Gunmen killed more than 70 people at a gold mining site near South Sudan’s capital Juba. Both government forces and opposition groups have been accused. Subsequent violence in Central Equatoria and Jonglei states brought the combined death toll past 130.
The army chief of staff gave soldiers seven days to ‘crush the rebellion.’ The language itself tells a story about how South Sudan’s military views its own citizens.
Gold mining in South Sudan operates in a legal gray zone where artisanal miners, armed groups, and sometimes uniformed soldiers compete for control of sites that produce minerals eventually absorbed into the global supply chain. The gold that leaves these mines does not carry the blood on it. By the time it reaches a refinery in Dubai or Zurich, it is just gold.
South Sudan has been in a state of perpetual crisis since gaining independence in 2011. Civil war, famine, displacement — the cycle is familiar enough that international media has largely stopped covering it. A massacre of 70 people at a mine registers as local news, if it registers at all.
But resource conflicts over gold, cobalt, and rare earth minerals in Africa are not local stories. They are previews of the global resource wars that climate change and technological demand are making inevitable. The violence in South Sudan’s gold mines is what happens when valuable resources exist in places where the rule of law does not.
One hundred and thirty dead. The gold keeps flowing.
