News from Dutch dailies about IHC C

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GREUSOME STORIES IN THE MARGINS

A remarkable group sat in the director's room of the ship and offshore
building company IHC Caland last week. Around the table: the president of
the dredging company, a Dutch action group and an American-Burmese couple
with their three year old daughter.

While  the toddler drew, her parents placed a report on the table
containing new information that proves that companies such as IHC Caland
have worked for years in Burma with full knowledge of the massive human
rights abuses occurring under Burma's military regime, and are therefore
also to be held accountable.  IHC Caland is the only Dutch company that
continues to do business in Burma.

The Burmese activist Ka Hsaw Wa (29) and the American lawyer Katie Redford
(32) are the tormentors of  such companies. In 1995, they began the
organization EarthRights International.  ERI documents human rights abuses,
including the tens of thousands of cases of forced labor that surround the
building of gas and oil pipelines in Burma. IHC Caland is also involved in
these projects. It provides the floating storage tanks for the extraction
of gas from the sea off the coast of Burma.

"Very friendly, but incredibly naive," said Ka Hsaw Wa about IHC Caland's
president Aad De Ruyter. "He said that he had 'actually never thought about
the fact that his company's business in Burma would not be possible without
the support of the military, which provides heavy security for the gas
project.  I can't believe that.  The whole world knows that Burma is one of
the worst military regimes in power, and that the regime lives on the
profits from gas and oil."

ERI says that the company from Schiedam may have known since 1996 that the
gas project goes hand in hand with forced labor.  That year, an internal
consultant of the Yetagun gas project wrote that the Burmese military
regime uses "even children" for forced labor for the pipeline. "They didn't
know about the report," Redford said. "I don't know if I should believe
that or not." In the States she is known for working with ERI to take
another investor in Burma, the Californian oil company Unocal, to court,
though with little success as of yet.  It stands accused of its (indirect)
involvement in forced labor in Burma.

"The idea is to show the Burmese citizens that you can assert your rights
by legal means," said Redford. "The many people we spoke to who had been
forced to work by the Burmese military think that violence is the only
solution, by attacking the military or sabotaging the pipeline."

The couple met each other in 1993 in the region where the pipeline is being
built.  As a law student, Redford researched human rights abuse in Asia. Ka
Hsaw Wa lived in a refugee camp in Thailand and used to go on underground
missions to Burma to collect data about human rights violations. "I didn't
even have paper, and had to use the margins of my English-Burmese
dictionary to write down all the gruesome stories that I heard from other
refugees. When I ran out of space, I had to memorize the information."

Ka Hsaw Wa ended up in a refugee camp, after he, like so many of his
contemporaries, took part in the massive demonstrations in the Burmese
capital Rangoon in 1988.  He had been taken in by the police right before
the demonstrations and endured three days of torture.  "And that's just
because they were looking for an acquaintance of mine."

He never saw Rangoon or his old house again.  Until last year, he lived in
Asia, where he went on missions from Thailand into the Burmese jungle to
document tales of mass forced labor imposed upon the citizens of the
coastal province of Tenasserim by the Burmese military, as told by citizens
and ex-soldiers. In the past few years, thousands, possibly even tens of
thousands, of men, women and children were forced to work under horrifying
conditions on two gas pipelines that led from the sea to Thailand.
Citizens were forced to build barracks for the security forces guarding the
pipeline, and are still used to carry munitions and other supplies or the
military. "And in areas where there are landmines, citizens are used as
human minesweepers," says Ka Hsaw Wa.  The death toll of forced laborers is
unknown, but many have died in the process of building the two pipelines.
Six thousand have fled to avoid forced labor.  Some have reported that in
the time they were working on the pipelines, they were locked in cages at
night to prevent escape.

For his work, Ka Hsaw Wa was honored with several international
distinctions last year. His photo was shown in the newspaper and on the
television.  Since then, he cannot go to the Thai-Burmese border area for
fear of being caught, not even with a fake identity. On one of his last
missions there, he noticed that he was being searched for. "To be safe, I
had six different identities.  Thai security even asked me once to get in
touch with them immediately if I ever came across one Ka Hsaw Wa in the
jungles. They were looking for me!"

He became a fulltime lobbyist and moved with his family to the United
States, where they can live safely.  Last week, he began his first visit to
Europe. In the Netherlands, the couple had some "promising discussions"
with MPs about possible economic sanctions against Burma by the
Netherlands.  The couple also visited the pension fund ABP, also a large
scale investor in IHC Caland.  ABN Amro was not on the list for discussion,
because, without informing the public, it had sold all of its shares in IHC
Caland by the end of April.  "They didn't even know about it in Schiedam, "
said Redford.

"The most ironic part is that not even one liter of gas has flowed through
the pipeline.  Thanks in part to our lobbying, the World Bank repealed a
loan to Thailand for millions of dollars, whereby the Thai electric company
that would refine the gas never finished construction.  The World Bank did
not want to share responsibility for the inhumane circumstances under which
the gas was extracted in Burma.  But the Burmese junta is quite clever;
they made Thailand pay for the undelivered gas."

-from De Trouw, may 22, 2000




ABN AMRO WITHDRAWS FROM IHC CALAND
Burma Policy scares investors off

Amsterdam-ABN Amro had sold all of its shares in IHC Caland by the end of
April because of the business between the ship and offshore building
company and the dictatorial regime of Myanmar(Burma), according to
correspondence between ABN Amro and the human rights organization Burma
Centrum Nederland (BCN).

The ABP, the Netherlands' largest private pension fund,  is also
deliberating the ownership of its stock in IHC Caland. "We are now
examining IHC Caland's code of conduct, and will discuss it with executives
at the shareholder's meeting on Friday, after which we will draw our
conclusions," says Rene  Maatman, head of the legal department at ABP.
Like ABN Amro, the fund owns less than 5 % of the stocks.

The president of IHC Caland, Aad de Ruyter, is disappointed with ABN Amro's
decision, but emphasizes that the company "will not let its existence be
threatened." Nor will the bank's decision influence the company's board.  

A spokesperson for ABN Amro denies that the bank has passed moral judgement
on IHC Caland's activities in Burma. The sale of the stock is based on
economic considerations of the stock's popularity, which, however,  is
influenced by the public opinion on Burma, according to the spokesperson.
Apparently, the decision to close the representative office in Burma was
also not made based on ethical considerations.

>From the correspondence between ABN Amro and BCN, it seems that the
relation between IHC Caland and Burma did play a role in the bank's
decision. "Like you, we have been made aware of the proposed sale of a
dredging ship to the Burmese ministry of transport by IHC Holland, a
division of IHC Caland...we can inform you that as of April this year, ABN
Amro Netherlands Fund is no longer investing in IHC Caland," according to a
letter from the director of the ABN Amro Investment Management Fund  to the
BCN on May 10.

Earlier, ABN Amro had told the BCN that the "persistent position
conflicting with societal values" of IHC Caland would lead to the sale of
its stock.  "Our judgement in this question would be influenced if IHC
Caland decided to sign a similar contract," the bank wrote already on
November 20, 1998.

IHC Caland has built and is managing a floating oil storage that is used
for the extraction of gas off the coast of Burma.  The project is
controversial because, according to human rights organizations, it helps to
fund the military regime. Also, the security measures taken by the regime
for the gas project seem to automatically result in grave human rights
abuses.  Despite the controversy, IHC Caland signed a contract with the
Burmese government for the sale of a dredging ship at the end of last year.

De Ruyter is surprised that ABN Amro has withdrawn, since IHC Caland has
just made public its code of conduct.  The code of  conduct was made under
the pressure of human rights organizations, institutional investors, and
trade unions.

According to De Ruyter, the sale of the dredging ship to Burma would
continue even with this new code of conduct in place; the ship could only
be used to improve the quality of life. "It contributes to the development
of a middle management which could eventually tackle the regime," says De
Ruyter.  "Also, the money that was spent on the dredging ship could not be
spent for military purposes."  IHC Caland would only cancel the order if
there would be an economic boycot.

The building of the controversial storage tank off the Burmese coast is
more difficult to reconcile with the new code of conduct, De Ruyter
acknowledges. "If  there had been as many Western countries considering a
boycot of Burma then as there are now, then it probably would not have been
possible in light of our present code of conduct," he says.

The United States has forbidden new investment in Burma since 1997, and
last week, the British government has called on the oil company Premier Oil
to withdraw from Burma. The MPs Jan Hoekema and Bert Koenders will ask the
Dutch government to call on IHC Caland to withdraw from Burma as well.

-from Het Financieele Dagblad, May 20 2000, front page





ABN AMRO LEAVES BURMA AND SELLS STOCKS IN IHC CALAND

ABN Amro has completely withdrawn from Burma, a country in which human
rights are systematically violated.  The only ABN Amro office in Burma has
been shut down, and an ABN AMRO investment fund has sold all its stock in
IHC Caland, a company active in Burma.

ABN Amro is the second Dutch company that has left Burma due to political
pressure, after Heineken in 1996. It closed its office in the Burmese
capitol Rangoon in the end of March, "because we couldn't see a opportunity
to profit in the short term," according to an ABN Amro spokesperson. Since
the end of April, the ABN Amro Netherlands Fund "is no longer investing" in
IHC Caland.

According to ABN Amro, both  decisions have been made on economic grounds,
although the "political context" was also taken into consideration.  "The
[political] situation in Burma diminishes the possibility for profit, and
the returns on an investment is also determined by the [public] feeling
towards that fund."

ABN Amro's decision increases the pressure on IHC Caland, which has been
under fire for the past few years  because of its activities in Burma.  The
ship and offshore building company from Schiedam has built and is managing
a floating oil storage for a large oil extraction project off the coast of
Burma. They have also sold a dredging ship to the Burmese military government.

The gas project is located in an area where a civil war has been waged for
decades between the government and ethnic minorities.  EarthRights
International, an organization fighting the abuses of human rights and the
environment in Burma, describes the area as an "occupied zone-but the
occupying force is the Burmese army, supported by Western oil companies,"
namely Unocal (American ), Total (France). and Premier (British).

EarthRights considers them to be accessories to human rights abuses, forced
labor, and the other misdeeds of the Burmese military.  They have taken
Unocal to court for this, the first time a company has been on trial for
complicity with human rights violations.

The organization has not yet set its sights on IHC Caland.  "Frankly, we
have bigger fish to fry," says EarthRights International lawyer Katherine
Redford.  She came to the Netherlands with fellow activist Ka Hsaw Wa to
speak with IHC Caland, among other things.

The relatively minor role of IHC Caland does not excuse its involvement,
according to Redford.  The offshore installation that IHC built would have
been "unthinkable" without the military's activity suppressing the local
people who have tried to stop the gas project.

IHC has recently instituted a code of conduct that also regulates dealings
with "wrong" regimes. Large scale investor ABP has been pressing IHC for
this since last year.  According to IHC executive A. de Ruyter. the code of
conduct does not conflict with its business in Burma. "We have no plans to
withdraw from that country."
-from De Volkskrant, May 20 2000

GREUSOME STORIES IN THE MARGINS

A remarkable group sat in the director's room of the ship and offshore
building company IHC Caland last week. Around the table: the president of
the dredging company, a Dutch action group and an American-Burmese couple
with their three year old daughter.

While  the toddler drew, her parents placed a report on the table
containing new information that proves that companies such as IHC Caland
have worked for years in Burma with full knowledge of the massive human
rights abuses occurring under Burma's military regime, and are therefore
also to be held accountable.  IHC Caland is the only Dutch company that
continues to do business in Burma.

The Burmese activist Ka Hsaw Wa (29) and the American lawyer Katie Redford
(32) are the tormentors of  such companies. In 1995, they began the
organization EarthRights International.  ERI documents human rights abuses,
including the tens of thousands of cases of forced labor that surround the
building of gas and oil pipelines in Burma. IHC Caland is also involved in
these projects. It provides the floating storage tanks for the extraction
of gas from the sea off the coast of Burma.

"Very friendly, but incredibly naive," said Ka Hsaw Wa about IHC Caland's
president Aad De Ruyter. "He said that he had 'actually never thought about
the fact that his company's business in Burma would not be possible without
the support of the military, which provides heavy security for the gas
project.  I can't believe that.  The whole world knows that Burma is one of
the worst military regimes in power, and that the regime lives on the
profits from gas and oil."

ERI says that the company from Schiedam may have known since 1996 that the
gas project goes hand in hand with forced labor.  That year, an internal
consultant of the Yetagun gas project wrote that the Burmese military
regime uses "even children" for forced labor for the pipeline. "They didn't
know about the report," Redford said. "I don't know if I should believe
that or not." In the States she is known for working with ERI to take
another investor in Burma, the Californian oil company Unocal, to court,
though with little success as of yet.  It stands accused of its (indirect)
involvement in forced labor in Burma.

"The idea is to show the Burmese citizens that you can assert your rights
by legal means," said Redford. "The many people we spoke to who had been
forced to work by the Burmese military think that violence is the only
solution, by attacking the military or sabotaging the pipeline."

The couple met each other in 1993 in the region where the pipeline is being
built.  As a law student, Redford researched human rights abuse in Asia. Ka
Hsaw Wa lived in a refugee camp in Thailand and used to go on underground
missions to Burma to collect data about human rights violations. "I didn't
even have paper, and had to use the margins of my English-Burmese
dictionary to write down all the gruesome stories that I heard from other
refugees. When I ran out of space, I had to memorize the information."

Ka Hsaw Wa ended up in a refugee camp, after he, like so many of his
contemporaries, took part in the massive demonstrations in the Burmese
capital Rangoon in 1988.  He had been taken in by the police right before
the demonstrations and endured three days of torture.  "And that's just
because they were looking for an acquaintance of mine."

He never saw Rangoon or his old house again.  Until last year, he lived in
Asia, where he went on missions from Thailand into the Burmese jungle to
document tales of mass forced labor imposed upon the citizens of the
coastal province of Tenasserim by the Burmese military, as told by citizens
and ex-soldiers. In the past few years, thousands, possibly even tens of
thousands, of men, women and children were forced to work under horrifying
conditions on two gas pipelines that led from the sea to Thailand.
Citizens were forced to build barracks for the security forces guarding the
pipeline, and are still used to carry munitions and other supplies or the
military. "And in areas where there are landmines, citizens are used as
human minesweepers," says Ka Hsaw Wa.  The death toll of forced laborers is
unknown, but many have died in the process of building the two pipelines.
Six thousand have fled to avoid forced labor.  Some have reported that in
the time they were working on the pipelines, they were locked in cages at
night to prevent escape.

For his work, Ka Hsaw Wa was honored with several international
distinctions last year. His photo was shown in the newspaper and on the
television.  Since then, he cannot go to the Thai-Burmese border area for
fear of being caught, not even with a fake identity. On one of his last
missions there, he noticed that he was being searched for. "To be safe, I
had six different identities.  Thai security even asked me once to get in
touch with them immediately if I ever came across one Ka Hsaw Wa in the
jungles. They were looking for me!"

He became a fulltime lobbyist and moved with his family to the United
States, where they can live safely.  Last week, he began his first visit to
Europe. In the Netherlands, the couple had some "promising discussions"
with MPs about possible economic sanctions against Burma by the
Netherlands.  The couple also visited the pension fund ABP, also a large
scale investor in IHC Caland.  ABN Amro was not on the list for discussion,
because, without informing the public, it had sold all of its shares in IHC
Caland by the end of April.  "They didn't even know about it in Schiedam, "
said Redford.

"The most ironic part is that not even one liter of gas has flowed through
the pipeline.  Thanks in part to our lobbying, the World Bank repealed a
loan to Thailand for millions of dollars, whereby the Thai electric company
that would refine the gas never finished construction.  The World Bank did
not want to share responsibility for the inhumane circumstances under which
the gas was extracted in Burma.  But the Burmese junta is quite clever;
they made Thailand pay for the undelivered gas."

-from De Trouw, may 22, 2000




ABN AMRO WITHDRAWS FROM IHC CALAND
Burma Policy scares investors off

Amsterdam-ABN Amro had sold all of its shares in IHC Caland by the end of
April because of the business between the ship and offshore building
company and the dictatorial regime of Myanmar(Burma), according to
correspondence between ABN Amro and the human rights organization Burma
Centrum Nederland (BCN).

The ABP, the Netherlands' largest private pension fund,  is also
deliberating the ownership of its stock in IHC Caland. "We are now
examining IHC Caland's code of conduct, and will discuss it with executives
at the shareholder's meeting on Friday, after which we will draw our
conclusions," says Rene  Maatman, head of the legal department at ABP.
Like ABN Amro, the fund owns less than 5 % of the stocks.

The president of IHC Caland, Aad de Ruyter, is disappointed with ABN Amro's
decision, but emphasizes that the company "will not let its existence be
threatened." Nor will the bank's decision influence the company's board.  

A spokesperson for ABN Amro denies that the bank has passed moral judgement
on IHC Caland's activities in Burma. The sale of the stock is based on
economic considerations of the stock's popularity, which, however,  is
influenced by the public opinion on Burma, according to the spokesperson.
Apparently, the decision to close the representative office in Burma was
also not made based on ethical considerations.

>From the correspondence between ABN Amro and BCN, it seems that the
relation between IHC Caland and Burma did play a role in the bank's
decision. "Like you, we have been made aware of the proposed sale of a
dredging ship to the Burmese ministry of transport by IHC Holland, a
division of IHC Caland...we can inform you that as of April this year, ABN
Amro Netherlands Fund is no longer investing in IHC Caland," according to a
letter from the director of the ABN Amro Investment Management Fund  to the
BCN on May 10.

Earlier, ABN Amro had told the BCN that the "persistent position
conflicting with societal values" of IHC Caland would lead to the sale of
its stock.  "Our judgement in this question would be influenced if IHC
Caland decided to sign a similar contract," the bank wrote already on
November 20, 1998.

IHC Caland has built and is managing a floating oil storage that is used
for the extraction of gas off the coast of Burma.  The project is
controversial because, according to human rights organizations, it helps to
fund the military regime. Also, the security measures taken by the regime
for the gas project seem to automatically result in grave human rights
abuses.  Despite the controversy, IHC Caland signed a contract with the
Burmese government for the sale of a dredging ship at the end of last year.

De Ruyter is surprised that ABN Amro has withdrawn, since IHC Caland has
just made public its code of conduct.  The code of  conduct was made under
the pressure of human rights organizations, institutional investors, and
trade unions.

According to De Ruyter, the sale of the dredging ship to Burma would
continue even with this new code of conduct in place; the ship could only
be used to improve the quality of life. "It contributes to the development
of a middle management which could eventually tackle the regime," says De
Ruyter.  "Also, the money that was spent on the dredging ship could not be
spent for military purposes."  IHC Caland would only cancel the order if
there would be an economic boycot.

The building of the controversial storage tank off the Burmese coast is
more difficult to reconcile with the new code of conduct, De Ruyter
acknowledges. "If  there had been as many Western countries considering a
boycot of Burma then as there are now, then it probably would not have been
possible in light of our present code of conduct," he says.

The United States has forbidden new investment in Burma since 1997, and
last week, the British government has called on the oil company Premier Oil
to withdraw from Burma. The MPs Jan Hoekema and Bert Koenders will ask the
Dutch government to call on IHC Caland to withdraw from Burma as well.

-from Het Financieele Dagblad, May 20 2000, front page





ABN AMRO LEAVES BURMA AND SELLS STOCKS IN IHC CALAND

ABN Amro has completely withdrawn from Burma, a country in which human
rights are systematically violated.  The only ABN Amro office in Burma has
been shut down, and an ABN AMRO investment fund has sold all its stock in
IHC Caland, a company active in Burma.

ABN Amro is the second Dutch company that has left Burma due to political
pressure, after Heineken in 1996. It closed its office in the Burmese
capitol Rangoon in the end of March, "because we couldn't see a opportunity
to profit in the short term," according to an ABN Amro spokesperson. Since
the end of April, the ABN Amro Netherlands Fund "is no longer investing" in
IHC Caland.

According to ABN Amro, both  decisions have been made on economic grounds,
although the "political context" was also taken into consideration.  "The
[political] situation in Burma diminishes the possibility for profit, and
the returns on an investment is also determined by the [public] feeling
towards that fund."

ABN Amro's decision increases the pressure on IHC Caland, which has been
under fire for the past few years  because of its activities in Burma.  The
ship and offshore building company from Schiedam has built and is managing
a floating oil storage for a large oil extraction project off the coast of
Burma. They have also sold a dredging ship to the Burmese military government.

The gas project is located in an area where a civil war has been waged for
decades between the government and ethnic minorities.  EarthRights
International, an organization fighting the abuses of human rights and the
environment in Burma, describes the area as an "occupied zone-but the
occupying force is the Burmese army, supported by Western oil companies,"
namely Unocal (American ), Total (France). and Premier (British).

EarthRights considers them to be accessories to human rights abuses, forced
labor, and the other misdeeds of the Burmese military.  They have taken
Unocal to court for this, the first time a company has been on trial for
complicity with human rights violations.

The organization has not yet set its sights on IHC Caland.  "Frankly, we
have bigger fish to fry," says EarthRights International lawyer Katherine
Redford.  She came to the Netherlands with fellow activist Ka Hsaw Wa to
speak with IHC Caland, among other things.

The relatively minor role of IHC Caland does not excuse its involvement,
according to Redford.  The offshore installation that IHC built would have
been "unthinkable" without the military's activity suppressing the local
people who have tried to stop the gas project.

IHC has recently instituted a code of conduct that also regulates dealings
with "wrong" regimes. Large scale investor ABP has been pressing IHC for
this since last year.  According to IHC executive A. de Ruyter. the code of
conduct does not conflict with its business in Burma. "We have no plans to
withdraw from that country."
-from De Volkskrant, May 20 2000