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BurmaNet News: September 27, 2000
- Subject: BurmaNet News: September 27, 2000
- From: strider@xxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Wed, 27 Sep 2000 12:11:00
______________ THE BURMANET NEWS ______________
An on-line newspaper covering Burma
_________September 27, 2000 Issue # 1627__________
INSIDE BURMA _______
*AP: US Trying To Put Myanmar On Security Council Agenda
*AFP: Junta blockades Aung San Suu Kyi's party headquarters on
anniversary
*BBC: 'Barbaric attack' on jailed Briton
*BBC: Burma deny reports of jail assault
*Asia Times: Myanmar alone in using landmines in Southeast Asia
REGIONAL/INTERNATIONAL _______
*AP: US Trying To Put Myanmar On Security Council Agenda
*The Daily Telegraph: Cook attacks Burmese junta over beating of jailed
Briton
*Channel NewsAsia: Singapore youths return from community project in
Myanmar
*Daily Star (Dhaka): Large number of Rohingya women being trafficked to
Pakistan
ECONOMY/BUSINESS _______
*Pittsburgh Post-Gazette: An Inextricable Link: Human and Environmental
Rights
OPINION/EDITORIALS _______
*The Nation: Opinion - From denial to undeniability: Unocal and
atrocities in Burma
*Progressive: Cheney at the Helm--At Halliburton, oil and human rights
did not mix
OTHER _______
*PD Burma: Calendar of events with regard to Burma
The BurmaNet News is viewable online at:
http://theburmanetnews.editthispage.com
__________________ INSIDE BURMA ____________________
AFP: Junta blockades Aung San Suu Kyi's party headquarters on
anniversary
Wednesday, September 27 12:04 PM SGT
YANGON, Sept 27 (AFP) - Myanmar's regime Wednesday blockaded the
headquarters of Aung San Suu Kyi's opposition National League for
Democracy (NLD) to prevent any celebrations marking the NLD's 12th
anniversary.
Military intelligence and police manned roadblocks closing off the road
in front of NLD headquarters, even though Aung San Suu Kyi and other NLD
leaders are under de facto house arrest, an AFP reporter witnessed.
They also patrolled the area and forced traffic entering and leaving the
capital to detour around the street where NLD headquarters is located.
NLD members were not allowed entry to their party headquarters on
Wednesday, the 12th anniversary of the founding of the party which in
1990 won a landslide victory in elections subsequently annulled by the
ruling junta.
Nobel laureate Aung San Suu Kyi and other NLD central executive
committee members have been under house arrest since last Friday when
they were escorted home from Yangon central station by police.
They had been prevented from boarding a train to the northern city of
Mandalay to investigate reported crackdowns on the party.
NLD deputy chairman Tin Oo is being held on a military base 50
kilometres (30 miles) north of Yangon.
US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright Tuesday vowed to keep the
pressure on the junta over its treatment of Aung San Suu Kyi.
"I can assure you that I will not let this issue drop. We are trying to
make the others move. It's not easy," said Albright.
"I think this is one of the saddest cases where, 10 years after she, her
party and she, were elected they are not allowed to take their rightful
position and there is no dialogue between her and the Burmese (Myanmar)
government," Albright said.
The NLD headed by Aung San Suu Kyi, daughter of independence hero
General Aung San, was founded on September 27, 1988 after the military
government announced it would hold elections.
More than 200 political parties were formed in 1988, of which the NLD is
the last remaining opposition force. All the rest of the parties have
signed deals with the junta or been crushed.
In May 1990 parliamentary elections, the NLD won 392 out of 485 seats.
The military government, then known as the State Law and Order
Restoration Council, annulled the result.
____________________________________________________
BBC: 'Barbaric attack' on jailed Briton
Wednesday, 27 September, 2000, 09:21 GMT 10:21 UK
The father of a British man serving 17 years in a Burmese jail for
distributing pro-democracy leaflets says his son has been badly beaten
in prison. Human rights activist James Mawdsley, 27, is understood to
have been attacked after protesting at being transferred to solitary
confinement.
His father, David Mawdsley, described the attack as an "act of
barbarism" and called for international pressure on Burma's military
regime. "He was beaten up by 15 men," he told BBC Radio 4's Today
programme. "He got a broken nose. He has blackened eyes.
"But what we are really concerned about is the rest of his body, because
they could have damaged his liver, his kidneys or his spleen."
Military blamed
James Mawdsley has been held at the prison in the remote town of Keng
Tung, 390 miles north east of Rangoon, since his arrest in the city of
Tachilek last September.
His mother Diana has gone to Burma to establish contact with her son,
but has been unable to speak to him about the attack.
Mr Mawdsley said Burma's authorities were directly to blame for the
attack.
"There is no doubt in my mind, no matter what they say, the junta has
ordered this," he said.
"No-one does anything in Burma unless it comes right from the top and I
have no doubt at all that this was a deliberate act."
Sanctions
He called for international pressure to help his son and urged companies
such as Premier Oil to stop investment in the country.
"Burma is looking for credibility and this is another case of them
losing credibility," he said.
"This junta has to go and it has got to be through outside pressure."
James Mawdsley, from Southport, Lancashire, was arrested last September
and charged with carrying anti-government literature, after twice
previously being deported from Burma.
He lost his appeal against the sentence in August but is hoping for
another hearing in November.
'Rights violated'
The Foreign Office confirmed that Ambassador John Jenkins had "protested
in the strongest terms" to the Burmese authorities about Mr Mawdsley's
treatment.
Foreign Secretary Robin Cook said he was shocked to hear James had been
beaten in prison.
"I understand the prison authorities have also removed his food and
possessions," he said.
"This is an outrageous violation of his human rights. It is yet another
example of the Burmese regime's utter lack of respect for the standards
of the international community."
Amnesty International reports that Myanmar, as Burma is now known, has a
record of widespread human rights violations, particularly against
ethnic minorities such as the Karen people.
James' protest called for an end to the genocide against the Karen
people, the re-opening of the universities and dialogue between National
League for Democracy and the military regime.
____________________________________________________
BBC: Burma deny reports of jail assault
Wednesday, 27 September, 2000, 15:36 GMT 16:36 UK
The Burmese military government has dismissed as ridiculous allegations
that a British human rights activist was severely beaten while serving a
seventeen-year jail sentence.
The British Foreign Secretary, Robin Cook, said he was shocked and
appalled by reports from British officials that James Mawdsley -- who
was arrested last year while campaigning against the Burmese authorities
-- had suffered a broken nose and black eyes after he was allegedly
beaten with bamboo poles.
Asia Times: Myanmar alone in using landmines in Southeast Asia
Sep 27, 2000.
Southeast Asia
By Teena Gill
CHIANG MAI - Phe Gai Hte was so intent to find food that he failed to
notice a device embedded in the soil as he walked back to his deserted
village in eastern Myanmar. The next thing he knew, he was on the ground
and in great pain. But what he saw horrified him - where his left leg
used to be was a mere piece of bone, with some flesh hanging loosely
around it.
That happened just months ago. Today, Phe Gai Hte is still struggling to
recover from his traumatic and violent encounter with one of the
anti-personnel landmines that dot most of Myanmar.
As more and more countries worldwide agree to ban the manufacture and
sale of landmines, the Myanmar military remains the sole armed force in
Southeast Asia using the destructive and inhumane devices, and one of
only three in the whole of Asia, according to a recently released
Landmine Monitor report.
The Landmine Monitor is produced by the International Campaign to Ban
Landmines, which received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1997. Its latest
report says that 10 out of Myanmar's 14 states and divisions are mined,
and that the country had some 1,500 landmine victims in 1999 alone. In
the Karen state, where Phe Gai Hte is from, one person is either injured
or killed by a landmine every day.
Sam Kalyani, an activist with the Chiang Mai-based organization Images
Asia, says: ''It is difficult to estimate what the latest figures of
landmine victims are (in Myanmar). Most are treated by mobile medical
teams going in from the Thai side of the border, or admitted to Thai
hospitals. But they are very visible.''
In truth, the devastation caused by such mines in Myanmar is now
estimated to be the highest in Southeast Asia, surpassing even Cambodia,
where mines planted by all the factions involved in the civil war there
made it one of the most heavily mined countries in the world. As of
1997, Cambodia was estimated to have some 10 million landmines.
While other weapons can be targeted specifically at an enemy, landmines
are obviously less discriminate and are usually left to continue to
wreak havoc even after an armed conflict has ended. Every year, some
25,000 civilians - 32 percent of them children - across the globe are
killed, wounded, or maimed by landmines. Many more are driven from their
homes and fields after these are found to contain mines.
Myanmar itself makes landmines, but mines from a number of other nations
such as China, Israel, Russia and the United States have also been found
in the country. Experts say these could have been purchased by either
Myanmar's military junta, which calls itself the State Peace and
Development Council (SPDC), or the various ethnic armies fighting
Yangon. There are about a dozen armed resistance groups battling with
the military regime, including ethnic minority groups from the Shan,
Karen and Karenni states in the east of Myanmar, and Chin and Arakan
states in the west.
Many of those killed or maimed by landmines, however, are civilians like
Phe Gai Hte. Thei San of the All Myanmar Students Democratic Front
(ABSDF), an exiled group of pro-democracy student activists, says: ''The
reason casualties are so high today is because of a change in tactic by
the Myamar army. They want to make sure all insurgency areas are cleared
of local people, including those hiding in forests, so they are heavily
mining all these areas.''
Working in Karen state, Thei San says that this new method came into
force only last November.
Myanmar is among those believed to have the largest concentrations of
landmines in the world today, along with Afghanistan, Angola, Cambodia
and the former Yugoslavia. In Southeast Asia, Cambodia, Indonesia,
Malaysia, the Philippines and Thailand have already either signed or
ratified the Mine Ban Treaty, which came into force in March 1999.
But while the growing international outcry over landmines has helped
lead to the decline in the production and sale of the deadly devices,
there are still some 85 to 110 million uncleared mines in about 60
countries around the world. About 250 million mines are also known to be
in the arsenals of 105 countries.
Of the three main types of mines in use across the world, the Myamar
junta is known to produce two. These are modeled after the Chinese Type
58 blast mine and the Chinese Type 59 stake-mounted fragmentation mine.
The fragmentation mine is designed just for the purpose of killing and
is effective up to 50 meters from the site of detonation. The more
common blast mine does not necessarily result in fatalities when
activated, but it certainly maims. Experts estimate that up to 50
percent of those who step on landmines die as a result of the impact or
from loss of blood and infection.
The United Nations has noted that while it takes only between US$3 and
$11 to make a landmine, removing one can cost anywhere from $300 to
$1,000.
In Myanmar, Sam Kalyani says, the most important issue concerning
landmines is ''rehabilitation. This could take another 20 to 30 years if
the conflict continues''.
Another activist working along the Thai-Myanmar border adds, ''Even when
the civil war in Myanmar ends, and even if there is democracy in
Myanmar, this will still be a pressing issue. The impact will be felt
for many, many years.''
___________________ REGIONAL/INTERNATIONAL___________________
AP: US Trying To Put Myanmar On Security Council Agenda
Wednesday, September 27 7:23 AM SGT
UNITED NATIONS (AP)--For the second day in a row Tuesday, the United
States raised Myanmar's confinement of Nobel Peace Prize winner Aung San
Suu Kyi and tried to put it on the agenda of the U.N. Security Council.
The United States wants the U.N. Secretariat to brief the council on the
military junta's crackdown on Suu Kyi, top leaders of her opposition
National League for Democracy, and between 80 and 100 members of her
support network.
But Russia, China and Malaysia are reluctant to raise the issue on
grounds that it involves internal domestic politics, or that it doesn't
constitute a threat to peace and security, Western diplomats said.
U.S. deputy ambassador Nancy Soderberg said Tuesday that Washington will
continue to consult with council members "to try to work out a way
forward," and will keep raising Myanmar's actions in the council.
Suu Kyi and eight other central executive committee members of her party
have been under virtual house arrest since Sept. 22 in the latest
crackdown on the pro-democracy movement in Myanmar.
"We strongly condemn these actions by the government in Burma and call
once again on them to lift the restrictions against Aung San Suu Kyi and
her supporters," Soderberg said.
"They are violating the most basic of human rights - freedom of access
in your own country - and we hope that they will lift these restrictions
and enter into dialogue with her," Soderberg said.
On Aug. 24, Suu Kyi and 14 party colleagues were blocked by security
forces outside Yangon as they were traveling to a party meeting in the
countryside. They refused to return home and camped beside their
vehicles for nine days, until the police took them back to the capital
and confined them to their residences.
A government announcement on Sept. 14 that restrictions on Suu Kyi and
her followers were being lifted was welcomed by U.N. Secretary-General
Kofi Annan and U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright.
But after the latest crackdown, Soderberg said, "We appear to be back at
square one."
Suu Kyi led a pro-democracy uprising against the military in 1988 and
was put under house arrest a year later. Her National League for
Democracy won general elections in 1990, but was prevented from taking
power.
Hundreds of its members have since been jailed, and the military has
rejected calls for a political dialogue with the opposition. Suu Kyi was
let out of house arrest in 1995, but her movements remain severely
restricted.
____________________________________________________
The Daily Telegraph: Cook attacks Burmese junta over beating of jailed
Briton
Sep 27, 2000.
By Anton La Guardia, Diplomatic Editor
THE Foreign Office and Christian groups expressed outrage last night
after a British human rights campaigner was severely beaten for three
days in a Burmese jail. British officials said James Mawdsley, 27, who
is serving a 17-year sentence for distributing pro-democracy literature
in a Burmese border town, suffered a broken nose, two black eyes and
bruises.
Robin Cook, the Foreign Secretary, said: "This is an outrageous
violation of his human rights. It is yet another example of the Burmese
regime's utter lack of respect for the standards of the international
community . . . The Burmese cannot treat our nationals like this." Mr
Cook said British officials had protested to the Burmese authorities in
Rangoon.
The Burmese ambassador to London is expected to be summoned by the
Foreign Office today.
Mr Cook said: "They must now either release James or transfer him to a
prison in Rangoon where our staff can keep a close eye on his welfare."
Mr Mawdsley, a committed Catholic and a former student at Bristol
University, was visited yesterday in Kengtung by the British vice-consul
in Burma, Karen Williams, who discovered that he had been beaten by
prison guards after protesting at his detention in solitary confinement.
His father, David, said: "He was beaten up by 15 men with bamboo sticks.
We are extremely concerned. James has not been seen by a doctor and they
might have done irreparable damage to his internal organs. The prison
authorities would not have done this of their own accord. They have been
told to do it by the junta. If James was not white they would have
killed him long ago.
The Burmese junta are scum."
Mr Mawdsley's mother, Diana, has been in Rangoon for the past three
weeks trying to see her son. She has refused to abide by Burmese
conditions that he sit inside a glass box during the visit to prevent
physical contact. Mr Mawdsley was jailed last year after a trial in
which he had no representation.
A spokesman for Christian Solidarity Worldwide, a Christian campaign
group, said: "Conditions for James just seem to get worse and worse
without the international community taking any decisive action. What is
happening to James Mawdsley is sadly only the tip of the iceberg. The
junta's brutal suppression of both the pro-democracy opposition and the
country's ethnic minorities has gone on for far too long. It is a human
rights tragedy of massive proportions."
Foreign Office sources said that at the weekend Burmese authorities
prevented British diplomats from visiting Aung San Suu Kyi, the
opposition leader and Nobel peace laureate. She has been under house
arrest since last Friday, after she and other leaders of the National
League for Democracy were stopped from boarding a train to the northern
city of Mandalay to investigate reported crackdowns on the party. The
NLD won a landslide general election victory in 1990, but the result was
ignored by the junta.
____________________________________________________
Channel NewsAsia: Singapore youths return from community project in
Myanmar
Wednesday, September 27 4:10 PM SGT
The first group of tertiary students on an expedition to Myanmar under
the Youth Expedition Programme have returned after an 18-day trip
working on a community project. The student-initiated project was a
success and the students built seven houses and a playground for a
village.
Twenty-five Civil Engineering students from the National University of
Singapore staged a campus-wide presentation to share their experiences
and to inspire others to take up the challenge of community work.
The two-year-old Youth Expedition Programme, which targets Junior
College students, has actually attracted interest from tertiary students
keen to work on overseas community projects.
Mr Michael Lee, Team Leader, said: "Personally I was there to touch
lives, to see for myself the different living conditions, and as well as
how different it is to work and do community service."
The students said a big challenge which they had to cope with was how to
raise 30 percent of the funds they needed, about $15,000, through
various activities before they left for Myanmar.
The rest of the costs were paid by the Singapore International
Foundation.
Students teams from the National University of Singapore and Nanyang
Technological University will carry on the good work with other projects
in Myanmar and Chiangrai.
Daily Star (Dhaka): Large number of Rohingya women being trafficked to
Pakistan
THE DAILY STAR, Dhaka - 24 September 2000
Large number of Rohingya women being trafficked to Pakistan (Star
Report)
A large number of Rohingya women from Bangladesh are being trafficked to
Pakistan, a report by a Thailand-based research organisation revealed
recently.
The report by Chris Lewa of Images Asia said, "The refugee camps in
Cox's Bazar are actually ideal recruiting grounds for traffickers. The
UNHCR and NGOs providing assistance in the camps confirmed that human
trafficking was thriving at the height of the influx."
Over the last two decades, two mass exoduses of Rohingya refugees have
burdened Bangladesh; in 1978 and 1991/92. Not surprisingly, the major
influxes of newcomers in Pakistan coincide with these two mass exoduses,
said the report, exclusively made available to The Daily Star.
In a report published in March 1994, the Pakistani police in Sindh
province estimated the number of illegal Rohingyas living in and around
Karachi in 1993 at around 200,000, an increase by 700 per cent from
their previous survey of 1988.
The police records also indicate that the Rohingyas comprise 14 per cent
and Bangladeshis 80 per cent of the total undocumented immigrant
population in Karachi.
UBINIG, a Bangladeshi NGO, carried out a research titled Vulnerability
and Insecurity among Rohingya women living outside the camps and
reported various cases of disappearances of young girls. Abductions of
young women, rape and sexual assaults are thus not uncommon.
Images Asia believes that the actual number of Rohingyas in Karachi is
likely to be much higher since many of them conceal their origin fearing
deportation to Myanmmar. Rohingya community leaders in Karachi speak of
a total Rohingya population of over 300,000.
The report said that Rohingya women from Myanmmar are trapped. In
Myanmmar, they are deprived of citizenship and face wide-scale
atrocities committed by the military junta.
In Bangladesh, they are unwanted refugees, threatened with repatriation
or deportation, and unable to meet their most basic needs. For many, the
only option left to them in order to survive is being trafficked to
Pakistan to face an uncertain future that often holds further abuses.
During the journey across the subcontinent they can be caught in the web
of ruthless traffickers. At every stage of the trip they are vulnerable
to sexual violence, physical abuse, as well as other forms of
exploitation, whether in the hands of the trafficker, the police, border
guards, or while in detention.
In Pakistan, some have been sold into slavery and prostitution, while
many more survive as illegal immigrants in extreme poverty in the
squalor of the Karachi slums. Others have spent many years in jail,
detained under the Pakistan Foreigners Act or under the Zina section of
the Hudood Ordinance.
In an interview by Chris Lewa of Images Asia, a staff member of Dhaka
Ahsania Mission (DAM), a Dhaka-based NGO, related a specific case in
which they got involved.
The Ahsania Mission staff narrated that in May 1998, a bus carrying 71
passengers, mostly women and children of various ages, was driving from
Cox's Bazaar to Benapole (Indian border).
The driver got suspicious about the passengers he was carrying and when
the bus stopped at a petrol station, he informed the police. The police
organised a road block near Jessore and intercepted the bus.
This way they found out that all the passengers were going to be
trafficked illegally to India. The passengers were taken to police
custody. Most of them told the police that they were from the Cox's
Bazar area.
However, when the police investigated the addresses that they had given,
these were either non-existent or incomplete. These women did not admit
they were Rohingyas, but the police assumed they were.
_______________ ECONOMY AND BUSINESS _______________
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette: An Inextricable Link: Human and Environmental
Rights
DON HOPEY, POST-GAZETTE STAFF WRITER
09/25/2000
As he demonstrated against human rights abuses that included slavery and
forced relocation of villagers near his native city of Yangon in 1988,
17-year-old Ka Hsaw Wa saw two of his good friends shot and killed in
front of him by soldiers in Myanmar, formerly known as Burma.
Wa himself was tortured by police and had to flee into deep jungle to
avoid worse; an estimated 10,000 people were killed when the military
dictatorship of the southeast Asian nation cracked down on the
pro-democracy protests. Unable to return home, he lived in the jungle
for years, documenting the human rights abuses he saw and experiencing
an awakening.
"I saw villagers forced from their homes by a company that opened a gold
mine, others displaced or killed by logging firms and more forced to
work carrying weapons and supplies on a pipeline project," Wa said.
"Slowly I came to understand that those abuses are all directly
related to the exploitation of environmental resources in my country. I
became an environmentalist."
Wa, now 30, was in Pittsburgh last week to kick off the Just Earth
campaign by Amnesty International and the Sierra Club Allegheny Group.
The worldwide campaign, which joins two of the largest grass- roots
activist organizations in the United States, is aimed at highlighting
the plight of advocates imprisoned and tortured for their stands on
environmental issues.
"Dividing human rights and environmental rights is a waste of time and
plays into the hands of governments and multinational corporations
exploiting both," said Wa, who has won the Reebok Human Rights
Environmental Award and the Conde Nast and Goldman awards for his work
documenting and exposing environmental human rights abuses.
The link between human rights abuses and environmental exploitation is
not always obvious in the United States. But environmental activists
are under attack in China, India, Kenya, Nigeria, Chad, Cameroon,
Ecuador, Brazil, Cambodia, Indonesia, Mexico and Russia, as documented
in a report recently released by Amnesty International and the Sierra
Club.
One of the most prominent cases was settled earlier this month when the
Russian Supreme Court dismissed charges of treason leveled in 1996
against Aleksandr Nikitin, a scientist and former naval captain who was
subjected to four years of investigations and harassment, two trials
and nine indictments for revealing nuclear safety hazards aboard aging
Russian nuclear submarines.
Amnesty International and the Sierra Club mounted a three-year
letter-writing and lobbying campaign on Nikitin's behalf that was
instrumental in his release, said Ellen Dorsey, the director of Chatham
College's Rachel Carson Institute and former director of Amnesty
International's human rights and environment program.
"People in those countries don't have the right to demand something
better, but a healthy environment is a human right," Dorsey said. "This
campaign aims to help protect those on the front lines."
She said some of the most politically repressive and corrupt nations
have the most severe environmental problems, and American policy and
purchasing decisions can have an effect on both.
In Myanmar, to get foreign currency needed to maintain power, the
military junta sold off the nation's fishing, logging, mining and gem
collecting rights, as well as natural gas deposits to multinational
corporations.
In the early 1990s, at great personal risk, the slightly built and
self-effacing Wa traveled into militarized areas where logging, mining
and pipeline construction were taking place. There he documented the
arbitrary detentions, tortures, rapes, intimidation and execution of
indigenous villagers, many of them ethnic minorities.
"Ethnic cleansing has happened," he said. "To get to the jade, the
forests, the gold, the military did whatever it had to, to whoever it
had to. It would even drive its own people out of an area."
Much of Wa's work focused on the human rights and environmental abuses
surrounding construction of the Yadana Gas Pipeline Project, built by a
consortium that includes UNOCOL, based in the United States, and Total,
a French company.
The pipeline crosses the Tenasserim rainforest, inhabited by diverse
peoples and home to tigers, Asian elephants, rhinoceroses and many other
endangered species.
Wa successfully lobbied the World Bank to withdraw funding guarantees
for a Thai power plant that was to use the Yadana natural gas pipeline.
As a result, the power plant has not been built and the pipeline,
though completed, is not pumping any gas.
"We've gotten the word out and exposed things to the world," said Wa,
who now lives outside Washington, D.C,. and wants to return to Myanmar
but can't. "That's started some reforms. We need to do more."
_________________OPINION/EDITORIALS________________
The Nation: Opinion - From denial to undeniability: Unocal and
atrocities in Burma
Sep 27, 2000.
Lawyers for victims of Burmese brutality during the building of the
Yadana pipeline are confident that a lawsuit against Unocal will
prevail, writes Jed Greer.
For the past four years, lawyers working on behalf of Burmese victims of
human rights violations have sought to hold the American petroleum
corporation Unocal accountable in a landmark lawsuit, John Doe I, et al,
v Unocal Corp, et al.
On August 31, the presiding judge found that Unocal did in fact know of
and benefit from atrocities committed by Burma's army in connection with
the building of the Yadana gas pipeline, a joint venture project in
which Unocal was involved. The judge also ruled, however, that Unocal
cannot be held liable and dismissed the case. People unfamiliar with the
US judicial system may be surprised by this perplexing outcome.
Thus it is important to be clear about what this decision means and what
it does not mean.
First, what the decision means. In his opinion the judge completely
validates the plaintiffs' factual allegations. Unocal can no longer deny
that egregious abuses occurred on its project. Indeed, the judge
observed, "[t]he violence perpetrated against Plaintiffs is well
documented . . . and need not be recited in detail[.]"
In addition, the judge noted that the plaintiffs had presented evidence
"demonstrating . . . that the [pipeline] project hired the military to
provide security for the project, a military that forced villagers to
work and entire villages to relocate for the benefit of the project;
that the military, while forcing villagers to work and relocate,
committed numerous acts of violence; and that Unocal knew or should have
known that the military did commit, was committing, and would continue
to commit these tortuous acts." Further, he wrote, "the evidence does
suggest that Unocal knew that forced labour was being used and that
[Unocal and Total, another joint venture partner in the Yadana project]
benefited from the practice[.]"
Such an acknowledgement is a major victory for the plaintiffs. In an
interview following the decision, Unocal's spokesperson claimed that the
company did not dispute its knowledge of the human rights violations.
This statement is at odds with previous public relations efforts. Unocal
has long denied that there is any evidence to support this suit.
Recent documentation of these atrocities - murder, rape, torture, forced
labour and relocation - came in May of this year when EarthRights
International released the most comprehensive report to date on the
subject.
Now, what the decision does not mean. It doesn't mean that the case is
over. The plaintiffs' lawyers are appealing the decision, a process that
will take at least a year. But given the unprecedented nature of this
lawsuit, it was always likely that it would go to an appeals court.
Nor does this decision mean that Unocal never can or will be found
liable. The appeals court will review the legal standards the presiding
judge used in dismissing the case. Only if the appeals court determines
that there is no way whatsoever for the plaintiffs to make their legal
claims will it agree with the presiding judge. That is a very favourable
position from the plaintiffs' standpoint, and plaintiffs' lawyers are
confident that the appeals court will reverse the judge's decision and
allow the case to go to trial.
That is as it should be. Beyond the legal issues involved, Doe v Unocal
is an early test case for determining the boundaries of corporate
responsibility in the age of globalisation.
Proponents of globalisation tout the many benefits of an increasingly
integrated global economy; rarely are we given a picture of
globalisation's downside, its flesh-and-blood victims. How the US court
system ultimately handles the Unocal case is no less a moral than legal
question.
JED GREER works with EarthRights Inter-national. ERI is co-counsel in
Doe v Unocal.
____________________________________________________
Progressive: Cheney at the Helm--At Halliburton, oil and human rights
did not mix
Sept 2000
By Wayne Madsen
Dick Cheney, George W. Bush's running mate, is a far cry from the "aw,
shucks" kind of Wyoming cowboy-politician painted by Republican
strategists. When he was at the helm of the Dallas-based oil services
giant Halliburton, Inc., from 1995 until his nomination, the company and
its subsidiaries--Brown & Root and Dresser Industries--were deeply
enmeshed in the military-intelligence complex.
After serving as Secretary of Defense in Bush the Elder's Administration
and making Kuwait safe once again for U.S. oil companies, Cheney went
around the country making speeches. But when the CEO spot opened up at
Halliburton, the board of directors tapped him, knowing that his
connections would come in handy. They just didn't know how handy.
For instance, after Halliburton acquired Dresser in 1998, it helped
rebuild Iraq's petroleum industry, which Cheney and the Pentagon had
decimated during Desert Storm.
During a 1998 speech in Corpus Christi, Texas, Cheney conceded that his
top job at the Pentagon stood him in good stead at Halliburton. "In the
oil and gas business, I deal with many of the same people," he told the
convention of the Gulf Coast Association of Geological Societies.
"Cheney delivered fast, embarking on months of globe-trotting that got
Halliburton top-level attention from prime ministers and oil sheikhs
from Riyadh and Baku to Lagos and Caracas," The Washington Post
reported. "Soon he was on a first-name basis with oil ministers all over
the world, building on the ties he had developed in the Middle East
during his Pentagon days."
The Pentagon itself has been a huge boon to the company. "Halliburton
eats at the trough of government contracts," says Wenonah Hauter,
director of Public Citizen's Critical Mass Energy & Environment Program,
noting that the company's two largest government contracts are with the
Pentagon and the British Ministry of Defense.
Cheney's links to defense contractors and the intelligence community
have made him suspect among human rights activists. Halliburton and
Brown & Root have played a role in some of the world's most volatile
trouble spots. These include Algeria, Angola, Bosnia, Burma, Croatia,
Haiti, Kuwait, Nigeria, Russia, Rwanda, and Somalia.
In 1998, while I was in Rwanda conducting research for my book, Genocide
and Covert Operations in Africa 1993-1999 (Edwin Mellen, 1999), a number
of U.S. military personnel assigned to that country raised questions
about Brown & Root's activities. "Brown & Root is into some real bad
shit," one told me. The U.S. Army Materiel Command has confirmed that
Brown & Root was in Rwanda under contract with the Pentagon. One U.S.
Navy de-mining expert told me that Brown & Root helped Rwanda's
U.S.-backed government fight a guerrilla war. Brown & Root's official
task was to help clear mines. However, my research showed it was more
involved in providing covert military support to the Tutsi-led Rwanda
Patriotic Army in putting down a Hutu insurgency and assisting its
invasion of the neighboring Democratic Republic of the Congo (Cheney and
Halliburton declined numerous opportunities to comment on this story.)
Cheney was no stranger to covert activities in Rwanda. In 1990, during
his tenure as Secretary of Defense, Rwandan strongman Major General Paul
Kagame, then a colonel in the Ugandan People's Democratic Force,
attended the U.S. Army's Command and General Staff College in Fort
Leavenworth, Kansas. Kagame, with the likely knowledge of the U.S. Army
and Cheney, suddenly dropped out of the school to assume command of the
nascent Rwanda Patriotic Army, which later that year launched a
full-scale invasion of Rwanda from rear bases inside Uganda. U.S.
military advisers were present in Uganda at the time of the invasion,
another fact that would have been known to Cheney and his Pentagon
advisers.
While three separate commissions appointed by Belgium, France, and the
Organization of African Unity have charged their own officials with
complicity in central Africa's turmoil, no American panel has ever
probed the involvement of the U.S. government, military, and defense
contractors in central Africa's woes. If there were such a panel, Dick
Cheney, the man in charge of both the Pentagon and Halliburton during
various invasions of Rwanda and the Congo, would certainly have to be
called and asked, "What did you know about covert U.S. military
operations in central Africa and when did you know about them?"
But that's not all of Halliburton's questionable involvements. The other
most serious charge against Halliburton comes from a group called
Environmental Rights Action based in Harcourt, Nigeria. "In September of
1997, eighteen Mobile Police officers . . . shot and killed one Gidikumo
Sule at the Opuama flow station at Egbema in Warri. . . . Several other
youths were injured during a protest," said the group in a report dated
October 16, 1998. It implicated Halliburton in this repression, saying
that the company was in collaboration with the police. Cheney was at the
helm of Halliburton at the time.
Halliburton has worked with Chevron and Shell in Nigeria, which have
been implicated in gross human rights violations and environmental
devastation there.
Leaders like Equatorial Guinea's Obiang Nguema Mbasogo and Congo
(Brazzaville) President Denis Sassou-Nguesso also use the revenues
generated from Halliburton-built offshore oil platforms to enrich
themselves and their families while ruthlessly suppressing ethnic and
political opposition.
In Burma, Halliburton began work in the oil sector a decade ago. Oil
company ties to the repressive government there have drawn criticism
from human rights groups around the world.
Halliburton also has some unsavory ties in Russia. "Halliburton was a
beneficiary of $292 million in loan guarantees extended earlier this
year by the U.S. Export-Import Bank for a Russian company's development
of a Siberian oilfield," The Washington Post reported. "The deal was a
major embarrassment for Halliburton because the Russian company that is
Halliburton's partner, Tyumen Oil, has been accused of committing a
massive fraud to gain control of the oilfield."
What's more, Halliburton has been involved with so-called private
military companies. Brown & Root has acted in concert with U.S.
mercenary companies like AirScan and MPRI (recently acquired by L-3
Communications) from Angola to Croatia.
Halliburton's environmental record is nothing to be proud of, either.
"They've had a lot of problems," says Hauter. Even the company admits
that. "Regrettably, in 1998, reported environmental incidents
increased," Halliburton says on its web site. "An environmental incident
is any unplanned event regardless of magnitude that could potentially
damage the environment." The company's annual financial statements say:
"Our accrued liabilities for environmental matters were $30 million as
of December 31, 1999."
Cheney's role at Halliburton and Bush's background in the oil industry
suggest that the interests of this sector will be paramount in a Bush
Administration. "With a Bush-Cheney team running the Executive Branch,
Big Oil will be in the driver's seat," says Hauter.
A Bush-Cheney Administration would mark a return to yesteryear. Their
ties to oil companies and the intelligence community should worry
indigenous, environmental, and human rights activists the world over.
Wayne Madsen is a journalist based in Washington, D.C., and a Senior
Fellow of the Electronic Privacy Information Center there. He wrote
"Mercenaries in Kosovo" in our August 1999 issue.
_____________________ OTHER ______________________
PD Burma: Calendar of events with regard to Burma
As of Sept 27, 2000
Published by PD Burma.
¨Z September 27th : Board meeting for
the
Burmese
Border Consortium, Oslo
¨Z September : UN General Assembly, New York
¨Z September : NCGUB Meetings
¨Z September/October : Second EU "troika" mission to
Burma
¨Z October : EU Foreign Ministers to review Burma
Policy
¨Z October 16-21st : 104th Inter-Parliamentary
Conference,
Jakarta
¨Z October 17-18th : 4th Annual Meeting for PD
Burma,
Jakarta
¨Z October 19- 20th : The Asem Summit, Seoul
¨Z October 26-28th : The 50th Congress of Liberal
International, Ottawa
¨Z November : ILO Review of Burma's
practises
¨Z November 2-17th : 279th Session of the Governing Body
and its
committees, Geneva
¨Z November 17th : Global Day of Action on Open Schools
¨Z November 10-11th :Meeting of the Council of
the
Socialist International, Maputo
¨Z December 11-12th : EU and ASEAN
Ministerial-level
meeting, Laos
December : Japan-Burma panel on reform
of
Burma's economic
¨Z
structure,
Tokyo
¨Z January 2001 : Sweden takes over EU Presidency
¨Z February : Meeting of Solidarity Groups,
Brussels
¨Z March/April : Teachers/ Students Union Conferences
¨Z March/April : EU Common Position Review
¨Z March/April : UN Human Rights Commission, Geneva
¨Z May/June : Meeting of Solidarity Groups
____________________________________________________
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