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Gold/Mining/Energy : Gold Price Monitor -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Crimson Ghost who wrote (73786)	7/22/2001 12:15:20 PM
From: long-gone	Respond to of 116896

<<A Gold Company with Ties to the Bush Family Tries to Muzzle a Muckraking Journalist>> careful, you might make some of both sides here reassess value of ABX vs NEM by posting that.

To: Crimson Ghost who wrote (73786)	7/22/2001 11:11:29 PM
From: E. Charters	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 116896

That (Tanzanian gold workers on foreign companies lands) is a complex story and one that is not easy to discern withhout a program. I was briefly associated with a company that held interesting gold ground in Tanzania not too far from Bulyanhulu. In addition to government delays that seemed to be sponsored by possible corruption as well as disorganization and lack of funds, there were political realities of thousands of drifting artisinal workers that claimed, (with some government encouragement that was at least partly written into law), some rights to gold areas. But as soon as any company made a discovery or got anything going on a piece of land, the thousands of workers would "drift" onto that land and lay some kind of claim. Our land had perhaps several hundred such "workers" scattered about, perhaps a dozen of which had some kind of history in small scale mining there. Bulyanhulu ended up with perhaps 10,000 such squatters. This became a major political issue and during the times of trouble in Rwanda some "workers" ended up in the area with AK47's, stirring up tribal troubles. On one claim nearby a geologist got shot. The gov't certainly did not want too much of that as it already had some potential tribal problems with certain people in the area. Handling the artisinal workers however thinly veiled was the legiticmacy of their claim, became a sensitive issue. They kept promising to send the army but it never arrived. Cash for field operations may have been an issue. In addition there were many layers of land ownership, some defunct Arabic names on land, not yet removed from the rolls, multiple claims running on the same piece of land with different foreign companies (a common competitive African practice, no one knows who is going to get the land in the end..) and counterclaims in court by other nefarious previous land owners of foreign extraction who had connections with the government, something it seems is a necessity in this area. All in all it is easy to point the finger at Sutton or Barrick as bad guys in this affair. In fact they did not the resources or the desire to push anybody around who had a legitimate historical claim and had been working the land. Buying out the limited number of people out who could have possibly effectively worked that small area is one thing. Buying out the huge mob of people who were opportunistically camped there is quite another. Not even the government had resources for that. EC<:-}