‘’We’ll shed our blood, but we won’t allow to destroy our village," the residents of the village of Ieli said, responding to a journalist's request to explain the causes of the incident in which hundreds of people stormed buildings of the US-Chinese gold mining company Optical Systems Inc and staged a riot there. According to the company’s legal adviser Irakli Gwiliya, a group of villagers "damaged all the equipment, beat experts, destroyed a camp field, damaged expensive machinery, as well as destroyed extracted resources." The reason for the attack was "deliberate disinformation that Optical Systems Inc uses toxic life-threatening chemicals when extracting gold.’’
Some employees actually worked with respirators in the field, but only in very dusty areas. This is normal during mining work. But such explanations don’t calm down the local residents, who are Svans. They say that investors are eager to receive excess profits, not thinking about the environmental dangers of the methods that are used in the process of gold extraction. The Ieltsi were especially angered by the secrecy of the actions of Optical Systems Inc. Construction and excavation equipment was brought to the village under cover of darkness, several tunnels were dug in vicinities of Ieli very intensively. At the same time, mined ore was not taken away and processed on site with the help of certain chemicals. "Toxic substances were brought by special machines. The names of those substances were first erased from barrels," the villagers say.
An expert at Optical Systems Inc, the geologist Galdava Badri, who worked at the site during that time, said that no chemicals were used, and the ore was washed with water only. "Extracted gold in Svaneti was a mechanical mixture in the sand. Cyanide and other acids are not used for its processing because this gold is easier to be processed. There is no such uranium ore in Georgia, in the Transcaucasus, in the Caucasus, or thousands kilometers from us,’’ the geologist said, responding to persistent rumors about the search for radioactive substances in the Georgian mountains.
But such explanations won’t calm down anxious people. "Experts told us that special chemicals are necessary for processing similar ore and extraction of gold from it because there are very small grains of gold,’’ a villager of Ieli, Vakhtang Mushkudiani, said without naming the specialists who shared this valuable information with the highlanders. "Who can guarantee that poisons won’t appear in the river?’’ Mushkudiani added. Our dwelling houses are located 50 meters from the place of work. They dug a 12-meter pit and left them uncovered. Children can easily fall into the pit. Therefore they won’t set their feet in here again,’’ the resident warned investors and workers employed by them.
According to ‘Vestnik Kavkaza’, Optical Systems Inc offered high-paying jobs to all residents of the village if only they do not interfere in the exploration and production of gold ore, but a significant (and the most active) part of the Svans refused, giving their preference to ‘children's health and the purity of nature’.
The Chinese-American company has a license issued by the Ministry of Environmental Protection and other documents, which are necessary for work in gold mining. The head of the company, Lin Ma, stressed that Optical Systems Inc received authorization to work in Georgia in 2005 for 15 years in order to realize a number of successful and mutually beneficial projects." They involve substantial transfers to the budget and new jobs. In the village of Ieli investors carried out and implemented several charitable projects. However, the villagers threatened "to lean over backwards to prevent the return of the poisoners."
The Georgian authorities faced a difficult choice: to accept the situation is fraught for them with a claim to international arbitration due to breach of the investment agreement and huge fines. Lawyers of Optical Systems Inc made it clear that an action will be filed if the government does not provide work safety and force the villagers to retreat. And the worst thing is not even the penalties under the contract and the license, but the deterioration of the investment status of Georgia. The country is vitally interested in attracting Chinese and US investments. But if Washington and Beijing decide to defend their own interests they may suspend other investment projects in various sectors.
However, it is more dangerous to oppose the Svans (Mountain Georgians). This warlike community has made the government refuse to sign an extremely profitable contract for the construction of a new power plant on the Enguri River with a capacity of 700 MW, which is capable of providing the whole of Georgia and a number of Turkey's eastern regions with cheap electricity. However, the contract with the investor was not concluded in 2014. It was not about the environment, but about the unwillingness of several villages’ residents to move to other regions in order to vacate for the construction of hydroelectric dams.
As for the case of ‘toxic gold’, the government is maintaining a deathly silence. Apparently, top officials are now discussing which of the two evils is the greater.
Photo: LiveJournal / dementievski
