Drink the Bitter Root

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Gary Geddes. Drink the Bitter Root

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ALSO BY GARY GEDDES

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“I’d be sitting having dinner at someone’s house and would ask who the woman was in the painting, only to be told it was my host’s wife, who had been killed by paramilitaries. Another would confide about a kidnapped child. And the Chileans—can you imagine, after what they’ve been through—have not signed on with us. There’s something incomplete, a sort of paralysis from not facing the legal implications of what has happened there, not demanding justice.” Béatrice turned her face away from me to regain her composure.

I wanted to know what Béatrice thought about the role of foreign mining companies in the ongoing violence. In Darfur, she informed me, she had brought together companies in the conflict area and asked what they wanted most. Was it mere profit or a stable society in which to do business? In public, their response was obvious, she said: yes, we prefer a stable society. I laughed and mentioned Madelaine Drohan’s book Making a Killing : How and Why Corporations Use Armed Force to Do Business, which argues that most of these companies favour instability, especially if it means getting a better deal from a rebel leader waiting in the wings to assume control. That was certainly the case with Laurent Kabila in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Luis Moreno-Ocampo—the fiery and dynamic new chief prosecutor of the ICC, who had come through the turbulent ’80s in Argentina with its torture and disappearances—was especially concerned with the “corporate factor,” Béatrice said, the role of resource companies in conflicts worldwide. The OTP’s team of lawyers investigating war crimes had been allowed to interview victims, rebel militias, even soldiers in the DRC, but their activities were cut short by the government the moment they tried to interview the white managers and executives of foreign companies in the conflict zone.

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