A Canadian Grave Digger in Burma
By: Kanbawza Win
Mizzima News Group (www.mizzima.com)
December 9, 2000
"Thu Ba Yar Zar" in Burmese means an outcast gravedigger whose profession compels him to live in a cemetery far away from town. He will earn the money only when somebody dies. Such a person in the modern sense is Robert Friedland of Ivanhoe Mines, Inc, a Vancouver- based company.
How Robert Friedland, an American, end up as a gravedigger is of interest. In 1981 Friedland launched his first mining venture, the ill-fated Gaslactic Resources. The company name is Summitvillle Mines, a cyanide heap-leach gold project in the state of Colorado. To save expenses, instead of taking necessary precautions, it leached 35 million pounds of cyanide and other toxic tailings into a nearby watershed. When it became known, the Colorado State government stopped the operation in 1991 and the US Government launched a $150 million lawsuit against Friedland. He declared his company bankrupts and fled to Vancouver where he already had connections.
He got his chance with Golden Star Resource at Omai on the Essequibo river in Guyana. Using the same strategy, he leached 3 billion liters of cyanide-laced mine tailings into the river, not only poisoning all life including fish stocks but also ruining Guyana’s farmlands.
Knowing this disastrous act would soon be uproar, his company fled after garnering a huge profit. Although labeled as the worst environmental disaster in Latin America, he escaped legal action by cunning.
Just a year after the Omai debacle he turned his attention to Canada, his adopted country. In Labrador, his company, Diamond Field Resources, struck a huge base nickel deposit in the native territory of Innu and Inuit (the outside world known them as Eskimos). As a shrewd and evil business genius he formed a consortium to exploit the deposit to solicit the support of a major Canadian company. The nickel miner Falconbridge fell to his bait and a deal worth $4.3 billion was inked with Friedland personally gaining $5 million. With a stroke of a pen, Friedland has become the biggest shareholder in the world’s largest deposit of nickel.
Now he has turned his attention to Asia and the Pacific and targeted the authoritarian regimes in Indonesia (under Suharto), Vietnam, China and Burma. This time his financial vehicles were Indochina Goldfields and Ivanhoe Capital Corp (ICC).
In 1996 he decided to devote his full time to Ivanhoe and moved on to Singapore. He was helped by an expatriate Burmese businessman, U Tun Maung (Reggie), who now has the position of a Senior Vice President of Ivanhoe Myanmar Holdings, a wholly owned by ICC.
Thus Friedland got a connection with the Burmese Junta for U Tun Maung’s son has married to the daughter of the Deputy Prime Minister of the Burmese regime. U Tun Maung also skillfully used religion to shore up the business when he made himself Chairperson of the Vancouver Buddhist Society, to which Friedland graciously donated $75,000. Ivanhoe Myanmar Holding sealed a compact with the Junta’s Mining’s Enterprise No1 to export copper deposit on a fifty-fifty joint venture. It is in the process of extracting 15 billion pounds of copper over a 30 year- period and Friedland boasts in as the cheapest run mines in the world.
In Burma where a dictatorial regime has banned all trade unions and the average worker earns just 8 cents an hour, there are practically no regulations to ensure both labor and environmental standards. It is an ideal place for Friedland to make a profit on the blood and sweat of the Burmese people. Furthermore, slave labour (International Labor Organization has decided to take actions against the regime for widespread use of forced labor in the country) was routinely used in building of infrastructure in areas around the mines. Open pit, heap leach mining is prone at the best of times to be a dirty business, especially when regulations are weak.
Open-pit mining involves clearing standing vegetation and forests, diverting drainage systems, disrupting drainage patterns and destabilizing topography, causing mountains to collapse. The heap leach design creates serious problems since waste rock and toxins have to be contained for a long period of time to avoid leaching. There is a serious risk of acid rock drainage, where exposed waste rock will leach sulfur trioxide when it rains. This is especially dangerous when heavy rainstorms and occasional flooding occur during the monsoon period. Mine tailings can contaminate local drinking water supplies, and poison water bodies and aquamarine life.
The Burmese people are sure that to maximize his profits Friedland will use the same old method that he used in Colorado and Omai. Even in democratic countries where information is openly accessible and where high standards of monitoring and control exists how much more dangerous will be a place like Burma where it is a crime to bring the people’s grievances to the authorities?
Independent investigation is next to impossible and local enterprises and foreign companies that do not answer publicly to shareholders and do not follow international accepted standards run these mines.
In past years an increasing number of people have expressed their faith in the "codes of conduct" emanating from the Asia-Pacific Mining Conference in Canada (1996), but there are growing skepticism about whether such codes are relevant or enforceable in states like Burma. These states essentially respond not to better environmental, human rights and labour standards, but to the need for foreign investment, which led them to meet, the structural adjustment criteria set by multilateral institutions. Where infrastructure and power supply are poor there is bound to be slave labour, as the ruling authority would prefer to protect its own internal interest rather than the welfare of local communities. That is exactly what the mining companies are doing in Burma. It is natural that a mining company will often try for as long as possible to fence off their critics by coming up with their own limited criteria and system of auditing rather than submit to being seen by an international body. Thus there is little or no way to stop the activity of this Canadian gravedigger in Burma.
it has been known that more than 50% of the global finances for mining are raised in Canada, particularly the Toronto Stock Exchange. Moreover, Canadian companies with more than $ 3 million in their annual exploration budgets are estimated to control 35% of the exploration expenditures worldwide. Even though the Canadian Mining Task Force made numerous recommendations to improve operating standards, it is doubtful whether they are ever implemented in Burma.