GRAPE VINE
TOTAL'S INTERFERENCES
Source : Rene Backmann,Le Nouvel Observateur (FRANCE)
[Translation by Info Birmanie]
Is it a coincidence that the petroleum company, Total - excuse me Total-Fina-Elf - persists to collaborate in Burma, with a dictatorship who uses forced labour, ethnic cleansing and a drug trade? No, is the reply in a disturbing, well researched book1 very unjustly passed unnoticed, by Francis Christophe, ex-investigator of the Geopolitical Observatory of Drugs , where he worked in particular with Burma. After a close investigation of the Erika affair, the links between Total and the Burmese junta, and also to the real petropolitik of Total in Rhodesia, South Africa and Iran, the author arrives at the same conclusions as the investigating commission of the French Parliament on the links between petrol and ethics : "when it comes to defending their economic interests, the large petroleum groups have a tiresome tendency to relativize, even to free themselves from international conventions, when they operate in countries with little care or respect for ethical norms decreed by the international community, the petroleum companies tend to act in accordance with the minimal regulations functioning in these countries.
A practice which is even more fearsome given that it's not contested - that is the least we can say - by the shareholders. Overjoyed certainly, by the announcement that profits of the company had tripled, the shareholders of Total Fina Elf, united in Paris last week, applauded the declaration of the chairman and managing director Thierry Desmarest "we do not want to interfere in the political problems of countries where we are established and then booed the representatives of ecologist groups and human rights organisations who came to recall that this prosperity had, In Britany as well as in Burma, another side, clearly less pleasant.
Because Total goes well above interfering in Rangoon. Considered by the head of the Burmese opposition Aung San Suu Kyi as "the principal support of the military regime the french company "closely collaborates with the Burmese army according to the latest report by Earth Rights International. Based upon several hundred testimonies gathered in Burma and in Thailand, this document accuses Total and the petrolium firms Unocal (U.S.A) and Premier (U.K) of benefitting from the resorting to forced labour and other violations of human rights perpetrated by the Burmese army.