BURMA-U.S.: Momentum Builds for New York Selective Purchasing Laws

By Farhan Haq Reprint | | Print |

NEW YORK, Mar 7 1997 (IPS) - Burmese democracy activists are optimistic that New York City can join a growing number of U.S. municipalities in adopting laws that forbid companies investing in Burma from receiving city contracts.

Following a series of hearings this week on human rights violations in Burma in New York’s City Council, supporters of selective purchasing legislation that would restrict New York City from contracting or banking with companies dealing with Burma are confident of its chances for passage.

“I am confident that the Council leadership will move this legislation along expediently, especially in light of the latest reports of atrocities in Burma,” said City Council member Tom Duane, a strong backer of the selective purchasing laws.

“Momentum is growing,” said Tim Keating, a staff member of the Burma U.N. Support Office, which supports the country’s pro- democracy movement led by Daw Aung San Suu Kyi. “I would say this would probably be the year for selective purchasing to be enacted in many cities across the country. The pressure on the business community is very real.”

Opposition to Burma’s ruling military junta, the State Law and Order Restoration Council (SLORC), has grown steadily in recent years following the SLORC’s annulment of 1990 elections believed to have been won by Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy.

Several U.S. cities — notably San Francisco, Berkeley, Oakland and Santa Monica in California, Seattle in Washington and Milwaukee, Wisconsin — have already adopted selective purchasing laws, as has the state of Massachusetts. But New York, the largest U.S. city, could raise the ante on divestment from Burma, much as it did a decade ago when the city refused to invest in apartheid South Africa, activists say.

“New York City has been a very good example in the past, during the anti-apartheid movement,” said Thaung Htun, U.N. representative for the democratic movement’s declared coalition government. Given that, and given that New York has suffered from heroin trafficking coming partly from Burma, New Yorkers could be expected to support laws that would help combat abuses in Burma, Htun said.

So far, one spokeswoman in the City Council told IPS, the Burma sanctions movement still needs considerable popular support before the New York laws can pass. Council President Peter Vallone will not decide to bring the legislation to a vote until he can determine “the significance of the legislation,” she said — including any widespread popular backing.

In recent months, the growing popularity of selective purchasing laws has demonstrated that a large movement, including human rights activists and students, oppose the SLORC regime. Central to the growth of that movement has been data from Human Rights Watch and other rights groups documenting forced labour by the Burmese government, and its role in building infrastructure to attract foreign investment.

But there has also been a backlash by some U.S. companies against efforts to prod business away from Burma. The California- based Unocal gas company, which is a partner with the Burmese government and France’s Total in a 1.2-billion-dollar gas pipeline project at Yadana, has argued that widespread sanctions on Rangoon will not help the cause of human rights there.

“We believe that sanctions are rarely, if ever, productive and would certainly not be productive in terms of their stated goals in Myanmar (the SLORC name for Burma),” Unocal president John Imle told the Asia Times last August. “Sanctioning U.S. business out of a nation like Myanmar simply isolates the United States. I fail to understand how the people in favour of sanctions think they can influence a government by disengagement.”

But Suu Kyi, a Nobel Peace Prize laureate, has countered that argument, noting that “what we are really suffering from is not a lack of investment or infrastructure but misgovernance…Profits from business enterprises will merely go towards enriching a small, very privileged elite.”

The debate on sanctions now threatens to go as far as the World Trade Organisation (WTO), with the European Union claiming that the Massachusetts law violates the General Procurement Agreement signed by the United States under the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade.

U.S. municipalities are not affected by the free-trade agreement, argued Keating, who noted that neither New York nor any other U.S. city has signed on to the Procurement Agreement. “There is no agreement that cities can’t go ahead and pass laws like this,” he contended.

Even Massachusetts has a justification for its selective purchasing laws, he added. The Procurement Agreement grants an exception to its free-trade strictures for actions taken to protect human life, or animal or plant life, Keating noted — criteria which would be valid in Burma, he argued, because of its record of forced labour, rape and forced relocation of ethnic groups.

Nevertheless, the power of activist cities to block companies which trade with Burma has angered many U.S. allies, including Japan, which asked Washington to win the withdrawal of the Massachusetts bill. One Japanese firm, Mitsubishi, was recently denied a 130-million-dollar contract with the city of San Francisco to build automated walkways for the city’s airport.

If the New York legislation passes soon, Keating said, a wave of similar city ordinances can be expected. That in turn could mean that yet more damage will occur to businesses dealing with the SLORC, sparking even more irritation from some U.S. allies.