For all the public comments that have been made about the contribution that gold mining continues to make to the country’s economy, it is clear that far less attention than is warranted is being paid to the downside of the highly touted gold rush.
Part of that downside has to do with the ongoing environmental transgressions that ensue as the lure of gold blinds some of the miners’ eyes to the likely long-term consequences of their mining practices. And while it is not the intention of this editorial to downplay the counterproductive mining practices its greater current concern has to do with the killing fields which the goldfields have become.
The first thing that should be said about what now appears to be an unrelenting bloodbath taking place in parts of the gold-bearing interior is that it casts a pall of gloom on the industry. Gold has come to be associated with greed and envy and dark, despicable plots and murder; blood gold, if you will.
More than that, the wantonness of the violence associated with the goldfields points unerringly at the near complete failure of the authorities to lay down the law in vast swathes of our Republic and ensure that people live by it.
From time to time we are told about interior security initiatives involving the mining sector and the disciplined forces even though there is really no persuasive evidence that sufficiently concrete and comprehensive measures are being taken by either the mining community or the state to create a regimen of security that will act as a deterrent to the unrelenting violence in some mining communities.
One cannot help but conceptualise some mining communities as ‘wild west’ territory where, rather than the laws of the land, it is the law of the gun or the knife that prevails.
The callous impunity with which the killings are perpetrated speaks to an absence of fear of legal consequence underpinned by the knowledge that as far as security in those desolate and hostile areas is concerned, the state is decidedly weak.
There is, too, a sense of remoteness associated with the violence in gold-bearing areas of Guyana that engenders an indifference to the succession of murders.
One can point to no serious and sustained initiative taken by the leadership of the country, the Guyana Police Force, the various umbrella bodies within the mining industry or the private sector, individually or collectively to tackle the crisis of unchecked murder in the goldfields. Killings occur, make the news and remain in the public eye only long enough for them to disappear into the mist of yet another killing.
We can, of course, continue to ‘talk up’ gold production and the contribution of the mineral to the country’s economy.
We can talk about what sometimes seems to be an unending struggle for control of the industry between the Natural Resources Ministry and the miners.
And we can continue to ignore the fact that our goldfields have become grotesque killing fields and that whatever contribution gold may make to the country’s economy, parts of the interior where gold is mined have become lawless, unprotected enclaves where chasing gold means risking lives.
Meanwhile, we carry on with straight faces contemplating the benefits accruing to the economy from the gold industry without pausing to consider the toll that it continues to take on the nation.
