http://www.malaya.com.ph/jul26/metro4.htm

CANADIAN mining firm Toronto Ventures Inc. Resource Development Phils. Inc. (TVIRD) yesterday said it had nothing to do with the demolition of a house of a small-scale mining couple in its mining site in Barangay Canatuan, Siocon, Zamboanga del Norte.

Rocky Dimaculangan, TVIRD public affairs director, said it was the Siocon Subanon Association Inc. (SSAI), the legal representative of the Subanon indigenous people ancestral domain title holders in Canatuan, which dismantled on June 22 the “unoccupied shanty of a holdover small-scale miner couple.”

He said the couple had refused to leave TVIRD’s Canatuan project area.
He said SSAI had negotiations with the couple on safety concerns and had repeatedly requested them to either join the new Subanon community or to vacate the area that their shanty was “unlawfully occupying.”

Anti-mining coalition Alyansa Tigil Mina (ATM) earlier accused TVIRD of forcibly dismantling and relocating a village of Subanons who are against its mining operations in Siocon. ATM brought the matter to the attention of Malacañang, the Department of Environment and Natural Resources, Commission on Human Rights, Senate and House of Representatives requesting immediate action. It also advised the Canadian embassy of the matter through the help of Canadian NGO MiningWatch Canada.

Dimaculangan said SSAI official Timuay Erdulfo Comisas “mobilized the all-Subanon team that dismantled the shanty of the non-indigenous people (IPs) who were part of the approximately 2,000 household-strong illegal SSM community that mushroomed in Canatuan and the Ancestral Domain in the late ‘90s.”

He said TVIRD has a mineral production sharing agreement (MPSA) which took effect on October 23, 1996 and covers an area of 508 hectares within the 6,523-hectare Subanon Ancestral Domain in Canatuan. He added that the mining firm has an agreement with SSAI for the development of Canatuan.

Dimaculangan said even before TVIRD started actual operations in mid-2004, it had already begun negotiations with around 150 small-scale mining families to relocate them away the mine area for safety reasons. “The families have been offered a ‘disturbance compensation’ that is many times higher than those prescribed by the provincial ordinance governing real properties,” he said, adding that only 30 of the 150 families still remain within the MPSA area.

Dimaculangan said TVIRD Canatuan general manager Yulo Perez had even offered to bring the couple back home to Cagayan de Oro and build a house for them there but the pair allegedly asked for a “deliberately unreasonable figure and refused the offers of both SSAI and TVIRD.

Dimaculangan said that based on reports, the two are being encouraged and supported by the Dipolog-based ATM to continue an anti-TVI campaign. The firm has already requested the National Commission on Indigenous People and the Commission on Human Rights to investigate the matter. – Reinir C. Padua