national mourning after the country’s worst mining accident at an ArcelorMittal site

Forty-two people died due to an accident at a mine of global steel giant ArcelorMittal in Kazakhstan, according to the latest assessment of the rescuers published Sunday October 29. The tragedy that occurred on Saturday in the Kostenko mine in Karaganda, in the center of the country, is the deadliest mining accident in the history of this Central Asian country since independence from the Soviet Union.

According to an update from the Ministry of Emergency Situations published at 3 p.m. local time (10 a.m. Paris time), “the bodies of forty-two minors were found and four minors were still wanted”, while more than two hundred and fifty miners were underground at the time of the explosion. The chances of finding the four ArcelorMittal group miners still missing alive were almost zero on Sunday.

The announcement of the accident and the number of victims, which adds to a long list of tragedies already occurring at ArcelorMittal’s Kazakh sites, pushed the government to announce an agreement to nationalize the local subsidiary of the global manufacturing giant. steel.

Towards a nationalization of the group’s local subsidiary

Immediately after the accident was announced, the President of Kazakhstan, Kassym-Jomart Tokayev, ordered “end the cooperation” with the group. In the presence of the families of the victims in Karaganda, he described ArcelorMittal as “worst company in the history of Kazakhstan from the point of view of cooperation with the government”.

In the process, the Kazakh government and the steel giant, led by Indian businessman Lakshmi Mittal, announced a preliminary agreement for “transfer ownership of the enterprise in favor of the Republic of Kazakhstan”. The Kazakh subsidiary, ArcelorMittal Temirtau, however, clarified on Sunday that it had signed ” last week “ This agreement.

“Every miner is a hero”

The chances of finding survivors are “very weak”, warned rescuers on Saturday evening, due to the lack of ventilation in the mine, the low autonomy of emergency respirators for miners and the power of the explosion, which spread over 2 kilometers. According to the Ministry of Emergency Situations, the search is complicated by the lack of electricity, the length of the tunnels, some of which are submerged, as well as the destruction of structures.

On Sunday, the flags with an eagle and a golden sun on a turquoise blue background of Kazakhstan were at half-mast for this day of national mourning, as in Karaganda, noted a journalist from Agence France-Presse. In the capital of this industrial region where mines regularly swallow workers, many residents marched to pay their respects in front of the monument in honor of the miners who died in recent years. “Every miner is a hero, because he goes down without knowing if he will come back up”summarizes Sergei Glazkov, himself a former miner.

“The best solution would be complete nationalization, without compensation for the current owner”says Daniïar Moustafine, a 42-year-old salesman, in front of this monument representing a slag heap, the face of a miner buried under coal as well as a woman holding a child with a miner’s helmet.

Nearly two hundred miners dead since the fall of the USSR

Since the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, around two hundred miners have lost their lives in Kazakhstan, the vast majority at ArcelorMittal sites, with the deadliest accident until the Kostenko mine taking place in 2006, when forty-one miners were killed in the Lenin mine.

The arrival in 1995 of the group in Kazakhstan, which operates around fifteen factories and mines in the center of the former Soviet republic, initially brought hope in the socio-economic slump following the fall of communism. But the lack of investment and insufficient safety standards were subsequently repeatedly criticized by authorities, while unions regularly called for tighter government control. ArcelorMittal assured on Sunday that it had in recent years “made many efforts to strengthen security”.