WARNING: This is Version 1 of my old archive, so Photos will NOT work and many links will NOT work. But you can find articles by searching on the Titles. There is a lot of information in this archive. Use the SEARCH BAR at the top right. Prior to December 2012; I was a pro-Christian type of Conservative. I was unaware of the mass of Jewish lies in history, especially the lies regarding WW2 and Hitler. So in here you will find pro-Jewish and pro-Israel material. I was definitely WRONG about the Boeremag and Janusz Walus. They were for real.
Original Post Date: 2007-12-02 Time: 00:00:00 Posted By: Adriana
The SA mineworkers plan a countrywide strike to ‘protest against the lack of safety in mines’. However, many of these mineworkers are causing these collapses of mineshafts in many cases because of their support of illegal gold-mine ‘pirates’, often young men who are actually slaves, they usually get food and drink and work underground for months on end to hack away inside the tunnels without any regard to safety regulations and then sell the gold-ore to gold-mine pirates. There are hundreds of little goldore smelters all over the townships around the gold-mines. They cause dangerous pollution problems of the water-table as well, pouring the chemical runoff away into the gutters. South African gold contains a high level of uranium.
The entire mining-community is thus involved in utterly destroying South Africa’s goldmines, with many shafts now becoming dangerously unstable. The slave-pirates’ haphazard digging – they are just uneducated youngsters lacking the technical skills – destabilise the shafts, putting thousands of ‘legal’ miners’ lives at risk.
The pirates spend weeks, even months underground, with food, drink and even post ferried to them by runners FROM THE MINEWORKERS’ COMMUNITY.
Clandestine mining reportedly produces about R2-billion ($250-million) of gold a year – but the gold pirates see little of that money. They are practically slaves — believed to be recruited by organised crime rackets that ship most of the gold to Switzerland.
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for instance, read the following story, published on Oct 11 2007:
WELKOM. Thobela Booi arrived in this mining town with hopes of landing a job that would allow him to support his wife and child. He ended up 1 500 metres (5 000 feet) underground, killed by the fumes of a raging fire.
Booi, 30, had been one of hundreds of desperate laborers who risk their lives working in the shadows of illegal mining operations, sneaking in through abandoned or poorly secured shafts and making their way through a warren of interconnecting tunnels to the ore.
South Africa is the world’s largest producer of gold and as the bullion price has risen – and legal mines dig ever deeper to meet the world’s voracious demand – so have the risks these “gold pirates” are prepared to incur in pursuit of the precious metal.
The gold piracy does not only endanger the pirates – known here as “zama-zamas”.
Haphazard digging – the miners often lack technical skills – can destabilise the shafts, putting thousands of legal miners’ lives at risk.
The pirates can spend weeks, even months underground, with food, drink and even post ferried to them by runners.
Clandestine mining reportedly produces about R2-billion ($250-million) of gold a year – but the gold pirates see little of that money. The workers are believed to be recruited by organised crime rackets that ship most of the gold to Switzerland.
The miners, often armed with guns and homemade grenades, have been known to smoke underground and use gas stoves, even in the presence of highly flammable methane gas.
Booi had been missing for six weeks before he was found. His body was one of 25 brought to the surface at No 8 Shaft at the St Helena Gold Mine, outside Welkom, one of the centres of South Africa’s gold mining industry.
The bodies were removed by police from one of the mine’s underground stations three weeks ago. It is believed the miners died from toxic fumes or got caught in a fire that erupted on September 18 and blazed for days at a disused section of the mine, 8 kilometres (5 miles) from the bodies.
They had been left by their colleagues, who made an anonymous phone call to mine security telling them where to find the bodies. Some had stickers giving their names and hometowns.
Booi didn’t have a sticker. His brother had to identify him among the other decomposing bodies.
“I want to know how this happened,” said the brother, Siyabulela Tenge, dazed and angry after seeing Booi’s corpse at the Welkom state mortuary. “How did he go underground?”
Tenge has worked for the Harmony Gold Mining Company, which runs St Helena. He has been underground and knows the hot and dangerous conditions. He says his brother was ill-prepared for the work.
“My brother wasn’t a miner,” he said.
There are several police and mine industry initiatives to tighten security and clamp down on illegal mining.
In late September, Welkom police arrested 120 illegal gold miners as they surfaced, probably fleeing the underground fire.
The pirates mine the ore then extract gold using dangerous mercury, often while still underground or in illegal processing plants hidden in sprawling hostels.
While the number of illegal miners underground at any one time is hard to verify, anecdotal accounts put it as high as 1 000.
The municipality-owned G Hostel, a wasteland of bungalows and sewerage on the outskirts of Welkom, is notorious. It is from there that it is believed miners are recruited for illegal operations.
A day after police raided the hostel, reporters were shown the remnants of the crude processes taking place there – blackened zinc sheets and tin containers in which mercury is burned.
A collection of plastic buckets stood out amid the filth, some with freshly washed silt coating the bottom – in them a glitter of gold dust.
One miner, who would not give his name, described the hell at the heart of the gold pit.
“Sometimes in the mine it is difficult to identify who is working next to you. It’s so dark.” – Sapa-AP
http://www.int.iol.co.za/index.php?click_id=13&set_id=1&art_id=nw20071011184936271C668816
Due to the above-mentioned mining-pirating activities, the future of SA mining does not look very bright. What investors will still be willing to sink new shafts, in spite of the country’s vast underground supplies of, for instance, uranium. It is being estimated that at least 25 new uranium mines will needed by 2020 to keep up with the growing worldwide-demand: (see story with map of SA’s uranium deposits)
http://groups.msn.com/crimebustersofsouthafrica/alertsonhealth.msnw?action=get_message&mview=0&ID_Message=3826&LastModified=4675640900470680127
COPS BATTLE GOLD-PIRATES UNDERGROUND IN SA MINES:
Andrew Quinn Mail & Guardian
15 November 2006 – In a dangerous cat-and-mouse game, South African police are battling armed gangs of gold pirates through dark mine shafts deep underground to stop an illicit gold trade worth more than $700-million (about R5,1-billion) a year.
Assistant Police Commissioner Mike Fryer said the new operation — pitting police against pirate miners in shafts as deep as 2km below the surface — opened a fresh front in South Africa’s war against gold smuggling.
“Our biggest problem is that they were utilising explosives and hand-made grenades to threaten the people underground,” Fryer said. “If one of those goes off in the wrong place, the whole thing could come tumbling down.”
Police have arrested a total of 60 illegal miners in six operations in recent months, often following hair-raising encounters with rogue gold pirates who “hijack” mine shafts.
A series of photographs in Johannesburg’s Star newspaper, which broke the story on Wednesday, showed dust-covered illegal miners and one of their hand-made grenades.
Police explosives expert Joe Meiring, who took part in the operation, said pirates assemble the bombs by sticking explosives in a bottle or a beer can and use iron for shrapnel.
“It can have a trip wire, or they’ll just light it and throw it at you,” he added.
Miners sometimes spent as much as a year in nightmarish underground tunnels without coming back to the surface in order to maximise their takings, Meiring told Reuters.
“There is no fresh air, it can be as hot as 38 degrees Celsius, everything is very compressed and the humidity is extremely high. They work there, they sleep there, they eat there,” he said. “It is hot and dark, and they age very quickly.”
Illegal mining is big business in South Africa, where the Institute of Security Studies estimated in 2001 that mining companies lost as much as 35,6 tonnes of gold per year to the pirates — equivalent to about a 10th of the country’s total gold production.
At current market prices that would be worth more than $700-million.
Fryer said the police began training their underground team after appeals from mine security personnel, who were running into armed panhandlers in dangerous, disused tunnels.
“They actually threw one of their hand-made grenades at security, but nobody was hurt. They were lucky because it was a relatively stable environment … further down the shaft it would have been horrific.”
Meiring said the illegal miners use basic tools such as chisels to prise out the valuable ore, which they then process using grinders and mercury, itself a dangerous process.
The illegal miners survive by buying surreptitious deliveries of food from regular miners at wildly inflated prices and sleep on wooden planks. Some even reportedly have girlfriends living with them deep in the shafts.
Meiring said that along with the danger of grenades and collapsing shafts, police worry the gangs are arming themselves to repel intruders — which could open a bloody new chapter in South Africa’s unfolding underground gold rush.
“About two months ago we caught one of them and he had a handgun, so they’ve definitely got those, and some security guys say they have seen them carrying AK-47s,” he said. — Reuters
http://www.mg.co.za/articlePage.aspx?articleid=290010&area=/breaking_news/breaking_news__business/
Source: http://www.mg.co.za/articlePage.aspx?articleid=290010&area=/breaking_news/breaking_news__business/