People Protest Against Plunder Of Public Property In Eastern Europe
By Countercurrents.org
01 October, 2013
Countercurrents.org
Plunder of public property is rampant around the world. Countries in east and central Europe are no exceptions. People are protesting there. The plunder and protest are being told in the following stories:
Marches against gold mine
Eugen David, former miner turned farmer and inhabitant of Rosia Montana, addresses protesters in Piata Universitatii in Bucharest . Credit: Claudia Ciobanu/IPS.
In the report provided by IPS [1], Claudia Ciobanu writes from Bucharest :
Street protests are snowballing in Romania against a Canadian-led gold mining project in the Rosia Montana area in the Apuseni Mountains . More than 20,000 people joined a protest march in Bucharest on Sunday, and thousands in other Romanian cities took to the streets.
The Sunday marches represent the third major countrywide weekend mobilization to oppose the project since Sep. 1. They drew the biggest numbers of participants so far. Smaller numbers of people have been protesting daily in Bucharest , in the western city of Cluj , and in others cities.
The protests erupted after the Romanian government proposed a draft law Aug. 27 that gives extraordinary powers to the project promoter, Rosia Montana Gold Corporation (in which Canadian group Gabriel Resources is the majority stakeholder).
According to the text, the company can relocate people whose homes are on the perimeter of the mine. Additionally, the law asks state authorities to grant the company all necessary permits within set deadlines regardless of national legislation, court rulings or public participation requirements.
Gold Corporation plans to build Europe 's largest gold mine at Rosia Montana to extract 300 tonnes of gold and 1,600 tonnes of silver over 17 years. The operation would involve the destruction of three villages and four mountains.
In all, 12,000 tonnes of cyanide would be used yearly and 13 million tons of mining waste produced each year, according to a project presentation submitted by the company to the Ministry of Environment.
The proposed law is meant to give the project a definitive green light after over 14 years in which Gold Corporation has not been able to secure all necessary permits.
In 2004, the Romanian Academy of Science – the most authoritative scientific body in the country – called for the project to be scrapped because environmental and social costs far outweigh benefits. Apart from environmental risks and displacements, the large-scale mining proposed by Gold Corporation would threaten the cultural heritage in Rosia Montana , a mining area since Roman times.
Hundreds of people in the 3,000-strong village have been opposing the project for years, setting up the NGO Alburnus Maior and successfully battling the corporation and state authorities in courts.
Contributing to the growth in public sympathy for the movement has been the seemingly close alliance between Gold Corporation, politicians across the political spectrum and mainstream media.
Political arch-rivals, such as centre-right President Traian Basescu and Socialist Prime Minister Victor Ponta, have at various points declared themselves in favor of the project.
Most major media outlets in the country have run Gold Corporation advertisements while failing to cover arguments against the exploitation. In a country where corruption is a big feature of public life, this consensus in favor of gold mining at Rosia reeked of backroom deals.
The predominant discourse about Rosia Montana in the public sphere has been that gold mining would create employment and enrich state coffers. According to the most recent agreement between the Romanian government and the company (annexed to the Aug. 27 draft law), Gold Corporation would employ 2,300 people during the two-year construction phase and 900 during the 17 years of exploitation. Over the duration of the operation, the Romanian budget is set to win 2.3 billion dollars while other benefits for the Romanian economy are estimated at 2.9 billion dollars.
The popular mobilization now targets the Parliament, whose vote will effectively decide the fate of Rosia Montana . If the law is approved, even if it is challenged as unconstitutional in the Constitutional Court (the premises for such a procedure exist since a judicial committee in the Senate issued a negative opinion on the draft law), construction could begin immediately, pending the supreme court ruling.
“We cannot tell what will happen with this project, but all that we can say is that we keep fighting, that united we will save Rosia Montana ,” Eugen David, leader of Alburnus Maior told IPS. “We are under siege right now in Rosia Montana , but in the end we will manage to lift it.”
The protests that began on Sep. 1 are remarkably strong for Romania . Since their start, misinformation in the public space has been abundant: the main television channels originally failed to cover the protests despite their size; on Sep. 10, media wrongly announced that the draft law had been rejected by the Senate; and Ponta declared that the project could not go ahead against popular will, only to later express again support for the project.
In spite of this, protesters – who function according to a non-hierarchical structure and have no official leaders – have skillfully kept the public informed and engaged via Facebook. The weekly hours-long marches go through neighborhoods with the goal of spreading the word about opposition to the project and showing that protesters are not hooligans as depicted on TV.
Their strategy seems to have worked since numbers this Sunday were bigger than ever. The first days of mobilization brought mostly youth to the streets, but older participants and youth-parent couples are increasingly visible. After two weeks of well-mannered street actions, police presence on Sunday can be considered symbolic.
“It is very interesting that such a revolt began with a case of protecting the environment, but this is not only about the environment,” Claudiu Craciun, an active participant in the protests, told IPS. “It is also about the right of people to keep their properties, about our duty to safeguard a patrimony that belongs not only to us, but also to the world and to future generations.
“The Rosia Montana case – in which you see legislation custom made to serve the interests of a corporation – highlights some failures of both democratic institutions and of the economic system, capitalism in a broader sense,” Craciun added.
“Rosia Montana is the battle of the present and of the next decades,” the activist said. “It illustrates the end of post-1989 cleavages [communist vs anti-communist, European vs. non-European] and the emergence of new ones. People today confront a corrupted political class backed up by a corporation and a sold out media; and they ask for an improved democratic process, for adding a participatory democracy dimension to traditional democratic mechanisms.”
Occupy Chevron's shale gas bubble
Villagers from Zurawlow protesting in Warsaw . The banner says "Shale gas = the death of farming". Credit: Claudia Ciobanu/IPS.
In another Warsaw datelined report [2] by Claudia Ciobanu writes:
Since Jun. 3, inhabitants of the village Zurawlow in Grabowiec district in southeastern Poland have been occupying a field in their locality where the U.S. company Chevron plans to drill for shale gas. The farmers' resistance is just the latest blow to shale gas proponents in the country.
Chevron, one of the world's top five publicly owned oil and gas companies (the so-called “Big Oil”), owns four out of the 108 concessions for exploration for unconventional gas currently awarded by Poland (data from Jul. 1, 2013).
Over the past years, Poland has been perceived as one of Europe 's most promising locations for shale exploration. The U.S. government's Energy Information Administration estimated two years ago that the country holds 187 trillion cubic feet shale gas resources, 44 trillion of which are in the Lubin Basin where Zurawlow lies. This year, the body revised those estimates downwards, to 148 trillion cubic feet for the country and nine trillion for the Lubin region, after applying tighter methodology.
Given Poland's annual gas consumption (currently over 600 billion cubic feet annually), the original EIA estimate has been translated to mean that shale gas resources would be enough to meet the country's needs for 300 years, a figure often quoted by media and politicians.
The Polish centre-right government headed by Prime Minister Donald Tusk has been depicting shale gas as a way to both reduce Poland 's dependency on Russian gas imports (two-thirds of Polish gas demand is covered from Russian imports) and to make a transition away from dirty coal, which at the moment covers 60 percent of energy demand in the country.
Past the political rhetoric, facts on the ground are less rosy. Despite around 40 wells being drilled in the country since 2010 (including by Halliburton contracted by Polish state company PGNiG S.A. ), no company has to date announced that it can extract gas for commercial purposes.
Over the past year, ExxonMobil and two other companies, Marathon Oil and Talisman, announced they would withdraw from Poland , doubting the gains they could make. The government appears to be in damage control mode, telling international media that Exxon still holds on to one out of six concessions and that Marathon has not yet submitted official requests to pull out.
Tusk's team is also working on legislative changes to make the companies' lives easier: in addition to tax breaks until 2020, firms would have the possibility to turn exploration licences into production licences automatically as well as to increase the depth of drilling without extra permits.
Yet the shale gas lobby thinks changes do not go far enough. According to the Polish Exploration and Production Industry Organisation (OPPPW), clearer wording is needed to ensure those who explore can automatically exploit (without the fields being put up for tender if gas is discovered), longer exploration permits are necessary, and too big a role is envisaged for a state company which is planned by Poland to have a stake in all exploitations.
“OPPPW members all wish to progress their projects in Poland ,” Marcin Zieba, the industry group's executive director told IPS. “But, as demonstrated by ExxonMobil, Talisman and Marathon stopping their operations. They can change their minds. We have yet to see a project in Poland that has demonstrated commercial flow rates – so this activity remains high risk, with no guarantee of success.”
Meanwhile, local opposition to fracking (pumping water and chemicals into the underground to release gas from rocks) is posing unexpectedly strong obstacles.
In 2012 already, Chevron had to stop operations in Zurawlow because locals successfully argued in courts that the company's operations at the time were breaching the EU Birds Directive.
The occupation this year started when the company renewed attempts to begin work, beginning with trying to fence off one area. Protesters say that Chevron is treating the concession like private property while according to them “the concession was awarded for public purposes – searching for hydrocarbons – and activities in the area must be conducted with the knowledge and acceptance of society.”
In a controversy that might be telling of the murkiness of the Polish legislative framework, villagers argue that while Chevron has the concession, it has not received supplementary approvals from local authorities to do anything more than seismic testing in the region. Chevron retorts that they do have all necessary approvals.
In a response to protesters, the ministry of environment says the right to build (including wells) on the concession land must be further regulated by state authorities and does not derive automatically from the concession.
The legalistic battle, however, is just a facet of the fundamental conflict between villagers and Chevron: in the predominantly farming area of Zurawlow, people fear fracking will forever destroy their water and lands, endangering their livelihoods.
“If they go ahead with drilling thousands of meters underground, our water will be affected and there will be no more life in our fields,” villager Stefan Jablonski told IPS during a protest in Warsaw last week. “Not to mention that we might end up with no gas and no water too.”
Villagers complain that an assessment of environmental impacts for shale exploration has not been conducted for Zurawlow. According to Polish legislation, state authorities can decide on a case by case basis if such an assessment is required.
Asked to respond to the claims of the protesters by IPS during a press conference Jul. 15, Polish Minister of Environment Marcin Korolec said: “Shale gas constitutes an enormous opportunity for Poland . The majority of environmental issues are extremely emotional, as we see with the people of Zurawlow, but we have to keep our route and realize our policy.”
“Unfortunately, our ministry of environment is behaving like a representative of companies,” Agnieszka Grzybek from the Polish Green Party told IPS. “In the legislative pack discussed at the moment, there is a proposal that says that new NGOs cannot send comments and engage in the debate unless they have existed for more than a year. This would effectively exclude groups like the farmers from Zurawlow from having a say on shale gas.”
Source:
[1] IPS, Sept. 17, 2013 , “Street Power Takes On Gold”, http://www.ipsnews.net/2013/09/street-power-takes-on-gold/
[2] IPS, July 24, 2013 , “ Poland 's Shale Gas Bubble Bursting'”, http://www.ipsnews.net/2013/07/polands-shale-gas-bubble-bursting/
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