Tobacco giant documents reveal 'smoking gun'

This has come to light from company documents that have been made available to the public as part of a settlement of a smoking damages case in England. A depository consisting of over eight million pages is being sifted through by researchers whose findings so far have revealed that BAT became very concerned with their public image in Africa in the early 1990s.

In November 1993 the All Africa Conference on Tobacco Control was held in Harare, Zimbabwe. Backed by the World Health Organisation (WHO), it was attended by a number of leading experts on health issues. A central figure was Dr Derek Yach, then an epidemiologist with the Medical Research Council and presently the WHO's Geneva-based executive director of noncommunicable diseases. Dr Yach is referred to in the BAT documents as the "outspoken, infamous anti-tobacco campaigner from South Africa".

It is clear from a strategy document compiled in June 1993 that BAT viewed the Harare conference as a possible precursor to similar "high profile attacks on the industry". "Even if this conference has a minimal impact," the document says, "the fact that it is happening necessitates the need for action."

It stated the objective of minimising the impact of the conference through a comprehensive media-relations campaign and proposed a seminar to be attended by carefully selected journalists to make "the media take our views more seriously and to increase the chances that they will offer us the chance to comment as issues arise". It suggested that the seminar be held "somewhere pleasant, usually a beach resort" as this "motivates the journalists to attend".

The speakers at the proposed seminar were to include "independent" and tobacco industry experts on issues such as environmental tobacco smoke, the youth and smoking, the WHO and health priorities, and the "politicisation of science".

As part of a plan to improve the company's corporate image the documents also suggest that a "Tobacco Republic" model be created for Africa: "Using factors, such as employment, exports, taxes, land farmed, it is possible to build a country with a population and economy entirely dependent on tobacco. Once these factors are collated for every country in Africa an impressive fictional country can be created to show the important social and economic contribution of tobacco."

According to the National Council Against Smoking, based in Johannesburg, BAT organised several media junkets during the 1990s as "propaganda events for the tobacco industry". The council says that one was held just before the Harare convention through BAT subsidiary United Tobacco at the Mount Sheba resort in Mpumalanga.

Says council executive director Yussuf Saloojee: "As long ago as 1970 tobacco industry scientists in private memos acknowledged that it was beyond all reasonable doubt that cigarette smoke caused cancer, yet the journalists were told the contrary, and repeated this lie in banner headlines."

BAT is the second-largest transnational tobacco manufacturer in the world after Philip Morris. Its South African subsidiary controls 95 percent of the local market with brand names including Peter Stuyvesant, Benson and Hedges and Lucky Strike.