H15588
Headlines : Human RightsOil companies fuelling Burma's junta
Oil companies are “funding the dictatorship” in Burma, according to Marco Simons, U.S. legal director at EarthRights International.
France’s Total Exploration and former partner Unocal Corp., which has since been acquired by Chevron, have been accused of collaborating with the Burmese military, and have been directly implicated in numerous human rights violations while a pipeline was being built across Burma to Thailand in the 1990s. This pipeline allows French, U.S., Indian and Chinese oil companies to export oil from Burma despite international condemnation of the Burmese junta.
Activists are planning gatherings at the Total Exploration headquarters in London this week, including a ‘die-in’ to protest the role that the French oil company has played in the continuing human rights crisis in Burma.
[Posted By tango]Republished from The Toronto Star
Just over a week ago – when marches led by Buddhist monks drew thousands in Burma’s biggest cities – Indian Oil Minister Murli Deora was in the country’s capital for the signing of oil and gas exploration contracts between state-controlled ONGC Videsh Ltd. and Burma’s military rulers.
The signing ceremony was an example of how important oil and gas resources in the country also known as Myanmar have become in an energy-hungry world.
Even as Burma’s military junta intensifies its crackdown on pro-democracy protests, oil companies are jostling for access to the country’s largely untapped natural gas and oil fields that activists say are funding a repressive regime.
China – Burma’s staunchest diplomatic protector and largest trading partner – is particularly keen on investing in the country because of its strategic location for pipelines to feed the Chinese economy’s growing thirst for oil and gas.
Posted by tango
Tango.
RELATED ITEMS
- Burma: Thousands of protesters are dead
Posted by Beagle17 on Tuesday, October 2nd 2007 - Myanmart
Posted by Szamko on Monday, July 16th 2007 - France and Total 'financing' Myanmar regime
Posted by Watson on Saturday, September 29th 2007 - The Shock Doctrine
Posted by silverback on Wednesday, September 12th 2007
oops, I posted my comment in the wrong article, sorry.
There is a general consensus, it seems, that the oil companies themselves are responsible. But clearly the problem is the marriage of necessary expense and corporate monopoly. It is the payback of the monopoly itself that motivates the behavior patterns. Because monopolizing the supply of anything that people have no choice but to need delivers absolute power.
That’s something that people, even animals, can quite easily get addicted to — and that’s why we are seeing all this desperate maneuvering in pursuit of The Fix.
We need a global decoupling. That would calm things down quickly and R&D would quickly leave the defense industry and flood into Sustainable Environmental Management technologies.
Anything that is necessary to just living, not iPods or chocolate or rum but water, literal power grids of any kind, should belong to the people. Of course. Obviously. And the people should own their respective governments. That’s a democracy. Any state where the government clearly diverges from the will of the people is not a democracy.
Of course, the people of the United States own their Big Oil companies, in the sense that they pay for everything Big Oil does. But the people of the United States . . .
I don’t know. What is that? What’s happened there? The US Senate has just okayed half a trillion dollars for 2008’s War Budget. Where do they think that money’s coming from?