Burma: Slave Nation

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Shocked, the generals (who had renamed the regime the State Law and Order Restoration Council, known by its Orwellian moniker SLORC) threw most of the newly elected Parliament into prison and turned Burma into what Amnesty International has described as "a prison without walls." Since then, year upon year, the United Nations Commission on Human Rights has translated Burma's tyranny into the following catalog: "Torture, summary and arbitrary executions, forced labor, abuse of women, politically motivated arrests and detention, forced displacement, important restrictions on the freedoms of expression and association, and oppression of ethnic and religious minorities."

What drew me to Burma earlier this year was a Human Rights Watch/Asia report that said that despite the release of Aung San Suu Kyi from house arrest in 1995, "the overall human rights situation is worsening... As the SLORC has moved to attract international investment at least 2 million people have been forced to work for no pay under brutal conditions to rebuild Burma's long-neglected infrastructure." Having opened Burma to the "free market" and released its most famous prisoner, the SLORC bargained that the rapacious instincts of the "Asian Tiger" states and the venerable plunderers of the West would respond with the investment it craved. The SLORC was not disappointed. The U.S. government, in spite of a certain sound and fury by its representatives at the U.N., said it would continue "neither to encourage nor to discourage" trade and investment. The British government mounted a London trade conference—“Burma: The Next Tiger?"—funded by the Department of Trade, which was told about the "visionaries" in the SLORC. And, immediately upon Aung San Suu Kyi's release, the Japanese government restored some $50 million in aid. The new Australian deputy prime minister, Tim Fischer, who had previously announced that "democracy is coming to Burma," said that Australia could now adopt a "flexible" approach to a country that offered "great economic opportunities."

By far the biggest investment, however, was already well established: a billion-dollar pipeline being built by the French oil company Total, partly owned by the French government, and its U.S. partner Unocal. This will carry Burma's natural gas into Thailand and give the generals an estimated $200 million to $400 million every year for 30 years. Indeed, more than two-thirds of the SLORC's foreign underwriting now comes from foreign oil companies. Tourism, the world's fastest-growing industry, promises to complement the oil money—if not in "Visit Myanmar Year 1996," then when the country's roads, railways, bridges, and airports are rebuilt.

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