Unocal’s Pipeline Project in Burma

Re “Last Burma Cowboy Stands Fast” by Tom Plate, Commentary, Dec. 24:

Unocal President John Imle’s attempt to separate his company’s billion-dollar-plus investment in Burma from any impact on the prosperity of the country’s brutal dictatorship is at best naive, a bewildering throwback to the long-gone days when Americans didn’t expect big business to practice minimum morality. The SLORC, the official name for the dictators, has proved to be an outlaw band of thieves and murderers. How do you do business with people like this and even pretend to keep your hands clean? And there is no one else in Burma to do business with.

Plate quotes Imle: “The people who really matter understand” [Unocal’s position]. As a proud member of the endless mob that doesn’t matter, I’d be grateful if one of those select few who do matter could stop mattering long enough to explain this Alice in Wonderland reasoning to me.

CAROLINE SALTZMAN

Los Angeles

* I can understand Unocal’s reluctance to sponsor a neutral fact-finding mission to investigate human rights abuses associated with its “death gas-pipeline” project in Burma. In June 1995, missionaries in Thailand contacted their headquarters in America be- cause one of their patients was abducted by Thai police. Maung Kyan, a Burmese refugee, had lost both hands and eyes in a land-mine accident. The missionaries paid for his cornea transplant. But he needed daily antibiotics treatment to prevent rejection of the transplant. The Thai police abducted Maung Kyan and refused medical care for him until the resistance armies would agree to a cease-fire with SLORC to protect the Unocal pipeline. An affiliate of the Thai government is a business partner in Unocal’s project in Burma.

The Bangkok Post published this story. Two days later the Nation, Bangkok Post’s main competitor, went to the Thai jail, took Maung Kyan’s picture and printed it on the front page. The Thai government was eventually forced to release him in the care of missionaries.

You can only do these dirty deeds in the dark. It is more difficult to engage in these activities when the international spotlight is focused to investigate human rights abuses. Whether Unocal is responsible for the actions of its business partners will be determined in two lawsuits filed against the company. But Unocal should also be judged by the American public as to whether the company meets its minimum standard of decency and acceptable behavior.

MYINT THEIN

Senior Advisor to the Burmese Resistance

Dallas, Texas