Niels Madsen, Inuit Founder of the 16th Union, Appeals For Help Against Greenlandic Government
The 16 August Union is a small miner’s association of Fair Trade ruby and gemstone prospectors in Greenland, and our supporters. We need your help.
The Greenland Bureau of Minerals and Petroleum (BMP) recently enforced a set of completely NEW RULES to govern community and small mining activities. The NEW RULES were enacted without any comment or support from the local communities or from our friends in the world.
We wasted our precious time reviewing a completely bogus set of rules they sent us to comment on. For generations, native Greenlanders have been free to prospect and mine gemstones in the traditional handmining manner, guaranteed by our Constitution as Section 32. No problem.
Then a Canadian mining company came in and kicked us off village lands while we were looking for ruby. Now, the BMP’s new rules deny us our rights to the land and to our livelihood. They now say that we can only collect and sell worthless minerals.
We can no longer collect and sell Ruby, Sapphire, Diamond, Chrysoberyl, Emerald, Opal and Pearl’s from the sea. Or even collect other minerals in Groups more than two (2) persons! We usually go out with our large families so their rules are anti-family. We need your help !!!
Basically, the NEW RULES treats us like we are a major mining company with lots of money and lawyers, and we are just people, living from day to day, trying to get by with our rocks.
The NEW RULES were approved in secret in March 2009 by the BMP, not by our Home Rule Parliament. Instead, the NEW RULES were approved by the ignorant Greenlandic Government and the Danish Minister of Energy !!!
Denmark is our former colonial master and still controls the show here in Greenland as far as shipping off the wealth from our natural resources, without any form of royalties paid by foreigners.
The NEW RULES are complex and unclear, over 55 pages of rules, regulations, and application forms. BMP is scared to print the rules in English because they know the world will not like the way they are treating us.
They now talk about conditional permission with personal exclusivity but we don’t like that since we all own the land together, and we cannot buy land here in Greenland, but have a common right of use (!?). That’s the Inuit Way. Now the BMP tells us we need an exploration license and then we need an exploitation license just to do what we have always been doing.
If they choose to give us the exploration license, maybe we can only explore for two years. Then we would have to document feasibility and justify an exploitation license for thirty years. We have to apply for exploitation before the last day of the exploration.
The BMP will now charge us a fee of 1,000 DKK (US$ 200) just to apply for the exploration license. Then they want another 5,000 DKK (US$ 1000) for the exploitation license. But, in the new rules they have hidden a number of other expenses like feasibility reports, drilling and closed environment accounts.
We also have to payback any of BMP’s expenses (!?) on top of their other fees, and can thereby be ruined, or be in a situation comparable to bankruptcy, which we are not allowed, even if we have valuable stones picked up on the surface at no expense!
The BMP says they will take three (3) months for them to decide on our application and that they can then arbitrarily decide if all, or if only part, of our application will be approved, and if none of us, one of us, or more than one of us can get out on our own shared land.
Land where we have freely hunted and fished and prospected in the past. BMP can at any time announce that an area is closed to us, or place special procedures on us they won’t tell us about now. They tell us we can have five areas under license but they can take them away from us at any time.
Here is what makes us really mad: The BMP tells us they will be closed for July and August !!! These are the summer months in the Arctic, precisely when we need them most, precisely when we go out looking to mine our gemstones.
They are closed, and we still have to pay them their application fees. With their three-month delay on applications, and summer closure, they just took away an entire year of our lives, in competition with international big scale mining.
The BMP now says we will need extra permits for our friends and helpers and that only nine people can be there at one time. We also need extra permits for the tools we normally use for our own safety. We can’t use “advanced navigation equipment” (Telephones with GPS), and that is stupid because we need GPS for safety reasons. They even want us to tell where we intend go to the bathroom !!!
Another thing that is really scary is that BMP says they can take any samples they want from us. They can take our best gemstones !!! That’s stealing.
We have to write them long reports and keep it confidential for five years, but they don’t have to be quiet and they can say whatever they want to big mining companies that are competing with the natives.
Our long reports have to have declarations and intentions and feasibility and such, and if they don’t like our reports they can take our license away, and there’s nothing we can do. They want us to pay for some kind of insurance. Then they will charge us whatever they decide their expenses are for handling our case. More money we don’t have !!!
BMP wants us to tell them the value of every mineral we have, but it doesn’t tell us exactly how to do that, and value all depends on selling and they won’t let us sell our gemstones !!!
The 16 August Union of Greenland needs your help NOW !!! We want to join the Association for Responsible Mining (ARM), and we want ARM to help us keep our native rights to the land. Please contact the BMP and tell them to stop hurting us.
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Niels Madsen
16 August Union
Nuuk, Greenland
