Newmont-owned illegal goldmine provokes murder
by Ustun B. Reinart, August 24, 2002
It is with great sadness that I report to you that the unwanted and illegal Normandy/Newmont goldmine in Bergama, Turkey, has provoked a murder in a village named Pinarkoy near the mine.
On Wednesday, August 22, a family whose members work at the mine attacked the home of 35-year-old Turan Kilinc, who has been active in the resistance against the mine, and shot him dead.
During more than ten years of resistance to the mine, the residents of the 17 villages within a 10 km radius of the mine in the fertile northern Aegean region of Bergama have scrupulously avoided violence. They used the Turkish courts (and won at every level of the court system), and they performed creative and determined acts of civil disobedience.
The Turkish government violated its own laws last spring, by issuing a special permit to the goldmine. Just last week, I visited the region where most villagers were bitterly complaining that Newmont was buying out powerful villagers to break the resistance. Now, enraged and grief stricken, they say the mine is destroying not only their lands but also their communities.
As you know already, Bergama is the site of an ancient Roman city named Pergamon, ironically dedicated to Asclepios, the god of Health. With its olive groves, nut-bearing pines, cotton fields and fig orchards it is - was - a Garden of Eden. Today, the pine-covered hill that rises above the village of Ovacik is a bald wound on the earth. The greenish tailings dam full of cyanide-contaminated mud grows larger every day. And now, a family is mourning a man shot dead in the prime of life.