“Jesuit Alumni/ae, for a better Africa” by Frank Turner SJ

WITNESSES TO HOPE

Jesuit Alumni/ae, for a better Africa: What have we done? What are we doing?

What must we do?

I thank the organisers for their imagination in inviting me to this rich experience. I was surprised, as well as pleased by the invitation, for three reasons. Surprised, first, since I am not a Jesuit alumnus. My only previous connection with the Jesuits was that my father had been a parishioner of the Jesuits: but he had been dead nine years when I entered the Society. Secondly, I don’t know much about schools. I taught for one year when I was ‘in formation’, as we say, but with a notable lack of competence. Universities are much easier! Thirdly, though, I am especially pleased. Allow me to say that insofar as I am ‘converted’ to Christianity, however imperfectly, it is largely due to Africa: an experience of fifteen months in my early twenties with Barclays bank in Ghana began to open my eyes, and to change my life: that, though, would be another story.

P. Peter Henriot offered an overview. I complement his presentation by focusing quite tightly. Mainly, I will speak of OCIPE’s own work: very briefly about the European Jesuits more generally.

What have we done? What are we doing?

I am invited to take OCIPE’S collaborative project with the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) as a case study: as one instance of how European and African Jesuit-related institutions are trying to work together. So I gave brief background about our organisation and will explain how our Africa project has developed up to now - before closing with some thoughts about the future.

• We are ‘OCIPE’ (‘Office catholique d’informations et d’initiatives pour l’Europe’) also known in Brussels as the Jesuit European Office: founded 1956, with offices in Brussels, Budapest and Warsaw, and an antenna in Strasbourg where we are legally constituted. I speak under the watchful but sympathetic eye of our President, Laurent Grégoire.
• For 50 years, up to 2005, we have dealt with themes affecting ‘the EU in itself’: the hoped-for Constitution, Enlargement to include post-Soviet countries etc. In 2005-06 we secured the support of the Conference of European Provincials to broaden our horizons. The most fundamental consideration was this. Just as there is no such thing as an ‘individual’ apart from his or her relationships, there is no such thing as ‘Europe’ in abstraction from its relationship with the rest of the world. That is especially obvious for a Briton, brought up with a sense of ‘Empire’, ‘Commonwealth’ etc. - and obvious to someone now living in Belgium, with its unique and rather terrible historical relationship with DRC. So though we maintain our work on ‘the European Union as such’ we took up a second, complementary, and equally important theme: work on the EU in relationship, especially with developing countries, and from the perspective of social justice. Once we accepted a role as a social centre, we naturally adopted the social justice priorities of the Jesuits - the first of which is Africa.
• Our next step: how to focus work with Africa, among all possible topics. We are a small organisation and need to focus, so we began by seeking one specific topic, one focal country:
  • We thought of the DRC. It is a country of massive importance that has suffered greatly (the civil war from 1996 to 2002 caused more deaths than any conflict since WWII: an estimated 5.4 million- almost 20 times those of Darfur). Secondly, the EU is massively involved with DRC: financial support for the democratic transition of 2006, military support for the UN peacekeeping force (MONUC) etc. What is more we are located in Brussels, - and the unique ‘history’ I mentioned means that there is much expertise in the Belgian universities, in the NGO sector, etc. We could bring that resource to other European partners, and this helps make us a useful partner to development agencies in Spain and in the UK.
  • We knew we wanted to work in the area of peace and development. But from then on, we focused our theme through conversations with the ‘Jesuit Superiors of Africa and Madagascar’ (JESAM) and with the ‘Cetnre d’Etudes pour l’Action Sociale’ (CEPAS) in Africa; secondly with the United States Jesuit Conference (USJC): and right from the outset with Jesuit partners at the Catholic University of Leuven, in Belgium. Finally, with endorsement from JESAM and its European equivalent the Conference of European Provincials (CEP), we arrived at the shared topic of the practice of transnational corporations in the exploitation of mineral resources. We called our project ‘RPAN’, the ‘Relational Peace Advocacy Network’. The Congo has immense wealth. But if Africa is rich, Africans are poor, largely through what Human Rights Watch calls ‘resource curse’. An abundance of natural resources is far from unmixed good news for a country. Without certain conditions, the benefits may almost all leave the country whilst the negative impact of the exploitation remains there. Peaceful and sustainable development for the Congo is almost unimaginable unless the resource question can be managed with greater justice than before.
  • Not least important: we were able to get initial (and so far renewed) funding: not only from bodies including from European Catholic NGOs, two of them Jesuit-linked, which work on questions of justice in natural resources, but perhaps without much knowledge of DRC or without much access to the institutions of the European Parliament.
  • However, the key step, and perhaps the one most relevant to this discussion, was to work out an understanding how, on this topic, CEPAS, USJC and OCIPE (Kinshasa-Washington DC-Brussels) could work as a triangular partnerships - but each in a different way according to its possibilities. So, we have worked out our complementarity as follows:

We are working for the same ends: as far as possible, together. But each of us focuses on what we alone can do. The DRC Government is far more willing to deal with a national civil society organisation, such as CEPAS, than with international bodies: so CEPAS primarily focuses there. The USJC has a special role in dealing directly with companies. This is possible because the ten US Jesuit provinces invest together and therefore acquire rights and responsibilities precisely as investors. In Europe we cannot affect companies in the same way as they do in Washington, since we are not investors: and as it happens, the most prominent Belgian corporation (George Forrest International, historically a major actor in the Congo) is allergic to NGOs. So our focus is on the European Union to which we have quite good access. (It is true that the European Parliament would probably welcome the witness of, say, P. Ferdinand Muhigirwa and P. Rigobert Minani of CEPAS. But it is we - or of course, some other European group - who would need to manage that process, and this takes a lot of time and energy.)

Let me stress how important is this triangle. We OCIPE have some credibility at the Parliament - in part because we have authentic African partners. But it is no less important for CEPAS to know that it has international support: and some issues of translational corporations’ presence in the Congo need to be challenged outside the country, where the companies are registered, etc. RPAN represents one case of a precious asset that the Church often brings to political advocacy: a very tangible sense of international community, that other organisations find it hard to match.

In addition to the geographical triangle we try to employ a triangle of perspective, and of method: contact (at least indirect) with those who suffer; presence in the academic network; and presence to political decision-makers.

Main recent landmark

I hope it will be helpful to give a specific example of our work, rather than to talk entirely in generalities. In April we co-ordinated a ‘Hearing’ at the Human Rights Sub-Commission of the European Parliament, on the topic of Business and Human Rights. We had ‘earned’ this event a few months before, by writing for a cross-party group of MEPs formal parliamentary questions which were put to the European Commission (the civil service of the EU, representing the Union itself, not the member states) and to the Council of the EU (the body that represents the individual member states in negotiation). The answers to these questions had been unconvincing, and this gave us extra impetus, and parliamentary support, for the next step. One always has to be flexible, and I must admit that the star witness at this hearing was not us, but was Professor John Ruggie, Special Rapporteur to the General Secretary of the UN on Business and Human Rights. However it was a valuable recognition for us that the coalition of NGOs we brought together was able to respond to Mr, Ruggie before the Parliament and, in a separate meeting, to hold a dialogue with him.

Now the European Commission, and most EU national governments, do not deny there is a problem of overseas business practice. The UN, the World Bank, and the Lutundula Commission in DRC itself, all found that many transnational corporations were involved in either criminal or unethical behaviour: that is, behaviour ranging from bribery, corruption and lack of transparency in contracts, the evasion of taxation and customs duty (meaning that virtually all the benefits of mining left the country) to the gross abuse of human rights of workers and local people - murder, rape etc. - the use of illegal armed groups to protect companies’ investment. These latter abuses profited from and also worsened the civil war. They certainly continue today. But these political bodies in Europe look for the remedy to voluntary guidelines.

Professor Ruggie has worked mainly toward enriching the voluntary framework of ‘corporate social responsibility’. I could, in another setting, go into the arguments at length. In brief, he believes that agreeing any international legal standard would take too long, and would set the standards too low, so as to get every country on board (His report to the UN General Assembly of April 2008 explains how he seeks to enhance the voluntary frameworks under the three headings: the State to Protect human rights, Corporations to respect them; people to have access to remedies. The Kimberley Process Certification Scheme, is a UN process, established 2003, designed to certify the origin of diamonds, as coming from sources which are free of conflicts themselves fuelled by diamond production. The process aimed to prevent rebel groups being financed by diamond sales, and to assure consumers that their purchase of diamonds does not finance war the abuse of human rights.). However, our group argued that the absence of legal norms means that in practice businesses use the law to protect their interests but are scarcely themselves subject to the law. Their executives may be personally liable, but the company is not: so there is a legal fiction that CEOs somehow act in a personal capacity! Further, so long as the framework is voluntary, each company is free to devise its own standards without being held externally accountable for failure to observe them: so effective comparison between companies becomes impossible. Thirdly, there is very limited liability of parent companies for the actions of their subsidiaries. This system effectively shields European and US TNCs from liability for the human rights and environmental abuses of their subsidiaries overseas.

Through our partner, the European Coalition for Corporate Justice (ECCJ) our group put forward to the Parliament three proposals: to:-

• enhance the direct legal liability of parent companies for subsidiaries (so that the acts of a subsidiary company in DRC could be challenged in a court of the parent company’s home base)’;
• establish a parent company’s ‘duty of care’ (so that a company is deemed to have the power to influence the acts of companies dependent on it, instead of pleading a fictional independence);
• establish mandatory environmental and social reporting (so that grossly untrue reporting, or the withholding of necessary information from local populations, becomes actionable).

This job of working towards legal norms is hugely difficult.

• No country wishes to change the law first - and so put at risk the competitive position of their own companies;
• It is naturally no easier to get countries to change the law simultaneously!

We are painfully aware that the European and US companies are not the worst offenders. We can do nothing directly about Chinese and other Asian companies. EU companies and governments will complain (reasonably, perhaps) about ‘competitive distortion’ if they are held to standards that new entrants from Asia do not observe. On the other hand, we have to accept our limits and work where we have the chance of having some effect. In addition, of the largest 100 non-financial transnational corporations more than half have HQs in the EU. The EU is by far the biggest donor of aid globally, and it articulates impressive founding principles - including that of solidarity with Africa, right from 9 May 1950. Given the economic impact of its companies abroad, given the close links between many European states and African ones, we believe that the EU is well-placed to take the international lead, so as to ensure that its corporate practice does not undermine that declared objectives of European aid to support development, HR and good governance.

The Hearing produced one outcome: Mr Ruggie said the debate of ‘voluntary guidelines versus legal norms’ was stale, and agreed - we think for the first time - that some legal norms were essential (though I think he remains opposed to what he calls an ‘overarching treaty’). Secondly, we secured a promise from some of our sponsor members of the European Parliament that in the new Parliament a hearing on the Congo itself could be arranged. This will be one of the focuses for the next year of our work.

This therefore is, in broad outline, what we have been doing. Let me sum up by trying to name its general principles:-

• The project (now in its fourth year) emerged through a process of consultation at all stages. We had to take into account both our own capacity and our limits, but also the capacities and the priorities of our African colleagues. We had also the explicit assurance, though its President P. Fratern Masawe, that we had a ‘mandate’ from JESAM. That support is essential.
• There is a balance here which we have to re-negotiate from time to time: since we are working on serious matters of justice in Africa, we can have no authority (even in our own European circles) that is not recognised by Africa. If African Jesuit organisations have no reason to value our work, we had better abandon it immediately. On the other hand, we are not merely the delegates of African Jesuits. We have to make our own judgements, for example, about what is useful and possible vis-a-vis the EU.

Challenges

There seem to me to be two kinds of challenges of such a partnership:-

Challenges inevitably involved in political advocacy

• challenging business practice in the name of ethics and law, where profits will be affected, is not always popular: and politicians, even those who wish to support you, simply cannot ignore popularity. Politicians also need to focus on short-term problems, whereas this is a long-term issue.
• Political relationships have constantly to be rebuilt: for example, we have just had elections to the European Parliament, and 54% of those elected will be new members. Since most new members come from national politics they will not know organisations like ours: also, they may not know or appreciate the significance of the issues.
• The European Parliament makes decisions jointly with the European Council - that is, the 27 Prime Ministers, or other ministers negotiating within an EU structure, but ‘intergovernmentally’ - on behalf of their own national governments. Opinion in the Council is still harder to shift than in the other European institutions.
• As already indicated, advocacy on our issue has become even more difficult since Chinese and other Asian companies started operating on a large scale in Africa, including Congo. Conditions in the Chinese mines are probably worse, and Chinese companies operating internationally make no ethical commitments. My colleague was asked by a Chinese: do you expect us to treat African workers better than we treat Chinese workers’? But of course a Jesuit organisation could have no influence or political voice in China, nor is there the kind of civil society that can pressurise Chinese companies operating internationally. The arrival of these corporations raised the competitive stakes for Western companies.
• We need to keep a strong spiritual perspective. The issue (mineral resources, human rights and social justice, in DRC) is huge, we are small, even working together. It took more than a decade to arrive at a landmines treaty, and to construct the so-called Kimberley Process which gives some possibility of ensuring that diamonds exported from Africa are not ‘blood diamonds’. However, we as Jesuits have the potential to work long-term: though the funding cycle for our project is actually two years, which means we are always vulnerable. It will seem sometimes that no progress is being made, and there are real setbacks (loss of the promised Congo focus at the hearing in April 2009, because of Mr Ruggie’s presence). We need plenty of patience - and enough courage not to lose either energy or hope.

Challenges stemming from the partnership process

• There are ‘ordinary’ problems of communication and technology: we have a monthly triangular telephone conversation (Kinshasa-Washington DC-Brussels) to share information and planning. A monthly phone call of one hour becomes a matter of information-sharing, and is not really enough to plan action together, to assess our progress. Also, the telephone line to Kinshasa does not always permit an easy conversation.
• We in Brussels have a full-time worker on this project, a Belgian woman lawyer, Emmanuelle Devuyst: Ferdinand Muhigirwa and John Kleiderer are busy on a broad range of issues. So it is not always easy to act speedily. We try to maximise the opportunities. P. Muhigirwa and P. Minani travel to Europe sometimes, and we try to meet with them. Similarly Ms Devuyst travelled to Rome last month to take advantage of the presence there of P. Muhigirwa and Mr Kleiderer, so as to work over the weekend.
• Out African colleagues know the European scene rather independently - they have contacts and partners in Belgium other than us, some quite long-term partners. But neither Ms Devuyst nor I know DRC well enough to have partners in Africa independent of CEPAS/JESAM, nor have we the chance of travelling to DRC often enough to build up our contact base there. Again we try to make the best of it. Ms Devuyst recently went to Lubumbashi for the Congolese Social Forum, contacting other partners than CEPAS: she also stopped for three days in Nairobi on the way home to consult with Jesuits there. But we need to keep a clear perspective on this. CEPAS is our primary partner in DRC, the others form a kind of second circle.
• We have to work hard to keep our shared aims clear and coherent: do we (1) really pursue a common project? or (2) work rather independently, but with reference to certain general shared objectives? We would like to be doing (1) but it sometimes seems more like (2).

‘What must we do?’

In terms of RPAN itself:

• we continue to try to strengthen our primary triangular network. For example, we follow affairs in Lubumbashi, Katanga, and it is CEPAS will shortly open an associate office there.
• In Brussels, one of the achievements of the Parliamentary Hearing was to gain a promise that a further hearing would focus specifically on the case of DRC. We now need to push for that promise to be kept.
• We will work with Belgian civil society organisations to target 2010. In 2010, Belgium will hold the EU Presidency for six months, and we already have an advocacy programme to ensure that DRC is high on its presidential agenda. It helps that 2010 is the 50th anniversary of the independence of DRC. The other President in 2010 is Spain, where we have good partnerships with two Jesuit-linked NGOs, ALBOAN and Entreculturas: we hope to work with them in relation to the Spanish Government, and have just accepted an intern to work on that theme.

EUROPEAN JESUITS

• Firstly: Ignatian movements in Europe can well be inspired by instances in which Africa leads. The case which moved me personally, in 2007, was the involvement of Christian Life Communities in the school in the massive slum of Kibera, Nairobi (the largest in Africa). I am not aware CLC in Europe, though admirable, has the kind of apostolic outreach that could envisage such a courageous and inspiring project.
• Fr Masawe could tell you more about the ‘Mixed Commission’ of 3 African and 3 European Jesuit provincials, seeking to develop new ways of collaboration between JESAM and CEP.
• I could speak (if I had time) at some length about the international advocacy process that arose from the Ignatian Encounter and World Social Forum Nairobi, January 2007: that involved Jesuit organisations from Latin America, Asia, and Europe, as well as from Africa, and in which OCIPE had a central role.
• If the Jesuits establish some advocacy capacity at the African Union, as desired, I hope there could become synergy there.
• We, the Jesuits, through the Conference of European Provincials, have become partners of an organisation called the Africa-Europe Faith and Justice Network. This is a group of 48 religious orders, wit a secretariat in Brussels: it focuses on matters of economic justice: e.g. food sovereignty, small-arms trafficking, generic medicines and (with special reference to the EU) Economic Partnership Agreements, or EPAs, to which referene has already been made in this congress.

Let me offer a final word on the unifying theme of this congress, hope. I certainly believe there is real hope for Africa, but I suspect it will continue to pas through deep suffering also. This will be a consequence of failures within Africa: but just as important, through the failures of the rest of the world towards Africa: in particular our own European failure to accept genuine solidarity, as if Europe and Africa were different worlds. We have exploited the continent rather ruthlessly for more than two centuries; we owe it a huge debt and I don’t see much sign that we fully recognise that.

Europe of course will not determine the fate of Africa. But the first step in ethics is to refuse to do harm: perhaps our project can be seen as an attempt to challenge some of hte harm that is inflicted in Africa by transnational corporations in the name of economic growth, but growth of a kind that has little to do with authentic development.

Frank Turner SJ

Bujumbura, July 24,2009.