Burma: Slave Nation

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In the deep south of Burma, in Mon State, I found what has been described as the "second death railway." Connecting the towns of Ye and Tavoy, it connects with the notorious line built by the Japanese with the lives of more than 100,000 Asians and Allied prisoners of war. We came upon it in dense jungle beyond a village where emaciated young girls held out silver urns for contributions to the welfare of their community, a Buddhist tradition. Their face masks of thanaka—a yellow paste made from tree bark that protects and nourishes the skin—gave them the appearance of small ghosts emerging from the undergrowth. They were fortunate compared with the gangs of children at work half a mile away.

While adult slave workers toiled on 20-foot embankments, the children were engaged in a crude brickworks, most of them exposed to the premonsoon glare and heat. The youngest were only nine years old.

One estimate is that, out of 20,000 adults and children forced to build the railway, up to 300 have died from exhaustion and disease or have been killed. This seems conservative. We counted some 20 bridges in the area, and children appeared to be working on all of them. "No one can escape [forced labor]," one villager told me. "SLORC officials or the army go from village to village. They take a child, as long as he is strong enough, without asking permission of the parent."

In one of its recent annual reports on human rights abuses throughout the world, the U.S. State Department says that the SLORC routinely uses slave labor and "will use the new railways to transport soldiers and construction supplies into the pipeline area." The oil companies deny that the railway is linked to the pipeline project, and although most supplies are likely to arrive by sea, there can be no doubt that the railway will allow the generals to protect the companies' investment and their own cut from it. In 1993 Total was contacted by officials of the Burmese government in exile, representing Aung San Suu Kyi's party, the National League for Democracy. They provided the company with extensive evidence of slave labor along the pipeline route. They also demonstrated how the profits from the project would invariably buy the arms and military equipment to which about half of the SLORC budget is devoted, thus helping to underwrite the repression of the population. Total's response was that it would continue. Unocal has described reports of slave labor as fabrications.

Aung San Suu Kyi discounts the notion, propagated by some investors, that the Burmese population at large benefits from foreign investment. "The best business opportunities always go to the same elite," she told Le Monde in a recent interview. "There's a class of people here who are getting very rich, so much so that they don't know what to do with their money. Meanwhile there are people who are so poor—particularly in rural areas—that they are forced to take their children out of school."

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