The Chinese Landing saga continues without resolution. Yesterday we reported the Ministry of Natural Resources in a press release as saying that it was working to ensure an amicable solution for all stakeholders in the mining dispute there. This seems an unrealistic objective at this point. As things stands the miners do not have permission from the Village Council to mine on land owned by the community, and the Council is not showing any preparedness to change its stance.
Early last month three officers from the GGMC in conjunction with two from the EPA had gone into Chinese Landing to inspect the situation in the Tassawini mines which are located on the community’s land. This inspection came as a result of a report in the Sunday Stabroek about the devastation there. What can be said is that it was clearly a less than professional excursion. Meeting with Toshao Orin Fernandes the members refused his request for the Village Council to accompany them, saying that it would represent a conflict of interest. Yet even at that stage the team was being transported by the Tassawini miners, who also took them to the mines. So much for consistency and adherence to principle on the part of government agencies.
Furthermore, the Toshao alleged that the miners appeared to have prior notice of the coming of the team, because they hid illegal equipment before the representatives of the two agencies arrived. And then there was the matter of the quality of the work that they did, which left a great deal to be desired, save for their report on the lack of safety in the pits. The evident destruction notwithstanding, they gave the mining operations an “all’s good” report. Never mind that the EPA was particularly delinquent in so far as it took no mercury samples, because, so they told the Village Council, these would have degraded before reaching the laboratory.
That particular bit of nonsense was duly dismissed by the chemist Mr Alfred Bhulai in a letter to this newspaper, but there has been no response in relation to it from the EPA. We reported that our attempts to contact Executive Director Kemraj Parsram were unsuccessful.
Vice President Bharrat Jagdeo, however, did make a comment on the inspection, saying the government was aware of breaches of the Act by the miners as well as the fact that threats had been made to the Toshao and the Village Council. Nevertheless, he said, he was taken aback by the GGMC and EPA visit. He explained that the President had ordered there be a surprise visit, because every time one was planned the miners would know beforehand and hide equipment, etc. Yet here a visit had been undertaken and it was the miners who were showing the staff of the GGMC around. “[W]e are not going to tolerate any violation of people’s rights and so this is happening it seems with the complicity of some individuals at the junior level of the government,” said Mr Jagdeo.
This in turn produced the response from the Guyana Human Rights Association that it was not the junior officers who must be held accountable for mining devastation in Indigenous communities, but the GGMC itself. It seemed a fairly uncontroversial observation in so far as organizations are always held responsible for the actions of junior staff members in the discharge of their duties, but it triggered an intemperate press release from the Ministry of Natural Resources, already referred to above in a different context.
More tendentious from the government’s point of view was the call by the GHRA for the reform of GGMC to address the “scandalous squandering of Guyana’s natural mining assets and systematic undermining of community life of Guyana’s indigenous peoples.” In any event, it launched into a ferocious attack on Mr Mike McCormack, the head of the GHRA, whom it accused of pursuing a “misinformation agenda to justify collecting funding from his political blind-sided handlers.”
It really doesn’t matter what the government thinks of Mr McCormack − and the antagonism between the two sides goes back a very long way − this kind of language brings the Ministry into disrepute. It makes it sound like a schoolyard bully rather than a responsible arm of government which has to look after the interests of the people. It might be added that such statements are also irrelevant to the arguments at hand.
And where those are concerned the Ministry said its hands were tied in what could be done owing to the ruling of the CCJ. “[T]he mining permit received favourable judgment from Guyana’s final court for redress, the Caribbean Court of Justice,” said the release. This is somewhat less than accurate. After the GGMC issued a cease-work order against miner Mr Wayne Vieira, he took them to court. The case wound its way up to the CCJ, which at its most basic level found (among other things) that a cease-work order issued under a regulation in the Mining Act could not be applied to the Amerindian Act. A dispute under the Amerindian Act which was also a dispute under the Mining Act could be pursued, but that did not apply in this instance. In other words the decision was, in a sense, made on a technicality, rather than the substantive issue.
The story is a complicated one, as these things often are in this country. Chinese Landing was granted title in 1976, under an act which did not recognise their right to minerals, although it did not receive its Certificate of Title until 2018. Between 1998 and 2001 four mining permits were issued to Mr Vieira to mine in the Tassawini area. In 1999 he made an agreement with the Village Council giving him exclusive permission to work in Tassawini in return for employment, training, medical services and 1% royalty. The agreement came on the recommendation and approval of then Prime Minister Sam Hinds.
However, according to the residents Mr Vieira continually violated the agreement and so they ended it in 2009. Nevertheless, the miner was given permission to mine for one month in April of that year in exchange for a 7% royalty payment, but by early June both he and his investor had been told to cease working and remove his equipment. It was following this that the cease-work order was issued by the GGMC in 2010, and the case went to court. Following the CCJ’s decision the miners – about 500 of them – are still there and the community finds itself debarred from entering its own lands, its residents unable to earn a living. They are threatened by miners and the police, while their waters and savannahs are contaminated by mercury.
(While it might be noted that the 2006 Amerindian Act recognised the right of Indigenous villages to allow small and medium-scale miners to operate on their land provided two-thirds of the Council agreed, that act did not come into force until the end of 2010.) Last year the community brought a case against Mr Vieira in the High Court, but it was dismissed. They have appealed the decision. They did, however, take their case to the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, which in its opinion stressed the importance of free and informed prior consent in relation to mining, which the villagers have not given in the present instance.
“[E]fforts will be continued for an amicable solution for all stakeholders within the confines of the law,” said the Ministry of Natural Resources. This is jumping the gun, as was suggested earlier. Before we get to an amicable solution (always assuming one is possible) first the facts have to be officially established by doing what Mr Jagdeo has said the President wants. In other words a surprise visit to Tassawini and other community areas has to be organised. The Ministry should start with the EPA which should just turn up one day with a view to taking mercury samples, among other things. Then the GGMC has to find a way to go into the area without the miners having prior knowledge. If they can’t manage that then there will be need for a major inquiry, because it means that at a wider level the Commission is incapable of doing its job and is in need of a serious overhaul. Then the evidence would have to be reviewed and a decision come to.
That decision would probably not be received ‘amicably’. This is probably a case where the choice will come to be between the miners and their pecuniary interests on the one hand and the rights of Indigenous peoples on the other. In a case of what appear to be such flagrant violations of rights in the eyes of the public, it is difficult to envisage what a compromise would look like.
