The French cement giant started operating in Syria just before the civil war erupted. When Islamic State took over the region, Lafarge paid them protection money so it could keep trading. The consequences are still playing out
But on home turf in France, Lafarge faces a criminal case that might yield a reckoning without precedent. Dozens of former Lafarge employees in Syria, along with two non-profits, Sherpa and the European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights, have accused Lafarge of. The history of treating companies as actors stoking conflict for profit dates back to the Nuremberg trials, says Mark Taylor, the author of a book titled War Economies and International Law.
Cement is invaluable, in part, because it’s so cheap, and for cement to be cheap, it has to be what Ian Riley, the CEO of the World Cement Association, calls “a local business”. Factories have to be situated close to quarries of limestone, the main raw material, so that the mineral can be gouged out of the earth and ferried in at little cost. “But you also can’t transport the manufactured cement very far, because trucks are expensive,” Riley told me.
In the dispatch office, a shaven-headed man named Samee Hassan helped control the entry and exit of trucks, weighing them as they came in and out. Distributors bought the cement and sold it on to their customers across northern Syria. At $60 a tonne, Lafarge made half a million dollars a day in sales. The pace was lively from the minute the plant started operations. Once Hassan worked for 36 hours straight. “The market needed cement urgently, so the company put a lot of pressure,” he said.
Hassan found it difficult to talk to me about the three weeks during which they were held in the basement of an old building in Manbij. To a Spanish documentary crew a few years ago, however, he offered some details: “I prayed for my death to be quick. Then they stripped us. One of them burned me with a cigarette in my face.” The rebels wanted a ransom. “They asked us to call the company, and they gave us a phone with Jacob Waerness’s number,” Hassan told me.
But Nader also found Lafarge a rigidly hierarchical place. “Technically, people on the ground have autonomy to make decisions, but the decisions have to travel back to Paris to be confirmed,” he said. Usually, employees obeyed Paris rather than speaking their minds. Nader left Lafarge in April 2013, upset that he’d been passed over for a promotion. “The role was given to a Frenchman,” he told me.
Lafarge was also reluctant to give up so quickly on its new $680m asset. The only way for the factory to make its investment back, the company decided, was to have it keep grinding out cement – in whatever way possible. “They didn’t tell us in so many words,” an employee at the factory told me, “but it was obvious what was happening. Lafarge had made a deal with the devil.
In May 2014, IS proposed stopping the import of Turkish cement entirely, and asked Lafarge what might be in it for them. In an email, Pescheux laid out the business case: a heavy toll on Turkish imports would not only be a new stream of income for IS, but would also increase Lafarge’s sales – and thereby also the fees paid to IS. Lafarge was tempting IS with a split of its profits.