| 双语新闻 Bilingual News | 双语对照阅读 分级系列阅读 智能辅助阅读 在线英语学习 |
|
| 双语新闻 Bilingual News | 双语对照阅读 分级系列阅读 智能辅助阅读 在线英语学习 |
| [英文] [中文] [双语对照] [双语交替] [] |
| Read Part One Here. |
| ‘Safety Is Just on Paper’ |
| At first, the changes seemed almost trivial at Tenke Fungurume — a 24-hour operation that employs more than 7,000 across a landscape the size of Los Angeles marked by deep craters and dust kicked up by earth-moving vehicles. |
| The new Chinese managers showed up in shorts and sneakers, a shock to employees who had been required to wear steel-toed boots and safety goggles. |
| “We were like, ‘Oh, this is not possible,’” said Pierrot Kitobo Sambisaya, who worked as a metallurgist at the mine for a decade until 2019 and had grown accustomed to a stricter environment. |
| Soon, work anniversaries came and went with no recognition. Holiday parties where workers’ families were invited to tour the mine no longer took place. Dozens of janitor and driver jobs once held by Congolese citizens went to the Chinese. |
| That was just the start. Employees were concerned that the mine was also becoming more dangerous, according to interviews with workers in communities surrounding the mine, current and former safety inspectors, Congolese government officials and mining executives. |
| Workers climbed into acid tanks to conduct repairs without checking the air quality. Others drove bulldozers and other heavy equipment without training or did dangerous welding jobs without proper oversight. |
| Last year, a worker was sitting in his truck while it was being towed, and it flipped. The worker tried to jump to safety, but the truck landed on him and crushed him to death, according to an annual operations report from China Molybdenum. |
| All of it was an extreme departure from the company’s American predecessor, which had “zero tolerance” for risky activities and safety violations, according to Alfred Kiloko Makeba, the veteran safety supervisor, and 10 other current and former employees, managers and contractors. |
| Freeport-McMoRan, which had built the mine, had learned some hard lessons years before at its copper and gold mine in Indonesia, facing international protest over its dumping toxic mine waste into a river in the rainforest as well as violent conflicts over its operations there. |
| In Congo, the company had its own struggles as it moved to build Tenke Fungurume, displacing more than 1,500 residents in a haphazard process. But once the mine opened, it gained an unusual amount of respect for its commitment to worker safety, both among local officials and U.S. diplomats. |
| Worker safety is an issue at other industrial mines in Congo, but under Freeport, employees who violated rules were immediately disciplined or fired, safety officers said. Records examined by The Times show just one reported death among workers during the eight years Freeport-McMoRan ran the mine, although it repeatedly published accounts of near-fatal accidents as cautionary guides. |
| When safety inspectors discovered violations after China Molybdenum took over, they were sometimes told to overlook them, or offered bribes to do so, workers and supervisors said. And when they did try to enforce the rules, violence sometimes followed. |
| One safety officer said he was thrown to the ground by a worker he had called out for improperly using welding equipment. The man twisted his arm and broke his cellphone and work-issue camera. |
| An executive at Gécamines, the Congolese agency that is a minority shareholder in the mine, said employees had reported confrontations and safety problems to the agency’s board. Safety issues are now part of a broader review of China Molybdenum’s operations. |
| Mr. Zhou, the China Molybdenum spokesman, denied that any inspectors had been assaulted. The allegations, he suggested, were probably being fabricated by fired employees. |
| In a statement to The Times, he said the mine had “a robust occupational health and safety framework in place and continues to exercise its zero tolerance rules.” In fact, he said, “internal statistics” published in a company report this year showed that worker injuries had declined since the company took over. |
| But employees who said they had been repeatedly told not to report injuries believed the data was being fixed as part of a campaign to cover up rising hazards. |
| That suggestion, which The Times was not able to independently confirm and which China Molybdenum disputed, was crystallized for Mr. Makeba one evening last year when he received an urgent phone call. A worker at the mine had fallen from a high perch after not wearing the required safety harness, he said. |
| Mr. Makeba rushed to the site and was shocked to learn, he said, that the worker, who had broken his leg, had been taken to a private clinic instead of the mine’s. |
| Mr. Makeba said the employee told him that his supervisors had paid him to keep quiet so that it would not be reported to management, where it would show up on the company’s audited injury tally. |
| When Mr. Makeba alerted his own boss, he said, he was told to drop the matter. |
| Mr. Zhou rejected Mr. Makeba’s account, adding that “any form of cover-up in disclosures is against rules, and corporate values.” |
| But according to Mr. Makeba and another safety manager still working at the mine, labor conditions have become increasingly important to automakers sensitive to consumer and shareholder demands. So China Molybdenum, they said, has blocked them from reporting near fatalities and routinely ignored other injuries. |
| “Safety is just on paper now,” Mr. Makeba said. |
| Problems at Tenke Fungurume are not just limited to employees’ complaints inside the mine. |
| Freeport-McMoRan had struggled with trespassers who carted off bags of cobalt. Some even died when hand-dug tunnels flooded or collapsed. |
| With China Molybdenum in charge, the conflict became much worse. |
| The company, faced with thousands of newly arriving trespassers, asked the government to send soldiers to help control the situation, one executive who worked at the mine back then told The Times. |
| The military arrived and began patrolling Tenke Fungurume and other local mines, bulldozing depots where trespassers were selling their cobalt rocks to traders. |
| The troops remained for months, and the situation eventually turned deadly. A soldier at Tenke Fungurume opened fire, killing an unauthorized digger, according to an employee who told The Times he had witnessed the encounter. |
| Riots then erupted in the man’s home village when friends arrived carrying his body. In the melee, a protester was shot dead, according to three local officials and the mine employee. |
| China Molybdenum paid for the burials, they said. |
| Troops with AK-47s were posted outside the mine this year, along with security guards hired from a company founded by Erik Prince, the former Navy SEAL turned private security consultant. |
| Even as this crackdown on theft was underway, the new managers at the mine were looking for ways to cut costs while increasing production. |
| China Molybdenum said it had saved more than $130 million a year through its “cost and efficiency” programs. “New management revitalizes the business by bringing ‘Chinese efficiency and Chinese elements,’” the company boasts on its website. |
| The Rush to Expand |
| China Molybdenum is steadily growing its output. Last December, it snatched up Kisanfu, paying Freeport-McMoRan $550 million for what is considered one of the world’s largest untapped supplies of cobalt. The ground underneath the site contains enough cobalt, according to China Molybdenum’s estimates, to power hundreds of millions of long-range Teslas. |
| And then in August, China Molybdenum announced plans to spend $2.5 billion at Tenke Fungurume to double production over the next two years. When the expansion is complete, the mine will produce nearly 40,000 tons a year. Last year, the United States produced just 600 tons. |
| This rush to expand, however, has drawn scrutiny from top government officials in Congo, reaching all the way to Mr. Tshisekedi, the president. |
| Questions have surfaced over payments Tenke Fungurume’s operators may owe to Congo, dating back to when the American company controlled the mine. When new deposits are confirmed at Tenke Fungurume, the owners are required to notify Gécamines, the Congolese agency, and pay $12 for every additional ton. |
| The accusations have provoked a bitter dispute between Congolese officials and the mine managers, with China Molybdenum’s spokesman calling the allegations “unbelievable, wrong calculations” based on an accounting error. |
| Gécamines executives have discussed forcing out the management at Tenke Fungurume or even taking the mine out of China Molybdenum’s control, according to two Congolese mining executives involved in confidential discussions as well as a government official briefed on the talks. |
| Robert North, a New Mexico-based geologist who has helped prepare reserve estimates at the mine for Freeport and China Molybdenum, said both companies as well as Gécamines knew of large amounts of cobalt underground at the site. China Molybdenum has been cautious in declaring it, he said, until the company knows it wants to go to the expense of extracting the deeper layers. |
| Mr. Tshisekedi’s commission is still investigating the allegations, and the president himself recently presided over a tense, six-hour meeting with top company executives. |
| Separately, the Congolese government, with financial assistance from the United States, is examining numerous mining contracts to determine whether Congo has been shortchanged more broadly. While the Chinese-funded infrastructure projects got off to a flashy start, many have not been built, officials said. |
| During a visit to the cobalt-mining region this year, the president acknowledged that corrupt or incompetent government officials in Congo might deserve some blame for deals that have left the nation feeling shortchanged. |
| “Some of our compatriots had badly negotiated the mining contracts,” he said. “I’m very harsh on these investors who come to enrich themselves alone. They come with empty pockets and leave as billionaires.” |
| Chinese government officials insist that the relationship is still on track and that the benefits to Congo are substantial. |
| The countries have a “longstanding friendship, and the bilateral practical cooperation has yielded fruitful win-win results and enjoys broad prospects,” Zhao Lijian, spokesman for China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, said at a news conference in September. |
| In an interview in Kinshasa, Mr. Tshisekedi said that his focus was not on which foreign power would dominate mining in Congo, but rather on how his country could share in the wealth generated by the clean energy revolution. |
| “We have an amazing potential for renewable energy, be it through our strategic metals or through our rivers,” he said, referring to both mining and hydroelectric power. “Our idea is, how can we put this amazing resource at the disposal of the world, but while making sure that it first benefits Congolese and it benefits Africans?” |
OK阅读网 版权所有(C)2017 | 联系我们