A deadly business


source: Manchester Guardian Weekly
´COMMENT & ANALYSIS
August 9, 2000

What do Dick Cheney, Slobodan Milosevic and the British company Premier Oil have in common?
Answer: they all believe in doing business with Burma.


For Mr Cheney, George W Bush's Republican running-mate, the appalling human rights record of the Rangoon junta presents no bar to trade.

As chief executive of Halliburton, the world's largest oilfield services company, he backed a lobbying group opposed to sanctions on Burma. .

As a board member of another pressure group he helped to persuade the United States supreme court to overturn a Massachusetts law that imposed penalties on firms trading with Burma..

Mr Cheney, who was US defence secretary during the Gulf war, believes in making the world a safer place for America's oil industry..

Slobodan Milosevic's top priority is a safer world for Slobodan Milosevic. The isolated Yugoslav president will talk to almost anybody these days. Last month he entertained Burma's foreign minister, Win Aung, in Belgrade. .

Mr Milosevic said they agreed that sanctions imposed on sovereign states were "a criminal form of behaviour [and] a massive violation of human rights". He is not troubled by the International Labour Organisation's accusation that the junta has committed "an international crime", possibly amounting to "a crime against humanity", in exploiting forced labour. .

Nor, apparently, are Burma's hundreds of political prisoners, its thousands of arbitrary arrests and torture cases, and the tens of thousands of tribespeople killed or driven from their land over-troubling to Premier Oil, which is persisting with its Yetagun gas pipeline. .

Never mind that Aung San Suu Kyi, leader of the National League for Democracy, and her supporters still face intimidation 10 years after elections in which they won 82% of the vote. .

Forget the junta's involvement in heroin production and trafficking, and the humanitarian and refugee problems resulting from its tyranny. .

All that, Premier seems to say, is not our business. It may sound sick to you. But it makes Dick and Slobodan proud.