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Free
Burma By Dan Beeton
Many of the leaders of this international movement are Burmese who organized the country’s largest ever uprising in 1988, remarkable also in its generally nonviolent character. But these student leaders and others fled after the military violently crushed the demonstrations, killing as many as 10,000 people in a massive bloodbath. In 1990, the regime allowed free and fair elections, but when the results favored future Nobel Peace Prize Recipient Aung San Suu Kyi and her party, the junta annulled them and placed Aung San Suu Kyi and the elected Members of Parliament under arrest. The military has ruled ever since, and although the junta freed Aung San Suu Kyi in 1995 and again, after re-arresting her, in 2002, there has been no substantive political progress. Escaping human rights abuses back home, Burmese activists founded the international Free Burma Coalition in 1995, eventually bringing together U.S.-based groups including Global Exchange, the American Anti-Slavery Group, and Rainforest Action Network and such Burmese-Thai organizations as All Burma Federation of Students Unions and the Assistance Association for Political Prisoners. Modeled on the successful anti-apartheid movement of a decade earlier, the coalition pressures Burma’s dictatorship through consumer boycotts and public education campaigns. The coalition gained an international profile through successful boycotts against companies—including Pepsi Cola and oil giants Texaco and Arco—that had gone into business with Burma’s junta. More recently, it targeted Western companies buying up the regime’s exports, taking aim especially at clothing importers and retailers; the coalition’s current goal is to deprive the regime of the massive revenue it generates by selling sweatshop goods to U.S. markets. “When you buy something labeled ‘Made in Burma,’ you help perpetuate widespread forced labor in the country,” says the coalition’s Director of Policy and Strategy and former political prisoner Aung Din. “Infrastructure for the garment factories themselves has been built with forced labor—even using children.” The U.S. State Department’s human rights report on Burma reads, “Forced labor, including forced child labor, has contributed materially to the construction of industrial parks subsequently used largely to produce manufactured exports including garments.” The regime makes money from taxing exports at the astounding rate of ten percent. Export trade is now a significant source of cash for the regime; it is likely that from Burma’s $1.4 billion in exports during the first half of 2002, the junta took away at least $140 million in hard cash. Aung Din sees it as no coincidence that as U.S. companies like Pepsi and Texaco pulled out of Burma in the mid-1990s, the regime began to export a greater quantity of garments and other products to the United States. Beginning in spring 2000, the coalition took action, calling on companies to cease production in Burma and to ban clothing, ceramics, and other products made in Burma from their stores. Some, like Fila, JanSport, and the world’s largest retailer, Wal-Mart responded quickly, announcing “no-Burma” policies.
But others ignored the call to ban business with Burma, and that’s when the grassroots pressure began. The coalition launched e-mails, phone calls, letters and pickets against U.S. corporations that have been boosting the regime’s rag trade. Upscale retail giant Federated Department Stores, the Children’s Place and, most recently, Burlington Coat Factory have all been on the receiving end of thousands of anti-Burma trade communications, and all have since decided to cease stocking products made in Burma. “We saw a lot of other large retailers were going down this path and it was determined a good idea,” Burlington Coat Factory’s general counsel Brian Flynn told a news service. “It’s socially responsible, and it’s good business. We don’t want to be associated with [that] sort of practice.” A few companies continue to profit from a garment industry built on slavery and help Burma’s dictatorship maintain its stranglehold on power; it will take still more grassroots action to convince them to stop. Burma’s
Biggest Investor Unocal’s pipeline project in Burma has grown notorious for the many alleged human rights abuses associated with it. Burmese plaintiffs are suing the company in U.S. courts over violations including forced labor, rape and murder. The plaintiffs claim that Burma’s military forced many to work on the project’s infrastructure and, in the course of providing “security” for the pipeline, forcibly relocated others to make way for it. Similar cases against companies including Shell Oil have followed. Unocal has fought back against the Free Burma Coalition and its allies, playing a leading role in the successful effort to strike down the Massachusetts Burma Law that barred state contracts with firms doing business in Burma. Since no amount of bad publicity seems to convince the oil giant that it should leave Burma, activists have decided to force the company out by making it unprofitable to remain there. On campuses across the country, students are leading successful campaigns to urge university divestment of stock in Unocal and other companies operating in Burma. Late last year, students at the University of Virginia persuaded the school to dump 50,000 shares in Unocal. The school made the decision after receiving a letter supporting divestment signed by seven Nobel Peace laureates including the Dalai Lama, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Rigoberta Menchú Tum, Oscar Arias, Betty Williams and Jody Williams. “While Unocal turns its back on the conditions surrounding its pipeline, its [partner], the illegal military junta, [is] torturing, killing, raping and enslaving thousands of people,” the letter said. “This decision makes me proud to be a student at the University of Virginia. We hope that the University of Michigan and [academic pension fund] TIAA-CREF will take action against this rogue oil company as well,” UVA student and Free Burma Coalition member Andrew Price said at the time. Price was referring to two of the campaign’s notable successes. University of Michigan students voted that the university should divest itself of $20 million worth of stock in companies doing business with Burma’s regime—a significant move, since one of Unocal’s board members, Marina Whitman, is a business professor at the school. And in addition to campus divestment campaigns, the Free Burma Coalition has organized a new effort to pressure Unocal through some of its largest investors: pension funds.
When TIAA-CREF, the pension fund of choice for many teachers and professors in the United States, held its annual participants’ meeting November 7, the coalition’s Aung Din and Andrew Silver were there to urge the fund to take action to support human rights in Burma. Since TIAA-CREF holds 1,506,000 shares of stock in Unocal, the coalition requested that the fund use its shareholder power to urge Unocal to leave Burma and divest itself of the Unocal stock if the company refuses. This request was backed up by the signatures of over 100 TIAA-CREF holders, including many well-known educators like anti-apartheid leader Dennis Brutus, linguist-activist Noam Chomsky, international law scholar Richard Falk and former member of Congress Father Robert Drinan. “We do not want our retirement funds, or any TIAA-CREF funds, to be generated from repression and abuse,” the letter said. The appeal also called for the fund to dump immediately its stock in Singapore Technologies, a subsidiary of which supplies weapons to Burma’s military. The same subsidiary, Chartered Industries, shipped ordnance to the Burmese regime just before it cracked down on the pro-democracy uprising in 1988. But as with the garment trade holdouts, it appears that it will take still more grassroots action to persuade TIAA-CREF to drop its stock in Singapore Tech and take action on Unocal. Dan Beeton is the Campaigns Director of the Free Burma Coalition. What You
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orty
years after the dictator Ne Win seized power in a coup, Burma remains
under military rule. But Burmese refugees and supporters of democracy
and human rights have scored a series of victories against the iron-fisted
military dictatorship, now led by General Than Shwe. From Thailand to
California, from refugee camps to campuses, activists are waging a campaign
to exert economic and political pressure on the regime. 
