The 500 employees of RMU Zenica do not have any information when the mine will be officially closed, nor when they will be paid their contributions for the past 16 years.
Shutting down the first brown coal mine in Bosnia and Herzegovina, the miners say, is solely to the detriment of those who have been extracting ore deep underground for decades.
They have earned their pension, but they have not received a single stamp so far because their seniority has not been paid. For a year, the Government of the FBiH left as many as 45 Zenica miners waiting for retirement, their colleagues say with sadness in front of the mine. Some of them are sick, some are disabled. The state left them without any income and forced them to live hard. As Senid Dizdarević prepares to retire at the end of this month, outrage over the fate of his colleagues is growing louder. It is very certain that he himself will wait a long time.
“We have people here who are disabled. There is a man who lost his arm in a pit and he needs a pension… what will he live on? It’s normal for me to be worried, waiting a year for someone to pay you what you earned honestly… it’s easy for them up there, they have good incomes and they all live well”, says Senid Dizdarević, a miner.
They are waiting for that information with concrete dates from the relevant federal ministry and the Government. At the moment, they don’t even know when the mine will be officially closed. No response from the ministry today to N1’s query.
“In the next two or three months, when we extract everything that is interesting for the Kreka mine to be made available there, we don’t know when people will be taken care of. We want to know: when will we retire people, when will there be a law on mine closure, when will there be operational funds for payment of seniority for all workers of RMU Zenica?”, said Nedžad Duraković, president of the union of workers in the Raspotočje pit in RMU Zenica.
While there are already rumors that their mine will become a museum, and therefore that they are a thing of the past, the miners struggle with an uncertain everyday life. Alija Selman says that for the past ten years, he watched the mine being destroyed with astonishment. In the past, the mine, he points out, was the pride of Zenica and the backbone of development. He could not have imagined that he would be part of the last generation of this mine.
“Shutting down the mine at that time bordered on the impossible. The mine had its own hotels, was in good shape, had investments in the mountains, production was so extensive that no one would have even thought that it could happen. But here… everything comes to an end, including the mine”, Alija Selman.
“The miner is now on the margin, so… the lowest man who earns money has no money for him, those who don’t earn money (the administration) has money for them. There is no money for us, is it so that we would shut down. Today, to retire… you have some joy, and then after a month you realize that you are on the street”, Bahrudin Čoloman.
Instead of security, the Zenica miners are greeted by a harsh reality. Those who earned their bread with a shovel and pickaxe in hand feel rejected and cheated. Earlier, the relevant ministry explained to them that everything up to the loan approval procedures is with the World Bank.
The miners of Zenica do not retire with song and recognition, as it used to be, but in uncertainty and struggle for what they gained by working in the darkness of the pit. They leave their equipment, you can feel the bitterness because the coal will no longer be mined here, but the shame because of the way the government sends these people off – will be felt on the surface for a long time, he writes N1 BiH.
