Militarization of Mining
Project Underground website, November 27, 1997
The two British men might have been mistaken for businessmen
as they walked through the Peninsula resort just outside Port
Moresby, Papua New Guinea (PNG) in February 1997. Few in that
south Pacific country noticed them and no one would have guessed
that the heavy suitcases they carried were filled not with business
papers but with cash. Nor could one blame bystanders, halfway
across the world at the small airport in Yopal in the Andean foothills
of eastern Colombia, for overlooking two black boxes carried by
another pair of Brits.
Like their colleagues in PNG, these men were not your average
businessmen or tourists. All were former members of the Special
Air Services, better known as the SAS, an elite British fighting
force. Several had participated in covert assassination operations
against the Irish Republican Army (IRA) in the 1980s.
These men are part of a growing number of slick new corporate
security operations around the world linking former intelligence
officers, standing armies, and death squad veterans. In unholy
alliance, they go into battle for new bosses: the mineral industries,
which range from multinational corporations to small oil and mining
entrepreneurs. Elizabeth Rubin, a contributing editor of Harper's
magazine, summed up this new phenomenon of armies for hire, recently
in a radio interview: "It's not just a military machine.
Behind it is the old colonial structure, only now it's dressed
up in a sort of multinational corporation, with suits and Sat
phones instead of Jeeps and parasols."
This militarization of the mineral industries is really a
result of three phenomena. The advent of new technologies such
as computer-aided satellite mapping and the use of cyanide to
extract gold have turned formerly marginal operations into potential
moneymakers. The collapse of the Soviet empire and the signing
of the global free trade agreements have opened up countries like
Angola that were previously offbounds to Western multinationals.
And lastly, the availability of capital and the mitigation of
risk have been ensured by the new push from the international
financial institutions, such as bilateral and multilateral agencies
including the World Bank and the US ExportImport Bank. They are
eager to provide cash and political risk insurance for private
resource extraction projects pretty much anywhere in the world.
Tim Spicer, one of the two former SAS men in the south Pacific,
was soon to regret his quiet discussion at the Peninsula Hotel.
He had met with two senior government officials about buying a
copper mine owned by Rio Tinto, the AngloAustralian mining titan,
on the island of Bougainville. Less than a month later, dressed
in crumpled jeans, Spicer was led into a Papua New Guinea court.
His suitcase, bulging with US$400,000 in cash, was produced as
evidence of his contract with the disgraced government to provide
a mercenary force to take over the copper mine. His mission had
been to defeat a small group of freedom fighters who had shut
down the copper mine for almost a decade. When news of Spicer's
contract became public, ordinary citizens and local army officers
took the law into their own hands. The rioting closed shops, banks
and schools and sealed off major roads until truckloads of police
armed with automatic rifles eventually dispersed the enraged populace
with teargas and rubber bullets.
The two unnamed exSAS officers in Colombia fared better. Their
black boxes full of guns and ammunition were waved through the
checkpoint run by a colleague, Bill Nixon, a former British intelligence
officer, whose new job is providing security at the private airport
owned by British Petroleum (BP). All three mercenaries were on
contract to BP to help train the Colombian policenotorious for
their human rights abusesto protect the DeleB oil rig. The oil
company interpreted security concerns broadly. According to a
recently surfaced report commissioned by the Colombian government,
BP collaborated with local soldiers involved in kidnappings, torture,
and murder. The unpublished document alleges that the oil company
compiled intelligenceincluding photos and video tapes of local
people protesting oil activities, and passed the information on
to the Colombian military which then arrested or kidnaped demonstrators
as "subversives."
Most of the men running the mercenary-for-hire operations
tend to operate behind the lines, preferring to employ other men
local or imported hired guns to carry out ontheground operations.
Both the Colombian and Papua New Guinean contracts were handled
out of London offices run by yet more former SAS officers. Spicer's
boss was ex-SAS officer Anthony Buckingham, the second man at
the Peninsula Hotel meeting in February. Buckingham is one of
the shadier operators in the security business, who runs a miniconglomerate
of mercenary, oil, and mining companies out of discreet offices
at Plaza 107, 535 King's Road in the up-market south London neighborhood
of Chelsea.
The Colombian deal was assigned to another security firm,
Defense Systems Limited (DSL), a slightly more upscale operation
with offices overlooking Buckingham Palace. DSL has a contract
with British Petroleum's security division, which in turn is run
by more former military types Mark Heathcote, a former British
intelligence officer and Tony Ling, a former SAS commander. Heathcote,
Ling, and Nixon, all worked undercover in Northern Ireland where
the SAS specialized in assassinating Irish Republican Army guerrillas.
Today, men like these provide "security" services
to companies and governments in Colombia, Guyana, and Venezuela
in South America; to Guinea, Liberia, Nigeria, and Sierra Leone
in West Africa; to Angola; and Namibia in southern Africa; to
former Zaire in central Africa; to Sudan and Uganda in East Africa;
to Papua New Guinea and Indonesia in the Pacific; and to Kazakhstan
in Central Asia. Many of these recruits are veterans of South
Africa's 32 Battalion and Civil Cooperation Bureau which were
the most notorious units of the old apartheid forces until elections
brought a multiracial government to power a few years ago.
There is little evidence (other than slick public relations
material) that these men are any different from soldiers of fortune
like "Mad Mike" Hoare, "Black Jacques" Schramme,
and Bob Denard, mercenaries who drank hard, womanized, and wreaked
havoc through Africa in the wars which followed independence from
colonial rule. In the 1950s, for example, Harry Oppenheimer, the
South African chair of De Beers, defeated his competitors in Sierra
Leone by enlisting Sir Percy Sillitoe, one of Britain's top counterespionage
agents during World War II. Sillitoe hired soldiers and launched
an allout diamond war. The mercenaries laid booby traps, mined
border crossings, and ambushed diamond traders until finally they
were persuaded to sell their wares to the De Beers buyers.
Military action, private or public, to support mineral extraction
is the history of the Americas. From the devastation of the Inca
in Peru by Pizarro in his search for gold in the 1530s to the
defeat of the Sioux warriors of the Black Hills of South Dakota
in the 1860s by Gen. George Custer as prospectors swarmed into
the region; from the forced march of the Navajo from Arizona to
New Mexico at the same time to the 1960s when the Peruvian military
bombed the Matses indigenous peoples in the Amazon on behalf of
Mobil, the pattern remains consistent. Jeff Moag, from the Washingtonbased
watchdog group National Security News Service, says that the financing
of the mercenaries by the mineral industries amounts to nothing
less than "a new colonialism."
And the men who enforce it, like their predecessors, are the
prostitutes of war who sell themselves to any company, faction,
or government with ready cash to pay. In fact, Martin Van Creveld,
a war theoretician, believes that future armed conflicts around
the world will resemble the old ones. He argues that conventional
nationstates are disappearing and that future "warmaking
entities" will look a lot like they did in the feudal past
tribes, citystates, religious associations, private mercenary
bands, and commercial organizations such as the East India Company
in the time of the British empire.
"As used to be the case until at least 1648, military
and economic functions will be reunited," Creveld writes.
In such times, Van Creveld predicts, "much of the daytoday
burden of defending society against the threat of lowintensity
conflict will be transferred to the booming security business,
and indeed the time may come when the organizations that comprise
that business will, like the condottieri of old, take over the
state."
The most infamous mercenary army contracted by the new colonialists
is Executive Outcomes (EO) which provided Buckingham and Spicer
with soldiersforhire in Papua New Guinea. But EO' most famous
campaign was in Sierra Leone in May 1996, by Sierra Rutile, an
Ohiobased titanium company, and Branch Energy, one of Buckingham's
many companies.
The EO mercenaries arrived in Sierra Leone better equipped
than most armies in Africa, with Russian helicopter gunships,
a radio intercept system, two Boeing 727s to transport troops
and supplies, an Andover casualtyevacuation aircraft, and fuelair
explosives. Used with devastating results by the US in the Gulf
war, fuelair explosives--one step below nuclear weapons in power--suck
out oxygen upon detonation, killing all life within a squaremile
radius.
The pilots, according to Martha Carey, an American who worked
for Doctors Without Borders, "were racist killers with no
interest in the country." Carey reported that during the
early days of the mercenary presence in Freetown, she had only
to see the EO helicopters flying over her house to know that it
was time to rush to the hospital and prepare for an influx of
wounded. The real mission of the mercenaries, she charged, was
to gain control of Sierra Leone's substantial diamond wealth.
And indeed, the operation left EO with a lucrative security contract
financed by the profits earned by the diamond mines.
Violent scenes like the ones that horrified Carey accompany
the mercenaries wherever they go. But to understand the forces
behind these operations, it may be better to travel back a quarter
century to visit three distinctly different men, whose lives have
been shaped by their singleminded pursuit of three minerals gold,
oil, and diamonds.
The first man, a quiet, urbane, Cambridge graduate, left Britain
to study business at Stanford in the late 1960s. John Browne grew
up in Iran and other countries where his father worked for BP.
"It was a colonial existence more than anything else. People
lived in these strange expatriate camps, and everyone was connected
with the oil business in some way," he later said, recalling
that he loved the excitement of the foreign travel. Over the last
two decades, Browne slowly but surely worked his way up to in
BP, based first in Alaska and then the North Sea. In 1989, he
became head of exploration for BP, steering the company to successful
oil strikes in the Caspian Sea.
The second, Robert Friedland, a charismatic young student
from Chicago got an early start in dubious trafficking at Bowdoin
College in Maine in the late 1960s where he ran an LSD smuggling
business out of a college dormitory until he was busted by local
undercover cops. He later moved to a hippie commune in Oregon
where he found an abandoned mine. "I crawled in and I was
scared because it was wet and cold, and here and there the walls
had caved in, and all I had was this funky old flashlight. But
I grokked it immediately Gold!" he once told a reporter,
describing his first infatuation with the yellow metal. Two decades
later, another of Friedland's mines in Colorado was the site of
the most expensive cleanup in this country's mining history as
the cyanidelaced waste from one of his mines killed all life in
a 17-mile stretch of the Alamosa river.
The third man was a Mauritianborn diamond buyer, JeanRaymond
Boulle, who was working for De Beers, the South African multinational,
in Sierra Leone and the Congo at the end of the 1960s. The Congo,
which had just been renamed Zaire (and had since taken the name
the Democratic Republic of the Congo), was being run by the iron
hand of Mobutu Sese Seko. The USbacked dictator had taken over
the country in 1965, after a bitter war fought by South African
mercenaries recruited and paid for by the CIA.
Meanwhile Browne climbed the corporate ladder, the other two
men led more colorful lives. Friedland spent time in India, Switzerland,
Canada, Singapore, and finally Australia while Boulle lived in
Belgium, Texas, Minnesota, Arkansas, Belize and eventually Monaco.
In the course of his travels, Friedland befriended the families
of the rich and powerful. In Indonesia, he established joint ventures
with the sons of Indonesian dictator Suharto; in Burma, he linked
up with Reggie Tun Maung the vice president of his holding companies
who just happens to be married to the daughter of Maung Maung
Khin, deputy prime minister of th current military junta; and
in China, Friedland donated a tenth of the assets of his joint
venture to a disabled peoples organization run by Deng Pufang,
the son of Deng Xiaoping, the late Chinese premier.
For his part, Boulle also courted power. During his stay in
Arkansas, when he was beginning to explore in the Crater of Diamonds
State Park, he met with the governor. "I spent a little time
with Gov. Clinton explaining to him that this could be important
to his state and to the nation," he says.
Boulle and Friedland had met through a common interest in
prospecting for diamonds off the Atlantic coast of Namibia. They
struck it big time in January 1994 when they staked out what they
originally thought was a major diamond property in Labrador. A
year and a half later, Friedland and Boulle sold this propertywhich
turned out to have a huge nickel deposit to Inco, the world's
largest nickel producer for $4.3 billion Canadian. In the next
12 months, the two parted ways but by then, each was the richer
by several hundred million dollars. Meanwhile, in April 1996,
Browne was appointed chief executive of British Petroleum under
chairman Peter Sutherland, the former Irish head of the World
Trade Organization.
As they gained wealth, the three mineral barons had more to
protect. At about the same time, they all started hiring men like
Buckingham, Spicer, and Nixon to put down local protests that
might interfere with their exploitation of gold, oil, and diamonds.
On April 30, 1996, BP finalized a deal with DSL to dispatch
trainers to Colombia to help the local police "defend"
the company oil installations and beef up BP's existing contracts.
The oil company's contracts with the army for protection eventually
became a minor political sensation in Britain.
Meanwhile, in the US, Boulle put up US$10 million in early
April 1996 for Sierra Rutile, an Ohiobased company that was struggling
to reopen the world's largest rutile mine in Sierra Leone. The
west African facility, a major source of titanium dioxide, had
been shut down by rebels in January 1995. The company used this
cash, plus money it had borrowed earlier from the World Bank,
the Londonbased Commonwealth Development Corporation, and two
US federal agencies the Overseas Private Investment Corporation
and the ExportImport Bank to pay for EO to quell the troubles.
The other major backer of EO in Sierra Leone was Branch Energy,
headed by Anthony Buckingham. Already an old Africa hand, the
Brit had spent the previous ten years helping the Canadian company,
Ranger, run oil exploration operations in Angola.
Michael Grunberg, Buckingham's financial adviser, introduced
his boss to Friedland just before Friedland began to withdraw
from active partnership with Boulle. In September 1996, Buckingham
and Friedland announced that they had set up Diamond Works (see
boxes). That collaboration set the stage for the new mineral extraction
colonies in places as far-flung as Angola in southern Africa and
Sierra Leone in west Africa, the Venezuelan Amazon and southern
China.
Some of the stories of the many military campaigns currently
being waged around the world on behalf of these three men and
industries they lead are told in the country studies below. But
they are by no means the only major players. There are at least
a few dozen others in the mineral industries, men like "Jim
Bob" Moffett, the maverick excollege football player from
Texas, who runs the biggest gold mine in the world, and Brian
Anderson, the outgoing chief of Shell Nigeria, who are responsible
for some of the worst environmental and human rights abuses committed
in the world today. Indeed, Millius Palawiya of the Londonbased
non governmental organization International Alert, says that mercenaries
today, cast themselves in the respectable mold of free market
businessmen championed by former British prime minister Margaret
Thatcher. "They use the Thatcherite language of private enterprise,
efficiency and investment," he says.
And now the governments of the new free market driven world
have even begun to court them. No less a luminary than Kofi Annan,
the United Nations secretary general, has consulted DSL on how
to protect the refugees on the border between Zaire and Rwanda,
while the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), the Pentagon=s spy
arm, invited Tony Spicer and other EO figures to a major conference
about private armies on June 24.
Many activists, however, have taken the opposite stance. In
June, the Londonbased Africa Research and Information Bureau (ARIB),
launched a campaign against new mercenary operations in Angola,
Sierra Leone and Sudan. "Mercenaries are a serious threat
to stability in Africa. We must get rid of the mercenaries from
the face of Africa," says Kayode Fayemi of ARIB. Indeed,
if history is anything to go by, inviting private armies into
Africa will only serve the interests of those who hire them: the
extraction of resources for profit by any means necessary and
with little regard for the human or environmental consequences.
Other activists say that those concerned by cultural, economic,
and environmental devastation wrought by the mineral industries
need to become more aware not only of those exploiting the planet's
wealth, but of those consuming it. Danny Kennedy, an activist
with the Berkeley-based Project Underground, an environmental
and human rights group, says: "As people in consumer countries
drive more and buy more oil, or wear more gold and diamonds, indigenous
peoples will continue to be killed and pristine places will be
destroyed. Only by building a movement of affected communities
and educating these consumers can we hope to reverse this terrifying
phenomenon."
The task is enormous not only because of the wealth and power
of the mineral industries, but because the privatization of their
security functions on the international scene is only one part
of a much larger phenomenon. Here in the United States, prisons,
policing, and even welfare are being turned over to corporations.
Wealthy people around the world are hiring private security firms
which use everything from brute force to sophisticated electronic
surveillance systems to keep the unemployed and the poor away
from their enclaves. Meanwhile, idiot economists argue about the
merits and demerits of free trade, forgetting that the debate
cannot simply be restricted to cheaper minerals, food or clothes
it is also about the trade in everything from guns to death itself.
Increasingly and openly, governments and corporations are joining
together to pillage public resources. When both are armed to the
teeth and obsessed by profit, war, inequality and environmental
devastation becomes inevitable.
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