BURMA: Students Begin Three Days of Fasts for Burma

By Farhan Haq Reprint | | Print |

NEW YORK, Oct 8 1996 (IPS) - Students across the United States stepped up pressure against Burma’s military leaders by kicking off a three-day fast in support of opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi.

Students in 56 U.S. colleges and 10 high schools nationwide — as well as others in South Africa, Japan, Germany, India, Thailand, Canada and Norway — began their fast Monday to draw attention to a new crackdown on Suu Kyi’s pro-democracy coalition.

The action comes as the administration of President Bill Clinton is considering imposing stricter economic sanctions against Burma, including a ban on new investment in the country. Unocal, the California oil giant with the largest current U.S. investment in Burma, is also coming under growing pressure to withdraw.

On the fast’s first day, the Wisconsin-based Free Burma Coalition, which is coordinating the effort, said at least 474 students from Boston’s Harvard University and California’s Stanford University to Lake Forest High School in Illinois, are participating in the fasts. One hundred students working with Japan’s Burma Relief Centre also joined, coalition spokesman said.

Suu Kyi, the winner of the 1991 Nobel Peace Prize, is “virtually under house arrest” in Rangoon, argued Sein Win, declared the prime minister of Suu Kyi’s government-in-exile, the National Coalition Government of the Union of Burma. But the pro- democracy leader praised the students’ fast in a taped message sent from her home.

“Young people were the backbone of the public demonstrations of 1988 that swept away the rule of the Burma Socialist Programme Party,” Suu Kyi said in her taped statement. “It is then most fitting that students should be taking up the cause of the as-yet- uncompleted democratic revolution of my country.”

Suu Kyi argued that her party, the National League for Democracy (NLD), is facing a new crackdown from the ruling State Law and Order Restoration Council (SLORC).

As a result, she said, the Free Burma fasts that began Monday should “focus attention on the essentially peaceful nature of the quest for democracy in Burma” and help to discourage U.S. and international investment in Burma.

“We are not anti-business,” Suu Kyi said. “But we oppose investment in Burma today because our real malady is not economic but political… Profits from business enterprises will merely go towards entrenching a small, already very privileged elite.”

One of the consequences of the students’ fast, argued Sein Win, is that many of the U.S. companies which have business links with Rangoon, including the PepsiCo soft drink conglomerate and the oil and gas companies Unocal, Texaco and Arco, may now think twice.

“PepsiCo especially takes very great care of its image,” Sein Win contended. “They want to press the image of their drink as ‘the taste of a young generation.’ So when the young generation participates in a boycott, it hurts those efforts.”

In general, the momentum against the SLORC regime, which refused to recognise a 1990 election in which Suu Kyi and the NLD won the most seats, has picked up in recent days.

The main spark, Sein Win said, was SLORC’s recent arrest of more than 800 members of the democratic opposition, in a crackdown which Amnesty International called the worst since the 1988 protests.

The SLORC has reportedly released several hundred of those it detained, but the State Department said Monday it knew if at least 200 opposition activists who remain under detention.

Clinton, who last week announced a ban on visas for high- ranking government officials and their families and supporters, is also considering whether the most recent round-up constitutes “large-scale repression” of the opposition. If so, Clinton is obliged by a new law to ban new all new investment by U.S. companies in Burma.

“We are satisfied” with Clinton’s actions, Sein Win said. But he argued, “The situation demands the United States place further sanctions.”

Already, the state of Massachusetts and several cities, including Berkeley, California, and Madison, Wisconsin, have passed legislation barring state and local contracts with companies that invest in Burma. New York City and other municipalities are considering similar laws.

“One year ago, we didn’t have this kind of awareness in the United States,” Sein Win said. But he conceded that, for many cities and states, legislation restricting investments in Burma will take a long time still to be drafted and to be passed.

Suu Kyi, in her message to the fasters, urged quicker action against further investment in Burma. “Companies such as Unocal and Pepsi, Arco and Texaco only serve to prolong the agony of my country by encouraging the present military regime to persevere in its intransigence,” she said.

Also serving to focus attention to Burma here are two lawsuits filed last week against Unocal in California. Plaintiffs, including, in one case, 15 ethnic Karens, accuse the company of continuing to do business with SLORC even after it learned about human rights abuses committed by the army in the construction of a gas pipeline being built jointly by the Burmese government, Unocal and the French firm Total SA.

The Karen representatives sued Unocal for “vicarious responsibility” in the Burmese government’s evictions of Karen near the Yandana gas field where the pipeline is being constructed, as well as forced labour, assaults, murders and rapes of villagers. A Unocal spokesman last week dismissed the lawsuits as “false, irresponsible and frivolous.”

On Friday, the plaintiffs’ lawyers succeeded in serving process against one SLORC official, Finance Minister Brig. Gen. Hwin Tin, who was attending the annual meetings of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund here.

Tracked down in his limousine after a brief chase in a glittering Washington hotel, Hwin Tin was served papers naming him as a defendant in one lawsuit based on the Alien Tort Claims Act, a 190-year-old law that permits anyone to sue foreigners on U.S. territory for serious human rights violations they allegedly committed abroad.

The act has been used successfully in recent years against senior officials in the Philippines, Argentina, Indonesia, and Guatemala. Defendants have avoided paying judgments of millions of dollars that have been awarded by U.S. courts only by staying away from the United States.