Premier oils wheels of change in Burma
source : The Times
BY CARL MORTISHED
FRIDAY MARCH 02 2001
UK company adopts high-risk strategy of engagement with Rangoon’s military junta
A TRAINING workshop is under way in the Asian city of Rangoon. Professors lecture and students take notes — a scene no different to countless classrooms in colleges and universities all over the UK.
But this workshop is different: it is sponsored by a British company, Premier Oil, and the students are senior officers in the Burmese Armed Forces. Moreover, they are being lectured about human rights.
David Kinley, a professor from Australia’s Monash University, is asking a group of staff officers from Burma’s Ministry of Defence to think about the notion of freedom of speech. He gives them a task: List five legitimate restrictions on free speech that could be justified in a democratic Burma.
It takes a jab with a pencil to remember where you are. The students are part of the apparatus of repression in this land where Buddhism has formed a strange marriage with Stalinism. Burma’s jails hold some 1,700 political prisoners and the country is on the rack at the International Labour Organisation for its use of forced labour. Censorship is routine, telephones are monitored; outside on the street, billboards exhort passersby to “forge national solidarity with union spirit” and “to crush together with the people all dangers threatening the state”.
Inside the conference centre, all seems normal and the discussion on free speech breaks for lunch. Kinley and his colleagues, Chris Sidoti, a former Australian human rights commissioner, and Tom Sorell, of Essex University, unwind, a bit like soldiers on leave after a jungle tour of duty. It is difficult to gauge the atmosphere, they say, to provoke reaction while avoiding the sort of confrontation that closes minds. They are nervous, says Kinley of his students. This is a new experience for them. They are used to a different kind of education: eyes down and write down what teacher says. Never question.”
Two hundred miles to the south, in a small village beside the Andaman Sea, more education is on display. Children’s drawings cover the walls of a schoolroom in Daminseik. Nothing unusual — a display of infant creativity that might be found in any nursery school in Britain. However, in this small, dusty fishing village the scribbles and doodles have political significance.
They are the work of children who attend an Early Childhood Care and Development programme. Set up by the American arm of Save the Children and funded by Premier Oil, the classes target the under-fives and their parents. Instead of reading and sums, it is about something more subtle — encouraging children to be creative, spontaneous and to become individuals. Risky ideas in a country where a child’s first lesson is to mind his p’s and q’s and show respect to elders.
Jerry Sternin, Save the Children’s field office director in Burma, is targeting some 1,200 children under four in an area where Premier Oil operates a pipeline. In Burma, he explains, a typical five-year-old is charged with the care of younger siblings. “He would be expected to massage his parents feet when they came home.”
Back in Rangoon, the novelty of free discussion has prompted one or two interesting exchanges. A debate erupts over when Burma will be ready for democracy. One soldier thinks it will take a generation and there is a discussion over what a generation means. Another gets fed up with the hair-splitting and says with finality: “We will have democracy within two years.”
The last time Burma experimented with a popular vote, the military annulled the result, which gave a landslide victory to the National League for Democracy. Its leader, Aung San Suu Kyi, remains under effective house arrest but over the past month, there have been hopeful signals. She is talking to the generals and both sides declare that there has been progress. The rumour mill is working overtime but neither Suu Kyi nor the generals are giving anything away — a sign in itself that the talks are more than window-dressing.
Premier Oil is on tenterhooks over the outcome. A small company, it has a big investment in Burma, producing gas from the Yetagun field and selling it to a Thai power station, a project that has cost Premier some $450 million (£310 million). Its embrace of a state shunned by the British and American Governments boosted Premier’s stature from obscure wildcat oil driller to international corporate pariah.
Campaigners for democracy accuse the company of supporting the regime, of allowing the Army to conscript locals for land clearance in the pipeline area, a charge it vigorously denies. Premier’s investment plans are frozen. There will be no new drilling until the politics improves.
Most companies would leave it there: lie low, dodge the blows and keep mum, hoping for a thaw. Instead, Premier is playing politics, using its links with the Government in Rangoon to nudge the regime into making tiny concessions. Notably, the company brokered the release of James Mawdesley, the Englishman jailed and beaten for distributing anti-government tracts in Burma. While Britain’s Foreign Office raged against Rangoon, the diplomacy was being done by a private company.
It is a high-risk strategy but Premier’s feet are buried deep in Burmese soil. A journey along the route of its 60-kilometre pipeline to the Thai border provides an insight. From scrubby countryside around the oil company’s camp at Kanbauk, the trail enters dense, canopied rainforest. By the side of the road, there are little stockades made of sharp sticks bunched together into a double perimeter fence. Inside are makeshift huts and pillboxes — home to units of the Burmese Army, which patrol the pipeline. They are on the lookout for rebels, obscure armies of insurgents that flit back and forth across the border with Thailand to harass the Burmese Army.
Burma is almost continually at war with one or other group of nationalist rebels that inhabit the border regions. Behind the political slogans, the battles are mainly turf wars between rival groups trafficking heroin and amphetamines. While the insurgents shoot it out, the Burmese and Thai Governments accuse each other of providing weapons and safe havens to their favoured drug barons.
In 1995 five technicians who were working for Total, the French oil company, were killed in a gun battle. Since then, the oil companies have seen little conflict; the Karen National Union, the main rebel army in the area, seems to be fairly indifferent to the pipeline. Another pressing issue becomes apparent as the road reaches the ridge, which acts as a frontier separating the two quarrelsome countries. Looking west into Burma, a forest of tall trees stretches to the horizon home to wild elephants and a small population of tigers. Turn 180 degrees to face the east and the barren hillsides of Thailand are shocking.
The oil companies have teamed up, proposing to fund the establishment of a 10,000 square kilometre national park to protect a small part of Burma’s rainforest from the gang rape that has been visited on Thailand’s ecosystem: indiscriminate logging and slash and burn agriculture.
Parks, community projects and human rights training. It is easy to sneer at Premier for trying to lubricate a sticky situation. That is clearly a large part of its strategy. The more interesting question is whether aggressive engagement with the regime helps or hinders change in Burma.
Premier’s notoriety soared last year when John Battle, the Foreign Office minister, told the company to quit. Our Government has chosen tiny Burma, with which we have very few commercial links, as a test of its ethical foreign policy and Premier was asked to bear the cost. The sight of a Union Jack on a project so important for Burma, is a bit embarrassing for Whitehall.
Premier’s response is that isolation achieves nothing. The Burmese cut themselves off for several decades under the bizarre dicatorship of General Ne Win. The new generals could revert to a policy of autarchy with the drug economy financing essential foreign imports — another Afghanistan. Currently, Burma’s finances are in a mess but there is no shortage of food and opium still grows in the hills.
Secret talks between the generals and Suu Kyi have occasioned a very subtle change in the voice of Burma’s opposition, which previously rejected outright the training organised by the Australian Government and Premier Oil. “If they are serious, we welcome any effort to promote and protect human rights,” said Bo Hla-Tint, a minister in the Washington-based National Coalition Government of the Union of Burma. “Basically, it is a good thing,” he said. “But the point I want to make, is the party who should be responsible for human rights is the Government.
In the end, the future is down to a very personal deal between a few soldiers and a woman. Isolation, the closure of Rangoon’s university and the imprisonment of dissenters has left Burma bereft of a political class. Politics has become personalised.
In that context, Premier’s engagement has some legitimacy. In the conference centre in Rangoon and the village schoolroom an attempt is being made to plant the seeds of political discussion at a personal level. “Human rights used to be taboo but now we are talking about it,” said Wynn Lwin, Burma’s former Ambassador to India, who is heading a committee to establish a human rights commission.
For Save the Children, the process needs to start much earlier, with the under-fours. “This country needs people who will be thinkers and problem-solvers,” says Sternin. “We get a lot of grief for being here but engagement is not black and white. We are influencing the Government by engaging. In a real sense, we are trying to build civil society.