Bleak Greenland Gets Some Good News: Gold

Just when things were looking bleakest in this ice-bound island of 53,000 people and 1,800 oxen, nature came to the rescue.

Until a few months ago, this is how things looked:

The U.S. Air Force was closing Greenland’s only international airport and the four radar stations it supplied.

A Canadian-owned lead and zinc mine was closing, and offshore oil exploration so far has proved fruitless.

There was chronic unemployment--except when the fish were running. Alcoholism and venereal disease were rampant and every year 50 Greenlanders killed themselves. It’s the world’s highest suicide rate, 129 per 100,000, more than double No. 2 Hungary’s 45 per 100,000.

All of those things still stand, but in November Danish and Canadian geologists announced they had found gold, a 1.6-square-mile patch on the country’s east coast, comparable in size to South African gold reserves.

A Danish newspaper, Jyllands-Posten, reported that mining could begin in five years and could yield 12 tons of gold a year, which at current prices comes to something like $150 million.

That should come as good news to Denmark, which last year provided semi-autonomous Greenland with $347 million, or 86% of the island’s budget.

It would also pay the $30 million a year it takes to keep open the Sondre Stromfjord airfield where a sign proclaims “United States Air Force Space Command.”

There’s nothing Space Age about the primeval-looking musk oxen roaming the nearby arctic hinterland. But, provided by the Americans, they are the only thing that flourishes around here.

The oxen, today 1,800 strong, are the offspring of a few hundred shaggy beasts flown here in U.S. transport planes four years ago and set loose as a gesture of good will.

The airfield, nestled between a jade-green fiord and the foot of a glacier, is Greenland’s only international airport, a hub of civilian flights.

This year the former Danish colony celebrates 10 years of semi-independence under a home-rule system, with its own parliament and two legislators sitting in the Danish parliament in Copenhagen.

Some income is generated by 300 U.S. servicemen and about 2,000 Danish civilians, who pay income tax, working at the controversial Thule radar base in the far north.

The U.S. military has volunteered other aid besides running the airport, which services Nuuk, Greenland’s capital, 198 miles to the south. Recently the Army Corps of Engineers offered to help with public works projects in remote settlements.

The gold find, which the Greenlanders will split 50-50 with Denmark, will augment the few exploitable resources of the world’s largest island, notably fish and shrimp. There are other problems just as formidable, such as the suicides.

“Alcohol is always involved, along with problems with the girlfriend,” said Rene Christensen, chief physician for the Nuuk district.

Women had a total of 870 abortions last year, against 1,100 births.

“Venereal disease is 100 times higher than in Denmark,” Christensen said.

The economy is drained by the expensive social welfare programs inherited from Denmark. The city of Nuuk, Greenland’s largest with 13,000 people, pays $14 million a year for benefits such as subsidized housing, kindergartens and day-care centers and unemployment. Free health service is provided by the Danes.

The job situation, never good, was worsened by the international campaign against seal and whale hunting, one of the main sources of income for the native Inuit people.

“It became shameful to be seen in a sealskin coat,” said Adolf Jensen, a hunter from a small village 250 miles north of the Arctic Circle.

“Today Greenlanders can’t live by hunting alone, though hunter families can supplement their incomes by using skins for clothing and eating the meat.”

The end of professional seal hunting has led to an uncontrolled growth in seal herds, which has been blamed by some experts for the sudden depletion of cod stocks several years ago.

Greenland is a glacial land of primitive and permanent white beauty, where dog sleds, coastal steamers and helicopters are the main means of travel outside the towns.

Ninety percent of Greenlanders live on the west coast of the island, which is three-fourths the size of Australia.

Most of its 870,240 square miles is covered with ice 2 1/2 miles thick, but the ice-free area is still half the size of Texas.

The southern coasts are snowless and verdant in summer, and it was here that the Scandinavian Vikings landed 1,000 years ago and gave the country its somewhat misleading name.

Eric the Red, a hero of Icelandic sagas, established tiny colonies that eked out a living for 500 years before mysteriously dying out.

Nuuk sits on a long strip of land between two fiords, with mountains rising on either side like sentinels. Long rows of publicly built five-story apartment blocks give the city an air of drabness.

Today four out of five inhabitants are native Inuits, who are related by language and custom to the Eskimos of Alaska, Canada and Siberia.

But 60% of the country’s administration is run by Danes.

Jonathan Motzfeldt, who has been prime minister since autonomy was granted, said the goal is for Greenlanders to take over entirely. In its first autonomous decade, he said, “Greenland already has undergone a silent revolution,” and he wants it to become more self-reliant.

Motzfeldt has announced deep cuts in social benefits, especially to the unemployed. From now on, he said, welfare clients who refuse a job offer in the summer will not be eligible for cash benefits.

The Greenland government also has taken its first international loan of about $166 million, in German marks and Japanese yen.

Denmark’s rule over Greenland dates to 1776, when it set up a trade monopoly and established missionary stations along the coast.

The Americans came during World War II, when Greenland was a midway staging area and refueling stop for troop transports and equipment on the way to the European theater.

U.S. forces also supplied the Greenlanders with food and essentials after the Nazis occupied Denmark, which old-timers still remember.

In the early 1950s the U.S. military built defense installations across Canada, Greenland, Iceland and Scotland known as the Distant Early Warning System, or DEW Line.

The philosophy then was that the shortest distance between two superpowers, as the bomber or ballistic missile flies, is over the arctic. But the stations have become outdated and are coming down.

The U.S. pullout from Sondre Stromfjord also is exacerbating tensions with Greenland over the Thule radar base, an important link for U.S. defenses in its ballistic missile warning system.

Thule was once a tiny Inuit hunting and trapping village. Under the U.S.-Danish Defense Agreement of 1951, the U.S. military relocated the native people and built a big phased-array radar.

It has been a bone of contention between the United States and the Soviet Union, which claims the modernization of Thule in recent years was a breach of the 1972 anti-ballistic missile treaty.

Though it is a source of income for Greenland, it is a political embarrassment for Motzfeldt, who is under pressure from leftists who want to get rid of the base. Motzfeldt grumbles about Thule as “that stupid radar.”

Denmark, mindful of its commitments to NATO, supports the U.S. position that Thule is “non-offensive,” and the Greenland administration has little choice but to fall in line.

Motzfeldt has intimated that the Americans won’t be welcome in Thule unless they agree to continue paying for Sondre Stromfjord’s civilian airport.

“We are not going to pay money to have the American bases here,” Motzfeldt said. “On the contrary, we insist that civilian people have the advantage of the Americans’ presence.”

Despite all of its problems, the discovery of gold should help make the future brighter. For the first Christmas in a long time, the world can truly say, “Yes, Greenland, there is a Santa Claus.”