Multinationals are moving into hitherto untouched areas, with catastrophic results, writes John Vidal
Amungme tribal leader Yosepha Alomang, a mother of 10, should be in Britain. But as she boarded the plane this month in Irian Jaya, Indonesia, to head for London and the Rio Tinto annual meeting, she was stopped by the military.
Had she come, Alomang would have told the mining firm’s corporate shareholders a harrowing tale of torture at the hands of the authorities. Four years ago she was imprisoned without charges, sexually abused and threatened with being shot. Held for a month in a filthy room, she was made to eat her own faeces.
Alomang is one of many outspoken critics of the huge Freeport copper mine, high in the mountains of Irian Jaya, which is part- owned by Rio Tinto. For years the mine has been the centre of well-documented human rights violations against indigenous groups.
It is also an example of an increasingly common trend that sees governments working in the interests of corporations, against their own people. The mine subsidises the army by $30-million a year and, like Shell in Nigeria or BP in Colombia, its owners distance themselves from atrocities carried out to “protect” its operation.
The extractive industries, especially mining, oil and timber, are becoming the new epicentre of human rights violations, land grabs, political destabilisation, environmental devastation and, increasingly, outright conflict. As countries bid to offer the lowest levels of environmental, labour and consumer regulation, abuses are rising.
Forced largely by “structural adjustment” policies, where international banks and leading industrial nations bail out indebted economies in return for access to their resources, 70 countries in Latin America, Africa, Asia and Eastern Europe have reformed their mining and forestry laws in the past six years in favour of international companies.
Led by Canadian, Australian, United States and British concerns, the global miners have invested more than $5-billion in exploring developing countries since 1992. They have negotiated long, renewable leases, vast concessions, tax breaks, rights to evict communities and exemption from laws in return for down payments and the promise of jobs and exports.
“The link between governments and governed is being weakened … The governed, increasingly, have no role,” argues Dr Tony Evans of Southampton University in the United Kingdom. “It is precisely those corporations and banks that are increasingly global in scale that have gained influence over state policy.”
The human casualties are the people who occupy the lands that the companies are being given exclusive rights to explore and exploit. Most of the new mining and forestry is in the homelands of some of the world’s poorest people.
“The scale of the crisis for tribal groups should not be underestimated,” says Richard Garside of Survival International. Large- scale mining or logging inevitably involves pollution, often the disruption of water courses and the undermining of subsistence farming. The poorest countries are usually the ones with the weakest environmental standards, and are least able to control companies’ activities.
“This sort of hit-and-run development leaves communities with little option in how they develop,” says a representative for the Amerindian Peoples Association in Georgetown, Guyana, which is trying to resist Malaysian and Korean logging companies while fighting for land rights and preparing communities to deal with companies that are exploring their areas.
A worldwide pattern of governments and companies working in tandem and using divisive tactics against opposition is emerging. Where companies need the permission of local communities to start work, they offer bribes, sweeteners and promises of help that can leave communities with little beyond short-term gain.
“The communities do not know how to negotiate. They do not know their rights or the monetary value of their resources and often sell them for a pittance,” says a Filipino development worker. And where communities resist their entry, the companies and governments subvert the democratic process, setting up alternative leaders and splitting villages.
In many countries, the government evicts communities before companies arrive. The companies harass people, block roads, and isolate activists. “There have been serious cases of human rights violations and people killed in the Philippines, Indonesia and South America,” says Survival International.
The presence of the mining, oil or logging companies is acting as a magnet for separatists and rebels. In Colombia, oil companies are such a regular target for guerrillas that Western operators can hardly function. They employ the military and provide arms, and the list of human rights abuses has escalated. In the Philippines old leftist paramilitary groups are recruiting and taking up the cause of the tribal groups.
The communities are increasingly desperate, having little access to legal help and few people to turn to except the churches and underresourced non-government groups. Many are contemplating physical resistance.
The Bontok people of Mainit in the Philippines recently sent a petition to the international community: “These [mining] operations will destroy our source of livelihood, like farming and small-scale mining, due to forest destruction and denudation. They will destroy our rice fields and rivers, desecrate burial grounds and subvert our customs and traditions. Let this be a warning to those who are trying to intrude in our ancestral lands. Blood will be the answer.”
In Indonesia and East Asia, where the economic miracle of the 1980s was largely based on land grabs and resource exploitation by businesses in league with politicians, the poorest will be hit again, says Frances Carr, of the ecological justice group, Down to Earth.
The economic crisis will make things worse, she says. “Indonesia will depend even more on selling off its resources to all comers. The tribal groups, who depend on natural resources more than anyone just to live, will suffer more. They will just become further dispossessed.”