The EU has not helped Aung San Suu Kyi’s cause
It has been a long-held view of mine that most of the evil in the world today can be traced back, somehow, to Peter Mandelson. People tell me that this is irrational and warped. And yet, as the Burmese soldiers sprayed those protesting monks with tear gas and bunged them in the back of paddy wagons to be taken God knows where and for God knows how long, the EU Trade Commissioner’s spectral form once again swam towards me from inside my television set.
We are all worked up and worried about Burma, quite rightly, because of its appalling record on human rights. It is not simply the continued house arrest of the resilient and personable Nobel Peace Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi, whose National League for Democracy won a landslide in the 1990 general election — a result which the military junta declined to accept. Opposition politicians are indeed routinely smacked about, arrested, tortured or simply disappeared, and have been ever since General Ne Win’s coup in 1962, which set the country on the path to glorious state socialist rebirth. (With a neatly Orwellian sense of irony, the present government — under Senior General Than Shwe — now calls itself the State Peace and Development Council; of course, there is not much peace in the country and still less in the way of development.) But beyond the harassment and persecution of opposition figures, there’s the other stuff, familiar to anyone with even a fleeting recollection of Stalinism: the forced slave labour. The uprooting of anywhere up to one million Burmese people and their transportation to distant parts of Southeast Asia’s biggest mainland country, far away from their homes. There is the persecution of the Christian and Muslim minorities, the continual war against the country’s ethnic minorities (particularly the Karen) and the extraordinary expenditure on Burma’s armed services — reckoned to be, at the latest count, something like half the country’s total budget.
It is the human rights business, the total and utter lack of democracy, which commands our attention and opprobrium and which the articulate opposition groups make much play of when addressing the West. And, to be sure, Burma is at least nominally a ‘pariah state’ — you can tell that simply by the way everyone, even the BBC, refers to it as ‘Burma’ and the capital as ‘Rangoon’ when the official names are Myanmar and Yangon respectively. But inside the country dissent has been building for more mundane, pragmatic reasons than a mere lack of freedom of speech. Grotesque economic incompetence and grinding poverty — again, familiar enough concepts for those who remember state socialism’s odious modus operandi. The protests on the streets of Rangoon in April this year, during which ten people were arrested, concerned themselves primarily with consumer prices and the almost complete collapse of public services — health, education, housing. Some 25 per cent of Burma’s citizens live below the poverty line; inflation runs at about 22 per cent. In 2003 the banks gave up the ghost and today it is virtually impossible for private sector businessmen to get credit, so tightly restricted are the major financial institutions.
As a result, this is a country with almost no private enterprise, despite tentative attempts at a sort of primitive liberalisation in the early 1990s, upon which the junta rapidly backtracked. The military control almost all key industries through one of two state institutions: the Union of Myanmar Economic Holdings and the Myanmar Economic Corporation. Burma should be a comparatively prosperous nation; it has abundant gas deposits and enormous mineral wealth — lead, zinc, copper, tin and precious stones. And it is a beautiful country ripe for tourist development, too. But its people have absolutely nothing, apart from the opportunity to admire a very large army. The country is almost bankrupt, hence the increasingly voluble protests from within.
Almost bankrupt though — but not quite. Something is keeping Burma afloat financially. Its most important trading partners are China, Thailand and Singapore and the refrain you hear every evening on the news is that China, its big neighbour to the north, ought to ‘do something’ about Burma, ‘apply pressure’, that sort of thing. Well, that would be nice, although I wouldn’t hold your breath. But something might be done from a little closer to home.
In 2001, European Union Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) in Burma accounted for 71 per cent of all FDI to the country. Taken together with bilateral trade, EU investment in Burma was worth in excess of $4 billion between 1988 and 2002, the last years for which I could find figures. While the US has imposed economic sanctions upon the regime, the EU continues to pay a sort of lip service to the terrible human rights abuses, lack of democracy, etc. — and then steps up its trade, year after year. On 11 May this year, exactly one month after those protests on the streets of Rangoon, it was reported that the EU would allow Burma to take part in free trade talks, as part of an agreement signed with the ASEAN trading bloc. This followed months of Peter Mandelson insisting that Burma’s human rights record might prevent such an agreement being signed: in the end, it didn’t.
The opposition groups are perfectly clear about where the fault lies, even if this whole business has been less copiously reported on our news programmes. EU insistence that Burma mend its ways coupled with continued investment in the country has ‘failed to bring a single democratic reform’ to Burma, they state. ‘There are no EU measures that effectively challenge the economic interests of Burma’s military establishment,’ the Burma Campaign (UK) insists, referring to the removal of the Generalised System of Preference (which would confer, effectively, favoured-nation status upon Burma) from the country. Further, as US investment in the country has dried up as a result of sanctions, EU investment has cheerfully taken its place: the EU has never been more crucial to Burma financially, and its importance grows by the year. Despite ever more plaintive pleading by Aung San Suu Kyi, ‘the EU has provided much of the investment that has buttressed Burma’s dictatorship’.
The usual arguments against sanctions here do not apply. The overwhelming majority of Burma’s citizens work in what is euphemistically called the ‘informal’ economy (largely in the agricultural sector). According to the opposition groups, they would be quite untouched by sanctions, which would simply reduce the flow of money to the military junta. Addressing the issue of EU investment in Burma, Archbishop Desmond Tutu said, ‘Apathy in the face of systematic human rights abuses is amoral.’ Aung San Suu Kyi has said that she cannot understand why European companies are still allowed to invest in the country.
The UK does not actively encourage trade with Burma — but it does not do very much to stop it. Opposition groups have drawn up ‘clean’ and ‘dirty’ lists of individual companies. Interestingly, the usual notions of corporate villainy are here stood on their head. On the ‘clean’ list is British American Tobacco; on the ‘dirty’ list, according to the opposition groups, Rolls-Royce. Burma, I reckon, challenges a good few of our preconceptions.
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