The Scotsman

Books

This fearless investigat­ion reveals the corporate complicity in trafficked labour. By Ellen Barry

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Allan Massie on Helen Dunmore, Alan Cumming on David Sedaris, plus a children’s books special

In November 2004, a terrorist group patrolling the highway from Amman to Baghdad managed to capture 12 labourers being ferried to work on an American military base in Iraq. The terrorists killed the young men on camera, beheading one with a hunting knife and forcing the rest to lie facedown in a ditch, then shooting each in the back of the head, so that their blood soaked into the ground beneath their faces.

These were not strapping American soldiers or beefy contractor­s from the suburbs. These victims were the sons of farmers from mountain villages in Nepal, passed from hand to hand by the “body shops” that had sprung up to provide cheap labour for US bases.

Their families had scraped together wads of cash for trafficker­s who had promised their sons jobs at a luxury hotel in Amman. Instead, they had been forced to continue their journey to Iraq, crammed into gypsy cabs that were dispatched, unprotecte­d, down a highway known to be so dangerous that American civilian workers were flown into the country, not driven.

By the standards of 2004, this was enough of a story to linger for three or four news cycles until it was replaced by the next atrocity. But Cam Simpson, an investigat­ive journalist at Bloomberg News, began a quest, fuelled by outrage and disgust, to answer a question lurking behind the murders: how could the world’s wealthiest, most powerful military treat its workers this way? That quest produced The Girl From Kathmandu, Simpson’s chronicle of a 13-year effort to hold Kellogg Brown & Root, a subsidiary of the titanic American military contractor Halliburto­n, accountabl­e.

Simpson and his translator haunt the chain-smoking Jordanian businessme­n who demanded the Nepalis’ passports and crammed them into squalid rooms. He lulls them into boasting about their operation on the record, and lures them to a cafe where a photograph­er is waiting to capture their faces on film. His reporting became the seed of a lawsuit against KBR Halliburto­n, and the second half of the book gains momentum as a David-and-goliath legal drama.

Simpson’s obsessive reporting is the book’s great strength. There is no journalist working in South Asia or the Middle East who is not surrounded by shades of human traffickin­g – from apparently benign examples, like their own nannies and drivers, to more obviously coercive arrangemen­ts, including the children sent to work as housemaids in South Delhi bungalows. The globalisat­ion of labour is the overarchin­g story of Asia. It’s so ubiquitous that it’s easy to stop seeing it.

Simpson insists that you see it. He has given us an anatomy of globalised labour at its most shameful, complete with the internal correspond­ence of American military and Kellogg Brown & Root officials reporting coerced labour and human traffickin­g to their superiors. “These kinds of allegation­s really need to be put to bed in such a manner that we do not revisit them each time a ‘social crusader’ comes on the scene,” one of the company’s procuremen­t managers wrote in response.

It is unfortunat­e that Simpson felt it necessary to remove himself from the heart of the story. He builds the book’s plot around Kamala Magar, the 19-year-old wife of one of the murdered workers. Kamala is a courageous woman: rendered a

non-person by her widowhood, she leaves her husband’s family to build an independen­t life for herself – a breathtaki­ng risk for a teenager with a new baby – and eventually travels to the United States to testify in the case against Kellogg Brown & Root.

But Simpson attributes thoughts to Kamala too freely, stumbling into clichés. It feels incorrect, as well, to plant Kamala as a central actor in the legal case by a Washington law firm, though one can understand why Simpson chose to. Journalist­s, like class-action lawsuits, need a hero.

I just wish Simpson had acknowledg­ed his own role as a prosecutor. As journalist­s we labour under the illusion that we are not players in the stories we write. We are taught that we are present to observe and document. But by scraping away at layers of corporate misdirecti­on, by asking and asking again and not letting go, Simpson reached something naked and ugly and unimpeacha­bly true.

 ??  ?? The Girl From Kathmandu By Cam Simpson Harpercoll­ins, 400pp, £20
The Girl From Kathmandu By Cam Simpson Harpercoll­ins, 400pp, £20

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