http://newafricanmagazine.com/charles-taylor-rubber-company/
Charles Taylor
and the rubber company
A
new investigative documentary aims to expose the history of US rubber company
Firestone’s engagement in Liberia. But in failing to follow the money, talk to
key Liberians and explore the company’s labour and environmental practices, the
film falls a long way short, as Robtel Neajai Pailey explains.
Despite
being released to great fanfare in the US on 18 November, the investigative
documentary Firestone and the Warlord is disappointing. As someone who has
extensively studied and written about Firestone, a tyre and rubber company
founded in Ohio in the US, which has operated in Liberia since 1926, I believe
the film’s producers simply did not dig deep enough.
There
are some merits to the ProPublica/Frontline documentary such as the revelations
from court documents, US State Department cables, Firestone corporate records,
correspondences, and video footage – but they ultimately conceal more
than they reveal of Firestone’s asymmetrical relationship with Liberia.
The
film’s narration begins: “This is a story about business and war. It’s a story
about a small group of Americans and the choices they made many years ago. A
story about the cost of operating in a volatile and remote country. Its setting
is a rubber plantation in Africa, owned and operated by Firestone.”
From
the outset, the narration harks back to Joseph Conrad’s description of the
Belgian Congo in Heart of Darkness. Liberia is an unnamed African backdrop of
savagery, calamity and doom, while Firestone and its US workers, like Kurtz in
Conrad’s novel, are presumed innocent until they encounter “the horror”. For
the first eight minutes of the film, we are bombarded with an often distorted
and caricatured interpretation of Liberia’s history by white male diplomats,
journalists, and former Firestone managers. We do not hear from two of
Liberia’s pre-eminent statesmen and scholars, Dr D. Elwood Dunn and Dr Amos
Sawyer, until much later. It sets the tone of the film as primarily concerned
with the perspectives of non-Liberians.
In
an attempt to make the narrative palatable to a US audience, the film vilifies
Charles Taylor, Liberia’s militant-turned-president, while portraying Firestone
as morally superior. It remains surprising that the film’s title was not
“Charles Taylor and the Rubber Company” since the gratuitous war imagery
employed to demonise the former Liberian president makes him the central
feature of the documentary. Taylor is referenced with accompanying video
footage, from his years in combat to his trial in The Hague for war crimes
committed during neighbouring Sierra Leone’s 11-year armed conflict. It
primarily paints the rubber company as a coerced, innocent victim of Taylor’s
brutality.
“When
evil is given an opportunity to reign freely, these things occur,” says former
Firestone accountant Steve Raimo, who reduces Liberia’s conflict to “tribal
warfare”. His former colleague Ken Gerhart continues with a mocking smile on
his face: “Well, if they were the right tribe, they survived. If they weren’t,
they didn’t.” Missing from their skewed analysis of Liberia’s armed insurgency
are the shifting geopolitics of the Cold War, the country’s rising inequality
and politicisation of identity and the alleged US complicity in Taylor’s
mysterious US jailbreak.
In
diminishing Liberia’s conflict to the irrational machinations of African
“tribes”, the film appears less concerned with Firestone’s business practices
and more obsessed with Taylor’s warmongering. Firestone is largely portrayed as
a law-abiding, tax-paying, responsible contributor to formal employment in
Liberia.
The
film’s narrator argues that when Liberia offered Firestone a chance to develop
a million acres of rubber at six cents per acre in 1926 that it was a “mutually
beneficial arrangement”. But for whom? Throughout the film, the Firestone
plantation pre-1989 is painted as a tranquil place for the mostly Liberian
labour force. Yet while the film exposes the “good life” of the company’s
expatriate managers, the living conditions and the low wages of Firestone’s
Liberian employees is generally glossed over.
During
the early part of Liberia’s armed conflict the company shut down and its
foreign staff left the country in 1992. Shortly thereafter, they return to do
business, but must first contend with Taylor.
In
a twist of irony, the film shows footage of Taylor scolding Firestone’s foreign
senior staff for their negligence: “There’s a little war, and you leave…there’s
no water, no food…it’s inexcusable.” Accusing management of abandoning
plantation workers, Taylor demands to know how Firestone will make amends.
In
1992, the company signed a Memorandum of Understanding with Taylor to resume
operations, which was crucial for Taylor. At the Hague, he said that Firestone
provided economic and political capital during the conflict.
Edwin
Cisco, president of the Firestone Workers’ Union, argues that the company’s
motivations boiled down to “profit, profit, and profit”. Yet, while the film
harps on about the fact that Firestone paid Taylor US$2.3m in “taxes” and spent
$35.3m on the plantation and its workers between June 1990 and February 1993,
the unaddressed elephant in the room is how much profit Firestone made. The
company has never revealed its earnings.
But
the film reminds us that Taylor siphoned off huge sums from the spoils of war,
while the same level of scrutiny is not paid to Firestone’s revenue stream.
One
former Firestone manager says unabashedly, “Firestone’s intent has always been
to make money. It always has and it always will be. We’re in the business to
make money.” Although the film is meant to be an exposé, it neither pursues the
money trail nor questions why such financial information is concealed.
One
US diplomat argues in the film that “Firestone has blood on its hands” because
of resumption of operations in the midst of armed conflict. This may be true
but Firestone’s labour relations could also be violent. When workers
demonstrated against the company’s arbitrary decision in 1997 to deduct 38% of
their monthly salaries to replace money that had allegedly been stolen during
the first Liberian armed conflict, then president Taylor unleashed his security
personnel to attack 7,000 unarmed demonstrators.
In
the film, Herman Cohen, former US Assistant Secretary of State for African
Affairs, and other diplomats condemn Taylor for being “venal” and “unsavoury”,
yet do not once interrogate Firestone’s practices. The film ignores the
backlash against Firestone crystallised in a transnational campaign, Stop
Firestone, spearheaded in 2005 by Liberians and an international coalition. The
campaign was largely based on a groundbreaking report “Firestone: The Mark of
Modern Slavery” by the Liberian NGO Save My Future Foundation (SAMFU). SAMFU
representatives were not interviewed for the film.
Also
glaringly missing is that in November 2005, 35 Liberian plaintiffs filed a
class action suit in a US court alleging that Bridgestone Corporation and
Bridgestone North American Tire, the parent company of Firestone Liberia, had
violated labour laws by using child labour and cruel labour practices by
instituting unrealistic daily quotas, dumping toxic substances in the
plantation’s only water source, the Farmington River. The film does not
interview Alfred Brownell, the Liberian lead attorney on the case. It should be
noted that the plaintiffs did lose the case.
On
the other hand, we do hear Gerald Padmore, a Liberian attorney and Firestone
legal representative arguing Firestone’s case: “They [Firestone] did the right
thing, they did not try to exploit the country…They did not pay off warlords or
give money under the table. They didn’t do any of those things. They did the
right thing.” It almost feels like ProPublica and Frontline went out of their
way to find a Liberian who would support Firestone’s innocence.
Rather
than climaxing with a critique of Firestone, the closing narration of the film
reframes the company as largely exempt from culpability because it has
“invested more than $146m to improve conditions on the plantation in Liberia
and remains the country’s largest private employer.”
The
irony is that Firestone has not built a single processing plant in its almost
100 years of operation. On the world’s largest industrial rubber plantation,
the company could not produce one latex glove in Liberia to shield healthcare
workers from the Ebola outbreak.
As
Dunn asserts: “Firestone has been able to get away with what it has because of
a combination of factors – Liberian regimes’ permissiveness, US government
support for its business interest and the media (local and international)
failing to beam the spotlight on the company’s transgressions.”
Unfortunately
for Liberians Firestone and the Warlord has done little to help correct that
injustice
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