The Nation-French team to submit Ya

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Subject: The Nation-French team to submit Yadana report soon

March 17, 1999
Headlines

French team to submit Yadana report soon

A TEAM of French parliamentarians said on Tuesday they could not yet confirm
if there had been human-rights abuses in the controversial
multi-billion-dollar Yadana natural-gas project.

But they said all information they had acquired or been given during their
trip to Burma and Thailand as well as back in France would be collated,
studied and assessed before being summarised in a fact-finding report to the
French parliament in June.

The three-member ad-hoc committee was created last October to investigate
the widely debated conduct of French oil companies in overseas investment.
In the past few years French petroleum firms have been strongly criticised
for making investment deals with authoritarian regimes in the Third World.
Their projects have often been alleged to contribute or to be related to
serious human-rights violations, forced labour and relocation and
destruction of the environment.

Although the MPs did not have a chance to hold a face-to-face meeting here
with Karen, Mon and Tavoyan refugees, tens of thousands of whom were
uprooted from their villages in southern Burma along the route of the Yadana
gas pipeline, they said they would ''use discretion'' in their judgment and
assessment.

''We are not going to believe everything we saw or were told. We'll use our
discretion as well. We'll check if information we gathered from all sources
matchs or not so that we can present a very neutral report,'' said Pierre
Brana of the Socialist Party.

Last week the team, which included Marie Helene Aubert of the Green Party
and Roland Blum of the Liberal Democracy party, spent three days in Burma
touring the Yadana pipeline route and neighbouring villages and meeting
senior Burmese officials, representatives of the French oil giant Total,
some Rangoon-based diplomats and Burmese pro-democracy leader Aung San Suu
Kyi and her political colleagues. They spent three more days in Thailand
talking to people and groups involved in the Yadana project.

Total, its American partner Unocal, Thailand's Petroleum Authority of
Thailand and Burma's Myanmar Oil and Gas Enterprise are partners in the
US$1.2-billion Yadana project.


Blum said it was still unclear if income from the Yadana would allow the
Burmese junta to stay in power, saying that it would be another two years
before there would be any payment.

Brana said the final report would contain information that could be proved
but that the committee was not duty-bound to dictate what the government
should do with its findings.

However, the judiciary, the legislature and international financial
institutions such as the World Bank may use the report to initiate action.

For example, French politicians could use the findings to propose a review
or amendment of existing French business laws to include economic sanctions,
Brana conjectured.

He said that unlike in many Western countries, existing French law did not
have the power of economic sanctions, but once it was armed with sanctions
it would have indiscriminate effect.

''Unlike some major powers, if we enact sanctions laws they will have a
blanket effect and be indiscriminately applied,'' he said, mocking some
Western powers which had discriminately imposed sanctions on Burma while
pursuing a different policy towards China, which had been widely criticised
for its poor human-rights record.

The three French MPs said that what they found ''absolutely unacceptable''
in Burma was the fact that the legislature elected in the 1990 general
elections was not allowed to perform its duties.

BY YINDEE LERTCHAROENCHOK

The Nation