Gold Miners Creating Sand Dunes in Jungle

by Warief Djajanto Basorie

Forest, swamp and rivers are major features of this huge island non-Indonesians know as Borneo, located in eastern part of the archipelago. But a trip upriver to a south central area of Kalimantan leads travelers to think they are in a desert in the thick of the jungle.

This "desert" is Aspai, a boom settlement reached by riverboat from the port town of Kumai, Central Kalimantan. A four-hour upstream journey through thick vegetation on the 60-km Sekonyer river brings visitors to an anomaly of nature.

In a clearing on the west bank are sand piles and pits for several hectares around. The place is dotted with makeshift wooden shacks, which house the people who come to Aspai. They come from as far as Sumatra and Java. They come for gold.

Sukerto hails from Madura, an island off East Java. Although he has been in Aspai for just seven months, his weather-beaten, wrinkled coffee-black skin, and blood-shot eyes betray the toughness of his toil.

He is in a six-man team of diggers in one sand pit 10 meters deep and 20 meters wide. When the prospectors exhaust the gold in one hole, they start another pit.

The whole of Aspai is strewn with perhaps a dozen pits. And Aspai is just one of nine scattered sites with some 2,000 to 3,000 prospectors all in all, along the Sekonyer.

Sukerto's team pumps water from the river. Through a long hose driven into the ground, which over the months has become a pit, the pump-driven water shoots out sand from beneath the surface.

The surging sand and water are directed down a 3-meter high carpeted slide at the pit's rim. The sand and water run off the length of the slide, but grains of gold and other dirt are caught in the carpet's fibre.

Before the day is out, the material caught in the carpet is rinsed onto a metallic pan, then mixed with mercury. The quicksilver bonds with the grains of gold, leaving out the dirt.

"We can get about three grams of gold a day," Sukerto says, drawing on a cigarette while taking a break. The prospectors can cash in their gold with the local hardware supplier cum grocer who doubles as a gold dealer. Basri, the grocer, says he buys the small miners' gold for 60,000 rupiah ($8) a gram.

He acknowledges it can fetch 65,000 ($8.67) in Pangkalan Bun, the commercial district capital 20 minutes from Kumai. In Jakarta the price was 69,000 rupiah ($9.20) per gram in late December 1998.

To keep track of fluctuating prices, Basri has a phone link, the only phone in Aspai, with the gold merchants in Pangkalan Bun. He also has a satellite dish to monitor world gold prices on the Singapore-based television channel CNBC.

What does Sukerto do with his share? The small, wiry, 40-something man from Madura says he brings his money home to the family he left behind.

In the past seven months he has returned to Madura three times. On his first return, Sukerto took back 1.5 million rupiah ($200). For the second trip, it was 700,000 rupiah ($93). On the third, he brought home 600,000 rupiah ($80).

Sukerto couldn't say how long he will stay. "For as long as I'm still strong," he exclaimed, standing up and stretching out his arms to work again.

Although Sukerto and his mates appear physically fit, they know their work is hazardous. In 1997, the sides of another pit collapsed and buried one digger alive.

Gold prospecting here is dangerous not only for humans but also for the environment. In digging for gold, the prospectors turn over the ground. The loss of topsoil nutrients, which create the sand dunes here, almost certainly rules out the possible re-greening of the area.

Another environmental menace stems from the accumulating sand, which gets washed into the river and causes siltation. The river is a dull brown, a sign that loose earth is spoiling it.

One other peril is residual mercury after it is separated from the gold by heat. When not handled properly, some of this quicksilver liquid winds up in the river.

It contaminates the water, making it dangerous for fish, wildlife and human beings who come into contact with the quicksilver liquid. The red around Sukerto's pupils is telling.

Another environmental problem is the expansion of the gold miners' activity into the northern part of a protected area on the mining sites' border: the 1 million acre Tanjung Puting national park.

"Their mining is without permits. But it is difficult to enforce the law," says Budiman, a park ranger.

The authorities have confiscated the miners' equipment and evicted them, but they keep returning, Budiman explains. He agrees that Indonesia's economic crisis would only draw more prospectors.

But for the numerous Sukertos, it is a no-win situation: They don't dig, they succumb to the crisis. They dig, a cave-in or mercury contamination can harm or kill them.