- Film showing of Strike a Rock, about the Marikana Miners Massacre – SOAS, Wednesday 22 November in the evening.
- Activist Day in preparation for the Mines and Money Conference, Saturday 25 November – London venue to be confirmed.
Dear friends, Last month we hosted visitors from Brazil, Colombia and the USA for the BHP Billiton plc AGM on 19 October. In this mailout, you’ll find a full report of the company AGM together with media coverage, including a beautiful short video made by our friends at Threepenny Festival arts group from Manchester. You can also read about our new report, The River is Dead, about the Samarco tailings (fine wastes) dam disaster in Brazil. You’ll find a link to the report itself. BHP owns 50% of the Samarco iron ore mine where the disaster occurred in November 2015. We published our report the same week as the BHP AGM. Around the same time, our friends at CIDSE (the network of Catholic development agencies in Europe) produced a multimedia dossier on the disaster and the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) published its own report about the safety of tailings dams around the world. LMN and other groups welcomed the report. There are two related actions you are invited to take part in: LMN member group Colombia Solidarity Campaign are holding a picket of Chatham House in London on Thursday 9 November, as Colombian President Santos will be there to receive a prize for his work for peace – while simultaneously pursuing mining policies which encourage multinational companies to invest in the country in a way which fuels conflict and violence. LMN member group War on Want is running an email campaign demanding that BHP clean up its act in Colombia, Brazil and elsewhere. We’ll be sending out more news in the near future, but for now please also note two other events coming up: