Gold rush hits Vietnam province

Gold rush hits Vietnam province

HANOI (DPA): As many as 30,000 illegal gold miners have flooded into a central Vietnam province recently, causing extensive environmental damage to a region inhabited by ethnic minority groups, officials said on Saturday.

Quang Tri province's Vinh Linh district is being overwhelmed by itinerant miners from mainly northern provinces in what local police are describing as a "complicated and serious" situation.

"Mercury has been used in excess during mining, and all the streams in the area have been seriously polluted," said a Vinh Linh district policeman who asked that his name not be used.

"This will leave a long-term effect."

The influx began last month, when stories of a Quang Tri gold find raced through mining communities like wildfire, the policeman said.

"The whole area now looks like it's been bombarded, with craters and wells everywhere."

The officer's ironic description reflects Vinh Linh notorious distinction of having been the most bombed district during the Vietnam War, which ended in communist victory in 1975.

Vast tracts along the border with Laos have been deforested, and the indigenous ethnic minority group in the region, the Van Kieu, have been severely marginalized by the mining activity, he said.

"Given this influx of illegal miners and the accompanying pollution, their lives have been made even worse," the officer said.

The friction comes seven weeks after ethnic minority unrest brought on by land disputes and stoked by religious tension rocked the central highlands 300 kilometers to the south.

Several minority groups there have struggled to cope with recent massive migrations of lowland Vietnamese and other minorities into the highlands who were said to be encroaching on ancestral lands.

Civilian and military authorities are combining forces in Quang Tri "to drive the miners from the locality," the officer said.

"If we don't make preemptive efforts, troubles will inevitably arise, just as they did in Nghe An."

Over 100,000 people swarmed into neighboring Nghe An province in the mid-1990s in a mad rush for gemstones discovered there.