FIGHT RACISM! FIGHT IMPERIALISM! FEBRUARY/MARCH 1994
RTZ is the biggest mining company in the world and Britain’s most infamous multi-national. In part two of his survey TREVOR RAYNE examines a sample of RTZ’s overseas operations, carried out in over 40 countries. British foreign policy is often adapted to meet RTZ’s interests.
Global Plunder
Africa
Between 1966-71 RTZ paid African miners under £5 million, but made nearly £140 million profit over the same period. In 1992, 12 per cent of RTZ’s 68,298 workers were employed in Africa yet they generated 21 per cent of the £537 million profit. Operations in Britain employing 18 per cent of the work force produced 1.3 per cent of the profits.
Rossing
‘It makes me proud to be British.’ (Prime Minister Thatcher on her visit to Rossing uranium mine in Namibia in 1989)
Southern African liberation movements and anti-apartheid activists made Rio Tinto Zinc a household name by exposing its activities in Namibia. RTZ’s role as the world’s leading uranium trader is of great strategic importance to the British state and both Labour and Conservative governments have been willing to defy international laws and opinion to protect that role. The Rossing lease was bought in 1967. By the early 1980s Rossing supplied nearly half of Britain’s nuclear requirements, 40 per cent of Japan’s uranium and 30 per cent of West Germany’s. Rossing accounted for 20 per cent of Namibia’s national product, 40 per cent of its exports and 10 per cent of world uranium output. UN hearings on Namibia held in 1980 heard that, ‘Rio Tinto Zinc [is] in the position of acting in many respects as a uranium producing and exporting country.’
SWAPO (the South West African People’s Organisation) declared that all mining rights granted in Namibia after 1966 were illegal. The UN passed its first decree forbidding foreign investment in Namibia for as long as it was under South African occupation in 1974. Former RTZ director Sir Val Duncan said he was ‘not prepared to take any notice of what the UN says on the matter’. Discussions over uranium contracts took place between RTZ and the Labour government between 1965-68. The first contract for Rossing uranium was agreed by the Minister of Technology, Tony Benn, in 1968. Benn says he was ‘kept in the dark’ about the source of the uranium. When the fact that it was Namibian uranium was revealed in 1970 Benn’s political partners saw no reason to end the contracts.
David Ennals, then Labour after of State at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, claimed in 1975 that the continuation of the contracts was in the interests of a future independent Namibia. The 1975 Labour Party National Executive condemned the contract as did the 1976 Party Conference, but the Labour government would not cancel it. James Callaghan claimed that SWAPO did not mind the deal.
About a third of South Africa’s uranium came from Rossing; Rossing was central to the programme for an apartheid nuclear bomb. It is also key to Britain’s Trident programme. The British government has been complicit in the imposition of apartheid conditions on Rossing’s miners, for instance the use of the South African Anti-Terrorism Act in 1979 to break a strike with dogs and tear gas (the strikers were protesting at pay awards of £5 a month for black miners and £60 a month for whites). In 1982 RTZ admitted having its own 69-man armed squad to ‘defend’ the Rossing mine. Despite RTZ directors’ claims that they were opposed to contract labour systems and that miners should live with their families, black workers were housed 16 to a room while the white workers had their own rooms. Africans were placed in separate camps according to their ‘ethnic groups’. Migrant workers found to be without their identity cards were automatically gaoled for a day. Injured workers were frequently denied compensation and sacked. Squalid, exploitative conditions remained down to independence in 1990.
Responding to claims that Rossing was producing tonnes of dangerous radioactive waste, RTZ Chair Sir Alistair Frame remarked that uranium mining was no more dangerous than the background radiation of a Scottish city!
South Africa
During the 1980s one George MacMillan who sat on the board of RTZ, ran Rossing and the Palabora copper mine for RTZ in South Africa. Palabora is owned jointly with the Anglo-American Corporation and De Beers. From 1983 MacMillan was a member of the South African Atomic Energy Corporation, the body responsible for developing the apartheid nuclear programme. Today, he also sits on the boards of Barlow Rand, Standard Bank South Africa, Sasol, South Africa Mutual Life Assurance and over 20 other companies.
Zimbabwe
After Ian Smith declared Rhodesia Unilaterally Independent in 1965 and the UN imposed sanctions, RTZ began omitting any mention of its gold, nickel and emerald mines in that country from its annual reports. RTZ, Anglo-American, Union Carbide and Lonrho were the main sanc-tions-busting mining companies that collaborated with the Smith regime.
In 1979 Lord Carrington, then a RTZ director, headed the Conservative Party’s ‘fact finding’ tour of Rhodesia. He was hosted by the head of Rio Tinto Rhodesia. Carrington negotiated independence in 1979. RTZ’s operations remain intact.
Australia
Rio Tinto merged with Consolidated Zinc in 1962. Today, RTZ owns 49 per cent of CRA (Conzinc Rio Tinto of Australia), in the top three of Australia’s largest companies. CRA has occupied more Aboriginal land then any other mining company and was the first firm to be boycotted by Aboriginal land councils for violating land rights.
Weipa and Mapoon in northern Queensland is the site of the world’s largest open cast bauxite mine, providing about 10 per cent of world capitalism’s supplies. After the site
Papua New Guinea Defence Force soldier guards an RTZ mine at Panguna
was bought by Conzinc in 1957 there followed a programme of evictions without compensation. When, in 1963, Mapoon residents resisted the mining company’s encroachments and attempted assimilation by the Church, armed police moved in and burned their homes down, arresting the whole community.
Wherever it needs to, RTZ is careful to buy support and split or neutralise potential opposition. Intending to extend its Weipa operations, CRA made a special privileged share issue in 1970. Not everyone could buy. On the first day of trading shares rose from A$2.75 to A$5.60. Among those who benefited so spectacularly were Queensland’s State Treasurer and Acting Premier, the Minister for Aboriginal Affairs and the ministers for Local Government, Industrial Development, Works, Electricity and Health, and the Premier of Western Australia. Other beneficiaries included Melbourne’s Presbyterian church, the Anglican church in Melbourne and Sydney and the then imminent Premier of Queensland and his wife, Mr and Mrs Bjelke-Petersen.
One Australian journalist writing in the Melbourne Age in 1976 reported: ‘If men ever establish a base on the barren surface of Mars it will look like Weipa . . . acres of dead craters unrelieved by a single growing thing. [Aboriginal] traditions have disappeared and alcohol has wreaked havoc … The Weipa operations have caused alarm in every Aboriginal community throughout the north of Australia’.
Weipa bauxite was used in the B-52 bombers that devastated Vietnam.
RTZ, through CRA, owns Argyle Diamonds in Western Australia. Between 1982-85 world diamond output increased over 40 per cent, almost entirely due to Argyle, the world’s most lucrative diamond mine. The output is marketed through the Anglo-American/De Beers Central Selling Organisation of South Africa, thereby keeping prices up through monopoly control of supplies.
CRA’s Pilbara mines in Western Australia produce nearly all Australia’s iron ore and 10 per cent of the world’s. They supply 18 per cent of Japan’s iron ore imports and are the largest source of China’s ore imports. The Aboriginal social structure in the Pilbara region has suffered from unattached white male workers exploiting the Aboriginal women.
Bougainville
Bougainville is an island 800 kilometres east of Port Moresby, capital of PapuaNew Guinea. It contains one of the world’s largest copper deposits. An extraction project was set up in 1966, underwritten by 27 British, European and Canadian banks and headed by the Bank of America. They were later joined by Mitsui and Mitsubishi Shoja Kaisha. The colonial administration in Port Moresby was offered a 20 per cent stake in the project and in return the Bougainville Copper Company could get any land it wanted free of tax.
Sir Val Duncan called Bougainville ‘the Jewel in our Crown’. By the early 1980s it contributed 23 per cent of RTZ’s profits while representing only 9.4 per cent of the firm’s assets. However, the people of Bougainville resisted the destruction of their land. When surveyors arrived, ‘Mothers put babies on survey pegs to stop the pegs being hammered in . . . ‘ Armed police were drafted onto the island in 1969 to try and crush the Napidokae Navitu resistance movement against the evictions, pollution and government collusion.
In 1988 guerrillas of the Bougainville Revolutionary Army led by Francis Ona commenced armed struggle. Ona declared Bougainville the independent Republic of Mekanni. in 1990. A thousand Papuan troops were deployed to put down the rising accompanied by four Australian supplied helicopter gunships. 1,500 people were killed but the mining had stopped and the company left. Sir Alistair Frame told RTZ shareholders that the guerrilla struggle had nothing to do with mining: ‘It’s a problem between local and national governments.’
Indonesia
CRA owns the Kaltim Prima coal reserves. Kaltim Prima is central to the Indonesian state’s ‘transmigration’ policy: the use of population transfers from the Indonesian mainland to the islands for purposes of political control.” With the coming of mining the tropical forests have been destroyed and drunkenness, prostitution and fighting are the common features of a ‘floating, aimless, unskilled population with few prospects’ according to one observer.
Latin America
RTZ threatened to ‘squash’ Survival International ‘like a fly’ if they did not abandon their campaign to defend land rights in Panama. RTZ has entered into joint ventures with the Brazilian government. A government Indian ‘protection’ agency issued a letter to RTZ guaranteeing that a project area would be `free of Indians’ by the time operations started. When RTZ bought BP Minerals in 1989 it acquired 48.8 per cent of the land area in Brazil under lease to non-Brazilian firms. RTZ also has holdings in Chile.
Canada
RTZ has repeatedly denied that its Elliot Lake uranium workings are dangerous to health. The place is surrounded by millions of tons of radioactive waste. Measurements showed workers were exposed to 40 times the safe radiation level. The local Indian population has a high rate for chronic disease, abnormal foetuses and foetal death.
Protest against copper mine, Wisconsin 1990
Norway
RTZ has just taken out leases on 40 per cent of the land area of Norway. The area they are interested in is Lapland, home of the Sami people. The Sami people can look forward to seeing potential political opposition bought off, the Norwegian government being handed a juicy slice of any takings, their land being turned to dust and ashes, their pasture and hunting grounds ruined, their sons and daughters uprooted and lives mutilated.
RTZ is an enemy of the people. It claws the land to furnish the arms industry with supplies. Its ‘low cost, high quality’ philosophy tramples over life in a stampede for profits. That is why RTZ is resisted. The unity of local peoples, environmentalists, anti-imperialists and socialists is a recurring threat for the RTZ directors, but thus far that unity has only flickered spasmodically then faded. RTZ marches on.
This report owes much to Plunderby Roger Moody, published by PARTIZANS and CAFCA. PARTIZANS are People Against RTZ and its subsidiaries, 218 Liverpool Road, London N1 1LE.
