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Our Money Adds To Burma's Misery.
Our money adds to Burma's misery
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[The West must help the Burmese end one of the world's most
repressive regimes]
The conduct of Burma's National League for Democracy is a display
of courage that beggars the imagination. The orgainsation, under the
leadership of the Nobel peace laureate Aung San Suu kyi, recently
convened in the capital city, despite the unwarranted arrest and
detention of 256 of its legitimately elected representatives and despite
constant threats and harassment by the military dictators who hold Burma
captive.
The free nations of the world must help these people, or one day
we will be sending our young there as "peace-keepers".
For almost 30 years, the Burmese people have lived under one of
the most repressive regimes in modern history. Thousands have been put to
death, usually for the mere suspicion that they opposed their ruthless
"leaders". Hordes have fled into the jungles, hoping to escape the terror
and privation that is daily life under the generals.
These same generals force 13-yera-olds into the army. They
appropriate private property where and when they please, and pay nothing,
leaving the owners impoverished and themselves that much richer.
The UN General Assembly has condemned Burma - or Myanmar, as the
generals have named it - for "continued violations of human rights...
including killing of civilians... restrictions on freedom of
expression... torture, forced labour".
The more one learns about the generals, the more one feels a
primal urgeto see them blasted off the face of the Earth. But we are
civilised, and fortunately there is still a peaceful way to help restore
freedom: bankrupt the generals.
As a result of the ineptitude that often goes hand in hand with
megalomania, the Burmese Government is desperate for foreign capital. The
sad truth is it is getting it - from Japan, from other Asian countries
and, worse, from petrol credit cards.
Two petroleum giants, Unocal and Total, are investing $1 billion
in a pipeline from Burma to Thailand to transport natural gas.
Who's building this massive project? Slave labour. Peasant
families are brutally separated or moved without recourse and then forced
at gunpoint to do hard labour on the project. Those who cannot maintain
the required pace - the sick, the elderly - are left to die at the side
of the road.
Even as Uncol and Total insist that these horrors are fantasy,
reliable observers operating covertly inside Burma provide continuing,
incontrovertible evidence that they are true.
This is not to say that the petroleum giants are lying or even
burying their corporate heads in the sand. It's doubtful that their
Burmese partners advise them of every roadside execution, every village
leveled, every family destroyed.
From the generals' point of view, why make anyone uncomfortable?
Better to keep these giants cash cows in the dark and enjoy the milk
themselves.
[Richard DeRoy, Los Angeles Times, 1 July 1996].
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