Blood Money: Barrick Gold’s Human Rights Abuses
Baluchistan in the Crosshairs
The story of Barrick Gold Corporation is written in the suffering of communities across three continents. From the razed homes of Congolese families to the brutalized bodies of Papua New Guinean women, this Canadian mining giant has left a trail of human rights violations that should serve as a dire warning. Yet Pakistan’s government, desperate for foreign investment and beholden to military interests, has invited this same company into Baluchistan—the nation’s most impoverished and politically volatile province—to extract billions of dollars in mineral wealth. This partnership represents not just a business deal, but a betrayal of the Baloch people, who have every reason to expect they will suffer the same fate as communities around other Barrick mines worldwide.
The Barrick Pattern: A Global Architecture of Abuse
To understand what awaits Baluchistan, one must first examine what Barrick Gold has done elsewhere. The company’s operations reveal not isolated incidents but a systematic pattern: corporations capturing state power, militarizing security, displacing communities, and prioritizing shareholder profits over human lives.
Congo: When Homes Become Waste Dumps
The events at Barrick’s Kibali mine in the Democratic Republic of Congo expose the brutal calculus of extractive capitalism. In October 2021, over 2,500 houses were demolished in the neighborhoods of Mege and Bandayi—entire communities erased to make room for mining waste. The destruction was swift and violent. Heavy machinery protected by military and police destroyed homes in just minutes, with many residents unable to remove their belongings in time. Witnesses described scenes of state-sanctioned brutality: “They destroyed churches, schools, health centers – everything. It was violent. If you are found with a phone, a camera, they will beat you to get that phone back. And then you go to jail.” One mother begged a police officer, explaining she had a three-month-old baby and asking him to leave even just a straw hut for shelter, but he refused—after demolishing all the houses, they left families in the rain.
The company’s defense is as cynical as the evictions themselves. Barrick claimed all residents were “illegal occupants” who had already been properly resettled between 2010 and 2013. Yet a three-year investigation by the Dutch peace organization PAX found considerable evidence that resettlement and compensation likely did not take place, or at least not fully. Many residents had obtained legitimate documents from local authorities when purchasing their plots, and some were even employees of the Kibali mine itself—workers for the very company that rendered them homeless. Interviews with victims indicate that many genuinely did not know they were living on land designated as an “exclusion zone,” suggesting that Kibali and Barrick failed to adequately inform these communities. The company allowed people to build homes, establish schools and churches, raise families—and then declared them all illegal squatters. “They waited for people to build houses, for the numbers to swell, to later come and say: ‘Now you have to get out, this place is ours!’” one victim told investigators. “Why wait all this time? They should have warned us, informed us!”
The corporate calculation was clear: Barrick knew or should have known that approximately 2,500 families—including children, pregnant women, and elderly persons—would be rendered homeless, yet the company did not call on the government to halt the eviction process. When communities protested this injustice, police and military fired live ammunition, killing at least three people. The moral obscenity reaches its apex in the contrast between human suffering and corporate profit. While thousands were left destitute, plummeting into deeper poverty, Barrick boasted that Kibali delivered a “stellar performance” in 2021 and paid $200 million in dividends to shareholders that year. Today, the part of Bandayi neighborhood inside the exclusion zone has become a waste dump for Kibali’s open pit operations. The land where families once lived, where children played, where communities worshiped—reduced to a repository for mining refuse. Investigators concluded these evictions represent the capture of a repressive state apparatus by a private company that lobbied the government to violently evict communities with legitimate land claims, simply because those lands were destined to become waste dumps for an ever-expanding, tremendously profitable international enterprise.
Papua New Guinea: Rape as a Security Strategy
If the Congo reveals Barrick’s willingness to destroy homes, Papua New Guinea exposes something even darker: a pattern of sexual violence so systematic it can only be described as a security strategy designed through terror. For decades, security guards at Barrick’s Porgera mine have systematically committed violence against local populations, with hundreds of women and girls brutally raped by mine security guards. This is not a few isolated incidents—this is an epidemic of sexual violence occurring on company property and in surrounding communities, perpetrated by company security personnel.
The conditions created this nightmare. The mine’s ever-expanding waste dumps continue to take over land and bury the homes of original landowners who have lived in the region for generations. Surrounded on all sides, villagers have no choice but to cross dangerous dumps to reach agricultural land, commercial areas, schools, or other villages, and many have not been compensated for the loss of their land and homes. Without land to farm and sources of clean water, the only means of income available to some indigenous communities is to scavenge for remnants of gold in the open pit or treacherous waste dumps—and there, in these desperate circumstances created by the mine itself, security guards preyed on women and girls. The cruel logic is inescapable: Barrick’s operations destroyed livelihoods, forcing women into dangerous situations where company security forces then violated them.
The company’s knowledge and inaction constitute complicity. Since 2005, before Barrick acquired the mine, the company was informed on various occasions of well-documented cases of alleged human rights abuses, including sexual assault, rape and killings by private security and police forces. Yet it took five years for Barrick to respond publicly, and the company’s response was criticized as inadequate by human rights experts from Columbia Law School, Harvard Law School, and MiningWatch Canada. When Barrick finally acted, the “remedy” revealed the company’s true priorities. Approximately 200 women who survived brutal rapes by Barrick’s security guards were asked to waive their legal rights in exchange for small “business grants” and “business training”—a process human rights advocates denounced as designed to protect the company rather than provide genuine justice.
One woman told representatives how she was brutally beaten, cut with a knife and raped by more than 10 Barrick guards, left unable to have children, then abandoned by her husband and ostracized by her community. She was offered business training and a $6,000 grant to start selling chickens or second-hand clothing—and asked to sign away her legal rights. She needed medical treatment and felt she had no choice but to accept, though she was angered by the insulting offer. Human rights advocates criticized the process because it failed UN criteria—it was not based on genuine engagement with affected communities, did not respect cultural norms around compensation, and provided remedies manifestly inconsistent with international human rights standards. The environmental destruction compounds the human toll. The mine dumps 16,000 tons of liquid waste into the nearby Porgera River every day, a controversial practice out of line with current industry standards, poisoning water sources for communities downstream for generations to come.
Tanzania: A Decade of Killings
For well over a decade, Indigenous Kuria men, women, and children living around Barrick’s North Mara Gold Mine have been subjected to excessive use of force by private mine security and police providing security services to the mine, including beatings, killings, and rapes. This violence has resulted in three separate lawsuits in under ten years—the first filed in 2013, all making the same allegations. The company settled the first case out of court in 2015, yet the violence continued. Local communities filed a second lawsuit, yet the violence continued. Now they have filed a third lawsuit, because still the violence continues.
In their 2022 legal claim, plaintiffs alleged that “Barrick’s security strategy for the North Mara mine effectively converts the Tanzanian police assigned to operate in and around the mine into a private and heavily armed security force for the mine,” leading directly to extensive human rights abuses. This is the privatization of state violence: public police forces functioning as corporate security, accountable to mining interests rather than the communities they are supposed to protect. The claim states that residents routinely enter “waste rock areas” at North Mara to retrieve rocks with trace amounts of gold, which they process and sell, and police have responded violently to people entering the mine. These are impoverished people, living adjacent to enormous wealth being extracted from their land, trying to recover scraps—and being shot, beaten, and killed for it.
Pakistan’s Faustian Bargain: Inviting the Wolf into Baluchistan
Against this documented history of violence, displacement, and human rights violations across three continents, Pakistan has chosen to partner with Barrick Gold for the Reko Diq project in Baluchistan. Mark Bristow stepped down as CEO of Barrick Gold on September 29, 2025, after nearly seven years leading the company, leaving behind this legacy of controversy. His sudden departure—which came without explanation just as Barrick announced a major gold discovery in Nevada—does nothing to address these systemic problems. This decision represents either stunning ignorance or callous indifference to the fate of the Baloch people.
Baluchistan occupies a unique and tragic position in Pakistan’s political economy. It is the largest province by area—comprising nearly 44% of Pakistan’s territory—yet it is home to less than 5% of the population and remains the country’s poorest region. For decades, the Baloch people have experienced systematic marginalization: limited political representation, minimal development spending, extraction of natural resources with little local benefit, and violent suppression of dissent by security forces. Reko Diq, located in Chagai District, is among the world’s largest untapped copper and gold reserves, in a region characterized by rugged terrain, vast sandy expanses, and arid deserts, home to roughly 270,000 people. The deposit covers 3.3 million acres and sits within the Tethyan Belt, a renowned metallogenic zone extending from Eastern Europe through Anatolia to Iran and into Balochistan. The potential wealth is staggering—estimates have valued the reserves at $60 billion or more.
Yet this mineral wealth has brought Baluchistan not prosperity but conflict. The history of Reko Diq itself illustrates the pattern. Pakistan first entered into an agreement on the reserve in 1993 with Australian mining company BHP Minerals, which in 2000 handed the project over to Tethyan Copper Company, a joint venture including Barrick Gold. Media reports revealed that the deal would be in effect for 56 years during which 75 percent of the mining wealth estimated at $60 billion would be handed over to TCC, with allegations that the company had undervalued the worth of the copper and gold reserves. In other words, foreign companies would extract three-quarters of the wealth from Baluchistan’s soil, while the province itself—already Pakistan’s poorest—would receive a fraction. In 2011, the Balochistan government rejected TCC’s mining lease application, citing legitimate concerns: smelting and refining should be done in Pakistan rather than abroad, royalty rates should be enhanced, the financial model should be reviewed, and there should be more participation of the local population in the project. These demands reflected basic principles of resource sovereignty and local benefit—yet they triggered an international legal battle that ended with a 2019 arbitration award of $5.976 billion in damages against Pakistan.
Facing this massive penalty and desperate for foreign investment, Pakistan contracted a new deal with Barrick Gold in 2022 to revive the Reko Diq project, with Barrick holding a 50 percent stake while the remaining half is split among Pakistan’s federal government, state-owned enterprises, and the provincial government of Balochistan. Barrick expressed interest in investing $7 billion to revive the project, aiming to start mining in 2028. The federal government and military have hailed this as transformative. Pakistani authorities say this will transform Balochistan’s future. But will it? The fundamental structure of exploitation remains unchanged. While Balochistan now has 25% ownership rather than the previous arrangement, this stake is split—15% on a fully funded basis and 10% on a free carried basis—meaning the province must invest capital for part of its share while Barrick maintains operational control with its 50% stake. Meanwhile, the federal government and state-owned enterprises control another 25%, ensuring that Islamabad—not the province where the mine is located—maintains ultimate authority.
While the company has pledged billions in investment and insists it will benefit locals, the community sees a familiar pattern: minerals and wealth extracted, with little or nothing reinvested in the marginalized population living on top of those resources. The comparison to other development promises in Baluchistan is instructive. A decade after the launch of the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), ordinary Baloch have seen little benefit—roads, ports, and energy projects may dot the landscape, but unemployment, poverty, and alienation remain a reality. The pattern repeats: grand infrastructure projects announced with promises of prosperity, billions of dollars invested, yet local communities remain marginalized while profits flow elsewhere. Consider the nearby Saindak copper-gold mine, where silver, gold and copper reserves have been extensively mined by Chinese-run Metallurgical Group Corp since 1987. According to experts, “The Chinese exploited Saindak’s resources for 16 long years without any checks,” and under the previous arrangement, the federal government received 50% of profits while Balochistan received a meager 5% royalty. After decades of operation, Saindak has not transformed the region—it has simply extracted wealth while local communities remain impoverished. Why should Reko Diq be different?
The Baloch response to Reko Diq reflects decades of accumulated grievances about resource exploitation. The coalition of Baloch armed groups, the Baloch Raaji Aajoi Sangar (BRAS), specifically warned Barrick Gold to stay away from Reko Diq, calling mega-development projects exploitative. Insurgents view high-profile economic projects like Reko Diq as legitimate targets, branding them as economic exploitation. Part of the insurgents’ appeal lies in a widespread perception of plunder and looting of Baloch resources without any financial benefits to locals. Whether one supports armed insurgency or not, the underlying grievance is legitimate: Why should the Baloch people accept foreign companies extracting billions from their land while they remain among Pakistan’s poorest citizens? The security situation has deteriorated dramatically. In 2024, violent attacks by Baloch insurgents rose by 119 percent from the previous year. In February 2025 alone, terrorism-related deaths jumped by 73 percent, with nearly two-thirds of fatalities occurring in Balochistan. This violence is not random terrorism—it is a direct response to perceived economic exploitation and political marginalization.
Pakistan’s response to this security challenge follows precisely the pattern visible at Barrick’s other mines: militarization of the project, with security forces serving corporate rather than community interests. Ten current and former provincial and federal government officials and mining sources say the military has become the most important voice on the future of Reko Diq, which it sees as a strategic national asset. The military will not only decide which investors develop the deposit, but an army-controlled engineering firm, Frontier Works Organization (FWO), is positioning itself to be a member of any consortium involved. A senior Baluchistan government official noted that Reko Diq “has been taken over by GHQ”—meaning Pakistan’s army General Headquarters in Rawalpindi now controls decisions about resources located in Baluchistan. The provincial government, representing the people who actually live on this land, has been sidelined. The last serious attempt at settling the Reko Diq case in 2016 was scuppered by the military, which vetoed paying hundreds of millions of dollars to TCC—demonstrating that the army, not civilian authorities, makes final decisions.
For support, Barrick has turned to Pakistan’s powerful army, which helps control the country’s politics and helped negotiate the 2022 deal to revive the project. This partnership between Barrick and Pakistan’s military should alarm anyone familiar with Barrick’s global record. In Tanzania, plaintiffs alleged that “Barrick’s security strategy effectively converts the Tanzanian police into a private and heavily armed security force for the mine.” In Congo, military and police forces demolished homes and killed protesters to serve mine interests. Now, in Baluchistan, Barrick has the explicit support of one of the region’s most powerful military forces—an army with its own well-documented history of human rights violations in Baluchistan. Analysts note that the military’s role in developing natural resources in Baluchistan carries significant risks, as indigenous Baloch people view outsiders with suspicion, and their anger about Islamabad exploiting the province’s vast natural resources has been one of the key themes fueling a separatist insurgency. In other words, the very structure of the Reko Diq project—military-controlled, federally-dominated, operated by a foreign company with a record of human rights abuses—embodies precisely the kind of external exploitation that has driven Baloch resistance for decades.
The Predictable Future: What Awaits Baluchistan
Given Barrick’s documented pattern and Pakistan’s approach to the project, the future for Baluchistan is grimly predictable. Militarized security will generate violence against local communities. Just as Tanzanian police became a private security force for North Mara, just as Congolese military demolished homes for Kibali, just as Papua New Guinea police killed villagers at Porgera, Pakistani security forces will be deployed to protect Reko Diq against local opposition. When communities protest inadequate compensation, environmental damage, or lack of local employment, they will face state violence deployed in service of corporate interests. Local communities will see minimal benefit. Despite promises of jobs and development, the pattern at other Barrick mines and other projects in Baluchistan suggests that real benefits will flow to shareholders, the federal government, and military-connected contractors. Local Baloch communities will get low-wage, low-skill jobs while skilled positions go to outsiders. Infrastructure will serve the mine, not local needs. Royalties will be spent by provincial and federal authorities with minimal community input.
Environmental degradation will last generations. Like the 16,000 tons of liquid waste dumped daily into Papua New Guinea’s Porgera River, Reko Diq’s operations will produce vast amounts of waste and consume enormous quantities of water in an already water-scarce region. The environmental costs will be borne by local communities long after the mine is exhausted and Barrick has moved on. Displacement will occur without adequate compensation. The Kibali pattern—where Barrick claimed people were properly resettled but investigation found otherwise—will repeat. Communities near Reko Diq will be moved to make way for mine expansion, waste dumps, and infrastructure. Compensation will be inadequate, culturally inappropriate, and administratively complex. Those who resist will be labeled “illegal occupants” and forcibly removed. Resistance will be criminalized and violently suppressed. Given the existing insurgency and military control of the project, any local opposition to Reko Diq will be framed as terrorism or separatism rather than legitimate grievance. The military will respond with force, generating martyrs and further fueling the insurgency—a self-fulfilling prophecy where resistance to exploitation is treated as security threat, justifying more repression. Profits will be privatized while suffering is socialized. Just as Barrick paid $200 million in dividends while Congolese families became homeless, shareholders will reap enormous returns from Reko Diq while Baloch communities bear the costs. When things go wrong—environmental disasters, security incidents, health impacts—the costs will be absorbed by local people and Pakistani taxpayers, not Barrick shareholders.
Pakistan’s Betrayal and the Question of Sovereignty
Pakistan’s partnership with Barrick Gold represents a fundamental betrayal of state responsibility to its own citizens. The primary obligation of any government is to protect its people and advance their welfare. By inviting a company with Barrick’s documented record into Baluchistan—a province already suffering from systematic marginalization—Pakistan’s federal government and military leadership have prioritized short-term revenue and geopolitical calculations over the human rights and dignity of the Baloch people. This is not simply a policy disagreement. When a government knowingly partners with a corporation that has demolished thousands of homes, presided over hundreds of rapes, and generated decades of killings elsewhere, and then positions that corporation to extract wealth from its most vulnerable and politically marginalized province, it crosses from policy error into moral culpability for the predictable consequences.
Pakistan cannot claim ignorance. The forced evictions in Congo were documented by Canada’s National Contact Point. The sexual violence in Papua New Guinea was investigated by Human Rights Watch. The killings in Tanzania have generated three separate lawsuits. All of this is public record, easily accessible to anyone conducting due diligence on a potential partner. Pakistan chose to proceed anyway. Moreover, Pakistan has its own problematic history in Baluchistan: forced disappearances, extrajudicial killings, suppression of political movements, and systematic economic marginalization. The combination of Pakistan’s governance failures with Barrick’s corporate abuses creates conditions not for development but for disaster.
The question of sovereignty is particularly acute. When Pakistan’s military, not elected provincial authorities, controls decisions about Baluchistan’s resources, when international arbitration tribunals can award billions against Pakistan for asserting regulatory authority over mining, when a foreign corporation operates the mine with majority control—whose sovereignty is being exercised? Not Baluchistan’s. Not even Pakistan’s. Instead, we see functional sovereignty exercised by capital: Barrick’s right to extract, the military’s right to secure extraction, and international law’s protection of corporate interests over community rights.
Conclusion: Breaking the Pattern or Repeating It?
The story of Barrick Gold is a story about power—who has it, who lacks it, and how it is deployed. Across the Democratic Republic of Congo, Papua New Guinea, and Tanzania, the pattern is consistent: a powerful corporation with access to capital and legal resources partners with state authorities to extract mineral wealth, deploying violence when necessary against communities that lack power, resources, or effective protection. In Congo, investigators concluded that forced evictions represented “the capture of a repressive state apparatus by a private company”—a perfect summary of the Barrick model. The company doesn’t need to directly employ violence; it simply needs to capture the state, ensuring that police, military, and courts serve corporate rather than community interests.
Pakistan is now replicating this model in Baluchistan. The military controls the project. Barrick operates the mine. International financing from the World Bank, Asian Development Bank, and Western governments backs the investment. Local communities have been given nominal stakes but lack real power. The security apparatus stands ready to suppress resistance. The legal framework protects corporate interests through international arbitration. All the pieces are in place for the pattern to repeat. What would breaking this pattern require? Genuine local sovereignty over resources. Meaningful community consent, with the power to refuse development. Transparent benefit-sharing weighted toward affected populations. Independent oversight with real enforcement power. Accountability mechanisms that prioritize victims over corporations. Demilitarization of mining operations. Rights of local communities to say no and have that refusal respected. None of these conditions exist at Reko Diq.
The gold and copper beneath Baluchistan’s soil belongs to the Baloch people. It represents their potential path out of poverty, their opportunity for genuine development, their children’s future. But under current arrangements, that future is being sold to foreign shareholders while local communities can expect, based on overwhelming evidence from Barrick’s other operations, to receive displacement, violence, environmental destruction, and broken promises. Mark Bristow’s departure as CEO in September 2025 changes nothing. The problem is not one individual but a corporate structure that systematically subordinates human rights to profit extraction. Leadership transitions at Barrick headquarters will not prevent the repetition of patterns visible across continents and decades.
The question is not whether Reko Diq will generate wealth—it will, enormous wealth. The question is who will benefit from that wealth and who will pay its costs. Based on Barrick’s record and Pakistan’s approach, the answer is clear: shareholders will profit, the military will profit, federal authorities will profit, and the Baloch people will pay—in displacement, environmental damage, marginalization, and violence. This is not development. This is extraction. And the Baloch people, like communities around Barrick mines worldwide, deserve far better than to watch their resources enriching distant powers while their homeland becomes another chapter in a long, shameful story of corporate abuse and state complicity.