Follow-Up to French MP Inquiry Miss

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Subject: Follow-Up to French MP Inquiry Mission

As a followup to the story below on the French MP fact finding mission
to Burma this week (if they went to check something out, we ought to
hear about it) there is a story in this weeks national Nouvel
Observateur magazine, the widely read high-brow popular weekly news
magazine (with a traditional leftish slant) on TOTAL's special security
arrangements for the Yadana pipeline. Its only one page, but lead from
the table of contents caught me browsing and buying the magazine

The title of the story, Les anges gardiens de Total (Special
correspondent Guillaume Léger) then leads with a sub-header
"Alors qu'une mission de parlementaires".... referring to the current
Aubert/Blum/Brana MP inquiry... With the MP visit investigating french
oil companies in Burma, witnesses confirm that Total keeps strange
relations with the army of the burmese dictatorship"

its a fairly long story, and i will post it if some of you are as
interested in it as I am, its rather good, cites some security
companies, good photo of a hilltop bunker with barracks and very large
helicopter pad, and some interesting information of how TOTAL and Unocal
are paying over $15 000 per month!(5 millions kyats) to each commander
of eight battalions, and that money some 400 kyats by day is supposed to
be distributed, and it says none of it is.

In all, it shows how TOTAL conducts security on its pipeline, directly,
with burmese military support, and with French diplomatic support
including personnel of the French embassy in Rangoon.

So, as this is printed to the French nation, it will be all the more
interesting to see how the MPs do their job of finding facts and getting
the French house of state in order to support european sanctions against
Burma, or at least support suspension of burma from the ILO.

dawn star 

Nouvel Observateur, March 18-24 1999, p 78 

ps, there is also a nicely colored map showing Burma, but no indication
where to find the Yadana TOTAL pipeline. Celui-ci est une faux pas! 

March 17, 1999> 
> 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.
> 
>