New book ‘102 Things to Do with a Hole in the Ground‘ spotlights global reclamation projects
Stories of reinvented coal mining regions, regenerated communities and rebuilt ecosystems are told in a new book published this month.
More than 800 people have been killed and over 150,000 others have been displaced since fighting broke out over the Jebel Amer gold mine in North Darfur in January of this year.
Darfur, a region of western Sudan, has suffered ten years of severe humanitarian crises since war broke out between Sudanese government forces and the non-Arab indigenous population in 2003. Ethnic and political forces have driven the conflict throughout most of the decade but increasingly the violence and instability stems from turf wars over gold.
Once united Arab tribes have “turned against each other in the scramble for material wealth. Rebel groups that oppose the government also want the metal.”
The 2012 Darfur death toll as a result of fighting over gold was “more than double” the total number of people killed in other conflicts between tribes, rebels and the army.
More than 200,000 Darfuris have been killed and roughly 2 million have been pushed out of their homes since 2003.
2 Comments
Todd
Work together and share it, use your resources and abilities for good. We are all cousins.
Robert_S_Stewart
This is pathetically shallow and bad reporting.
Sudan was never just a country of quarreling Arab tribes for the past 2000 years. Gold from Sudan was the first ever found, mined and supplied to Cleopatra and Nefertiti 3000 years ago. It came from the Southern part of the country dominated by Black African, Christian Nilotic tribes dating back 2000 years ago to the earliest spread of Coptic Christianity and much earlier.
The gold then spread around the Mediterranean lands and Europe to be the first currencies for most nations. But the country of Sudan is split between Northern Arab Moslems (Khartoum) and Southern Black Nilotic Christians (Juba).
For that reason it formally split in two on July 8th, 2010 following a 40 year civil war, millions dead and thousands of years of genocide from the North. British colonialism of the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan did little to defend or protect the Southerners who dwelled in extreme poverty and deprivation throughout the whole of British rule.
The situation hasn’t changed much today with corruption, disease, poverty and tribal wars amongst black groups now the rule of the day. They were pathetically prepared for independence and the miss-rule continues unabated.
Darfur is still stuck in the Northern half of the country while its population is predominantly Southern, Black and Christian.
For this reason it has been subjected to on-going domination by Khartoum, genocide and murder for the past 2000 years. Did you ever notice the Black slaves in all the Masters paintings of the Lower Nile Egyptians in the London Museums? South Sudanese Nubians.
Someone in the Mining.com editorial department forgot his history lessons. Knowing the details of this history, one can make intelligent differentiations between investing in a gold mine is Sudan (not advisable) against investing in South Sudan.
This is the world’s newest country (Capitol – Juba) with substantial gold, uranium deposits and petroleum reserves that rival Saudi Arabia. See the South Sudan Master Plan (http://www.interopag.com).
While better prospects and more interesting for many reasons, it still takes a strong-willed and adventurous spirit to push back this frontier state mired in a history of blood and excruciating poverty. There is no infrastructure, energy or transport. Government management is deplorably poor.
The only part of Sir Cecil Rhodes Cape Town-to-Cairo Railway that wasn’t completed to access the early found gold mines, was South Sudan. Any white man who ventured into the area 150 years ago was never seen again. All that gold is still sitting in the ground.