Changing the Guidelines
Given the ineffectual efforts of the NCPs in following up on the charges of corporate misconduct in Congo, RAID suggested revising the OECD Guidelines. Something extra was needed to compel First World governments to investigate abuses committed by the corporations based in their countries. The report also stressed that governments must find means to enforce corporate compliance with the guidelines. Their strictly voluntary nature meant that corporations faced no consequences for behaviors that cause staggering amounts of human suffering.33
These conclusions were also affirmed in a September 22, 2005 report by the organization OECD Watch, Five Years On: A Review of the OECD Guidelines and National Contact Points. The organization noted pessimistically, “There is no evidence to suggest that the Guidelines have helped reduce the number of conflicts between local communities, civil society groups and multinational companies.” Key to failure of the guidelines was the fact that NCPs had generally adopted a narrow interpretation of when the guidelines ought to apply to corporations’ activists. The NCPs argued that t relationships between multinational businesses and their suppliers were trade-related rather than investments – and thus not subject to the guidelines. The corporations cited by the UN Panel were therefore at fault for buying plundered resources only if they actually owned the companies doing the plundering. These proponents of a narrow interpretation argued further that multinational had little control over the other companies in their supply chains and so could not be blamed for the illegal and unethical behavior of companies more directly involved in extracting resources.
The NGOs argued that the text of the guidelines clearly showed that they must be applied to both investment and trade. They also argued that corporations must “readily accept responsibility for product quality in the supply chain and engineer their management practices to ensure product quality.” Companies hire subcontractors in other countries to produce goods of a specified design and quality and could easily choose to hire people who do not violate the guidelines.
The OECD Watch report suggested ways to make the OECD Guidelines for Multinational Enterprises stronger by enhancing the power of NCPs, governments, and NGOs to address corporate abuses. For example, it suggested appointed NCPs who were more independent of governments and of business interests and who had more power to investigate violations of the guidelines. These NCPs would present annual reports to parliaments and have their decisions scrutinized by parliamentary committees or ombudsmen. Governments could provide subsidies, export credits, and political-risk insurance for corporations only if corporations observed the OECD guidelines. NGOs could have the power to challenge NCPs who were interpreting the guidelines too narrowly. In countries that were not signatories to the OECD Guidelines, NGOs could present complaints directly to NCPs through the diplomatic staff from the corporations’ home countries.34
If national and international governing bodies do not mandate such reforms, the corporatocracy and its local suppliers will continue to shirk responsibility for funding wars and human rights abuses.
Testimony
When I first came to Congo in October 2005, I tried to understand the situation there using other projects that my NGO, Christian Peacemaker Teams, has established over the years as frames of reference. In both Haiti and Chiapas, we had lived among people targeted by paramilitary violence. We had accompanied rural and urban Palestinians facing violence by Israeli soldiers and settlers.
At the time of the invasion of Iraq in 2003, we had set up camps near water-treatment plants and hospitals in order to protect the infrastructure when the US began bombing. (Destruction of these plants in the first Gulf War and the imposition of sanctions caused a grave humanitarian crisis in subsequent years.) After we began hearing stories of US Forces abusing Iraqi families during home raids and torturing Iraqi detainees (almost all of whom never had charges brought against them), our team began documenting these abuses. We sent reports to all relevant US military and civilian authorities three months before the story of Abu Ghraib broke.35
Of all the Christian Peacemaker Team Projects I have worked on, Colombia struck me as bearing the most resemblance to the situation in Congo. Colombia is also a resource-rich country. Its resources fuel military, paramilitary, and guerilla groups whose victims are mostly civilians. Acts of terror – kidnapping, torture, and mutilating bodies – enable armed groups to control the resources. Multinational corporations have a vested interest in preventing meaningful democratic change.
However, Colombia has a more or less functioning government, judicial system, and press – even tho government representatives, prosecutors, judges, and reporters are often murdered. (A Colombian church leader once told us, “In Colombia you are free to say whatever you want, and anyone else is free to kill you for saying it.”) Colombian church and civic groups, and small settlements of campesinos in the Magdalena Medio region we visited, immediately saw ways that a CPT presence might open some political space for them to work for social reforms. About a hundred families displaced by paramilitary groups moved back to their farms with the promise of CPT accompaniment.
In contrast, few Congolese saw any use for the work that CPT has done traditionally in the Americas and the Middle East. We asked about accompanying women when they cultivated the fields and were told that we would inevitably meet the same fate as the Congolese in an attack by armed groups. “Of course you would be raped,” said a woman who works with the Department of Women and Children in Bukavu. Indeed, we were told, the presence of white people might actually cause militias to target the Congolese communities hosting us (altho black internationals might be able tot ravel surreptitiously into the countryside and document atrocities there, several women told us.)
So we were left feeling helpless. We could refuse to use technology made cheap by the pillage in Congo. But the corporatocracy has millions of consumers lined up to take our places. Besides, cell phones, laptops, and digital cameras have dramatically enhanced the ability of human rights workers to document abuses by governments and individuals.
In the end, once they found out that we were not aid and development workers, most of the Congolese we met said they just wanted their story told. So I am telling you about fifty or sixty rape survivors who clapped and sang for us as we entered the Lutheran meeting hall in Bukavu. About the Lutheran laywoman who told us, “When they are singing they can forget what happened.” About the dejected pastor who brightened only when we talked about bringing delegations of women from North America to meet the 250 survivors under his care. About the university students who said of Western nations, “They denounce things and nothing happens, so the international community must want it to happen.”
And I will proclaim the tragedies of baby Esther and her mother. The first is the rape that forced them to the margins of a devastated society. The second is the reality that Congo has more than enough wealth for Esther and the millions of other Congolese children to have abundance of nutritious food, clean water, education, and decent medical care for the rest of their lives. But its resources go instead to adorn the wealthy with jewelry and to manufacture PlayStations, cell phones, and weapons systems for affluent First World societies.
John Perkins’ term economic hit man seems almost too tame for the behavior of the corporatocracy and its minions in Congo. An unflinching look at what they have done to the Congolese make economic war criminals seem more apt.
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