefly suspend operations. However, it reopened after paying a fine, provoking an outcry from Turkey's opposition parties.
Media under lock and key
Never before has there been such a high death toll as at Yambali. According to a local correspondent, at the Porgera gold mine in Papua New Guinea, the first landslide occurred in 2014, following torrential rains, and buried several artisanal miners. However, no trace of this accident can be found on the Internet. Papua New Guinea's two daily newspapers are foreign-owned: The National is owned by Malaysian logging giant Rimbuan Hijau, and the Post-Courier belongs to News Corp, the sprawling group of Australian-American billionaire Rupert Murdoch. Private broadcaster EMTV News, one of the few media outlets to promote investigative journalism, is under severe duress: one of its reporters, Scott Waide, was suspended in November 2018 for disclosing possible embezzlement of public funds. More recently, in February 2022, the channel's editorial manager, Sincha Dimara, was sacked for “insubordination” after publishing an investigation that displeased a member of the government. At the same time, 19 journalists who had supported Sincha Dimara were dismissed...
Not many people will be telling the story of the Porgera mine. And yet, it's quite a poem (with all due respect to poetry)...
The Porgera mine, an environmental and human scandal
The Porgera gold mine, located in a remote and difficult-to-access jungle zone at an altitude of 2,200-2,700 m, was commissioned in 1990, and produced four million ounces of gold in its first four years of operation. At the outset, the project placed great emphasis on collaboration with local communities, and included the payment of royalties to landowners and provincial governments. It also involved providing ongoing assistance to schools, medical facilities and a wide range of public projects involving roads, water and electricity infrastructure. Operation of the mine was initially entrusted to the Canadian company Placer Dome, which was bought out in 2006 by Barrick Gold, also Canadian, the world's largest gold mining company at the time. It was at this point that serious problems began at the Porgera site.
It began with the dismissal of all staff responsible for relations with local communities. This new approach was described as “slimier” and “more cruel” by a Canadian journalist, Richard Poplak, while another Canadian journalist, Catherine Coumans, recounted how the town of Porgera had become a “hellhole” and a “dumping ground”, documenting how mountains of dumped tailings blocked passage between communities and polluted waterways.
Community law was undermined, as was environmental law, but that's not all. Barrick Gold had obtained the right to use its own security force of between 400 and 500 people, who even had the right to kill. As a result, 14 people were killed by Barrick Gold security guards, without any form of investigation or trial.
Worse still: as a Human Rights Watch investigation revealed, multiple rapes and sexual abuses were committed by the mine's security personnel. Journalist Richard Poplak reported hundreds of rapes and, from 2003 or 2004, a systematic policy of using sexual violence to intimidate local communities. After denying all allegations, Barrick Gold's management was forced to acknowledge the facts, and pledged to compensate 119 survivors of sexual violence, to the tune of 8,000 Canadian dollars, on condition that they agree not to sue the mining company... (see video below)
The history of Barrick Gold, which operates sites in the United States, Canada, Australia, Peru, Chile, Argentina, Mali and Tanzania, is littered with scandal after scandal. Since 2009, it has been the subject of a dispute before a U.S. court: indigenous groups are opposing the mining of a gold site, the Cortez Hills project, located in northeastern Nevada. Since 2011, Barrick Gold has been trying to overturn a law protecting glaciers in Argentina: it seems well on the way to succeeding with the new libertarian-fascist president Javier Milei. The company is regularly accused of dubious environmental practices: the use of cyanide to extract gold from Lake Cowal in Australia; the excavation of glaciers made of relatively pure water at Pascua Lama in Chile; the spillage in 2004 and 2005 of at least seven tonnes of mercury in a mine near the town of Kalgoorlie-Boulder in Australia, etc. In 2015, the company was fined 145 million pesos by the government of San Juan, Argentina, for spilling cyanide solution from the Veladero mine. In Quebec, a class action has been authorized against Barrick Gold, accused by shareholders of falsely declaring that a mining project in South America complied with environmental requirements. In Tanzania, members of the indigenous Kurya community have also filed a complaint alleging murder, shooting and torture. Nothing less... Even the United Nations, in January 2023, denounced Barrick Gold's actions in Argentina: “Spills and timely inaction by the government and the company are endangering people and the environment”, stated three special rapporteurs in a ten-part document on the Veladero mine operation: “We express our extreme concern about the human rights abuses caused by spills of cyanide, arsenic, mercury and other hazardous substances from the Veladero mine”.
Yet only one country in the world, Norway, has decided to blacklist Barrick Gold and exclude the company from its state investment fund. The rebuke is mainly based on the operation of the Porgera mine in Papua New Caledonia, “which entails an unacceptable risk of major and irreversible damage to the environment”. At the time (in 2009), the Norwegian government criticized the company's “lack of openness and transparency with regard to environmental assessment” and said it had “every reason to believe that Barrick will not change its practices”...
Mark Bristow, CEO of Barrick Gold (left, photo Henry Nicholls/Reuters) is also a big hunting fan:
leopards, elephants, antelopes, zebras and other wild animals killed in Africa.
(right: Mark Bristow behind an elephant he shot during a trip to Africa, Mozambique, in 2014, Photo DR)
In Papua New Caledonia, the rape and sexual violence scandal was such, among many others (murders, destruction of homes, failure to respect community commitments), that in August 2019 the government withdrew Barrick Gold's operating license for the Porgera mine..., before doing an about-face in 2023. What happened in the meantime? Not to mention the bribes we don't know about, which led the Prime Minister of Papua New Guinea to make a complete U-turn (once in opposition, once in the majority, depending on how the wind shifted) Mark Bristow, the CEO of the Canadian company, has doubled down on the counter-attack. On the one hand, in the absence of a conviction for murder (no investigation) and rape (the victims' silence having been bought), Barrick Gold went to court for “breach of contract”, demanding colossal compensation that Papua New Caledonia would take five centuries to pay. On the other hand, he attacked again under a borrowed identity. In 2022, the firm signed a consortium agreement with the Chinese group Zijin Mining, one of the spearheads of Beijing's “Silk Roads” policy, which operates China's largest gold mine, the Zijinshan mine, and which since 2015 has embarked, from Congo, on a vast globalization program, based on “low-cost counter-cyclical mergers and acquisitions” (not expensive in terms of investment, but which can pay off handsomely). In this way, the Chinese government is seeking, without spending too much, to secure maximum control of various mining extractions, including gold, whose use is essential in the whole of the electronics industry (connectors, switching contacts and bonding wires in electronic devices such as computers and cell phones) for its excellent electrical conduction properties and resistance to corrosion.
So, you might say, it's "business as usual". But how is the Porgera mine (photo above) responsible for the landslide that buried more than 2,000 people alive in Yambali in the early hours of May 24?
In October 2023, the Papua New Guinea government granted Barrick Gold (and its Chinese partner) a new mining permit for the Porgera mine, despite strong local protests (against which Emmanuel Macron's friendly Prime Minister sent army and police forces). Work resumed in early 2024, and what a job it was! Blasting, excavations, etc. It's enough to stir up the subsoil for miles around.
The day before the deadly landslide on May 23, a “Safety Forum” was held. The representative of the “landowners”, Tony Mark Ekepa, stormed out of the meeting on the grounds that the documents signed between Barrick Gold and the government had not been communicated to the local communities, as required by law. The Minister of Mines replied that the agreements were confidential and could not be disclosed publicly. Of course...
The crime of ecocide is already obvious. For many years now, the mine has seriously contaminated the Lagaip River (which flows below the village of Yambali), where processed ore is directly dumped (along with large quantities of cyanide, mercury and other heavy elements): this increases the sediment load by around 8 million tons per year. In addition, the mine has two “erodible dumps”, i.e. areas where soft barren rock is dumped, which, under the effect of heavy tropical rainfall, gradually flows into the local rivers. This increases the sediment load by between 4 and 6 million tons a year! The resumption of mining activity since the beginning of the year has “clogged” the rivers through which even torrential rains could flow. It's hardly surprising, then, that in these conditions and on ground that is fragile “by nature”, a mega landslide could have formed.
Common sense, and international environmental regulations, would dictate that thorough geological studies should be carried out before any new mining operations are undertaken. In the case of Progera, such a study was indeed carried out, entrusted to Australian researchers (Kevin C. Hill, Gareth T. Cooper, Agnes Pokondepa, Peter Essy, Thiwaporn Phonsit and Mark Haydondont) who were suitably paid, as one can imagine. The study, financed by the Porgera Joint Venture (i.e. Barrick Gold) and published by Géosciences, is instructive: it deals exclusively with the geological possibilities of extending the Progera mine. Not a single line on adjacent geological risks.
In Yambali, on May 24, 2024, at least 2,000 people died, snatched from their sleep. But after all, they were just Papuans. In other words, savages, for those who enjoy hunting and killing elephants, zebras and leopards in Africa. Three days after the Yambali disaster, with no regard for the victims, Barrick Gold issued a press release congratulating itself on the fact that the landslide had not affected the Porgera mine, which could “operate without restriction and had enough fuel on site for 40 days”. The next day, Barrick Gold shares were trading up 1% on the Toronto Stock Exchange...
Jean-Marc Adolphe
Thanks to the NGO Justice Foundation for Porgera
English translation edited by Maria Damcheva
NOTES
(1). Agence France Développement (AFD) has committed 4.8 million euros to 19 Pacific island states and territories as part of the “ Kiwa initiative” to “strengthen adaptation to the effects of climate change”. Until now, AFD has only provided grants for regional projects. Under the presidency of Emmanuel Macron, these grants are now transformed into loans (which the countries or regions concerned will then have to repay). https://www.afd.fr/fr/page-region-pays/papouasie-nouvelle-guine