By GEOFFREY YORK
BEIJING — A human-rights group says it has found evidence that Canadian companies are endangering the rights of indigenous residents in three major investment projects in Asia and Africa.
The Canadian investments are, in some cases, jeopardizing the water sources and human rights of the local population, the study said. In another case, it said, Canadian involvement is making it easier for authorities to monitor dissent and impose military control on the local people.
The study, obtained by The Globe and Mail, is to be released at a news conference in Ottawa Wednesday. It investigates, among others, two Canadian-owned mining projects in the Philippines and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, along with a Canadian telecommunications company in Tibet.
The investigation was conducted by Rights & Democracy, a Montreal-based organization that was created by Parliament in 1988 to promote human rights and democratic development around the world.
Some of the report’s strongest criticism is levelled at TVI Pacific Inc., a Calgary-based company that operates an open-pit gold-and-silver mine on the island of Mindanao in the southern Philippines.
While it has created hundreds of jobs in an impoverished area, the Canadian mine has also displaced many families, divided the indigenous people, hurt the local small-scale miners, damaged a mountain that is considered sacred to the people, and caused pollution that harmed the livelihoods of fishermen and rice farmers, the report said.
It said the Canadian company has hired a paramilitary security force that has “contributed to militarization of the area.” The security personnel, hired from the national army, have cleared people from the mining area and engaged in violent confrontations with protesters, the report said.
It described the forcible eviction of small-scale miners, including the bulldozing of gardens and farmland by the company’s security forces. The local miners also complained of harassment and intimidation by TVI’s security agents.
The Canadian government, through its embassy in the Philippines, has supported the TVI project and channelled funds through the company for local projects, the study found.
The study called for the disarming of the company’s paramilitary security forces and a halt to the mining project until the company improved its rights record.
John Ridsdel, a spokesman for TVI Pacific, said the report is “simply wrong, factually and interpretively, from start to finish.” He said the investigation was “fundamentally flawed” because its researchers were “a collection of politically motivated organizations that have been dedicated to opposing mining projects.”
He said the allegations by these groups “have everything to do with politics and money, and almost nothing to do with human rights.”
Mr. Ridsdel said the company’s anti-pollution efforts have reduced the level of mercury in local waterways. The mine has had no effect on the local fishery, and the company has taken steps to reduce the silt that has affected the farmers, he said.
He agreed, however, with some of the report’s criticisms of the paramilitary security forces, and that the area should be demilitarized.
The report also criticized a Canadian-led mineral project that produces copper and cobalt in the Congo. The company’s processing operations are located over a water table that supplies drinking water to 70 per cent of the nearest city’s population, and there is a “major risk” that it could contaminate the water, in which toxic metals are already present in increasing amounts.
The mineral company, known as Société Minière du Katanga, is owned by a Canadian citizen and has been supported by the Canadian embassy in the country, according to a researcher who worked on the report.
The report also examined Nortel Networks Corp. and its controversial involvement in the high-altitude Chinese railway to Tibet. The company is supplying the railway with a digital wireless-communications network that will help China consolidate its military control over Tibet, the report said.
The Nortel equipment on the Tibet railway is “part of China’s surveillance architecture, and thereby underpins the capacity of the state to monitor dissent and maintain political control in Tibet,” the report said.
It said the project is part of a development system that “contributes to human-rights violations.” Nortel made no significant effort to consult the Tibetan people or to seek their informed consent about the construction of its communications towers along the railway, the report said.
A spokesman for Nortel denied the accusations in the report. “Nortel is not collaborating with any government to repress the human rights or democratic rights of its citizens,” said the spokesman, Mohammed Nakhooda. “We live by a code of ethics and human-rights behaviour for Nortel employees that is extended anywhere we do business.”
He noted that on March 15, Nortel adopted a new policy that will establish a process to include human-rights considerations whenever it assesses business opportunities or carries out business activities.
