WORLD> Africa
Kids working in African gold mines
(Agencies)
Updated: 2008-08-11 10:16

The AP watched buyers take the Post-It notes upstairs to Traore's office, where dirty curtains cover the windows. There the 50-year-old bearded man chews kola nuts while a TV flashes the price of gold on the world market.

Traore's men pay the buyers from a safe stacked with West African francs and US dollars. The price for gold from Tenkoto is US$22.40 a gram - about US$3.40 more than the buyers paid the miners. A courier making a typical delivery of one kilogram receives US$22,400, of which US$3,400 is profit.

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The buyers head back to the mine with their hidden pockets full of cash to buy more gold. The pattern is repeated over and over at bush mines where children work all over West Africa.

Children travel from mine to mine, moving with the gold. Six months after Saliou and his friends arrived in Tenkoto, their boss decided the mine was nearly played out. So he and the boys walked for more than a week, crossed the Senegal border, and arrived at another mine in Hamdalaye, Mali. There, the gold the boys mine is sold to a different buyer. The gold then makes the same journey by motorcycle to Bamako, this time to another of the five main traders, Sadou Diallo.

The traders, in turn, send the uneven gold bars by courier across Bamako's clogged roads to a wretched orange building. Inside, the couriers head for Room 207.

The walls are stained with handprints, the hallway smells faintly of urine, and drapes dark with dirt block out the light. The filth obscures the fact that millions of dollars course through the office of Abou Ba.

In Mali and Senegal, there are hundreds of itinerant gold buyers and five major gold traders. But there is only one man with the paperwork, money and connections to make a business of exporting bush gold to Europe. An AP review of five years of Malian customs documents confirms that only Ba regularly takes bush gold out of the country.

All five traders said they sell all their gold to Ba, also known as Bah.

"He has the means to take it out. We don't," said Fabou Traore, who sells roughly 80 kilograms (about 2,570 ounces) of gold to Ba per month.

"For a long time, he's worked with the white people," said Sadou Diallo, who showed a recent receipt from Ba for US$194,000 worth of gold.

"There is no choice," said Fantamadi Traore.

Taking gold out of Mali is expensive. Government monitors assay the gold and charge US$11 per kilogram, and a 6 percent tax is added at the airport. From the bush to the world market, an ounce of pure gold increases in price by about US$380, a margin that strains each middleman along the route.

In an interview, Ba acknowledged that all his gold comes from bush mines, including from the Tenkoto and Hamdalaye mines where The AP saw Saliou and many other children working.

Asked about child labor, Ba got testy. "We don't live in the bush, so we have nothing to do with child labor," the 50-year-old trader said, the comment translated from his native French. He has never visited the mines, he added. "We just buy gold."

Ba told the AP that nearly all of the gold he buys is exported to Switzerland. Later, one of his Swiss customers presented a written statement from Ba saying he sells 90 percent of his gold to buyers in other West African countries. Mali customs logs, however, have no record of such exports. When the AP sought clarification, Ba, stood by his original statement.

"We do not work with any African country," he wrote. "All of our merchandise is sold in Switzerland."

Since at least 2003, Ba and his associates have carried bush gold in suitcases and packages to Geneva on commercial flights from the Bamako airport, usually making the trip several times a month.

Mali customs logs show he normally takes three to five kilograms at a time - worth as much as US$86,000 to US$143,000 at today's prices.

"I can assure you that what he declares is only a fraction of what is going out," said inspector Bassirou Keita at the Mali Department of Deeds and Surveying, which oversees tax revenue from mining. "If I am wrong, you can cut off my head and put it on a platter."

In response, Ba wrote: "I make my declarations. I pay my taxes."

The Mali customs records say that between January 2003 and March 2008, Ba exported over 800 kilograms of gold (more than 2,140 troy pounds) to Switzerland. That's roughly the weight of a Volkswagen bug and worth up to US$22 million at today's prices, depending on purity.

In Geneva, Ba said, he drops off the gold bars at a Swiss customs counter inside the international airport.

Once in Switzerland, Ba's gold enters the nebulous world of Swiss banking and precious metals trading, where secrecy is enshrined in both tradition and law. Swiss customs records, like its banking transactions, are confidential.