Report: Junta gas profits ‘fuel nuclear schemes’ as pipeline abuses continue

Wednesday, 07 July 2010 15:53 Thomas Maung Shwe

Chiang Mai (Mizzima) – Earth Rights International, the NGO most famous for using American courts to sue Unocal (now Chevron) for its complicity in murder, rape, torture, and forced labour during the construction of a gas pipeline in Burma, released a new report on Monday linking the huge profits the Burmese regime received from gas projects led by Total and Chevron to the junta’s secretive nuclear activities.

Last year Earth Rights International (ERI), citing confidential sources, accused the Burmese regime of using secret bank accounts in Singapore to hide of billion dollars in revenue it had received from the gas projects. ERI said on Monday that revenues from the gas project continued to be kept in Singapore and were neither included in Burma’s normal budget nor spent on the Burmese people.

Referring to allegations made by a prominent defector from the military’s weapon’s programme reported by DVB last month that the Burmese regime had sought nuclear and missile technology from Kim Jong-il’s increasingly isolated regime in North Korea, ERI said that instead of being used to pay for education and health care the funds had “enabled the country’s autocratic junta to maintain power and pursue an expensive, illegal nuclear weapons programme while participating in illicit weapons trade in collaboration with North Korea, threatening the domestic and regional security balance”.

Using documents released as part of ERI’s lengthy legal battle with the multinational firms operating in Burma and the latest market prices for natural gas, ERI stated in the new report titled, “Energy Security: How Total, Chevron, and PTTEP Contribute to Human Rights Violations, Financial Secrecy, and Nuclear Proliferation in Burma”, that from 1998 to last year the Burmese regime had received nearly US$5 billion (around US$416 million per year) from the multinational gas project, which it pointed out were led by two western firms, France’s Total and American Chevron.

The Singaporean banks identified by ERI as colluding with the regime, the Overseas Chinese Banking Corporation (OCBC) and DBS Group, both publicly denied last year that they were involved in hiding the gas revenue. But ERI maintained both banks were indeed still involved in hosting the generals’ billions; money which ERI said “could be used for many purposes, including the illicit acquisition of nuclear technology and ballistic weaponry”.

Total and Chevron refuse to disclose payments to Burmese junta

ERI, American union federation, the AFLCIO; NGO’s Amnesty International and Global Witness; respected world leaders such as former Norwegian prime minister Kjell Magne Bondevik and former Irish president Mary Robinson; and many other organisations, have demanded that Total and Chevron disclose the royalties and other payments it made to the Burmese regime.

Not wanting to create a precedent, both firms refused to disclose any details of the payments.

“Natural resource wealth in authoritarian contexts can make bad regimes far worse. Revenue transparency is a reasonable request of these companies given the gravity of the situation in Burma. It’s the least Total, Chevron and PTTEP could do, and it’s within their ability,” ERI research team member Matthew Smith said.

ERI says killings continue along the pipeline, with two killed in February

Despite claims from Total and Chevron that no human rights abuses had occurred in areas surrounding their pipeline, ERI said Burmese soldiers from Infantry Battalion (IB) 282, contracted to guard the pipeline, were still committing numerous rights abuses and this February had killed two Mon villagers from Ahlersakan village near the pipeline.

ERI field teams learned from a villager from Lawther that the villagers were killed by soldiers from IB 282 and that “their officer Balay [aka] Nyi Nyi Soe is the one who gave the order. They suspected these two villagers had connections to the Mon armed group so they questioned them. They arrested them for one night and the next day the soldier came in to the village to get a digging tool and later people found out that both of the villagers were killed by the soldiers”.

From late last year to early this year, the ERI teams documented many villagers being forced to porter goods over several days for pipeline security troops. They learned from a villager who lives in Total’s recognised zone of responsibility that one evening late last year around 20 soldiers arrived in Zinba village. “I don’t know what they were doing there but I knew that [name withheld] had to give them one of his goats to feed the soldiers. And the next day when they left they had the son of a house owner go to Michaunglaung through the jungle route. It took one night and the next day they let him come back.”

Another villager told a rights group team of another instance of forced portering: “In late 2009, during the harvest season, around 25 soldiers from LIB 410 [an infantry battalion] came to our village and they ordered [three villagers] through the village headman to porter for them. They had to carry food for the soldiers as well as be the guide … They went into the jungle to check on the armed opposition group. It was happening not so far away from the Total pipeline route. This time, it took about five days for them to come back. This kind of portering happens as needed by soldiers.”

The report also documents numerous land grabs in contradiction of Burmese ownership laws. According to ERI research, “these land confiscations were done without adequate community input or compensation, and were part of a [environmental protection] programme founded by local authorities and funded by Total”.

According to villager testimony, the environmental protection programme was limited and misguided, failing to address the real environmental issues facing the region.

A man from Zinba village said this year: “They only marked a few areas of land around the village in which the villagers can farm. Some of the areas which they marked for forest conservation go through some people’s plantation land … I know one villager, about six acres of his cashew nut plantation was marked for the conservation area.”

The area’s poor villagers to rely on “shifting cultivation”, which is impossible if their land is confiscated or if access is restricted, the report says.

Despite ERI’s well-documented reports of human rights abuses both Total and Chevron remain unrepentant. In May, at its annual shareholders meeting, Chevron had police arrest a prominent critic of the firm for trespassing after she had asked the firm’s executives an embarrassing question about its controversial activities. Antonia Juhasz, director of the Chevron Programme at Global Exchange, and several other rights activists, had to spend the night in jail.

Total’s behaviour is hardly any better. Last year Total’s chief executive, billionaire Christope de Margeriem, told an interviewer from Newsweek that critics of Total’s operations in Burma could “go to hell”. Many of the villagers living in areas adjacent to Total’s Burmese pipeline would respond that they are already there.