Peter Kollie was digging for gold in the forests of southeastern Liberia when the deep shaft he had carved out of the earth collapsed, turning into a dark, airless tomb.
However, that was a risk the 20-year-old, like thousands of desperate and impoverished young men working the illegal gold-mining camps of the border region by Ivory Coast, had been prepared to take.
“In such cases there is nothing we can do. We leave the body there and abandon the area for a while,” Lomax Saydee, a fellow miner and youth welfare volunteer, told reporters a few days after Kollie’s death. “After a certain period of time we go back and reopen the place, and generally in that case you discover a huge quantity of gold in the area where the person died underground.
“So it is like you are digging your own grave sometimes, because if it closes on you no one can help you,” Saydee said.
Kollie had been working in the Dark Forest, in the heart of Grand Gedeh County, where Liberia’s unofficial alluvial gold sector is a booming but poorly regulated business.
Boys aged from seven or eight toil alongside men in their 30s in expansive open pits, digging into narrow shafts which drop as far as 100m to gold seams from where ore is lifted to the surface in baskets on ropes.
“Fatalities from tunnel collapses are not uncommon,” a 2012 report by the UN Panel of Experts on Liberia said.
The miners — mostly Liberians, but also former fighters fleeing political violence in Ivory Coast — live under vast encampments of tarpaulin, cooking bush meat on open fires.
The more remote camps lack basic services and are overcrowded, putting their inhabitants at risk of waterborne infections.
Drug abuse is “widespread,” according to the UN panel, which has voiced concern about the “potential threat to border security that these itinerant and disaffected young men pose.”
The government says it appraised 416.5kg of gold valued at US$16.5 million for export in the first nine months of 2013, although industry sources estimate the real annual production is likely to be closer to 3,000kg.
The government sees little of that revenue — about US$500,000 in 2013 — but it is the miners who really lose out, sometimes making a few dollars in a day and often nothing at all.
Meanwhile, legitimate brokers complain the market has become increasingly dominated by illegal traders and their agents from Mauritania, Senegal, the Gambia and Mali.
From the Dark Forest, the gold is smuggled by ethnic Mandingo and Fulani traders to Monrovia or into Guinea and Ivory Coast, where it is smelted into bullion and then trafficked on to the United Arab Emirates.
Jasper Tomapu, 12, sweats profusely as he struggles with a spade that looks much too big for him in a township of about 3,000 miners called Benin, in the heart of the forest.
“I want to go to school, but I have no one to pay the fees. My parents are jobless. Since I was born I have not seen a classroom,” he says.
Moses Kerkula, who tells reporters he is just eight, says he needs gold “so I can buy some clothes,” adding that there is no school in Benin.
Officials from Liberia and the UN agreed in 2012 to suspend all alluvial gold mining in the border regions, but the decision has never been implemented.
The UN says poor infrastructure, the remote locations of many mines and the underfunding of government personnel has made regulation extremely weak.
In any case, local authorities recognize that the trade provides a living for a large number of youths who would otherwise be a bigger problem.
Peter Solo, a senior local government official in Grand Gedeh, says stopping the trade would be “counterproductive ... when you don’t have optional employment for them.”
A major source of income for communities on the Ivory Coast and Sierra Leone borders, gold mining has also begun to lure youngsters from Monrovia.
Sick of begging on the streets, Alvin Doe, an aspiring soccer player who believes he is good enough to take up the sport professionally, has come to Benin to earn cash to move abroad.
Doe says there are very good soccer players, who have played for the top clubs in the capital, who have found their way to the Dark Forest.
“We can burst the rock and — at least when God blesses you — you get something to find your way out,” he says.
“There is no support, no good sporting activities in the country... We are asking God to help us and take us from here,” he said.
‘IN A DIFFERENT PLACE’: The envoy first visited Shanghai, where he attended a Chinese basketball playoff match, and is to meet top officials in Beijing tomorrow US Secretary of State Antony Blinken yesterday arrived in China on his second visit in a year as the US ramps up pressure on its rival over its support for Russia while also seeking to manage tensions with Beijing. The US diplomat tomorrow is to meet China’s top brass in Beijing, where he is also expected to plead for restraint as Taiwan inaugurates president-elect William Lai (賴清德), and to raise US concerns on Chinese trade practices. However, Blinken is also seeking to stabilize ties, with tensions between the world’s two largest economies easing since his previous visit in June last year. At the
Nearly half of China’s major cities are suffering “moderate to severe” levels of subsidence, putting millions of people at risk of flooding, especially as sea levels rise, according to a study of nationwide satellite data released yesterday. The authors of the paper, published by the journal Science, found that 45 percent of China’s urban land was sinking faster than 3mm per year, with 16 percent at more than 10mm per year, driven not only by declining water tables, but also the sheer weight of the built environment. With China’s urban population already in excess of 900 million people, “even a small portion
UNSETTLING IMAGES: The scene took place in front of TV crews covering the Trump trial, with a CNN anchor calling it an ‘emotional and unbelievably disturbing moment’ A man who doused himself in an accelerant and set himself on fire outside the courthouse where former US president Donald Trump is on trial has died, police said yesterday. The New York City Police Department (NYPD) said the man was declared dead by staff at an area hospital. The man was in Collect Pond Park at about 1:30pm on Friday when he took out pamphlets espousing conspiracy theories, tossed them around, then doused himself in an accelerant and set himself on fire, officials and witnesses said. A large number of police officers were nearby when it happened. Some officers and bystanders rushed
Beijing is continuing to commit genocide and crimes against humanity against Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities in its western Xinjiang province, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said in a report published on Monday, ahead of his planned visit to China this week. The State Department’s annual human rights report, which documents abuses recorded all over the world during the previous calendar year, repeated language from previous years on the treatment of Muslims in Xinjiang, but the publication raises the issue ahead of delicate talks, including on the war in Ukraine and global trade, between the top U.S. diplomat and Chinese