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Bangkok. Energy giants Total and Chevron are propping up Burma’s junta with a gas project that has allowed the regime to stash nearly $5 billion in Singaporean banks, a rights group said on Thursday.

France’s Total and US-based Chevron have tried to whitewash alleged rights abuses by Burmese troops guarding the pipeline, including forced labor and killings, two reports by US-based EarthRights International said.

The group urged the international community to exert pressure on the two companies, which have long managed to evade Western sanctions against the generals who rule the impoverished nation.

“Total and Chevron’s Yadana gas project has generated $4.83 billion for the Burmese regime,” one of the reports said, adding that the figures for the period 2000-2008 were the first ever detailed account of the revenues.

“The military elite are hiding billions of dollars of the peoples’ revenue in Singapore while the country needlessly suffers under the lowest social spending in Asia,” said Matthew Smith, a principal author of the reports.

The iron-fisted junta had kept the revenues off the national budget and stashed almost all of the money offshore with Singapore’s Overseas Chinese Banking Corp. and DBS Group, the watchdog said.

“The revenue from this pipeline is the regime’s lifeline and a critical leverage point that the international community could use to support the people of Burma,” added Smith, the group’s coordinator for the country.

Total was recently at the center of controversy over its lucrative dealings with the regime, following the extension in August of the house arrest of pro-democracy icon Aung San Suu Kyi.

Chevron and Total are two of the biggest Western companies in Burma, both escaping wide-ranging economic sanctions imposed on the junta by the United States and the European Union.

Total has long come under fire for its role in Burma, but EU sanctions against the country currently only cover arms exports, wood, minerals, gems and metals, while French ministers have defended the company’s dealings there.

US lawmakers in July 2008 dropped plans for sanctions that would have ended tax write-offs enjoyed by Chevron and would have pressured it to pull out from the Yadana project, following Burma’s violent crackdown on peaceful protests a year earlier.

Total has been a major investor in the Yadana project since 1992, holding a 31.24 percent stake. Chevron has a 28 percent stake in the field, production from which represents 60 percent of Burma’s gas exports to Thailand.

EarthRights said that as a result of the hidden revenues, Total and Chevron were a “primary reason” why international and domestic pressure on the Burma military regime had been ineffective for decades.

The group meanwhile said that impact assessments of the pipeline by US-based CDA Collaborative Learning Projects, a US non-profit organization commissioned by Total, had covered up adverse effects and abuses.

CDA “willfully participated in whitewashing Total and Chevron’s impacts in Burma and their role in forced labor, killings, and other abuses,” report joint author Naing Htoo said.

CDA visited villages in the pipeline area on five occasions but only with escorts from the oil company and interpreters from Total, while villagers were warned by members of the security forces not to give bad news, the report said.

Burma has been ruled by the military since 1962. Its huge natural resources are a major target for Asian countries, especially China, which eschew western sanctions.



Agence France-Presse