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Letters in NI.
PepsiCo
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We were shocked to see you unilaterally let PepsiCo off the hook.
Contrary to what you state in your issue on BURMA (NI 280), the company
has not left the country, but is simply engaged in paper shuffling. It
has turned its operations into a franchise directly owned by a Burmese
company run by Thein Tun, who chaired a mass rally for the Burmese
dictatorship in June where he denounced Burma's democracy movement.
Meanwhile, PepsiCo itself still refuses to explain how it could
have exported agricultural goods from Burma without trading in produce
grown by using forced labour. To have avoided this, PepsiCo must have
known about the practice long before the human-rights groups dis. Yet it
did not present any testimony concerning this during US Government
hearings on Burma, nor did it inform even its own shareholders.
Had you contacted the PepsiCo/Burma boycott organizers you would
have avoided a major error which has set our work back considerably.
[Reid Cooper and Terry Cottam, Burma-Tibet Group, Ottawa, Canada]
(The New Internationalist, September 1996).
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One Choice
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Your issue on BUMRMA (NI 280) is clear that tourists should not
visit Burma. But according to an article I read in a local magazine, a
group of travellers concluded that the Burmese people do want you to come
to their country: "In our tour through this country long on discipline
but short on progress, one thing was clear: going there is a tough moral
call to make but to the Burmese people we talked to, you only have one
choice. They want you to come and see how their Government has managed to
turn Shwe Puidaw - the Golden Land - into one of the 10 poorest countries
in the world. They want you tell their horror stories. Your only
responsibility is to pass them along."
[S Edwards, Dubai, United Arab Emirates]
(The New Internationalist, Septembet 1996).
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