Canadian complicity

Canadian complicity

The Monywa mine falls firmly within the category of Burmese investments projects currently condemned by the ILO and which - were it operated by a US company - would likely make it subject to human rights legal action in the USA [Financial Times 5/7/99]. But, despite Friedland's notoriety, the Canadian Government did nothing to prevent IGL's initial entry into Burma. Indeed in 1997 Friedland was able to boast that "… in 1996 representatives of the company met with officials of the Canadian government in Ottawa [and] at no time did the government advise us against investing in Myanmar [Burma] or attempt to dissuade us from doing business in the country" [Canada Newswire 8/8/97 op cit] On the contrary, Canada's Export Development Corporation (EDC) is believed to be a key provider of political risk insurance to the Monywa mine [Indochina Goldfields Ltd, "Focus on Myanmar: case study"; presentation by Eric Edwards, Chief Financial Officer, to the Northern Miner 3rd Annual Southeast Asian Mining Conference & Exhibition, Vancouver June 25 1997]. Equally important, the Canadian authorities allowed Friedland to relocate to Singapore without any investigation of the deals which permitted IGL - and its investment partners - to extend their destructive and exploitative reach throughout the Asia-Pacific region.

Nearly a decade after the Summitville debacle, in 1998 a Canadian court refused the USEPA permission to indict Friedland for the Summitville disaster - the debacle that launched him into mining in the first place. This rebuff to the world's most experienced environmental protection agency was all the more galling given that the USEPA, along with the State of Colorado, two years earlier had finally commenced legal proceedings against Friedland in Denver, accusing him of critically defective decision-making at the mine. In response the Supreme Court of British Columbia temporarily froze US$152 million worth of Friedland's newly acquired shares in Inco, in order to pay towards the mine's clean-up [MJ 30/8/96]. An outraged Friedland claimed he had already offered a "substantial" financial contribution to mitigate the disaster, while he needed the Inco shares to finance "business opportunities" (no doubt primarily Monywa) and support lines of credit he had with the Bank of Montreal [Financial Times 9/9/96].

Clearly the authorities in his home country will not readily be persuaded to bring one of its most distinctive reprobates to justice. But Friedland's undoubted hubris might finally undo him. The prices reached for copper, gold and diamonds have become highly volatile in the past two years, under the impact of commodity scandals, price collapses and the shaking of entire economies in precisely the region on which Friedland has come most to depend, both for extraction and marketing. Morever, the stock market shocks of mid-1998, by revealing most shares to be woefully over-priced, could already have dented prospects for some of Friedland's putative ventures.

Finally, as global consciousness grows about both Indigenous self-determination and the negative consequences of mining in bio-diverse tropical regions, this unique - and uniquely damaging - mining impresario will face mounting resistance on several fronts. Not long ago, and not that far away from the protection of Burma's taskmasters, another, almost equally brutal, regime was confronted with evidence of Robert Friedland's history and self-aggrandisement. In 1997 The World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) compiled a dossier on his exploits (based on material supplied by Nostromo Research) and presented it to the Indonesian authorities in support of their application for the Lorentz reserve in West Papua to be protected from all mining.

A few months after Suharto fell in 1998, the Ministry of the Environment in Jakarta promised that Lorentz would indeed be gazetted as a National Park from which mining - in particular Friedland's company, Montagu Mimika - would be banned.

When democratic rule is established in Burma... Well – readers are invited to come to their own conclusions.