MEDIA-CANADA: Gold Giant’s Lawsuits Silence Press

By Paul Weinberg Reprint | | Print |

Paul Weinberg

TORONTO, Mar 27 2002 (IPS) - A litigious “war on reporters” by Toronto-based Barrick Gold Corp. may have kept the press from discovering what really happened when miners were evicted from a site in Tanzania now owned by Barrick, says a journalist sued by the company.

The London Sunday Observer was forced to settle with Barrick in July 2001 for an undisclosed amount of money because of a political story written by U.S.-based freelance correspondent Greg Palast that quoted allegations regarding the mine.

Palast remains unrepentant, blaming strict British libel laws (generally similar to Canada’s) that allow an aggrieved party to sue over the mere mention of allegations in a published story, even if all sides are given their due.

The Observer is not the only publisher pressured by Barrick, one of the world’s top three gold companies. Earlier in 2001, a U.S.-based news service received two letters threatening legal action against it and a reporter if they published a story about the Tanzanian mine.

“They [Barrick] said they would sue us under Canadian libel law,” recalls the reporter. The news service subsequently decided to not publish its findings.

The Canadian satirical magazine Frank was also forced, in the face of threatened legal action, to issue an apology to Barrick after doing its own story on Bulyanhulu.

The bare bones of the Bulyanhulu controversy finally entered the public record on Sep. 27 last year in Ottawa, at a news conference hosted by NGO the Council of Canadians.

Tundu Lissu, a Tanzanian lawyer with the Dar es Salaam-based Lawyers’ Environmental Action Team, provided eyewitness statements, photographs, and a police videotape of interviews with local Bulyanhulu residents to back allegations of mass murder at the gold mine.

The Council of Canadians demanded an international independent investigation into the accusations that more than 50 people were killed and buried during the forced removal of tens of thousands of small-scale miners and their families from the site by the Tanzanian police in 1996.

The area around the mine was the subject of a legal dispute between the inhabitants and a local subsidiary of Vancouver-based Sutton Resources Ltd, which sold the mine to Barrick Gold in 1999.

Bulyanhulu is valued at about 280 million U.S. dollars. Barrick told shareholders in its 1999 report that the mine “will be a powerful cash generator for Barrick for at least the next 20 years”.

Newspapers including Canada’s Globe and Mail immediately reported on the Council of Canadians press conference. At the time, former Sutton president Michael Kenyon told reporters that that no killings, injuries or burials occurred and the removal of the miners “was conducted in a safe and systematic fashion”.

The Canadian and Tanzanian governments, as well as the World Bank (its Multilateral Investment Guarantee Agency (MIGA) provided 56 million dollars in political risk insurance for Bulyanhulu) sided with Sutton and Barrick in resisting the investigation call.

Palast singled out The Globe, which calls itself “Canada’s national newspaper”, for criticism. He says that as the one paper in the country with the resources to conduct a major exploration of events in Tanzania, it deserves “the Cowardly Lion award” for “ducking out” of the story weeks before the Sep. 27 press conference.

The Globe had planned to send reporter Mark MacKinnon to Bulyanhulu after attending the Aug. 31- Sep. 7 United Nations anti-racism conference in South Africa. But the trip was cancelled and the reporter was diverted to the Middle East on Sep. 11 to cover developments following the terrorist acts in New York and Washington.

“We decided we had other priorities,” the newspaper’s executive editor Sylvia Stead said in an email. MacKinnon did not respond to a request for an interview.

National Post reporter and mining specialist Brian Hutchinson also did not travel to the East African country during his three weeks of research on the story. But he does not think that made much of a difference to his final product – more than two pages in the paper’s Dec. 29 edition rebutting the allegations by the Council of Canadians.

Hutchinson describes Palast’s Observer article as “libelous”, “inept”, and “garbled”.

“If the media suspects there is nothing to the allegations, that the allegations have been overstated, they are going to leave, right, disappear,” Hutchinson told the Straight Goods Internet news site. “How many stories have you seen post-Sep. 27 on Bulyanhulu? Like none. You have to ask yourself why.”

But veteran Canadian author and investigative journalist Stevie Cameron, who has researched the events in Bulyanhulu for a possible book, counters that the naysayers are being hasty. Not to be discounted, she says, is the role of corruption among politicians and the police in Tanzania. “I also believe that the story Lissu tells is not unique,” says Cameron.

Barrick, as the present owner of the Bulyanhulu mine, does not figure at all in the allegations themselves, which involve the eviction of miners before the firm took charge of the property.

Barrick spokesman Vincent Borg denies any suggestion the company has intimidated journalists. “We don’t argue with any publication or outlet to publish whatever they choose to, as long as it reflects the truth and is not libelous,” says Borg.

Others like Tundu Lissu note that Barrick stopped threatening legal action after the Council of Canadians put the allegations and rebuttals regarding Bulyanhulu on the public record.

Barrick is now focused on presenting its case in the media, says Lissu. “I’m also reliably informed that they are preparing a dossier on me. I do not know what good would that do them but then let’s wait and see.”