Vote to save Rosia Montana

Rosia Montana Gold Corporation (RMGC), majority owned by the Canadian company Gabriel Resources, has been trying for more than a decade to start a gold mining project in Apuseni Mountains, near a village called Rosia Montana. In this area, the gold was extracted for almost 2000 years, in the beginning with the use of small hand tools, and then by the use of open-pit mining. The Romans also extracted gold here, using underground mining; the testimony are the galleries that they built, which lasted until our days. For several years now, RMGC has been making everything possible to convince the locals to leave their houses and lands an go away, so they can cut the mountains into pieces. They invested a lot of money into media campaigns, in order to convince us there's no environmental risk, even though they plan to use cyanide in the gold recovery process, which is then to be disposed in a natural rock-lined tailings dam with the capacity of 245 million tonnes. The company’s decision not to use a synthetic liner is concerning, with experts arguing that rock liners are inefficient in containing hazardous waste leakages.

Sadly, our current Government, who should manage Romania in the interest of Romanians, not only rushes to approve the start of this project, but also gives everything almost for free to this corporation. For this, a special law project was approved by the Government and proposed to the Parliament on August 27, 2013. By reading this law proposal, it's very clear that the people who should work for us, are acting against us, the ordinary people. That law (which looks more like a contract between the state and the corporation) mentions royalty payments of 6% for Romania and a 25% stake in the project. It also includes abuses and violation of fundamental human rights, including the property right (as it includes forced resettlement of people and land grabbing, as well as relocation of churches, and their graveyards) and the right to a clean environment for us and our children; instead, it gives unfair privileges to a private company, owned by foreign investors.

The Justice Ministry gave a negative feedback to this law, because it contradicts several articles from our Constitution, but the Government disregarded his concerns and sent it forward to the Parliament for approval. The Parliament will discuss it in the following weeks, so we have to act really fast and gather as many signatures and send them to the Romanian Parliament, our representatives, so that they know our will. If the parliament will vote this law, everything will be lost: not only several mountains and forests, but also a millenarian heritage left by our ancestors in that land. We are afraid that a terrible accident may happen, similar to the one in 2000 in Baia Mare (a bit to the north, close to the Hungarian border), when a cyanide leak from a facility using similar techniques as the ones proposed by RMGC caused an environmental disaster that destroyed wildlife along Hungary's eastern waterways. Then an entire lake of water contaminated with cyanide will spill, killing everything in it's way, destroying a beautiful land, more fit for tourism than heavy industry, polluting water courses that would eventually get to the Danube, and then the Black Sea. That's why we have to understand this is not only a local issue, but one that can affect us all.

Meanwhile, the greedy guys that started all this, will say they did their best to avoid this and they will take their dirty money and go away, leaving it on us to clean-up all the mess they did. One doesn't have to be a predictor to see this, it happened already (see here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=anmmpAhD3Ig#t=973)

I saw how you react every time human rights are violated, or when a big company walks over the innocent people in order to increase its profit. I'm counting on your help on this matter, in order to stop this irreversible disaster. Thank you!