Friday, 18 February 2005By Reinhard Krause
FUXIN, China - China has held funerals under tight police guard for some of the more than 200 coal miners
killed in the worst blast to hit the disaster-plagued industry in more than half a century.
As more bodies were pulled from the mine in the northeastern rust-belt province of Liaoning, the death toll rose to
213, state media said on Friday. Relatives were left with the grim task of identifying the corpses.
Open trucks filled with coffins made their way from mine to morgue through the grim, industrial city of Fuxin, the
freezing air thick with coal dust and the smoke from paper money burned in offering.
The remains of several of the miners killed in Monday's explosion were cremated as convoys of buses carried
mourners bundled against the cold into a cemetery sealed off by security.
The heavy police presence was apparently to maintain public order after this latest in a long series of mine disasters
which have provoked an angry response from mourners in the past.
As the funerals took place, the death toll from a blast on Tuesday in the southwestern province of Yunnan rose to 27.
State media had harsh criticism for mine owners and pointed to lax regulations as the government struggles to curb
accidents in the world's deadliest mining industry.
China's leaders have pledged repeatedly to clean up the nation's mines, but officials and state media remain
sceptical.
"There are still a lot of loopholes in safety management of coal mines throughout the country," the official Xinhua
news agency quote Sun Huashan, deputy director of the State Administration of Work Safety, as saying.
While Premier Wen Jiabao has ventured underground and lunched with miners in a personal show of support,
analysts say the lure of profit in an industry producing 70 percent of the fuel driving China's booming economy makes
policing the pits a huge challenge.
"The reality is many coal mine owners just ignore the interests of workers in their wild pursuit of profits," the China
Daily said in an editorial.
HIGHER COMPENSATION
It welcomed plans to raise compensation for families of miners who die in accidents, saying measures had proved
ineffective at curbing accidents in the face of rising profits.
"Low compensation means employers do not suffer economically as their profits can well offset expenditure for
industrial injuries," the editorial said.
Relatives of the Fuxin miners said those with private insurance would be paid 200,000 yuan, but most were reliant on
state compensation which would be far less.
They were also bitter the accident took place during the Chinese New Year, when workers were supposed to be
relaxing with their families, and said mine bosses had threatened to dock their salaries unless they worked through the
holiday.
Total compensation paid for the 166 killed in a blast last November was a little over $6,000, the China Daily said.
Prosecutors in Henan found 24 people responsible for a blast there last October, including the central province's
deputy governor, Shi Jichuan, Xinhua reported, as China seeks to cultivate better accountability among its leaders.
But illegal mines that are shut down in sweeps routinely reopen once inspectors leave, drawn by coal prices that
jumped more than 40 percent last year.
Annual coal production is about 1.95 billion tonnes, but China can guarantee safe production of only a little more than
half of that, official media has reported.
China last year produced 35 percent of the world's coal but reported 80 percent of global deaths in colliery accidents
at a rate of three fatalities per million tonnes of coal.
|
Friday, 18 February 2005
Reuters via Swissinfo
|
|
