The Truth Buried Alive

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In Canada, where libel laws are similar to Britain’s, Frank magazine had picked up my story. Frank swiftly grabbed its ankles by running that incredible retraction–that no one had been “killed or injured” in the mine clearance. The editor apologized to me; they simply had no resources to fight billionaires. Who could blame them? The first report of the alleged killings in Tanzania came from Amnesty International, whom I quoted. I called their headquarters in London. Courageously, Amnesty refused to help. The organization whose motto is “Silence is complicity” announced that, on advice of lawyers, they would be silent.

Barrick made good use of Amnesty’s self-censorship. The company told the court–and the many news outlets around the world that were sniffing around the story–that Amnesty had conducted an investigation and had concluded that “no one was killed in the course of the peaceful removal of miners.” If this were true, I would have retracted the story immediately. I’m not infallible, and nothing would have made me more joyous than to find out those miners were still alive. But Barrick could not produce the Amnesty clearance–no such report could be located. Amnesty said Tanzania had barred them from investigating, so the killings remained neither confirmed nor denied–in short they had never cleared Sutton Resources. But that was off the record. Publicly, the Nobel Prize-winning organization (despite several angry calls to them from Bianca Jagger) continued to hide under a desk, knees knocking.

One excellent reporter, chosen Britain’s journalist of the year, told me just to sign whatever it took to get out of trouble. “That’s just how it’s done here.” Floyd Abrams, who defends the New York Times in the United States and Europe, explained to my astonishment that the truth alone is not a defense in English courts. Photos of dead bodies and body parts in Tanzania meant nothing in our case.

I’m not a Man for All Seasons. Honestly, I was ready to go along with some kind of bum-kissing apology to Barrick, only because at the time I was living on Red Bull, potassium powder and no sleep trying to get out the Florida vote theft story, and I sure as hell didn’t need another distraction.

But I had a problem. Our paper had encouraged an internationally respected expert on human rights and the environment, Tanzanian lawyer Tundu Lissu, familiar with the allegations, to go to the mine. If Lissu said no one died, I’d sign off as Barrick requested. Instead, over several missions to his home country, he sent back more witness statements, photographs of a corpse allegedly of a man killed by police during the clearing of the site, a list of the dead–and a videotape of bones, and a worker going into one pit to retrieve bodies buried, he says on the tape, by the “Canadians”. (Barrick says the bodies were not from the subsidiary’s mine site or, if from the site, the deaths were not the result of the clearance of the site.) In April 2001, when Barrick found out Lissu was asking questions inside the mine site, they sent him and his employer, the World Resources Institute of Washington, DC, a letter outlining a lawsuit if he repeated the allegations concerning the removal of miners.

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