Bankrupt the Generals

The meeting of Burma’s National League for Democracy last weekend was a display of courage that beggars the imagination. The organization, under the leadership of Nobel peace laureate Aung San Sui Kyi, 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 “peacekeepers.”

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-year-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 U.N. 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 labor.”

The more one learns about the generals, the more one feels a primal urge to see them blasted off the face of the earth. But we are civilized, 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 Myanmar government is desperate for foreign capital. The sad truth is they’re getting it--from Japan, from other Asian countries, and, worse, from gasoline credit cards, yours and mine.

Two petroleum giants, Los Angeles-based Unocal and Colorado-based Total, are currently investing $1 billion in a pipeline from Myanmar to Thailand to transport natural gas.

Who’s building this massive project? Slave labor. Peasant families are brutally separated or relocated without recourse and then forced at gunpoint to do hard labor on the project. Those who can’t maintain the required pace--the sick, the elderly--are left to die at the side of the road.

Even as Unocal and Total insist that these horrors are fantasy, reliable observers operating covertly inside Burma provide ongoing, 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 giant cash cows in the dark and enjoy the milk themselves.

The board of directors of Unocal meets Monday at the company’s former research center in Brea. One hopes that Unocal’s heavy involvement in Burma will come under serious reconsideration at that time.

Unocal and Total must come out of the dark. Otherwise they will go down in history as willing collaborators in another killing fields. If we stay silent, we’re collaborators, too.