/IPS ENVIRONMENT BULLETIN/ GUYANA: Lawsuit Over Guyana Mine Calls For Company to Cleanup

By Pratap Chatterjee Reprint | | Print |

Pratap Chatterjee

SAN FRANCISCO, Mar 29 1997 (IPS) - The newly filed suit by three Guyanese citizens against the Canadian mining company Cambior is the latest action taken against a multinational corporation for environmental damage in the Third World.

The suit, filed Wednesday in Montreal, accuses Cambior of spilling 3.2 billion litres of cyanide-laced waste into Guyanese rivers in August 1995. The spill occurred when the wall of a pond holding the mining wste broke at the Omai gold mine, a joint venture between Cambior and Colorado-based Golden Star. Hundreds of fish were reported killed as the waste washed into the Omai river which feeds into the Essequibo, the country’s main waterway.

“Multinational companies have got to realise that the days in which they could go to a Third World country, extract resources, dump toxic waste, and export the profits are over,” says Shanna Langdon, editor of Drillbits & Tailings, a magazine that reports on the environmental and human rights impact of oil and mining operations.

“Today, the communities in these countries are coming to challenge the comnpanies on their home turf, and it is only a matter of time before the courts will recognise their rights,” she adds.

The lawsuit, brought by Elizabeth David, Judith David, and Leslie Patrick Norton of Bartica, a town near the mine, was filed in a superior court in the province of Quebec.

Speaking from Montreal, Steve Michelin, the lawyer for the three plaintiffs, said it made perfect sense to file the suit in Canada.

“Cambior is resident here,” he told IPS. “This gives my clients the right to sue them ere, because we believe that the decisions that led to the disaster were made here in this city.”

The three plaintiffs have set up a Quebec organisation — Recherches Internationales Quebec (RIQ) — to represent them and the 23,000 people living near the Omai river. RIQ has asked the court to order the company to clean up the area of the spill and pay 69 million Canadian dollars to compensate local people.

In a sworn affidavit, Elizabeth David says that the spill caused physical, psychological, environmental, and economic damage to her and the fishing community. She also quotes a finding by a Guyanese government commission that “the Omai tailings dam as designed and constructed was bound to fail.”

Geoffrey King, a spokesman for Cambior, told IPS that the lawsuit was “totally unfounded.” He added that the company has asked its lawyers to challenge the suit.

The company is already battling 520 claims arising from the disaster in Guyana’s own courts. King says that Cambior has settled 226 claims for an average value of 400 Canadian dollars and says that another 470 claims have been rejected.

“We were given permission to continue operations in January last year, and operations have continued uninterrupted since Feburary last year,” he said. Kig added that the company had built a second waste pond that it believes will be sufficient to deal with the waste over the 11-year estimated life of the mine.

King quoted from a Guyanese commission of inquiry which said that “at no time was the contaminated water a serious threat to life,” and pointed out that the company repaired the pond within 100 hours of the break.

But a Pan American Health Organisation report done at the time found that the spill killed all aquatic life in the Omai and at the junction where the Omai and Essequibo meet.

The Omai mine was using a technique known as “cyanide leaching” to extract gold from ore. This process involves spraying cyanide solution over ore to extract gold. The cyanide waste that is left over is stored in lined and covered ponds to prevent contact with local animals and birds.

More than 11,000 fish were killed along an 80-km stretch of the Lynches River by a similar but far smaller cyanide spill from the Brewer gold mine in South Carolina seven years ago. The worst disaster reported before Omai was the failure of the Summitville gold mine in the San Juan mountains of southwestern Colorado. Cyanide and heavy metal leaks from its operations killed all aquatic life along a 27-km stretch of the Alamosa river.

More toxic than the cyanide are the associated acidic waste and heav metals like arsenic, copper, cadmium, iron, lead and mercury which can cause severe and sometimes fatal stomach problems for livestock and humans.

Lawyers say that Cambior will probably ask the courts to throw out the lawsuit on the grounds that the case should be heard before courts in Guyana where the spill occurred.

But lawyers working on behalf of the Guyanese plaintiffs say that there are precedents for suing Canadians in Canada for acts committed abroad. Just last year, the U.S. government won 4.5 million dollars in damages from three Canadian citizens for a waste dump in Michigan.

Here in the United States, there are several lawsuits in the process of being heard against companies for environmental damage or human rights abuse caused in other countries.

New Orleans-based Freeport McMoRan is currently being sued in New Orleans for six billion dollrs for environmental and human right abuses allegedly committed its operations and agents on the western half of the island of New Guinea.

Last year, the Australian company Broken Hill Proprietary (BHP) settled out of court in Australia for an estimated 400 million dollars for compensation, clean-up, and mitigation of environmental damage caused by a copper on the eastern half of New Guinea.

Two other lawsuits filed by Ecuadorean groups on environmental grounds against oil giant Texaco and Asarco, a New York-based mining firm, have been dismissed by U.S. judges. Both dismissals are being appealed.

The New York-based public interest group, the Center for Constitutional Rights, is also representing communities in Burma and Nigeria in lawsuits against Shell and Unocal for human rights abuses allegedly committed by local security forces in conjunction with their oil operations.