Sanctioning hypocrisy: recent media reports highlight Burma's ongoing disregard for human rights and the inconsistent way that the US is dealing with it - Human Rights

New Internationalist, Nov, 2003

BURMA'S military is killing people by forcing them to walk across minefields to reveal where explosives are buried, reports Richard S Ehrlich. The September article that Richard submitted to the NI documents disturbing allegations made by a researcher from an international organization campaigning to ban landmines. 'More and more people are being taken for forced de-mining who are prisoners. In a suspected mine area, they [the regime] will take these people and they will march them ahead of military units to detonate any mines that may be there,' says Yeshua Moser-Puangsuwan, a researcher with Landmine Monitor on Burma.

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'Up to 70 per cent of these people die. They can die being caught in the crossfire, they can die due to malnutrition and malaria, but they are also being killed by landmines, simply by being casualties in a war zone but also as human mine sweepers,' he said.

London-based Amnesty International, Washington-based Human Rights Watch and other groups have documented 'human mine sweepers' dating back to 1985, Moser-Puangsuwan says.

Such atrocious human-rights abuses have made the Burmese regime an international pariah--one that merits the outspoken condemnation of the US Government, which imposed sanctions following the latest arrest of democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi and the murder of an estimated 70 of her supporters. When President Bush signed a law imposing economic sanctions on Burma in late July, White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan declared that the continued oppression of the Burmese people could not be allowed to stand. 'The US is fully supportive of the people of Burma in their struggle for freedom and democracy.'

But--as an article submitted to the NI by Matthew Dimmock explains--the US is not so supportive if the human rights abuser is one of its own corporations.

Back in 1996 human-rights defenders at EarthRights International teamed up with lawyers to sue US oil giant Unocal on behalf of a group of Burmese villagers. They alleged that Unocal had been complicit in gross human-rights violations (including forced labour, murder and rape) committed by the Burmese military along its Yadana gas pipeline project. The case was made through the Alien Tort Claims Act (ATCA): a two-centuries-old law that allows citizens of other countries to sue in US courts for human-rights violations that take place overseas.

On 8 May this year the Justice Department filed a brief with the US Court of Appeals urging the court to dismiss the case against Unocal and to 'reinterpret' ATCA in a way that would render it useless. If accepted, the Justice Department's argument would destroy the legal basis for the villagers' suit outright--in addition to all victims seeking to sue through the ATCA in US courts for abuses committed overseas.

In a sweeping argument that went well beyond the Unocal case, Ashcroft's Justice Department argued that ATCA cases interfere with US foreign policy and undermine America's war on terrorism.

'Without ATCA,' says Rick Herz of EarthRights International, 'US corporations can literally get away with murder--and forced labour, rape and torture--as long as it takes place overseas. In a world of transnational business, we need transnational accountability.'

For more information and analysis visit: www.earthrights.org