BURMA: Government Critics Target Gas Companies over Yadana Pipeline

By Farhan Haq Reprint | | Print |

NEW YORK, Jan 15 1997 (IPS) - Opponents of Burma’s ruling military regime have stepped up attacks on the French gas company Total and the U.S. gas conglomerate Unocal, accusing them of having links to a Burmese group tied to forced labour and heroin trafficking.

The two gas companies, who are involved jointly with Burma’s state-run Ministry for Oil and Gas Enterprise (MOGE) in developing the Yadana pipeline linking Burma to Thailand, now face a growing clamour for penalties if they continue to deal with Rangoon.

“No one should buy goods from a country whose economy benefits from slave labour,” U.S. financier George Soros, president of the non-governmental Open Society Institute, said of Burma in a recent speech delivered in Prague. “And that goes for oil companies that are eager to make money from the natural gas reserves in the seas off Burma.”

Unocal and Total have been hurt by recent reports from several media outlets, including ‘The Nation’ magazine last month, connecting the MOGE, an arm of the ruling State Law and Order Restoration Council (SLORC), to heroin trafficking.

“There are allegations that the account that was used for the Yadana project has been used to launder millions of dollars in heroin traffic,” said Larry Dohrs, coordinator of the Free Burma Campaign in Seattle, Washington. “Those are serious allegations, since the ministry is (the gas companies’) business partner.”

According to the U.S. State Department, 60 percent of the heroin traffic that enters the United States originates in Burma. Doing business with Burmese state entities linked to that narcotics trade is like working with the Mafia, Dohrs said.

The Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers Union (OCAW) has also filed a shareholders’ resolution, to be voted on later this year by Unocal shareholders, seeking an investigation into the money laundering allegations. “Uncovering the truth may mean that Unocal bears direct responsibility for the rise of heroin use in the United States,” Robert Wages, OCAW president, said.

The sharpened focus on the gas companies follows several years of accusations, mainly by opposition leader Daw Aung San Suu Kyi and her National League for Democracy, that the pipeline’s construction has involved forced labour for at least hundreds of Burmese.

“The use of forced labour is integral to the SLORC’s effort to create the infrastructure needed for the (Yadana) project,” Soros said. “The pipeline, when completed, will be the SLORC’s single largest source of foreign currency…The oil companies bear a grave moral responsibility.”

“It appears that Unocal, by abandoning its U.S. operations to take advantage of low wages and slave labour in Asia, is leaving us with a bitter legacy,” Wages added.

But Unocal has repeatedly denied the forced labour charges. One Unocal spokesman, speaking on condition of anonymity, called the charges “false, irresponsible and frivolous”. He said that Unocal’s own investigation had shown no evidence of forced labour or money laundering.

But Mike Jendrzejczyk, the Washington director of Human Rights Watch/Asia, countered that “as to the pipeline itself, there’s been a lot of documentary evidence that forced labour has been used.”

The rights group’s interviews with Mon refugees from the Yadana region indicate that the military has conscripted hundreds of people to work on a range of infrastructure projects. “Military barracks are being built with forced labour to protect the railway line at Yadana,” Jendrzejczyk said.

The SLORC, however, has prevented groups like Human Rights Watch from undertaking a full investigation into the charges, he argued. “The problem is, there’s no independent access” to Yadana, Jendrzejczyk said. “It’s all tightly controlled by the government.”

The SLORC’s control over Yadana has similarly hindered Unocal’s own investigations in the area, Dohrs contended. “Unocal’s investigations are typically very shallow, always coming to the conclusion that they didn’t see any violations,” he said.

The increased pressure on Unocal and Total comes at a time when many governments are stepping up pressure on Rangoon to recognise Suu Kyi’s democratic movement, which won 1990 elections that the SLORC refused to recognise.

Last month, the European Commission asked the European Union nations to suspend Burma’s trading privileges as a result of the forced labour reports. New U.S. foreign policy officials, including Secretary of State-designate Madeleine Albright and Secretary of Defence-designate William Cohen, have also been vocal critics of the SLORC, feeding hopes that Washington soon may review its Burma policy.

Suu Kyi has built on such growing interest by admonishing all outside businesses not to invest in Burma as long as the SLORC regime cracks down on the democratic movement.

“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 persist in its intransigence,” Suu Kyi said from Burma in a taped message to U.S. activists last September.

As calls for boycotts of businesses that deal with Burma swell, the gas companies and the other foreign investors also face the likelihood of increased sanctions against them. “Experience shows that corporations pay more attention to their consumers than to moral principles,” Soros noted.