To be candid the story originates in 1981 an American launched a mining venture, a cyanide heap-leach gold project in the state of Colorado. To save expenses, instead of taking necessary precautions, it leached 35 million pounds of cyanide and other toxic tailings into a nearby watershed.
When it became known, the Colorado State government stop the operation in 1991 and the US Government launched a $150 million lawsuit against him. He declared his company bankrupts and fled the country to Canada where he already had connections and is now a respectable gentleman of Vancouver. Soon he got his chance with Golden Star Resource at Omai on the Essequibo river in Guyana. Using the same strategy, he leached 3 billion liters of cyanide-laced mine tailings into the river, not only poisoning all life including fish stocks but also ruining Guyana’s farmlands. Knowing this disastrous act would soon be uproar, his company fled after garnering a huge profit. Although labeled as the worst environmental disaster in Latin America, he escaped legal action by cunning.
Then in Labrador (Canada), his company, Diamond Field Resources, struck a huge base nickel deposit in the native territory of Innu and Inuit (the outside world known them as Eskimos) where he become the biggest shareholder in the world’s largest deposit of nickel.
Soon he turned his attention to Asia and the Pacific and targeted the authoritarian regimes in Indonesia (under Suharto), Vietnam, China and Burma. This time his financial vehicles were Indochina Goldfields and Ivanhoe Capital Corp (ICC). He was helped by an expatriate Burmese businessman, Reggie T. Maung, now is a Senior Vice President of Ivanhoe Myanmar Holdings second only to him. T Maung connected him with Tay Za, a tycoon who became rich through his connections to the military government via Than Shwe the evil genius and the Junta’s supremo.5
During the Junta administration widespread forced labor was routinely used in building of infrastructure in areas around the mines. Open pit, heap leach mining is prone at the best of times to be a dirty business, especially when regulations are weak. Open-pit mining involves clearing standing vegetation and forests, diverting drainage systems, disrupting drainage patterns and destabilizing topography, causing mountains to collapse.6
That is the sole reason of why the people of Burma together with the monks are protesting and demonstrating.
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