Ninjas Battle for Gold in Mongolia's 'Wild West'
Mon Jun 28,10:25 AM ET
By Nick Macfie
OGOOMOR BAGA, Mongolia (Reuters) - Heaven meets hell where blue
hills lining Mongolia's vast grasslands, untouched for millions of years,
have been turned into giant slag heaps.
Multi-story floating dredgers scoop up the
beds of newly diverted rivers and, with metallic
rumblings straight out of a sci-fi film, crunch
and separate the gold-bearing deposits from
the debris they disgorge 24 hours a day.
Vast floodplains, above which at night the
Milky Way stretches across the sky, are
being turned upside down and areas just as
big await a similar fate.
Nearby, gold rush towns are rising from the dirt, turning the central part
of the land of Genghis Khan into a squalid Wild West.
It is all legal.
But at night, the dredgers are followed by the ninjas -- illegal miners
named after the green, turtle-shell-like pans they carry on their backs --
who sift the droppings under cover of darkness and pan them for the gold
the dredgers have missed.
The only sign of the ninjas the next morning is the dozens of discarded
batteries from their flashlights.
Mongolia, once the center of one of the world's greatest empires, has
gold in them thar hills, and foreign companies have been quick to grab a
piece of the action.
Some multinationals have tried to clean up the mess they leave behind,
but others have done nothing. As for the ninjas, they are doing
irreparable damage -- to the environment, to themselves and to the
herders living nearby in circular, white tents called "yurts" in Russian and
"gers" in Mongolian.
In some places the ninjas simply dig 65-foot holes in the ground, or sift
disgorged material left by the dredgers or pan rivers, using a system of
secret flashes and calls at night to warn the others of danger or of an
approaching official.
Elsewhere they use poisonous mercury to absorb the gold and then boil
the mixture, evaporating the mercury, to get at the gold. In some gers,
the apparatus sits next to the kitchen stove.
"We have found herders with five to six times the safety limit of mercury
in their urine," said D. Jargalsaikhan, chairman of the Mineral Resources
Authority of Mongolia.
"The damage the ninjas are doing is a major problem. Also, about 30
percent of small (legal) gold miners do not care about the environment."
HAND TO MOUTH
Nomadic livestock herding of sheep, goats, horses, cattle, yaks and
camels, constitutes the core of Mongolia's economy and represents the
basis of the nation's cultural traditions.
About 60 percent of the country is covered by grassland while the Gobi
desert envelops the South.
The ninjas are herders who lost everything in three years of devastating
"zuds," or disasters. Some turned to illegal mining just to survive. Some
are making it rich.
Other ninjas are relatives of legal miners holed up in such gold rush
towns as Ogoomor Baga, with its dilapidated shacks and central,
non-stop disco. Some are legal miners working overtime.
On the central steppe of Zamaar, the ninjas live brazenly in camps of
hundreds of gers and traditional pitched tents.
"We can't go in there," said a Mongolian geologist, watching one such
camp after he had navigated the mostly dirt roads for five hours from
the capital Ulan Bator. "There may be drunks, bad people. We don't
want to start a fight."
All was quiet. In the camps there are shop gers, satellite television
gers, pool-playing gers and even girlie-bar gers. All surrounded by
treacherous holes in the earth, old mines that give way and kill all too
often.
In the river, teen-agers and sun-wizened old folk panned the stream,
every few minutes coming up to show off a piece of gold the size of a
sliver of tooth but sometimes worth a few dollars. Men on tiny horses
sat and watched.
"This is not a good business for us," one said. "We are not making
money. We are doing this just to survive."
More than 30 percent of the primeval country, nearly half the size of
Western Europe, has been licensed for exploration and mining which
have taken off as booming neighbor China buys its copper, lead and
other minerals.
Gold mining alone, legal and illegal, has become a key driver of the
economy, spinning off smaller businesses such as shops, kiosks and
bars in gold rush towns and in Ulan Bator.
"In five to 10 years, mining will easily double gross domestic product,"
said the Mineral Authority's Jargalsaikhan. "Mining will change the
whole country. Hopefully for the better."
Robin Grayson, general director of Eco-Minex International, a
British-Mongolian gold exploration joint venture, estimates there are
about 100,000 ninjas, including families and support services such as
shops and bars.
story.news.yahoo.com
Hi Dave, i really don't wanna talk about the election right now, if you don't mind -g- ..... just tripped over this, and i believe you know Robin Grayson ..... also, you've heard of this place Mongolia .... speaking of weird politics -ggg- .... cheers |
