Dark Forest, Liberia---Peter Kollie was digging for gold in the forests of southeastern Liberia when the deep shaft he had carved out of the earth collapsed, turning into a dark, airless tomb.
But that was a risk the 20-year-old, like thousands of desperate and impoverished young men working the illegal gold-mining camps of the border region by Ivory Coast, had been prepared to take.
"In such cases there is nothing we can do. We leave the body there and abandon the area for a while," Lomax Saydee, a fellow miner and youth welfare volunteer, told AFP a few days after Kollie's death.
"After a certain period of time we go back and re-open the place and generally in that case you discover a huge quantity of gold in the area where the person died underground.
"So it is like you are digging your own grave sometimes, because if it closes on you no one can help you."
Kollie had been working in the Dark Forest, in the heart of Grand Gedeh County, where Liberia's unofficial alluvial gold sector is a booming but poorly regulated business.
Boys aged from seven or eight toil alongside men in their 30s in expansive open pits, digging into narrow shafts which drop as far as 100 metres (330 feet) to gold seams from where ore is lifted to the surface in baskets on ropes.
"Fatalities from tunnel collapses are not uncommon," said a 2012 report by the United Nations Panel of Experts on Liberia.
The miners -- mostly Liberians but also former fighters fleeing political violence in Ivory Coast -- live under vast encampments of tarpaulin, cooking bush meat on open fires.
- Widespread drug abuse -
The more remote camps lack basic services and are overcrowded, putting their inhabitants at risk of waterborne infections.
Drug abuse is "widespread," according to the UN panel, which has voiced concern about the "potential threat to border security that these itinerant and disaffected young men pose".
The government says it appraised 416.5 kilogrammes (920 pounds) of gold valued at $16.5 million for export in the first nine months of 2013, although industry sources estimate the real annual production is likely to be closer to 3,000 kilos.
The government sees little of those revenues -- about $500,000 in 2013 -- but it is the miners who really lose out, sometimes making a few dollars in a day and often nothing at all.
Meanwhile, legitimate brokers complain the market has become increasingly dominated by illegal traders and their agents from Mauritania, Senegal, The Gambia and Mali.
AFP
