Nobel's Arms for Peace Investments

[dawnstar@xxxxxxxxxxxxx]

Re the recent story published in the Indian Express on Nobel Foundation
"the secretive Swedish institution behind the prestigious peace prize,
funds its awards by investing in arms companies and firms with doubtful
human rights records",covering some 80 million US dollars of invstments
in London and NY stock markets without "ethical" guideless, the story
comes at time when the British areospace Hawk jets are competing for
Indian defense billions, in a decision to be taken by Indian Govt and
Defense Minister the human rights advocate George Fernandez. Readers may
not know that George Fernandez is one of the leaders who brought down
the Indira Gandi government (landed him in prison but he emerged a
minister of Industry and Telecommunications in another govt at the time)
and it was Fernandez too, then who exposed the nefarious Swedish arms
deal with the Gandi government. The Swedes are far from neutral when it
comes to arms for peace, but Nobel made his millions manufacturing
gunpowder and arms before WWI if I am not mistaken. So where is the
irony.

Look at the statement by Nobel's fund manager in the US, Alfred
Harrison, on Boeing, currently one of the advocates strongly pitched
against Free Burma selective purchasing Ordinance in Seattle : "There
are no ethical guidelines placed on us. We have full discretion in whom
we invest. Yes, we have invested in defense companies like Boeing but it
has never been a problem." Well it is a problem, and that kind of 
hypocrisy and double-standard disregard for ethics is part of the
problem in Seattle. 

Does the Free Burma movement share a consensus on this absense of
ethical investment by the Nobel Foundation, or is it going to let it
pass.

EuroBurmaNet is absolutely shocked and firmly denounces the unethical
investment practices of the NOBEL FOUNDATION and considers its
investments in defense companies and arms manufacturers to be paramount
to an act of violence and encouraging violence and EBN considers it
belittles and renders virtually insignificant its advocacy for human
rights. If the NOBEL FOUNDATION continues to invest in defense
companies, it must be considered an investor in armaments industries,
with all the implications and innuedos that that identification
engenders. Is this arms for peace gesture valid today? Is investment in
defense companies by the NOBEL FOUNDATION an ipsofacto statement about
ethics or do we live in a totally unethical world, where business
investments only consider the bottom line and everything else is
irrelevant. In today's post cold war still-born materialistic world,
where money is the categorical imperative, it is all the more apparent
that we must once again raise what for some remains to be an onerous
question: "Does ethnics have a price".

Let us recall Pierre Sané's remark last week when he said during the
Human Rights Anniversary Day celebrations, 'Human dignity is not quoted
on the stock market." 

At EBN, we continue to call for the Worldwide Total Boycott, against
French govt support of the Total pipeline and the Burmese military drug
junta. Now that the Nobel Foundation's investment policy is under
scrutiny, we applaud its peace prize endowments but we deplore its 
investment policy and lack of moral guidance and urge that it be
modified in accordance with non-defense corporate investments, and to
avoid any ambuiguity that may inevitably in the future compromise its
reputation as an institution dedicated to the promotion of human rights
with all the sanctity reserved to that responsibility.

EBN calls upon the NOBEL FOUNDATION to make a full public disclosure of
its investments so that the world community may actually see for itself
and respond to this most disturbing revelation, lest the entire human
rights community be cast under a lingering shadow by the grotesque of a
human rights institution that mocks its own principles.

dawn star
founder
EuroBurmaNet
Worldwide Total Boycott