For those interested in the bigger picture of the politics of mining, here is a link to a new publication that makes fascinating reading. I refer to a new e-publication by War on Want: Fighting Global Poverty. Their publication is entitled Fanning the Flames.
The publication is not for the faint of heart. It is gut-hitting, hard-punching, biased, prejudiced, and one sided. But it is well-written and presents a picture that demands response by the London-based mining industry that it attacks. To give you some idea of its tone and approach, here is an abstract:
The global mining industry is enjoying an unprecedented boom period, with many companies posting record profits as a result of soaring commodity prices. The UK is doing particularly well: the three largest mining companies in the world are all British, while London provides much of the finance for the industry as well as hosting a major share of global metals trading. The British government has regularly championed the cause of British mining companies across the world.
Many developing countries, on the other hand, have experienced the negative side of mining. Armed groups have often enriched themselves through minerals extraction, doing deals with companies and using the revenues to fuel civil wars. Human rights violations have occurred where security forces paid to protect mining assets have attacked local communities and anti-mining activists. There is now an established pattern in country after country where local people have been forced off their land by mining projects, and those protesting have been intimidated, beaten or shot.
In countries such as Colombia and the Philippines, anti-mining activists and local communities are faced with an ever-present threat from military and paramilitary forces. In both countries, protestors have been murdered for their opposition to corporate mining activities. Yet British companies continue to operate in such conflict zones, often benefiting from the intimidation caused by armed security groups. And there is a similar pattern of abuse in a range of other countries around the world.
War on Want believes that the UK government must acknowledge the harm being done to local communities in developing countries as a result of British mining companies’ activities. Relying on voluntary codes of conduct and self-regulation to police the extractives industry has been shown to be ineffective, and the government must now take action to make mining companies accountable both nationally and globally. War on Want calls on the UK government to introduce new rights of redress in the UK and to support binding standards for corporate accountability at the international level. Only through such action will we be able to tackle corporate complicity and human rights abuses.
There now, I thought that British imperialism was at an end. I thought colonialism had collapsed long ago. By way of disclosure, I note that my grandmother never would speak English; she regarded it as the language of the oppressor, for she and her female relatives had been incarcerated in one of the first concentration camps set up by the British at Taba Nchu when they grabbed the gold mines of the Witwatersrand from Paul Kruger and his cronies. She spoke only Afrikaans to me, and I recall understanding little when we visited her in a corrugated-iron-clad house in the poor area of Brakpan. How she met and married my grandfather, an Irishman come to South Africa to fight the British in the hope of eventual Irish freedom, I will never know. He died in a mine accident many years before I was born. Those events are lost to the past, but the present seems to perpetuate past approaches.
The real problem is how an enlightened government like that supposedly in power in England or Canada enforces codes of good conduct on the activities of their nationals and native-registered companies operating in corrupt and incompetent places. If such governments go too far, then the companies will simply go off-shore, much as the cruise ships do with their flags of convenience.
International law is a beguiling concept, but almost impossible to formulate and enforce in the mining context. Ultimately, I must confess that I believe the only solution lies in educating the citizens of the exploited nations to demand and enforce decent laws that protect their interests. This may be a particularly American perspective: the citizen must take up arms to protect their rights against the oppressor. I have never been able to understand how people like the British and Canadians can put so much faith in the political leader to right all wrongs. I view this faith in the supreme leader that characterizes so much of the philosophy of the people of British-based countries as plain addle-headed folly.
Thus my ultimate criticism of the report reviewed above: it places the blame and the solution in the non-existance of a benign ubermensch politician. All too easy, and as always, doomed to failure and frustration.
