Thousands protest against Alamos Gold Mining in Çanakkale

           AUGUST 7st 2019

By Patryk Krych | The World Daily

Protests Over Alamos Mining Sites Potential Environmental Hazards

Alamos Gold, the Canadian-based intermediate gold producer has already pre-paid for the reforestation at its project involving mining in Western Turkey, according to its chief executive who had spoken to, and told Reuters. The talk came among a time of growing spite and uncertainty towards the industry, additionally denying the possibility that cyanide could leak out into the environment as feared by the majority of protesters.

On Monday in the Canakkale province, a protest was staged by Turks and opposition lawmakers numbering somewhere in the thousands. The protestors stood against what they stated they believed would be mass pollution and environmental degradation caused by the Alamos project, having said that the firm had ended up cutting down more trees than it had declared it would, and feared its potential use of cyanide, which they claimed would contaminate water in the region.

Late on Tuesday during an interview with the Alamos CEO John McCluskey in Ankara, he’d stated that the protests against his company’s project near the town of Kirazli were nothing more than “misinformation” of the politically-motivated kind.

McCluskey said  that “We’ve already paid for it. What you have to appreciate is that as part of the forestry permit, we have paid about $5 million for those permits. A big component of that fee is to pay for reforestation,” further adding that only government authorities were allowed to cut trees, not the company. The area at the site now massively stripped of its trees would begin to return to its previous state after the six years envisaged for the project, he said. “In six and a half years, the whole focus of this area will be to replant. And in a decade, maybe a bit more than that, it will look like a forest again.”

The project’s critics and opponents have expressed certain fears regarding the mine’s use of cyanide, and how it will bring about harm to the surrounding ecological structure of the woodlands and in the process lead to the contamination of the soils, as well as the waters residing near the Atikhisar dam within the district.

Cyanide will only be used, however, when working on the final step of the mining process, as a means to extract the gold, confirmed McCluskey, and added that measures had been taken by the company to ensure that there would not be any leaks into the local/nearby environment. “Not only do we make that impossible, if we didn’t make that impossible we shouldn’t even start because by the time you’ve added the cyanide to the process it’s because there is gold there. And if you lose the cyanide, you lose the gold,” he said.

“We have one impervious membrane and underneath that is another impervious membrane. In between the two layers, we have a leak detection system. If it should ever happen, before it gets to the other layer, we’ll know,” McCluskey said in a statement to Reuters during a two-hour interview on the day of the meetings in Ankara. McCluskey said that it was simply not at all possible for the mine to effect the dam, due to the fact that to reach a separate watershed, the mining solution would have to flow uphill.

When directly asked about the uncertainty regarding some of the claims made by the leaders of the protests, McCluskey said that “In order to say something otherwise, they just have to lie.”

Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan’s government have approved many construction projects which had entertained some rather harsh and serious criticism over the course of the years, recollecting some such as the protests in 2013 over a project to demolish Istanbul’s Gezi Park. The protest had gotten to such a point of panic and nationwide anti-government unrest, that a violent security crackdown was swiftly prompted, which led to hundreds of arrests and injuries.

Protests in Ankara against plans to cut down hundreds of trees to build a dorm on a school campus had occurred earlier this year, with students representing the bulk of the protestors. The government said that these projects were supportive in terms of the economy and ought not see as much criticism as they do, having led to a construction boom that put an end to the country’s recession.

After having been asked about the thousands of protesters near Alamos’ mining site, McCluskey said the demonstrations were merely a political attack aimed at creating a moral panic. “It is a very cynical thing to say, but I believe that this whole attack is essentially just an environmental cloak that is being put over what is really a deep political agenda,” McCluskey said. “What I’ve never experienced in the past is where there has been very deliberate misinformation about this project that is being published in an effort to get very rapidly a very emotive social media response.”

By Patryk Krych | The World Daily