Ethical mantle falls on company shoulders
The Times
Business analysis
FRIDAY DECEMBER 08 2000
ANALYSIS BY CARL MORTISHED
AT A meeting in Laos on Monday, Britain will put its ethical foreign policy to the test. The tiny country is hosting a summit meeting between the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (Asean) and the European Union. Britain wants to use the occasion to create a stink about human rights in Burma.
Our Foreign Office "has it in" for the Burmese generals. The regime has amassed a catalogue of human rights offences: political prisoners, torture, censorship, and above all, the refusal to relinquish political power to a democratically elected leader, Aung San Suu Kyi.
Isolating the rabble in Rangoon ought to be an easy diplomatic victory for Robin Cook, the Foreign Secretary. In this case, we have no conflicting interest to distract us. Burma, unlike Indonesia, Iran or even Nigeria, has few things that we want - too little oil and gas to make a difference, a few rubies, disappearing teak forests and temples for our tourists to visit.
We are unlikely to prevail. Fratricidal conflict is too recent in South-East Asia's history for Asean to abandon its policy of non-intervention in internal affairs. Britain likes to believe its voice carries a long way but, in fact, our diplomats are largely impotent except when backed by the threat of Tornados.In many parts of the developing world where the King's writ used to run, Britain's political influence and power has passed from the public to the private sector.
We still have embassies but if you want access to movers and shakers - if you want to persuade rather than shout - you might find an introduction from someone at BP or Shell more useful than a letter from the British Ambassador.
Evidence of the gradual privatisation of diplomacy came this week when Premier Oil admitted that it acted as go-between in negotiating the release of James Mawdsley from a Burmese jail. By the standards of its industry, Premier is a tiny oil company. It made its name as a buccaneering adventurer,drilling speculative wells in places where many fear to tread: Cuba, Albania, Pakistan and Burma, where, to its delight, it found a sizeable gasfield.
Premier was surprised by events in Burma: not by the coup d'etat - for oil companies such as Premier, military coups are as regular as the monsoon - but by the torrent of abuse heaped on it by human rights campaigners and, recently, by the British Government.
A flood of letters arrived on the doormat of Charles Jamieson, the chief executive. Protesters turned up at the annual meeting and little Premier took on the notoriety of a British Aerospace or a Shell. The protesters wanted it to quit Burma and cease supporting such a nasty regime with its investment dollars.
It seems to matter little to the protesters that Premier's partner in the gasfield is Petronas. the Malaysian state oil company, a vast and wealthy enterprise and one unlikely to be moved by an angry letter or two. Premier's experience in Burma mirrors that of Shell in Nigeria, of BP in Colombia and of De Beers over "conflict diamonds" - gems sold by rebel groups in Angola and Sierra Leone.
These multinationals, and now the diminutive Premier, have become the focal point for protest about the ills of the world. It is not Robin Cook's ethical foreign policy that the public cares about. It is the ethical foreign policy of Shell, Rio Tinto, BP and ExxonMobil that matters.
And bizarre as it should seem, all these companies have now adopted ethical policies or statements of corporate responsibility. Reluctantly, private companies have been forced to adopt a public stance on issues that they previously believed were not their province. Chief executives in their 50s can remember the protests against multinationals in the 1970s. Accused then of interfering in the affairs of Third World countries, US companies were assumed to be arms of the CIA, packed with spies, fomenting coups. Today, the same protesters want Shell and BP to reverse policy, to interfere even more, to play politics, to demand fair elections and the release of prisoners.
Unlike governments, businesses listen to public opinion. So, De Beers has set up a certification system to clean up its diamond business and Premier has intervened, reluctantly, to have a British prisoner released from a Burmese jail. And in a bizarre further development, the oil company is sponsoring a human rights training programme in Rangoon in February at which a group of senior army officers, intelligence officers and judges will be lectured by Australian and British human rights experts.
Create a vacuum and something will fill it. Salil Tripathi, a campaign co-ordinator at Amnesty International, reckons that contemporary multinationals are being thrown into a role not unlike that of the old East India Company. "In certain countries where the rule of law is absent, people will gravitate to the only organised structure and a person may end up appealing to the corporation."
In the Niger Delta, Shell is the only structure that matters. Small wonder that the company faces daily threats of violence and extortion. There is no point in the impoverished locals rising against the Government. They would be fighting a shadow. Shell, at least, can do things, organise, build roads or clinics.
Among human rights campaigners, one detects some enthusiasm for the new corporate converts. If a small oil company can convince a Burmese general that his troops should be lectured on human rights, it cannot be such a bad thing.
However, we should be wary of relying on corporate ethics. Corporations are reluctant converts and offer no substitute for democratic institutions. What is troubling about the move by big business into the political vacuum is the vaccuum itself.
The world's protesters seem to want BP, Shell and Exxon to take charge. What if they really did?