by Cam Simpson
When the Dashain festival came around that year, the fourth since Jeet’s death, Kamala and Kritika fought through the crowds at Kathmandu’s transport terminus to squeeze into a hot, tightly packed bus bound for Gorkha. Little had changed in the village on the ledge. Kamala’s in-laws remained distant, but she cared far less now. She watched with joy as Kritika took to the freedom of the hills, where there were no walls or streets, running barefoot with her young cousins up and down the dirt tracks worn into the hillsides. During the two-week holiday, Kamala made her way back around the length of the horseshoe, spending as much time as she could with her aunts and uncles and with Maya and her family. It was the first time Maya had seen Kamala since she left the ashram, and she marveled at how confident and contented her nani had become.
Kamala also had struck up a friendship with Surya Bhujel, a man she had known for years from another village in the horseshoe. He had started a business ferrying passengers in a microbus along dirt roads from the bottom of the horseshoe ridge to the nearest towns, where they could shop or catch buses to the bigger cities, and he sometimes took villagers all the way to Kathmandu. He always checked on Kamala whenever he heard she was en route back home, and made sure he was available to take her anywhere she needed or wanted to go. He was waiting when her bus from Kathmandu arrived, and drove her and Kritika toward the horseshoe ridge. Sometimes he would take them on his motorcycle after the point where the road was too narrow for his microbus to continue. In just the three years since she donned the white sari at the well below the village, Kamala had come far, but some inequities surrounding widowhood remained unshakable. Some villagers from all around the ridge, even friends of hers, could barely mask their disdain when they saw her and the driver in each other’s company, and some members of Jeet’s family openly chided her, saying that she should never think of remarrying. Kamala appreciated Bhujel’s many unconditional kindnesses to her and Kritika, but she decided to maintain a certain distance from him, for everyone’s sake.
Kamala had met the families of the other men murdered in Iraq a few times when they came together for special functions, but the families of the twelve stayed fairly guarded in such moments, mostly because their grief was on public display. Although Kamala was keen to get to know them, especially the other widows, such opportunities never seemed to avail themselves. At one event, held in a hotel ballroom, she was hounded by television reporters as she tried, for the first time, to share a private moment with the other women. The families also had gathered together a few times for meetings at the offices of Ganesh Gurung and the small think tank he ran on the north side of Kathmandu. They grew somewhat closer on these occasions, and sometimes even had the opportunity to share memories and speak of their pain, but most of these meetings were dominated by the administrative tasks at hand, as Gurung managed all Handley’s long-distance paperwork demands. It had been some time since Kamala had heard from Gurung when, in mid-2008, she got a call commanding her to come to an emergency meeting at the Shangri-La Hotel along the busy Lazimpat Road in Kathmandu, just north of the Royal Palace. Gurung told her he could not speak over the phone about why they needed to meet, which worried Kamala.
Kamala walked past the glass doors leading to the lavish gardens of the Shangri-La Hotel, up the stairs from the ground floor, and into a small conference room with a sign that read “NIDS,” the acronym for Ganesh Gurung’s think tank, the Nepal Institute of Development Studies. Gurung was just inside the door, standing with a tall, smiling, slightly heavyset foreigner dressed in a business suit and tie, along with a woman by his side. They all greeted Kamala and the other family members as they came into the room. Gurung and the foreigners were beaming, which slightly unsettled Kamala, still unaware as to why she had been called to the hotel with the other family members. Gurung thanked everyone for coming and then turned to the foreigner. “This is Matt Handley,” he said, and then also introduced Handley’s wife. It was the first time the couple had returned to Nepal since finishing their service in the Peace Corps more than a decade earlier. Handley rose and started speaking Nepalese for the first time in ages, although he quickly realized he didn’t know the Nepalese word for “lawyer,” and had to ask for Gurung’s help. Handley told the families that he had come to Kathmandu to inform them in person that they had won their compensation case. The judge, a former judge advocate for the U.S. Air Force, had found the evidence so compelling that he had rejected all the arguments from the attorney representing the contractor for KBR Halliburton and its insurance carrier without even holding a hearing. The judge had restated Handley’s evidence as his formal findings in a dispassionate, matter-of-fact five-page order and had commanded the payments, which were calculated from the copy of Buddi Gurung’s contract, in two final words: “So ordered.”
There was a sense of relief and gratitude in the room, but nothing approaching joy. Soon it would be four years since the massacre, but the pain clearly remained raw. Gurung invited anyone who wanted to speak to stand and do so. The mothers of the dead rose first, without allowing their husbands to say anything and without seeking even so much as a nod of permission from them. Each woman looked at Handley and told him about the moment she had learned that her son had died, and the devastating impact that it had had on her life since that day. Bishnu Maya Thapa, the stonecutter who had prayed so hard for a son, said that she had wanted to die when she first learned of his murder, and that she would have done anything to have him by her side again. She looked at Handley from across the room and began weeping as she profusely thanked him, saying that whatever compensation she received would mean nothing compared with the fact that Handley, a foreign man whom she had never met, had shown such concern. “Just the fact that people so far away have worked so hard to keep my son’s memory alive for these years, this is the greatest comfort to me,” she said. It was the first time the families had been so open with one another about their experiences, because it was the first forum in which they had had any real opportunity to do so.
Handley and Gurung met with the families one on one to discuss privately how much each would receive, since the awards were all different. Each was built on the cold calculus of actuarial tables generated by the insurance industry, with such factors as the level of dependence for each family and each man’s age at the time of his death among the most important. The awards ranged from a low end of about $60,000 to a high end of about $200,000, a sum that would have seemed trifling in the United States for the value of a young life lost, but almost unimaginable in Nepal, especially for farmers. Gurung found that, after their conversion into the local currency, the compensation amounts were so large that there was virtually no translation in Nepalese for their values, at least not one that any of the farmers had ever heard in their daily lives. Kamala received one of the largest awards because she was a widow and had a child.
Looking at Handley, she thought he had a kind face, but as the two men explained how much she would be paid, Kamala could not help but feel sad, as the money, and the entire occasion, served to remind her of what she had lost, and how that loss now was being calculated in cash. Still, she felt grateful that someone would be paying a price, any price, for what had happened to Jeet, grateful that his death had not been forgotten, and thankful that a prayer had been answered, one she had made during her worst days in Jeet’s farmhouse following his death—that she would gain enough independence never to have to rely on anyone else again. For many of the families, Handley’s surprise appearance that day seemed to be the answer to a prayer.
Handley also explained to the families that the compensation came from a program administered by the U.S. government, but having already worked with Gurung to corroborate the circumstances behind each man’s journey to Iraq, he also told the families that they could pursue a broader civil action in the American courts for human trafficking against the companies involved—KBR Halliburton and its Jordanian contracting company Daoud and Partners. It would be up to them, he said. Each family, inclu
ding the sets of siblings who did not receive the compensation payments, wanted to know more. The families understood that the second case would be about accountability and justice, as opposed to simply compensating them for a lifetime of lost income. If a case got filed, Handley told them, it would inevitably be a far more difficult journey than anything they had faced to date, and could be a source of pain in their lives for years to come, potentially delaying any hope they might have for closure.
Beyond questions of compensation and closure, the American lawyers believed a successful action for human trafficking against one of the largest U.S. government contractors in history, one with sway over tens of thousands of at-risk foreign migrant workers in a war zone, could deal a powerful blow against forced and coerced labor at a critical moment. It also could bring accountability for multinationals operating in a globalized age squarely into an American courtroom. At a minimum, Handley told the families, a lawsuit filed on their behalf would include a demand against KBR Halliburton that nothing like this would ever happen again for any of the men and women like their husbands, brothers, and sons in its supply chain. Each family wanted Handley to move forward. Kamala felt especially committed to the notion of accountability for what had happened to Jeet.
By the end of the day, Handley felt both exhausted and exhilarated, especially given the wrenching words of the mothers. He knew this was one of the most fulfilling moments of his life, certainly professionally, most likely personally, and that he had used the law to achieve justice in a concrete way for people who needed and deserved it more than any others he had ever met, and in a way few lawyers ever got a chance to accomplish. That night in the Shangri-La Hotel, his wife did not seem to share the depth of his feelings about the day, though. By now, their marriage had become irretrievably broken, and it was clear to both that returning to Nepal was not going to fix it, a hope Handley had, perhaps naively, subscribed to before they left for Kathmandu. Within a few days, she told Handley she was leaving him.
* * *
Handley returned to Washington, paradoxically buoyed by a sense of purpose and bowed by heartache. He and his wife had struggled for what seemed like ages, but the pain of their unfolding breakup gripped him just as he felt new meaning and urgency in his vocation. The hours he had poured into his work since joining the firm surely hadn’t helped settle his marriage, and at a minimum, they helped blind him to its approaching end. Still, they at least represented something in his life that would give him hope and pride. His victory in the compensation case also vindicated his decision to carry a heavy load of pro bono matters despite the overwhelming demands of the firm’s shareholder class-action practice, and despite the concerns of its partners. Cohen Milstein’s top lawyers seemed pleased by the victory, and the firm garnered positive national publicity from being the first to fight and win such a high-profile battle emerging from the war, and in an area of the war’s prosecution that few knew about. The U.S. government even reimbursed Cohen Milstein for its costs and fees, meaning that the partners got paid for what initially had been a pro bono venture.
Agnieszka Fryszman, the human rights lawyer at Cohen Milstein who had pulled Handley into the case, had been working in parallel on investigating and crafting the broader potential human rights lawsuit against KBR Halliburton and Daoud that Handley had discussed with Kamala and the other families in Nepal. Even without the victory in the compensation battle, there seemed to be momentum for broader action. By 2008, human trafficking in U.S. contracting operations in Iraq had become widely acknowledged at the highest levels of the executive and legislative branches of the U.S. government. At the Pentagon, General George Casey’s order following the inspector general’s investigation specifically cited violations of the U.S. antitrafficking laws and “evidence of illegal confiscation of worker passports by contractors/subcontractors; deceptive hiring practices and excessive recruiting fees, substandard worker living conditions at some sites, circumvention of Iraqi immigration procedures by contractors/subcontractors, and a lack of mandatory trafficking in persons training.” Although the actions of the U.S. government were beyond its purview, the State Department took the unprecedented step of citing the abuses in its annual compendium on global human trafficking, doing so in a special section titled “Department of Defense (DOD) Responds to Labor Trafficking in Iraq.” The report, published as a book and unveiled by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice at a press conference, said that a “DOD investigation . . . identified a number of abuses, some of them considered widespread, committed by DOD contractors or subcontractors of third country national (TCN) workers in Iraq,” and went on to specifically cite “low-skilled workers from Nepal.” In March 2007, a subcommittee on human rights of the Senate Judiciary Committee followed the House of Representatives action of the prior year by holding its own hearing on the issue. The subcommittee chairman, Senator Richard Durbin of Illinois, declared for the record that the government needed to “find a way to make sure that our contractors, these companies that our tax dollars sustain, are held accountable, and understand the economics of their decision, if not the criminality of their decision.”
This was precisely the sentiment Fryszman seized on as she argued behind the scenes at Cohen Milstein for a second case, one that she saw as continuing the firm’s proud tradition of seeking accountability for multinationals. But if momentum and awareness were gathering behind the issue of human trafficking across official Washington, the appetite for such actions seemed to be diminishing inside the walls of Cohen Milstein. The firm’s highest-profile partner, Fryszman’s boss, Michael Hausfeld, had led the way nationwide on Holocaust litigation, dating back to his case against the Swiss banks. Despite the massive commitment of time and resources that went into the complex, research-intensive international effort, Hausfeld had fought it on a pro bono basis. On the second wave of Holocaust cases he brought, the firm’s partners had earned a financial pittance compared with the 15 to 22 percent slice they, or any of their counterparts, usually received from class-action settlements. Even so, public controversy dogged the lawyers for their accepting anything at all, given the modest payments that were then passed on to survivors of the Nazi system of slave labor.1 Then Hausfeld suffered total defeat on the next front of his World War II–era litigation initiative, the case spearheaded by Fryszman against the Japanese government on behalf of women from Korea, China, and other Asian nations who had been forced into sexual slavery for Japanese soldiers during World War II. The case was dismissed, without a lifeline from appellate courts, before there was ever enough pressure for a settlement. Also, Hausfeld had opened, at significant expense, a London office of the firm, believing that the future of class-action litigation was in Europe, as Republicans in Congress and judges increasingly squeezed the space for them in American courtrooms. The expansion came as the financial crisis hit without warning, devastating the legal business around the world.
By mid-2008, Hausfeld had become increasingly isolated among partners in the firm, some of whom were quietly organizing a putsch. How much would they be willing to invest at that same moment in yet another international human rights and war slavery case—one headed by the less experienced Fryszman, along with Molly McOwen, the junior lawyer serving in a fellowship, with only occasional help from Handley, who was still just an associate in the shareholder class-action group? Deciding how much to spend out of pocket to develop a case like this is always a delicate matter at any firm.
On August 27, 2008, Cohen Milstein filed a federal lawsuit in the U.S. District Court in Los Angeles against Daoud and Partners and KBR, which Halliburton had spun off as a separate company during the height of its Iraq War controversies. In the corporate divorce, which was finalized in 2007, KBR had agreed to accept full freight for any liabilities resulting from its work in the war. The suit was filed on behalf of Kamala, Kritika, Jeet’s mother, other family members of the twelve, and Buddi Gurung, the worker who had been in the same seventeen-vehicle convoy the day the men were kidnapped.
The suit said:
This is an action for damages brought by the family members of twelve men who were victims of trafficking in persons and one surviving laborer. All of the men were illicitly trafficked across international borders to provide menial labor at a United States military facility in Iraq for defendants, which are United States military contractors. The men were recruited in Nepal to work overseas. Most of them left their homes believing they were going to work at a luxury hotel in Amman, Jordan. Their families went deep into debt to arrange the jobs, which they hoped would lift them out of poverty. Instead, they were transported to work as laborers at a military base in Iraq. Twelve of the men were killed.
The body shops and labor brokers, from Kathmandu to Amman, were named as coconspirators but not defendants. As often happens in a case like this, the firm threw the book at KBR and its contractor, hoping that just one of the listed causes of action would stick. In the process, its forty-eight pages accused one or both of the defendants of violating a laundry list of statutes—everything from human trafficking and racketeering down to vanilla negligence due to the clear risk of sending Jeet and the other men along the Highway Through Hell. The amount of damages sought was not specified. Yet the calculus of valuing a life in a case such as this, given the horrific way in which the men had died, the global public spectacle around their deaths, and the exploitation that had led them to their own massacre, could easily reach vast multiples beyond what had been paid in the compensation claims. Invoking the laws against racketeering also allowed for a potential tripling of any damages. In short, it was a fiercely aggressive lawsuit, and it could cost KBR significantly, in terms not just of damages but also perhaps of future business for the largest wartime contractor in U.S. history. From a business perspective at Cohen Milstein, it also was not inconceivable that the case could yield fees in the neighborhood of those from Hausfeld’s Nazi slavery case, and all for a greatly reduced up-front investment by the partners.
