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Click the the links to visit theses pages:
1. http://www.noneofusarefree.org/ and 2.Lloyd's: Stop Underwriting The Junta
1. My Post-Elections Thoughts
2.
Times: Burma Crackdown Reflects Junta's Insecurity
3. Amazon Defense Coalition:
Chevron Whitewashes Its Website of Burma
1. My Post-Elections Thoughts
Now that the US elections were over, and one might wonder what the results might mean to the Burma cause. Below are my thoughts to that end.
One thing that would never change is that Burma needs support from all of you: independents, republicans and democrats. Therefore, as always, any one that you are close to at any level of the government, please make sure he or she is aware of the Burma's long and hard struggle for freedom and her needs of his or her support.
The current administration has been the strongest one ever in pressuring the Burma’s military regime. It has tightened sanctions, imposed visa bans to regime officials and its cronies. However, it struggles greatly in persuading the regimes enablers, Burma's neighbors: China, ASEAN nations, and India, and Russia, to follow suit. Their continued support for the regime by military, economy and diplomatic means have hugely undercut the US pressure, and help sustain the regime.
With China and Russia firmly in the regime’s corner, despite the US efforts, the UN Security Council continues to drag its feet in dealing with Burma while the regime completely ignores its poor special envoy whose repeated visits to Burma has produced no meaningful progress. On the other hand, the European Union (EU), which is based on consensus among its members in making decisions, has never been outstanding in pressuring the regime. The EU countries are often at odds with each other on how to take on the regime.
The lack of collective efforts and consistent policies towards Burma’s military in the past 20 years has proven to be very costly for the people. The result was that the people sink deeper into the poverty and misery while the regime and its cronies have consolidated their grip on the power and the wealth. Far from being able to stop the brutal regime, the US and the international community miserably fails even to secure the release of Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, who has been under house arrest since May of 2003. The number of political prisoners in Burma now readily exceeds 2000.
The regime is now firmly in control after overcoming the recent challenges, which are of historic proportion: saffron revolution and Cyclone Nargis. It is now set to hold the 2010 sham election that would erase the Burma’s historic 1990 elections results that it has ignored. Currently reported imposing of harsh sentences on the activists are part of the regime’s efforts to scare people off not to stand in the way of its 2010 election. We all have seen the regime holding the referendum to force the approval of its ridiculous constitution while the country was under water and the people were dying. So they will do anything to realize the 2010 elections and establish the faked civilian government to ease the western pressure.
What is needed now is collective, consistent and firm policies towards Burma, and a global leadership to get there. Therefore, we would like the new administration to keep the strongest pressure on the regime while being more active and creative in providing leadership to the international community in engaging with Burma. VP-elect Joe Biden has been known as one of the strong supports of Burma and was the author of the most recent Senate Bill that was signed into a law by President Bush last July. We must not forget what the First Lady Laura Bush has done for Burma. She has been praised often for going out of her way and speaking out about Burma. To this ends, we wish soon to be First Lady Michelle Obama to do the same (or even better) for Burma.
As many are being acknowledged, this is the time of historic moment and opportunity in the US, and with this new momentum and hope, we wish you all a new and better America. In fact, this historic election and the great gathering at the Mr. Obama’s election night victory speech reminded me of the events in 1988 and 1990 in which we all had high hope of a change towards better Burma. Even under the threats and possibility of crack downs, several hounded thousands people (some estimates were even higher) attended the Daw Aung San Suu Kyi’s speech at the Western entrance of the Shwe Dagon Pagoda on August 26, 1988. Similarly, in the 1990 historic election, the people of Burma has overwhelmingly voted for the Suu Kyi's NLD party despite her being under house arrest by the regime. Sadly, the dictators did not allow the people to follow their beloved leader nor the leader to lead her beloved people. And the international community has been unable to stop the cruel regime from its destructive course of actions in Burma.
Therefore, we all need to step up in helping Burma and regardless of who you are or which candidate or party you support, the people of Burma needs you.
Thanks,
Nyunt Than
BADA
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Times: Burma Crackdown Reflects Junta's Insecurity
Even for a notoriously repressive regime, the jail sentences were unusually harsh. Last year, the generals who control Burma, also known as Myanmar, violently crushed a peaceful, monk-led protest movement calling for economic and political reforms. Hopes that an influx of foreign aid — dispersed after Cyclone Nargis devastated the Irrawaddy Delta last spring — would convince the junta to take a softer approach were dashed by the rash of detentions that accelerated in late October. Last week, two journalists were jailed, while three lawyers representing political activists have also been sentenced to prison. "These last few weeks show a more concentrated crackdown on dissent clearly aimed at intimidating the population," said Elaine Pearson, deputy Asia director at Human Rights Watch, in a statement from the New York-based rights group. "These peaceful activists should not be on trial in the first place, let alone thrown in prison for years after unfair trials."
Burma has scheduled multi-party elections in 2010. The polls are considered a charade by many international observers, who note that the leader of the main opposition party, Nobel Peace Prize laureate Aung San Suu Kyi, is under house arrest and is barred from participating. But even after locking up a woman whose National League for Democracy won the 1990 elections that the junta then ignored, Burma's ruling brass still appears spooked by the power of the people. "Burma's leaders are clearing the decks of political activists," says Pearson, "before they announce the next round of sham political reforms." Overall, one Burmese exile group based in Thailand estimates that 2,120 Burmese now languish in jail for their political activism, nearly double the number who were in prison before last year's anti-government demonstrations.
Despite the predictable expressions of condemnation issued this week by countries like the U.S. and Britain, there's little that the West appears able to do to convince the junta, which has ruled since 1962, to treat its citizens more humanely. Economic sanctions by the U.S. and the European Union are undercut by the eagerness with which China and other Asian countries do business with Burma's generals. Although one of Asia's poorest nations, Burma holds a wealth of natural resources like timber, natural gas and precious stones.
The country's leaders have grown rich from the land's bounty, even as most Burmese struggle just to feed themselves. Roughly one-third of civilians live below the poverty line. Last month, many Burmese, who get their news from clandestine radio broadcasts, were shocked by a BBC Burmese service report that claimed a daughter of junta leader Than Shwe had spent more than $80,000 on a gold shopping spree in the city of Mandalay. Than Shwe himself brooks no dissent. The offense of Saw Wai, the poet who was sentenced to two years in prison? Writing a love poem published in a weekly magazine in which the first words of each line spelled out a brazen message: "Power Crazed Senior General Than Shwe."
(See pictures of Cyclone Nargis' devastation in Burma here.)
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Amazon Defense Coalition: Chevron Whitewashes Its Website of Burma
Charges of Rape and Murder Prompt Disappearance of Entire Country from Corporate Website
SAN FRANCISCO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Chevron has quietly removed from its website any reference to its operations in Burma, a country where the oil giant has been implicated in allegations of rape and murder connected to a lucrative pipeline project that generates up to $1 billion annually for the country’s brutal military regime, the Amazon Defense Coalition said today.
The company has replaced the majority of substantive information on its website with a short page glossing over their role in the country.
Chevron removed the references to Burma while it has been embroiled in high-stakes legal case charging it helped orchestrate the deaths of two Nigerian villagers protesting Chevron’s operational practices in the African country. The trial on those charges began Tuesday in federal court in San Francisco.
Earth Rights International, a legal organization based in Washington, D.C., has leveled withering criticism at Chevron for jointly operating a natural gas pipeline with the Burmese military. Just in the last year, the Burmese army has violently suppressed protesting monks and diverted international relief aid after a devastating hurricane, and the country’s government is considered an international pariah.
The pipeline generates an estimated $1 billion per year in hard currency for the clique of generals who rule Burma. Chevron has defended the project on the grounds it exercises a liberalizing influence on the country’s government.
Just two years ago, Chevron’s Burmese operations were featured prominently on the company’s website. This week, one could not find a single reference to Burma on the website where Chevron boasts of its worldwide operations and lists the dozens of countries where it has investments.
The earlier website is archived at www.archive.org.
In a recent report, lawyers for ERI concluded that Chevron faces liability for being complicit in murder, rape, and slave labor committed by the Burmese Army in providing “security” for the pipeline. ERI is most known for having settled a legal case against Unocal over the same charges before Chevron bought Unocal in 2005 and inherited the pipeline project.
As ERI noted in their report “The Human Cost of Energy: Chevron’s Continuing Role in Financing Oppression and Profiting From Human Rights Abuse in Military-Ruled Burma (Myanmar)”: “Chevron and its consortium partners continue to rely on the Burmese army for pipeline security, and those forces continue to conscript thousands of villagers for forced labor, and to commit torture, rape, murder and other serious abuses in the course of their operations. Due to its involvement in the Yadana Project, Chevron remains vulnerable to liability in U.S. courts for the abuses committed by these security forces.” The full report is available at http://www.earthrights.org
The removal of any mention of Burma is the latest in a long series of controversial moves by Charles S. James, Chevron’s General Counsel, to hide or divert attention from Chevron’s growing human rights problems.
“James has shown a repeated willingness to tolerate unethical practices by Chevron to hide its growing reputation as a global human rights violator,” said Jeremy Low, who monitors the company’s human rights record for the Amazon Defense Coalition, which has sued Chevron for environmental damage in Ecuador.
“What we’re seeing is hard information replaced by absolute fluff or just blank space,” he added.
Just last week, Chevron was accused by the environmental group Amazon Watch of paying journalists to write favorable editorial content without disclosing their financial relationship to the company. One of the journalists, San Francisco writer Pat Murphy, has not denied he accepts fees from Chevron to write one-sided articles in his online newspaper that mysteriously get “Google bombed” to the top of search engines.
Undisclosed payments to journalists for favorable coverage are considered highly unethical, yet James has not denied that the company engages in the practice.
The Nigeria case, being tried before Judge Susan Illston, has created a lengthy record of charges that Chevron paid Nigerian military officers to shoot local villagers who had staged a peaceful protest on one of the company’s oil platforms. The trial, expected to last five weeks, began on Tuesday.
In the Amazon region of Ecuador, where Chevron faces a potential $16.3 billion liability for dumping more than 18 billion gallons of toxic waste, local lawyers have long accused the company of paying uniformed Ecuadorian army officers to provide “security” designed to intimidate members of indigenous groups.
“I am sure James wishes Chevron could erase its human rights problems as easily as it can erase mention of Burma from its website,” said Low. “But as the company is now finding out, that’s not so easy.”
To view the former websites, Archive.org maintains an extensive database:
Long URLs in this release may need to be copied/pasted into your Internet browser's address field. Remove the extra space if one exists.
About the Amazon Defense Coalition
The Amazon Defense Coalition represents dozens of rainforest communities and five indigenous groups that inhabit Ecuador’s Northern Amazon region. The mission of the Coalition is to protect the environment and secure social justice through grass roots organizing, political advocacy, and litigation.
Contacts
Karen Hinton, 703-798-3109