Mining protests in the small Romanian town of Carpathian occurred last week. The astonishing part was that there were two simultaneous protests one which lamented the delay to the proposal to develop the largest open cast gold mine in the region, the other which hoped that the mine would never come to be.
Conversely, anti-mining protests have been going on for the last two weeks in all major cities across the nation. A wave of anti-government rallies have marked the protests. Many citizens have even demanded the resignation of President Traian Basescu and Prime Minister Emil Boc over this issue. Falling living conditions and austerity measures have also contributed to the anger of the citizens.
The mine that the Rosia Montana Gold Corporation hopes to develop has the Romanian government as a 19% stake owner. Major stake owner in the project is the Canadian company Gabriel Resources. The project is to use cyanide to mine the 314 tonnes of gold and 1,500 tonnes of silver at the mine.
This has been opposed by the civic rights groups, and environmentalists who feel that this would destroy the Roman gold mines and villages in the area. The local citizens feel otherwise as they say that they live on gold but die of hunger. 300 protesters even collected outside the parliament building in Bucharest waving flags and banners of protest hoping to hurry up the process of giving the mine an environmental permit to operate in the region.
Some residents of Rosia Montana hope that the development of the project will bring in jobs and money to the region despite the loss of three mountain tops and villages that make up Rosia Montana. On the other hand the opposing team says that it wants the government to declare the area as a UNESCO World Heritage site.