Apocalypse Now but Far Away

On November 30 last year, 21 Occupy activists were arrested for occupying a building where the director of Xstrata mining corporation was based. They made a banner drop from the top of the building in London’s Haymarket, stating ‘All power to the 99%’. No members of the public were hurt or threatened or remotely put out by the action. None that is, but Mick Davis, the director in question. Occupy made it clear that he had been targeted because he was the highest paid director of any FTSE 100 company in 2011, receiving £18.4 million. His PR company scrambled into action but all they could muster in response was the laughable correction that Occupy were wrong and in fact, Davis had ‘only’ earned £17.7 million. In 2009, the worst year of the recession, the company’s annual report shows that Davis took home a staggering £27m, including basic pay, bonus and share options. Occupy had come to challenge the one percent, and Davis was a perfect example.

To support the 21 activists arrested and in anticipation of their court case on June 27, Occupy London’s Corporations Working Group began researching what they could about Davis and Xstrata. The group were a mixed bunch of around a dozen people, meeting in a tent outside a big church once a week – certainly not professional investigative journalists or experienced NGO operatives. From a range of backgrounds and varying in age from 19 to 60, they included an ex-teacher, a care worker, a few students and an ex-fireman.

We began contacting groups we thought might be interested in helping, saying we were Occupy and wanted to raise awareness about Xstrata. A surprising number of organisations and individuals around the world were keen; Xstrata had made a lot of enemies. We wanted to reveal how the mining corporation was responsible for gross abuses of human rights and labour rights, environmental destruction, economic and political corruption and even murder. All crimes that would far outweigh the ‘crime’ of running into a building and dropping a banner from its roof. It was humbling to be in touch with all these people around the world who were on the sharp end of Xstrata’s machinations. They ranged from tiny indigenous activist groups in Peru and the Philippines to large ‘coalitions’ of activist groups like the London Mining Network who have remained tremendously supportive to the small Occupy working group throughout. We were soon meeting people who personally knew indigenous activists and priests who had been murdered or disappeared for standing up to the mining corporation. We were in touch with documentary makers who had covered the inequities of Xstrata. These included Stephanie Boyd, who made the award winning ‘Devil’s Operation’, and Mike Watts, who, when we first contacted him, was about to go off into the jungle to secretly film a mining operation. Film-makers and journalists were endangering their lives to even come close to the plant.

In February 2012, the news came out that Glencore, which already owned 33 percent of Xstrata, and whose CEO was close buddies with Mick Davis, were planning a merger with Xstrata. If Glencore, being the biggest commodities corporation in the world, couples with Xstrata, we will see the creation of another corporate ‘superpower’, which would join the pantheon at the top of the corporatocracy that currently has inordinate control over the fate and fortune of the world. Suddenly, this barely heard of corporation Xstrata was on the main news. In fact both of these companies have been in the news on a regular basis since then, and some of the reports have been highly critical. The mainstream media seems to be doing some of our work for us. In April, Panorama broadcasted a scathing blast at Glencore on primetime television, linking the company to: an ‘acid fountain’ in Africa, an imprisoned ex-paramilitary officer in Colombia, who claimed that he and his men were paid to terrorise and murder people on land that Glencore wanted, and to child labour in mines in DR Congo. Panorama managed to present the evidence to Ivan Glasenberg, the CEO of Glencore. For anyone watching, it was easy to believe the body of research which suggests that to get along in the corporate world, being a psychopath helps.

Soon, the Corporations Working Group were widening their research, as it became clear that the methods by which Glencore and Xstrata work are par for the course for a whole host of mining and extraction corporations including Shell, BP, Rio Tinto, Vedanta Resources, Anglo American and BHP Billiton.

Similarities we found between these operations include: the murder or disappearing of indigenous activists who oppose them, the use of rape and torture to control or deter activists, illegal land-grabs, corruption of local and national political figures, turning peoples against each other, flagrantly ignoring environmental controls, abuse of labour rights, swallowing up or poisoning local water supplies, a fondness for operating in conflict zones where laws can be broken even more easily, the funding of conflicts for the same reason, empty promises of employment and better living conditions, the ability to evade and avoid paying taxes, use of sophisticated law firms to excape trouble whenever they have been caught, funding of local media outlets to create pro-mining propaganda, and employment of the world’s leading PR firms to keep greenwashing and whitewashing all of the above.

The London Mining Network recently held an event at Portcullis House, to launch their latest body of research ‘UK listed mining companies and the case for stricter oversight’. One of their spokespeople, Richard Solly, gave an introductory speech, which he started off by saying “It should no longer be the job of small NGOs or investigative journalists to reveal the crimes of these companies.” This fact hit hard, the realisation that all this information is out there, all these abuses and violations are being caught and gathered but really, very little is being done. Most of the time, the crimes are ignored by well paid state officials; or even more highly paid corporate law firms step in and draw out legal proceedings for years, ultimately watering down any real punishment or due responsibility.

As an example, take how well Shell faired after a fourteen-year legal case regarding a connection to the execution of Nigerian activist Ken Saro-Wiwa and eight of his comrades. It ended with the families being paid $15.5 million out of court, and Shell stating that the payment did not imply any admittance of liability, but was a form of ‘reconciliation’. And of course, much of what happens, particularly with financial abuse, is considered to be ‘above board and legal’. This was the case with the recent accusations brought by Global Witness, who chose the day before Glencore’s first public AGM to release a report claiming that “Glencore played a role in secret and possibly corrupt sales of stakes in the Kansuki and Mutanda mines in Congo’s southern Katanga province ”. In defence, Glencore’s CEO Simon Murray simply stated, “We are confident that these transactions were entirely proper”. Time and again, much of what can be considered to be psychopathic behaviour is ‘above board’ or ‘legal’ by some stretch of the legalistic imagination. and if it is not, it can almost always be paid to go away.

It became a daily experience for Occupy London’s Corporations Group to come across new stories of murder, rape, environmental destruction and legal, political and economic violations. On one day, we were meeting with a group of Congolese describing in detail how their families had been destroyed by rape and murder; on the next day, we were talking with delegates from the Cree first nation people in Alberta whose entire culture has been destroyed by the infamous Tar Sands projects. Other groups heard about us and started sending us lesser known stories about the crimes of these kinds of corporations. Sometimes we heard news of activists who had been arrested and locked up, one priest for 40 years due to the ‘crime’ of standing in front of a truck to block it from going to a mine.

At the Greenwash Gold launch, organised by UK Tar Sands Network, London Mining Network and the Bhopal Medical Appeal, we heard from people who are suffering due to projects run by huge corporations that are currently trying to clean their images by being major sponsors of the Olympics. We listened to fishermen from the Mexican Gulf attesting to the fact that BP have done next to nothing towards cleaning up their mess from Deepwater Horizon. Cree spokespeople described the illnesses striking down their people due to Shell’s Tar Sands project. A survivor from Bhopal gave an account of the immediate as well as the long-lasting suffering caused by the industrial disaster at the Union Carbide chemical plant, which is now the famously ignored legacy of Dow chemicals.

All of these were powerful first hand accounts but one stuck out more poignantly, purely due to the fact that it is a concern that few people are aware of, and because the speaker was a profoundly humble and haunted man. Benny Wenda, from the Free West Papua movement, spoke about how the Indonesian Army are being used to bring genocide to the West Papuans, so that corporations like Rio Tinto are able to plunder the resources available, including the gold that goes into the Olympic medals. His love of the land that was being destroyed clearly hurt him as much as the destruction of his people; this was not a callous view, rather it reflected how the people and the land were bound together as one, and both were being slaughtered for the profits of foreigners using the Indonesian army as hired hands to steal what they wanted. Journalists are not allowed to enter West Papua freely to cover what is taking place there but several documentaries have been made that reveal what is happening.

And that is what we have found. The horror. Understanding of the inspiration behind Colonel Kurtz/Marlon Brando’s last words in Apocalypse Now… “The horror, the horror.” The film was based on Joseph Conrad’s ‘The Heart Of Darkness’, a book which sought to reveal the hell-like abuse of the Congolese at the hands of the Belgian colonisers, who squeezed all they could from the rich land they had taken by force and subjugated, with now infamous sadism and violence.

The Carnival of Dirt has been inspired by the process that started on the roof of a nondescript office block in the Haymarket. It is the result of a coming together of several activist groups from the past and the present, from the UK and from the rest of the world, all wanting to challenge the stupidity and destruction of a broken and unsustainable system that rewards the few at the cost of decimating our last resources and bringing suffering and degradation to entire countries. It is a response to the often hidden horrors of the mining and extraction corporations, an opportunity to mourn those who have died or been tortured or raped for coming up against them, a celebration of all those who are fighting back against one of the most hideous faces of the corporatocracy, and a chance for people to come together and challenge this unsustainable, undemocratic, unjust and utterly filthy system.

By Jamie Kelsey Fry (@JamieKelseyFry)