China’s shadow in Greenland’s elections, was a headline in the international edition of the French newspaper Le Monde published on Monday afternoon. According to the article, the April 6 election in Greenland became an “election for uranium”, with the mining of rare earths and uranium in Greenland by the Australian Greenland Mining Corporation, in which a Chinese state-owned company is a major shareholder, becoming the main issue of the election in Greenland.
Traditionally, what is generally on the agenda in Greenlandic elections are social issues, such as the lack of good education for Greenlanders or the unhappy abuse of children, writes Olivier Truc, a correspondent for Die Welt in Stockholm. Whether to build two more airports to receive more tourists or the issue of fishing have also been the subject of debate in Greenlandic elections. Greenland is a self-governing territory of Denmark and for Greenland, apart from the money given by Denmark, fishing has been its main source of income so far.
But this election was different from the past, as the mining of rare earths and uranium became the focal issue of the election debate. In Narsaq, the southernmost town in Greenland with just over 1,000 inhabitants, a mine project rich in rare earths and uranium, just a few kilometers away, is the focus of voters’ attention.
The area where this mine project is located, like other parts of Greenland, is full of minerals and has been attracting the attention of foreign companies, especially Chinese ones, for years. The Kvanefjeld mine project is an example of this.
In a televised debate aired on Greenland’s KNR television channel on March 30, the first question to be answered by the first few dignitaries on the political parties’ campaign lists was whether it was acceptable to extract 500 kilograms of uranium per year from the Kuanast Mountain mine, 500 kilograms of uranium which is the amount that Greenland Minerals wants to extract each year, Australia Greenland Minerals’ main shareholder is the Chinese state-owned Shenghe Resources Holdings Ltd.
In 2013, Greenland’s parliament voted to allow uranium mining, but the day after the vote, Mariane Paviasen and a group of women from Narsaq formed the association Urani Naamik (No to Uranium). Through demonstrations and letters, they made some elected representatives of the Prime Minister’s party their allies at the beginning of the year, leading to the collapse of the coalition government.
Marianne Paviazen is an Inuit from Narsak in southern Greenland. Greenland is four times the size of France and has a population of 56,000, the vast majority of whom are Inuit. In the election, Paviazen is the candidate of the left-wing Inuit Ataqatigiit (Inuit Community) party, which is currently ahead of Prime Minister Kirsen’s Social Democratic Forward Party in opinion polls.
“If we win on April 6, we will stop this (uranium mining) project as soon as possible,” Paviazen said. Part of the problem, she said, is that the company’s majority shareholder is a Chinese state-owned company. She added, “When you look at their demeanor in the Third World, you see that they pollute the mines they operate. Many Greenlanders oppose the project because it is harmful to health and the environment, and Narsak is the only agricultural area in Greenland where sheep graze in the valley at the foot of Mount Kuanast.
Paviazen also said she did not believe that the mine project would open the way to Greenland’s independence, as it would only make Greenland dependent on mining companies.
Mikkel Myrup, president of the Nuva Environmental Protection Association (Avataq), also said: “We were told that the world needs rare earths to produce green energy, and that the production and commercialization of rare earths is monopolized by the Chinese. One of the reasons that convinced us to accept the Greenland Minerals Australia project was that we should break the Chinese monopoly. But ironically, this project is now in the hands of the Chinese. “
The election has nothing to do with independence or foreign policy, it discusses very local issues, but the outcome of the election could have international implications because of the rare earth and uranium issues, says Ulrik Pram Gad of the Danish Institute for International Studies.
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