Gingerly touching the bruises on her forehead, Enkhmaa — a middle-aged mother and illegal gold miner — explains why she is afraid to go out on the street with a green plastic bowl.
Three days earlier, she says, the Mongolian police seized, beat and imprisoned her for wandering too close to a foreign-owned mine. ”They chased after me in a car. When they caught me, they dragged me inside, they hit me on the face, pulled my hair and beat my leg with a truncheon.”
Ogoomor, where Enkhmaa lives, is probably the only town in the world where you can be arrested and beaten by police for possession of a bowl. It is a bizarre side effect of a Mongolian gold rush that is pitting nomadic miners against foreign companies, and raising serious concerns about human rights.
Ogoomor is Mongolia’s Wild West, a dusty, thrown-together town of miners and nomads, tents and wooden shacks, karaoke discos, internet cafes and police cells. From Ulan Bator, it is a seven-hour drive across vast plains inhabited only by a few nomads and their herds of sheep and goats. According to locals, the town did not exist 20 years ago and was only recently given a name. But reports of giant nuggets in the nearby hills have sparked a gold rush that attracted several thousand prospectors — legal and illegal.
The area around Ogoomor has been called a Mongolian El Dorado. The town is located in the Zaamar valley, where geologists estimate there are gold reserves of at least 100 tonnes. At today’s price of $23 000 a kg, that means the land contains $2,3-billion of wealth — more than Mongolia’s entire GDP last year. Russian and local firms have bought up concessions to mine the land. In the nearby hills, their giant draglines clear the top soil, while their screeching dredges sift through the earth, spewing out giant heaps of dirt.
Until recently, thousands of Mongolians scavenged illegally through these mounds for small fragments of gold missed by the giant machines. To pan the dirt, they used green plastic bowls, which they carry on their backs like a shell. This appearance gives them their nickname — ”ninja” — after the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles cartoon.
Many were former nomads, but as the gold rush gathered pace, students, vets and taxi drivers from Ulan Bator joined the ninjas, not just in Ogoomor but in other gold towns across the country. Today, estimates of their numbers range from 30 000 to 100 000. This created a huge black market for gold — most of it thought to be smuggled across Mongolia’s 4 800km border with China.
For years, the ninja were tolerated. With three-quarters of the 2,9-million population living on less than $2 a day, scavenging and small-scale mining were seen as a way to ease poverty and unemployment. But a Russian mining company asked for new security measures last year after thousands of ninja invaded one of its mines, beat the guards, destroyed equipment and stole gold. A huge ditch was dug around the perimeter of the town, troops and police were moved in to beef up security and checkpoints were set up on the roads into the community.
Arbitrary arrests are now common, local people say. ”We live in constant fear of being taken away,” says Amarjargal, a resident of the town for five years. ”We can’t even take a green bowl onto the street or we will be picked up.”
Since the crackdown began last year, the locals guess 500 of the 3 000 residents have been detained. ”The police have taken people younger than 16 and older than 60,” said an elderly woman called Sunjee.
Some of the arrests are legitimately made among the mounds of earth behind the dredges, where the ninja scavenge for flecks of gold. These areas are the property of the Russian concession holders so the ninja are trespassing and stealing.
But the police crackdown has become indiscriminate. Residents say they are pulled from their beds at night, chased as they walk down the street or arrested at checkpoints on scant evidence that they have been scavenging among the waste dumps.
Visitors to Ogoomor have been shocked by the changes, which, they say, run contrary to Mongolia’s reputation as central Asia’s most democratic nation, as well as its nomadic traditions as a barrierless culture.
”Ogoomor has become a concentration camp in the original sense of the word. The authorities enclose and control the local population as the British did in the Boer war,” says Robin Grayson, a geologist who has visited the town more than 20 times.
But this is no black-and-white story of human rights abuses and wealth inequality. Most ninja make $10 to $20 dollars a day — more than policemen or soldiers. Some strike it extremely rich. The town abounds with tales of people who found giant nuggets worth tens of thousands of dollars.
The Russian mining company, Altan Dornod Mongol, says the ninja are organised and controlled by criminal bosses. ”The ninja are a Mongolian social problem. There are whole towns of them with bars and prostitutes. They even use their children to get gold,” said a spokesperson. ”We don’t want to abuse human rights, but we must protect our mine and our workers.”
She acknowledged the police sometimes overstepped the mark with spot-checks of hotels in the middle of the night and beating locals, but said this was nothing to do with the mining company. ”When they get drunk, they sometimes do bad things and use our name,” she said. ”It’s like the Wild West.”
The Centre for Human Rights and Development, a Mongolian NGO, is opposed to the use of troops, barriers and arbitary arrests by police to protect foreign mining interests. ”There are serious human rights violations in Ogoomor,” the group told The Guardian. ”The existing experience shows that mining did not give anything to local communities. On the contrary, it only destroys their livelihoods by degrading the soil and polluting the water.”
The conflict is a result of the changes taking place in one of Asia’s poorest nations. Eight hundred years ago, the armies of Genghis Khan and Kubla Khan created an empire that stretched across central Asia, through the Middle East, all the way to eastern Europe. But in recent centuries, Mongolia has been eclipsed by its two powerful neighbours — China and Russia. With a nomadic culture and population-density of just two people a square mile, this giant but empty country has long looked vulnerable to outside pressure.
The ninja claim they are being victimised by a government that cares more about foreign investment and lucrative concession deals than its own people. Prime Minister Miyeegombo Enkhbold is accused of using excessive force to maintain control.
Oyungerel Tsedevdamba, a pro-democracy activist, said she witnessed ninja families screaming for help as their tents were torn down at the start of the crackdown last year. ”Most human rights abuses happen to local people away from Ulan Bator. Mongolia must not trade off local people’s interests for economic development.”
Mongolia is booming. Thanks to the demand for minerals, particularly from China, its economy is racing forward at a rate of about 7% a year. In Oyu Tolgoi, the Canadian company Ivanhoe will soon open one of the world’s biggest gold and copper mines with deposits estimated at $38-billion.
Once that and other large mines in the Gobi desert start operating, Mongolia’s growth rate is expected to surge to more than 20%. The new wealth is already evident in Ulan Bator. On the streets, Humvees and other luxury four-wheel drives are adding to the increasingly heavy traffic. Silhouettes of cranes fill the skyline. Hilton and at least three other chains have begun projects for five-star hotels.
It is an acceleration of a long-term trend as the former communist-bloc nation embraces globalisation. Old Soviet monuments have been reinvented to fit the capitalist culture. The Lenin museum is now a billiard hall. A statue of Stalin decorates the dance floor of a nightclub.
But there are growing concerns that the mining boom may prove as much a curse as a blessing. Mercury — which is used to separate gold from rock — has polluted many rivers and wells, with potentially deadly consequences.
Nationalists have staged demonstrations outside Parliament in protest against what they see as government selling off the country’s riches to foreign firms. About 40% of the nation’s land has been licensed for exploration.
The World Bank fears mining revenues are not being fairly distributed outside the capital. Arshad Sayed, the bank’s country representative, says Mongolia is at the front end of a miningÂÂ-led boom, but is already showing signs of repeating the mistakes made in other nations that rely too heavily on mineral exports. The currency is appreciating, money is being allocated without due consideration of the country’s long-term needs, and businessmen are increasingly complaining about corruption.
”Mongolia is already heading down the wrong path seen in much of Africa and other countries that are resource-rich,” says Sayad.
Compared with other developing nations, he says, Mongolia still rates highly in terms of transparency and governance. But he finds the reports from Zaamar disturbing. ”There are issues of safety, but it would be a travesty if mining areas were to be made into military prisons.”
In Ogoomor, most of the ninja have been driven away. The few who remain — mostly women — say they would like to work legally for the Russian mine. But until that is possible, they want to be allowed to use their plastic bowls again.
”Two-thirds of the heads of household here are women. We have to search for gold on the waste dumps so that we can raise our children,” says Tsetsgee, a resident who has been arrested five or six times. ”We are just trying to make a living in difficult conditions.” — Â