Barrick Mining snubs indigenous leaders

BY JEREMT BROWN
Members of Aboriginal communities in Australia, PNG and North America travelled to Canada on May 6 to attend the annual general meeting of Barrick Mining in Toronto.

The meeting, telecast by Fox Media by satellite, allowed time for visitors to voice their concerns to Barrick shareholders but Barrick management pulled the plug on the telecast at the end of the AGM.

The three guests continued to address the meeting, telling shareholders that as a result of Barrick’s unregulated operations on their lands, heavy metal poisoning, land degradation, loss of wildlife species and water pollution were rampant, and human health and human rights were being ignored.

They also accused management and shareholders of ignoring the downstream consequences of mining activities.

‘Barrick Gold has absolutely no respect for our cultural heritage and the very essence of our cultural being is at stake,’ said Neville Williams, a Wiradjuri elder and spokesman of the traditional custodians of Lake Cowal in central NSW.

‘In addition to excavating an unstable open-pit mine on the edge of the lake, Barrick has taken thousands of historically important objects from the mine site.’

Jethro Tulin, a spokesman for a PNG tribal rights group, said Barrick Mines in PNG were a textbook case of what can go wrong when large-scale mining confronts indigenous peoples.

And Larson Bill of the North American Shoshone noted that Canada does not have laws to ensure the activities of Canadian mining companies in developing countries conform to human rights standards ‘ an omission criticised at international forums like UNHCR.

The group is now headed for Ottawa to present submissions to Canada’s Federal Parliament.