U.S.-BURMA: Tough Sanctions Move Closer

By Jim Lobe Reprint | | Print |

Jim Lobe

WASHINGTON, Jul 26 1996 (IPS) - Just as Washington’s closest allies in Southeast Asia embraced the repressive military regime in Burma this week, the U.S. Senate came within just a handful of votes of imposing a unilateral aid and investment embargo against Rangoon.

By a 54-45 margin, the Senate approved an administration-backed amendment to the 1997 foreign-aid bill which permits Washington to retain its humanitarian and anti-drug aid programme in Burma, also known as Myanmar.

The amendment, co-authored by Republican Senator William Cohen of Maine and Democratic Senator Diane Feinstein of California, requires a ban on new U.S. investment in Burma only if President Bill Clinton determines that the military authorities have armed or exiled Nobel Laureate Aung San Suu Kyi or have engaged in “large-scale repression” of its democratic opposition.

It also requires the U.S. representative on the boards of multilateral development banks, like the World Bank, to oppose new loans to Burma and bars the issuance of U.S. visas to government officials.

Earlier this month, the Senate Appropriations Committee had agreed on a much stronger measure which would have banned all U.S. aid and investment in Burma until a democratic government replaces the military junta, known as the State Law and Order Restoration Committee (SLORC).

Despite passage of the weaker version, anti-SLORC campaigners here hailed the Cohen-Feinstein bill as a victory. “This is a definite step in the right direction,” said Simon Billenness, an investment advisor who has led stockholder actions to get corporations to divest from Burma.

“We will continue to build the political momentum,” he said. “I think we will win an investment ban as early as next year.”

But Republican Senator Mitch McConnell, the sponsor of the tougher measure, expressed disappointment. “The crux of the Cohen amendment is to give the president total discretion to keep on doing what he has been doing — which is nothing,” he told his colleagues during the debate on the Senate floor.

Indeed, U.S. efforts to isolate Burma from its neighbours have borne little fruit since Clinton named a special envoy to consult with the members of the Association of Southeast East Asian Nations (ASEAN), which include Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, the Philippines, Thailand, Brunei and Vietnam, on a common position last month.

The envoy, Stanley Roth, apparently got a cool reception in ASEAN capitals which have so far pursued a self-described policy of “constructive engagement” with Rangoon.

And, despite direct appeals by Secretary of State Warren Christopher and the European Union during the ASEAN Summit in Jakarta this week to harden the group’s position on the SLORC, ASEAN voted to grant observer status to Burma, a first step toward full membership.

ASEAN officials have insisted that they share the same goals as the West which they accuse of being heavy-handed. Last week, however, ASEAN’s secretary-general Ajit Singh of Malaysia accused the West of conducting a witchhunt against the SLORC. “It is not an issue at all as far as ASEAN is concerned,” he said.

ASEAN has been considered a pariah state here since the junta seized power in 1988 and launched a violent campaign against a student-led pro-democracy movement. The SLORC held elections in 1990 but refused to recognise the landslide victory of the opposition National League for Democracy (NLD). It promptly arrested hundreds of NLD activists, including its leader, Aung San Suu Kyi.

Suu Kyi, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1991, was held under house arrest for nearly six years until her release almost exactly one year ago, but her calls for dialogue with the military have gone unheeded. Beginning in late May, the SLORC rounded up hundreds of NLD activists and launched a propaganda campaign against Suu Kyi.

In a videotape shown by members of the European Parliament last week, Suu Kyi called for international economic sanctions to be imposed on Burma “to make it quite clear that economic change in Burma is not possible without political change.”

Her appeals were widely cited during the Senate debate, as was the recent death in custody of James Nichols, a close friend of Suu Kyi who served in Rangoon as the consul for Switzerland and three Nordic countries.

Since his death last month, two European breweries, Carlsberg and Heineken, have announced they will pull out of Burma, while a large Danish pension fund has sold off its shares of the French oil company Total, which has substantial investments in the country.

But a bare majority of senators were persuaded by the administration’s plea for greater flexibility in dealing with Burma and by pressure from two major oil companies with major investments in the Asian nation: Unocal and Texaco.

California-based Unocal, which has a major and controversial pipeline project in Burma, has been especially aggressive in lobbying against sanctions. Feinstein argued that forcing the company to divest will bring a windfall to the company’s foreign competitors. “You know who will take Unocal’s share in this?” she asked during the debate. She named Japan’s Mitsui as the most likely beneficiary.

Billinness, who works at Franklin Research and Development Corporation of Boston, still thinks it’s only a matter of time until an investment ban takes hold, however. A veteran of the successful anti-apartheid divestment campaign against South Africa in the 1980’s, he says U.S. companies are unlikely to make any new investments in Burma.

In the last year, a number of local U.S. jurisdictions, including San Francisco and the state of Massachusetts, have enacted measures banning companies with investments in Burma from bidding on government contracts. New York City and the state of California are currently considering similar measures.

Many of these same companies are facing ongoing stockholder actions and consumer boycotts pressing them to divest from Burma. Some prominent clothing retailers, including Liz Claiborne, Levi Strauss, and Eddie Bauer, have also cancelled ties with local Burmese contractors.

“What company wants to get in the middle of such a firestorm,” he asked.