Growing up in Burma, all Ka Hsaw Wa (pronounced Kah-sow-ah) wanted to be was a businessman, to be rich. He had even begun to make a name for himself in Rangoon as a successful money changer.
But the forces of history had other plans for Ka Hsaw Wa and the people of Burma. After socialist military leader General Ne Win stepped down in 1988, mass democracy demonstrations erupted, leading to a brutal coup d’état led by General Saw Maung. Ka Hsaw Wa was among the many protesters who were captured, and he was tortured for three days.
When he was released, he fled to the jungle, where he lived clandestinely for seven years and where he began to interview other brutalized victims of the junta. But he noticed that there were other forces at work here—those of transnational corporations who were exploiting the country’s natural resources and its people.
The $1.2 billion Yadana pipeline, stretching from the Andaman Sea and across Burma to supply natural gas to Thailand was the cause of many human rights abuses. Companies involved in the pipeline supplied money to the ruling junta to provide “protection” for its construction, leading to vicious murders, rapes and forced labour of the ethnic minorities in the region.
In 1995, Ka Hsaw Wa joined forces with two American lawyers (including his now-wife Katie Redford) to form Earth Rights International, an organization whose mission at that time was to hold these transnational companies accountable for their hand in the brutalization of the Burmese. ERI eventually sued American oil corporation Unocal in California on behalf of the Burmese villagers, leading to a court battle that would last 10 years.
Meanwhile, at the beginning of the millennium, Bulgarian-Italian producer Milena Kaneva began working on a series on the negative effects of globalization for Italian television. When she came across the story of the Unocal case, she was immediately intrigued. After interviewing Aung San Suu Kyi, leader of the Burmese National League for Democracy and winner of the 1991 Nobel Peace Prize, in 1995, Kaneva felt a strong connection to the plight of that country—she says that growing up under communism helped her understanding.
“I was, in Italy, kind of a Burma expert, and they were, like, ‘how are you going to shoot it?’” Kaneva explains. “I thought, well the pipeline is already done, and a part of the law suit in US, so how am I really going to tell the story? Then came the shareholder meeting of Total [one of the partner companies in the pipeline project], so I needed to go and shoot, because it’s one per year.
“At the time, very innocently, I thought that the film [would] be done in a few months—I was already planning another series on Italian TV. And so I left for Paris with my camera man, and the French organizer said, ‘you’re so lucky because Ka Hsaw Wa is coming.’ And I was, like, ‘who is Ka Hsaw Wa?’ For so long, he was a name without a face. And then, he still remains somebody that would never put himself frontline and would always behind and hiding. And I met him with Katie Redford, his wife, and three-year-old daughter. I met these two young people who were actually the cause of this—they made it happen. I became with so fascinated and thought that this was a really great story.”
The result of her fascination would become the five-year journey of making Total Denial, the compelling documentary set to open the 25th Global Visions Festival. Kaneva followed Ka Hsaw Wa into the jungles of Burma to meet and interview the 15 unnamed plaintiffs; she would interview Total Oil shareholders, who quite plainly told her that the human rights abuses were not their problem—that they didn’t like to mix business with politics—completely ignorant of the fact that Total had already done that by giving the Burmese government in the neighbourhood of $5 million to protect their pipeline investment; she also managed to have the only camera in the courtroom to follow the proceedings of the case in California.
“There was one detail, being an Italian-Bulgarian, I didn’t know that it was forbidden to shoot in federal court,” she says, “so I just asked, and they gave me the permission. That was very fortunate.”
One thing she was not allowed to shoot, however, was the actual testimony of the villagers themselves and the ordeal they went through to go on record for the US court. Although the version of the film to be shown in Edmonton doesn’t delve into these details, Kaneva has been working to add an explanation to a newer version.
“All their testimonies were videotaped, and it happened in Bangkok,” she explains. “It was the summer of 2002, and Ka Hsaw Wa absolutely forbid me to go and shoot because he was sneaking them out and it was very, very complex for him.
“So the lawyers of Unocal questioned them, and their own lawyers questioned them [in Bangkok]—and this is something I put [more of] in the film, in the new version, in which Katie [Redford] is explaining how it all went—and there was a judge that was on the phone in California that was asking questions, and they were answering.”
One of the things that truly struck Kaneva was the plaintiffs themselves. It wasn’t just their stories of murdered children and spouses or being forced to carry unfathomable loads, nor even the rightful justice they were after. After the initial class-action suit was dismissed (because of the near impossibility of proof), these 15 plaintiffs knew they were in this 10-year battle for everybody else who was affected.
“In the settlement, they obtained another amount of money, which would go to all of the other victims, and with it they would build hospitals and schools,” she says. “Even the plaintiffs themselves, in the interviews I did after, they don’t have the sense the victory is about the money, because these are people who will continue hiding in the jungle … But everyone of them will say, ‘and now I can help the others.’ Like Jane Doe One, the mother with the baby, her dream is to finish the Bible School, and then to help the others and then to help the others.
“And this was amazing for me, as a human being, to see that there’s still human beings who care about the others.”
Kaneva tried to use this sensibility in how she told the story, as well. While Ka Hsaw Wa is the glue holding the story of Total Denial together, she avoided painting him as some kind of saint.
“I didn’t put in a lot of stories that were very, very dramatic because, somehow, I tried not to make him too much of a hero,” she says. “What he was saying is that everyone can be a hero. Because he was a normal guy and all he wanted was to be a rich man.
“But somehow, everyone in life has this choice of being a hero,” she continues. “And that’s something that I think is the ultimate idea of that story that makes it such a powerful story. That first of all, when you do firmly believe and never give up the right side—or what you believe is the right side—there is possibility that you win. And everybody thinks, ‘no, things are like this, and you cannot change anything.’ And people give up before even trying to defend themselves or fight for themselves.”
Unocal would never admit their part in the human rights abuses, and even the Bush administration and other American multinationals argued in their defence, saying that companies should not be liable unless they are directly involved in the crimes.
But in 2005, Unocal offered the plaintiffs a large settlement to put the matter to bed (according to a Jan 24, 2005 Business Week article, the rumoured settlement was about $30 million US). For ERI, the people of the pipeline region and other human rights activists, it was a victory.
As you can likely imagine, this case has far-reaching implications, announcing to the world that corporations could no longer exploit people or politics and perpetrate human rights abuses to line their own pockets, not without consequence. And there are currently a number of cases, including more initiated by ERI, putting large American corporations, like ChevronTexaco, Coca-Cola and Del Monte Foods, to task for their unjust actions in developing nations.
Thu, Nov 2 (8 pm)
Total Denial
Directed by Milena Kaneva
Empire Theatres City Centre, $12