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please disregard the "radical measu



Subject: please disregard the "radical measures" session in the previous posting

Dear All,

RE: radical measures

This is Zarni from Madison.

It has been brought to my attention that the disclaimer "we don't take any
stand on these measures" RE: monkey-ranching Pepsi machines, dumping oil,
etc.  can damage the image of the Free Burma Coaltion and will make us (me,
more accurately) liable for "mischevous" (quotes mine) activities other
people carry out in the context.
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                So please disregard the session "radical measures."
________________________________________________________________________________

Ignorance on my part is, of course, no excuse. I should have been a bit
more thoughful before I wrote that session.

As far as Public Relation or legal implications (even after I post this
note), I and I, alone AM responsible for those words. The session in
qeustion does not necessarily reflect the Coalition as a grassroots
activist group.

My sincere apology to all of you, should that particular session cause any
concerns.

Here is my personal independent, I repeat, independent, stand on this issue:

With this said, I am greatly distressed by the fact that Royal Dutch Shell
Oil (in the case of Nigeria) officially "requested" the Nigerian
dictatorship to deploy mobile troops so as to protect Shell oil drilling
stations in Ogemi communities.  We all know what that led to.

There are similarities between Shell's case and Unocal's. (Kevin Heppner
can tell us what corporate presence in indigenous communities mean to
thousands of subsistence farmers).

We all KNOW the truth that when authoritian regimes do the nasty, corporate
executives look the other way.

Each time I,as an individual, see a "corporate logo and property," I fail
to see them as sacred properties and symbols protected by capitalist laws
and capitalist cultural values which teach "property, not human, matters
most."    Rather they trigger images of bloated corpses floating down
Salween and Irrawaddy rivers victimized and thrown out by Slorc soldiers,
Heppner's slides on villages and indigenous communities utterly destroyed,
girls as young as 10 carrying baskets of gravels on their shoulders and
being forced to work for Slorc under the blistering tropical heat, young
girls and women smuggled and forced into sexual slavery into neighboring
Thailand, young students and their dead bodies lying on the streets of
Burma with their brains literally bursted out by automatic machine gun
bullets, political prisoners tortured, battered, and executed in  Slorc's
concentration camps,thousands of refugee families fleeing into neighboring
countries, ecological devastation and its likely consequences for our
country, and, finally, three-piece suit corporate executives and the Slorc
generals smiling, shaking hands, and sharing the economic benefits out of
utter misery, and at the expense of, my people.


Thank you.

Sincerely,

zarni