Cotidianul.ro publică o traducere în engleză a articolului „Roşia Montană, la răscruce”, un reportaj de pe frontul bătăliei pentru aur.
Gold is underground and tension is in the air. People are watchful. It seems that nobody dares to breathe. Visiting children who lunched on meatballs and juice in exchange for saying they supported the mine (which they know nothing about) are the only ones to inject some life into the tense atmosphere in Roşia Montană, as they play on the swings and chase the chickens. Roşia Montană is a small town in the Apuseni Mountains which has been luring gold prospectors for 2,000 years has become one of the most controversial communities in Europe. The company, Roşia Montană Gold Corporation, known as Gold by everyone, has spent half a billion dollars on the project, but does not know what the future is. The town is at a crossroads. Most Romanian journalists, with a few exceptions don’t write anything about the controversy.
The so-called „cream” of the Romanian journalistic community who went on an outing to New Zealand courtesy of the company haven’t bothered to visit Roşia Montană. The only journalists who report from Roşia Montană are foreign correspondents and local reporters who’d give their life for the mining company judging by the way they extol the company’s virtues in print. In recent days there was more tension than usual as the annual Fân Fest (The Hay Festival that celebrates rural traditions in the Apuseni Mountains) got underway. For a rural festival such as this one which attracts thousands of relaxed twenty somethings from all over Romania, (those with no money and no worries), there were a suspiciously high number of luxury cars parked in the town centre. The town has no hotel, no restaurants and just a small pizza parlor. There was no wedding or baptism taking place at any of the town three or four churches as far as was known. Were the people in these luxury cars invited by the company to one of the private clubs they have in houses in the town?
Roşia Montană is rather an odd place. Local authorities refuse to giver permits for small business or enterprises, so people have gone into hiding and there is unofficial business. Children on a pro-mine march wore tee shirts saying. „We want mining.” Asked whether ”Daddy’s a miner?”, the children said their fathers weren’t. „Teacher invited us on an outing and told us that we’d get meatballs and juice.”
The Romanian tradition of handing out meatballs and beer in exchange for votes is being used on children. You vote for a mayor and you get meatballs and beer. „Vote” for a mine and you get meatballs and juice, even if you are only ten. Many locals are wary of saying what they really think to outsiders. A local „moată” (the people in the Apuseni Mountain are known as Moti, pronounced Motz and are known for being honest and uncompromising), a good-natured and dignified woman, keeps cows and pigs in her yard. She admits she is poor but she doesn’t want to sell her house. Her son works at copper mine and is not against mining as such but is afraid is cyanide of houses being knocked down and of forests being cut down. It would be hard to find bucolic and traditional scenes such as the ones on the outskirts of Roşia Montană anywhere else in Europe.
The central square is the battleground for this war that has been raging for 10 years in this divided community. Some want mining, whatever the cost, and others don’t want it at all. People on both sides no longer talk to each other. They almost hate each other. Gold or the promise of gold has brought jobs, but also suspicion, stress, hate and uncertainty.
People who support mining (or have been paid to say they do) and those that imagine and want another kind of future for one of the oldest communities in Europe meet in the central square. The area was full of police and gendarmes during the Hay Festival where police say no arrest were made. Many of the young people were dressed in a hippy style giving the Aupseni Mountain community a slightly cosmopolitan air. The key word in Roşia Montană is „the future”. Gold which has 500 employees (trade unions, mechanics, geologists etc) say that the community’s future should be like its past: mining. If you ask a company supporter about the possibility of an alternative to mining (pottery, textiles, dairy), you are told the only future is mining. It’s like people have been brainwashed and have given up thinking.
An elegantly-dressed lady who works for an association that supports mining tells tourists in Romanian, Hungarian, French or Italian that cyanide is good, that she drinks it every morning in her coffee. She boasts that she’s been to New Zealand where she dunk water and ate tomatoes (the tastiest in the world, she says) near a gold mine that uses cyanide in the extraction process.
Others see things differently. Sorin Jurca, whose eyes are the colour of a summer sky, is perhaps the best known opponent of the mining project. He says the future as envisaged by the company will be the end of the town and it will be a tragedy. Douglas McFarlane, who’s been coming to the Hay Festival for a few years says it straight. „What kind of future is that?, he says in Romanian, with a Scottish accent. ”The project will last for 19 years so a child who is born here no longer has a place to call home when he is grown up,” he adds. „The company is full of lies. It’s now pretending to be a restoration charity, refurbishing old monuments,” he says ironically referring to RMGC’s promises to restore historic monuments in the old town. It’s true, he is an outsider, and some would say he has no right to an opinion, but if we use the same measuring stick, many of Gold’s supporters are company employees and what are they supposed to say?! If you talk to enough people, you meet people who don’t believe in fairy tales and Prince Charming.
A local man, who in his own words is „independent” refused the company’s money. Father Arpad Palfi of the Unitarian Church who has been a priest here for 35 years received an offer to restore the church built in 1796, which urgently needs to be repaired. He refused that offer and other financial offers from the company and is now considered „an enemy.” There’s nothing slimy about this man, who is reed-thin and dry as parched grass. His eyes are green and he looks you straight in the eye. He dresses soberly in dark colours like a Calvinist priest. The money would have been useful for the church and his family, he tells us, but what is more important to him are his independence and being honest and faithful to the church he serves. „They can’t buy me. I have no price”, he says, spoken like a true „motz.” Only then do you understand the spirit of the Apuseni Mountains. It’s more ancient and precious than gold.
