Rare earth mineral: A Gem of a Story

Hidden in a mountain outside Peshawar is a rare earth mineral that can make men millionaires.

To a visitor, Zagai Ghar may look fairly ordinary, a hillock like any other in Fata. But to the villagers, it is a gem of a mountain, brimming with riches in the shape of gemstone and rare earth deposits.

I came across Zagai Ghar in 2008, while on my way back from Mulagori in Khyber Agency, famous for its marble processing plants. My host had warned me about the Taliban base near the mountain but despite the threat to non-locals, I was keen to visit.

It was only this May that I managed to make it there. As I stood at the foot of the mountain, wondering if I had the stamina for the climb, I succeeded in befriending two locals, Fazal Malik and Yarzada, who agreed to accompany me. We started our ascent at noon and didn’t pause till we had crossed the 100-metre mark. Halfway through my energy drink and the climb, I realised that curiosity wasn’t enough fuel for mountaineering.

The mountain has turned mining into a money-minting profession. Rumour has it that discoveries of the reddish brown beroj, known as ‘Bastnasite’ in the international market, have turned men into millionaires overnight. Two years ago, a teenage boy told me that a villager had found a jewel which, even when it broke into two, sold for hundreds of thousands of rupees, enough for him to buy a brand new Toyota pickup. The legend seemed almost too good to be true.

The rugged terrain of Zagai Ghar poses quite a challenge for any inexperienced climber.

The presence of two ancient wells near the crest signalled that perhaps in the days before the arrival of the Khalil, Mohmand and Daudzai tribes in Peshawar during the Mughal era, locals may have been aware of the riches hidden in the mountain. We also found several small trenches dug by miners in search of the stones. But I wanted to see a real mine that I was told was only at the peak.

Mining apparently started here in earnest in 2007 courtesy an Afghan called Hazrat Mian who still lives in the area. He was an experienced miner and had worked extensively in Afghanistan. His presence drew the suspicion of the local landlords who owned the hillock. And one day he was caught digging near the crest. After that, another villager found a good-sized stone which sold for several hundred thousand rupees, forcing the owners to open up. One stone was bought for Rs1.4 million by a foreigner.



“Mining here is a game of luck and patience so I abandoned it,” says Yarzada. According to him, if four miners found a stone worth Rs200,000 after searching for six months, it broke down to earning a little over Rs8,000 a month if they split it. This hardly made it worth it. “We are poor so our families cannot wait for six months. Only those who have that kind of time and money can wait.”

Sitting under the shade of a tree at the bottom of the mountain three hours later, I began to understand how this stone had changed lives in a place where only the drug trade could make you a millionaire overnight.

According to Shafiullah, a dealer in the main Namak Mandi gem market, Bastnasite can fetch thousands of dollars in the international market. “The rare mineral mined in Zagai is not for jewellery. It is used in decorative pieces, mainly bought by nature museums or collectors around the world.”

The lack of proper mining techniques and the use of dynamite have posed a major problem for the dealers. Almost 90 per cent of the stones are lost during extraction and the ones retrieved are irregularly shaped, reducing their market value. And something tells me that the mining for Bastnasite in Zagai is far from becoming a business that the government will patronise any time soon.

Published in The Express Tribune, Sunday Magazine, June 23^rd, 2013.

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