These days, even if gold prices are down a bit from recent highs, it’s hard to find a trinket that doesn’t swallow the paycheck. Now there’s something else you have to consider: it could be dripping in blood.
As 2013 draws to a close, gold is at the end of a 13-year price party that has powered a burst of exploration and gold mine development on every continent except Antarctica. It has also driven some of the world’s most brutal mining practices, as armed militias enslave whole populations, driving them to mine at the point of a gun. In the circles that monitor such activity, a phrase has emerged that should send fear into the hearts of miners and bullion dealers: blood gold.
According to the Washington, D.C.-based Enough Project, the infamous M23 rebel group is still mining conflict gold in the Democratic Republic of Congo, despite the surrender of its leader, Bosco Ntaganda, to war crimes investigators in The Hague this year.
The M23 and other armed groups in the Congo’s goldfields smuggle gold to Uganda and Burundi, where they sell it to international buyers. The gold flow out of Congo is about $500 million a year. This illicit gold joins another $2 billion worth from South Africa, where criminal syndicates employ miners in unsafe, often hellish conditions, paying them a pittance to loot the country’s gold mines. Some of the miners are forced to live underground in the furnace-like labyrinth of the deep mines for such long periods that, deprived of sunlight, their skin turns gray. In South Africa they call them “ghost miners.”