Coalition opposes Burma business ties - Coalition for Corporate Withdrawal from Burma

Christian Century, Nov 17, 1993

The Coalition for Corporate Withdrawal from Burma announced recently that an investment firm has filed a shareholder resolution with Amoco asking the oil company to cut its business ties in Burma. Franklin Research and Development Corporation, a socially responsible investment company, says Amocos operations in Burma support a repressive and illegitimate government. The CCWB, along with members of the Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility in New York, plan to file similar shareholder resolutions with Texaco, Unocal and PepsiCo. The resolutions will request that the corporations either disclose information about their Burmese operations or halt them altogerher. Burmas ruling junta is known as the State Law and. Order Restoration Council (SLORC).

The Franklin Research shareholder resolution filed at Amoco points out that Levi Strauss and Company withdrew from Burma in 1902, stating at that time that "under current circumstances, it is not possible to do business [in Burma] without directly supporting the military government and its pervasive violation of human rights." The Amoco resolution asks the firm to "terminate forthwith all financial and business ties to SLORC and all agencies of the military government of Burma."

Said Simon Billenness, a securities analyst at Franklin Research and chairman of CCWB's steering committee: "The Coalition is not asking investors to sell their stocks in companies doing business in Burma; [it] is simply asking institutional investors-- especially large public pension funds and universities--to vote their shares in favor of resolutions filed by Coalition supporters."

Reports by various civil rights organizations, including Amnesty International and Asia Watch, have termed Burmas government one of the most repressive in the world. More than 300,000 Burmese refugees have poured into Bangladesh, and some 80,000 into Thailand. According to Nobel Peace Prize laureate Betty Williams, "The SLORC has shown an appalling disregard for human rights and refuses to respect the results of the 1990 elections in which the National League for Democracy, led by Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, won a landslide victory. The military continues to uproot, rape and murder thousands of indigenous people as it moves to cleanse the border areas of ethnic insurgents and plunder the country's rich natural resources." Suu Kyi won the Nobel Prize for Peace in 1991 and has been under house arrest by the Burmese authorities since 1989.

Franklin Research helped form the CCWB in August; its backers include the Sierra Club, the Asian Human Rights Commission and the Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers Union AFL-CIO. The Coalition supports the February 1993 call for economic and investment sanctions on Burma made by ten Nobel Peace Prize winners, including Williams, Desmond Tutu, the Dalai Lama, Mairead Maguire, Oscar Arias and Amnesty Internationals Ross Daniels.

In "Burma as South Africa,"an article in the September 16 issue of Far Eastern Economic Review, Tutu wrote that "SLORC's generals" have "imprisoned, tortured and murdered... Burmese who speak against military rule." In calling for sanctions against Burma, Tutu said: "Any country should have deep qualms about dealing with a regime...assailed by the UN for denying fundamental freedoms to its people." According to the Anglican archbishop, attempts to influence Burma's government through "talk and trade" have failed as they failed in South Africa, and "international pressure" is now needed to change the situation in Burma.

Stephen Mills of the Sierra Club's International Program noted that "the presence of multinational oil companies has encouraged the destruction of Burma's once vast teak forest, and the near extinction of a variety of rare species." Mills added, "We are particularly concerned by the plans of Total, Texaco, Unocal, Premier Consolidated Oilfields, Nippon Oil and the Petroleum Authority of Thailand to build gas pipelines from offshore fields overland to Thailand through Burma's last remaining rain forest and wildlife preserves." According to Billenness, "The Burmese military has stayed in power, in part, through the support it has received from foreign corporations."