Wasting the Nation.indd - Groundwork

Chapter 4: The toxic cradle of productionto indigenous people, North or South, without capitalist property rights. The term‘sacrifice area’, reports mining activist and researcher Roger Moody, 63 was first officiallyattached to the Four Corners region of the US Midwest by the US Academy of Sciencein 1973, after it had been trashed by uranium, coal, oil and gas mining. In July 1979,a tailings dam in the area burst to release 1,100 tons 64 of milling waste and nearly 100million gallons 65 of radio-active liquids into streams on Native American (Navajo)territory. According to Native American activist Winona La Duke “at least one memberof every Navajo family has likely died from lung cancer and other diseases resultingfrom uranium mining” [quoted by Moody 2007: 127].In Papua New Guinea, Rio Tinto insisted on the right to dump wastes from its verylucrative Panguna mine in Bougainville into a nearby river and so provoked a civilwar:Leased in 1966, when the territory was under Australian control, within sixyears the Panguna mine had become the most commercially successful ofall the company’s operations. Costs were savagely cut by dumping all themine’s wastes (tailings) into the nearby river. By 1988 a few of the Pangunaindigenous landowners, led by a former Rio Tinto mineworker, FrancisOna, demanded US$10 billion compensation for the ruination of theirgardens, forest and waterways. The company jeered at the claim and refusedto negotiate. Ona set up a nucleonic ‘Bougainville Revolutionary Army’,declaring independence from Papua New Guinea. Backed by Australianhelicopter gunships, troops from the mainland invaded the island. In thebloody civil war that ensued up to a fifth of the island’s population (between15,000 and 20,000 villagers, many of them women and children) were todie before peace was reached in early 1998. [Moody 2007: 2]Mines do not only leave physical waste, they also lay waste to the institutions of theirhosts. Greg Lanning and Marti Mueller’s 1979 classic Africa Undermined describes inhistorical detail how mining corporations underdeveloped Africa and intervened tomake state structures in ‘independent states’ its servants.63 Moody is managing editor of the Mines and Communities website at www.minesandcommunities.org.64 The US uses imperial measures: hence ‘tons’ rather than metric ‘tonnes’.65 About 378 million litres.Wasting the Nation - groundWork - 89 -