At the foot of the majestic Carpathian mountains, Petrila waits in dread for the closure of its coal mine, the oldest in Romania and the life force of a town struggling to survive.
“We are already the valley of tears; we don’t want to become the valley of death,” one resident said, referring to the Jiu Valley where Petrila lies, Romania’s main coal mining region where miners’ numbers have dwindled to only a fraction of those employed in the 1990s.
Petrila’s 153-year-old mine has not only been the town’s livelihood, but its very identity. Petrila without mines would be like Bordeaux without its vineyards or Silicon Valley without its IT firms, locals say.
Photo: AFP
However, pressure from the European Commission, the EU executive, on member governments to cut subsidies to lossmaking mines means the one in Petrila, two elsewhere in Romania and several others across the 27-member bloc will be shut down by 2018. Demolition work has already started.
“It’s the age-old story of the deindustrialization of Europe,” said David Schwartz, a Bucharest director who recently drew attention for Underground, a play he and the well-known Romanian playwright Mihaela Michailov worked on for a year, giving voice to the miners and their families in this once-prosperous company town.
The EU’s plan is to shift subsidies from mines toward renewable energies. Up to 30,000 jobs, out of a total 100,000 in the EU mining sector, could be lost.
Photo: AFP
In Spain, angry miners have staged protests and clashed with police, but those in Romania appear resigned to their fate, still smarting from violent protests in 1990 that many feel stigmatized them wrongly.
That year, then-Romanian president Ion Iliescu called about 10,000 Jiu Valley miners to Bucharest to end protests against his government, the first elected after the fall of the communist regime, but one made up mostly of former communists, like himself.
The miners were severely criticized for using force against protesters, but many today say those who took part were “manipulated.”
Communist-era mosaics at the Petrila mine are a reminder of its flourishing past before the economic decline of the last two decades.
In 1988, the town had about 4,000 miners, now there are 688. In the wider Jiu Valley, numbers have dropped from 50,000 to 7,600, Petrila mine director Constantin Jujan said.
“In 1997, a wave of redundancies at the time meant people suddenly got a lot of money. But they weren’t ready; they spent, they set up businesses and got in debt, found themselves without homes, with nothing,” said local restaurant owner Elena Chelba, whose husband and father are both miners.
Today the unemployment rate in the town is more than 40 percent.
Charity shops proposing second-hand clothes, crockery and toys are testimony to the hard times.
“I don’t know if things can get any worse,” Chelba said. “But if the mine closes, things will not be rosy; so many people depend on it.”
Everyday, ignoring the danger, dozens of locals jump on the trains bringing coal to Petrila to steal a few lumps, either to keep warm or to sell.
One of them, who gave only his first name, Traian, collects what coal he finds on the tracks in red buckets — there is no way his pension of 200 euros (US$244) a month can pay for heating.
Traian’s son has left Romania for Germany, and his daughter will join him for two months of seasonal work. Like many, Traian doesn’t complain for himself, but worries about his children. Emigration is often seen as the only answer.
“My daughter’s future is not here,” one miner said solemnly, tramping out of the mine after a night’s work.
“Some families cannot pay their gas and electricity bills any more. We give them clothes so their children are not ashamed to go to school,” said Florin Popescu, who runs the local branch of Save the Children.
The center ensures that about 100 children get a hot meal, as well as psychological and educational help.
“We know that we will have to leave because there is no work here. It’s sad for me because this is where I have grown up and where my friends are,” said Cristinel Homoc, a 15-year-old who dreams of becoming a soccer player or a lawyer.
Some residents hope for better days in a region that they believe has immense tourism potential.
Stretching about 1,500km across central Europe, the Carpathians are blessed with virgin forest, rich flora and wildlife, including lynx and bears.
Romanian culture is also a draw. A local caricaturist, Ion Barbu, organizes festivals and has turned the childhood home of writer Ion D. Sirbu — a key opposition figure during Nicolae Ceausescu’s dictatorship — into a museum.
Barbu, like many other residents, wants to preserve the buildings at the mine site to create cultural and “industrial” tourism, to retain Petrila’s link with its prouder past.
Industrial tourism has worked in other areas: UNESCO designated three former mining sites in the Wallonia region of southern Belgium and one site in northern France as World Heritage sites.
However, the residents’ dreams have met with opposition from Petrila deputy mayor Constantin Ramascanu, who would prefer to raze the site.
Rejecting all ideas of green tourism — even from Britain’s Prince Charles, who has tried to develop rural tourism in Romania — Ramascanu’s vision is a valley covered in hotels, casinos and quad-biking tracks.
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”
Sales in the retail, and food and beverage sectors last month continued to rise, increasing 0.7 percent and 13.6 percent respectively from a year earlier, setting record highs for the month of March, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said yesterday. Sales in the wholesale sector also grew last month by 4.6 annually, mainly due to the business opportunities for emerging applications related to artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing technologies, the ministry said in a report. The ministry forecast that retail, and food and beverage sales this month would retain their growth momentum as the former would benefit from Tomb Sweeping Day
Thousands of parents in Singapore are furious after a Cordlife Group Ltd (康盛人生集團), a major operator of cord blood banks in Asia, irreparably damaged their children’s samples through improper handling, with some now pursuing legal action. The ongoing case, one of the worst to hit the largely untested industry, has renewed concerns over companies marketing themselves to anxious parents with mostly unproven assurances. This has implications across the region, given Cordlife’s operations in Hong Kong, Macau, Indonesia, the Philippines and India. The parents paid for years to have their infants’ cord blood stored, with the understanding that the stem cells they contained