Isn't it funny how the mind works? There I was, reflecting on the news that British American Tobacco (BAT) had reluctantly pulled its investments from Myanmar — and before I had so much as organized my thoughts on the matter, I found myself humming that Stranglers' tune No More Heroes.
I've had a soft spot for Myanmar for the last five years — ever since I spent 36 nervous hours dodging its secret agents, before they tossed me out of the country. Whenever I hear of Myanmar (I prefer to call it Burma), my heart always skips a beat. The situation in that country is a neat commentary on an issue very close to my heart.
Myanmar's military junta, known by the suitably implacable and ironic acronym SPDC (State Peace and Development Council) is, by common consensus, one of the most corrupt, vindictive and authoritarian regimes in the world: an old-style dictatorship, an anachronism in a world where most dictators have long since swapped uniform for mufti.
This is the regime that has kept Nobel Peace Prize-winner Aung San Suu Kyi under hours arrest or close surveillance since her National League for Democracy won 80 per cent of the popular vote in 1990.
Despite winning a landslide in a multiethnic country, the NLD has never formed a government; instead, its party members and elected representatives have been tortured and terrorized by a junta whose long rap sheet includes providing a safe haven for the world's biggest opium warlord, Khun Sa.
Only the unconscionable and/or naive would do business with such a junta. But where there's brass, there's muck. And despite the junta's appalling human-rights record, and a tough regime of sanctions imposed by the EU, the United States and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), there's no shortage of chancers looking for an opportunity to make a buck in a country rich in natural resources, particularly in crude oil and natural gas.
Until last week, the giant multinational BAT had a 60-per-cent stake in Rothmans of Pall Mall Myanmar. It sold it to a Singaporean investment house after the British government pressured BAT to join the exodus. “We are leaving Myanmar with regret,” BAT said last week, arguing that it was one of the “best employers” in the country.
At the centre of this case are two related issues — one about whether engagement or isolation is the best way to bring about social and political change, and the other about corporate responsibility: Where does a corporation's mandate to make money end and its responsibilities as a citizen begin?
To engage the issue is to enter a moral maze.
I don't know as much about BAT's track record in Myanmar as that of Unocal, the U.S. energy conglomerate. Heavily invested in an initiative to tap Myanmar's vast natural gas reserves, Unocal is unequivocal on the issue of its responsibilities and philosophy: In a briefing note titled “The story you haven't heard about the Yadana Project in Myanmar,” the corporation puts it about that “engagement is by far the more effective way to strengthen emerging economies and promote more open societies.”
That debate has moved from the court of public opinion to the law courts in the U.S., where Unocal is facing charges brought under the Alien Tort Claims Act (ACTA) that it aided and abetted soldiers who displaced whole villages, forced residents to work against their will, and allegedly raped or murdered those who refused to make way for a Unocal pipeline.
Whatever the merits of the case, Unocal's position and BAT's grudging withdrawal from Myanmar strikes me as another example of the attitudes that have hardened people running corporations into thinking that they are beyond the reach of morality and law. For too long, corporations have responded to charges levelled against them by green-washing their image; they seem to think that corporate social responsibility (CSR) is only about publishing reports.
Reporting on a corporation's social responsibility is a good place to start — but where's the bite? How about adopting a global standard with punitive sanctions for corporations that break international law? It is so galling when corporations bleat about how much they do for a country, even as they are raking massive profits. Meanwhile, the repressive regimes that also profit from those same investment dollars continue to buy the arms that allow them to terrorize their own people.
As I was thinking about all this, that Stranglers' line “no more heroes any more” must have danced into my head. I wasn't able to shake it out until I thought about the time I interviewed Aung San Suu Kyi in Myanmar five years ago. Like many others who have met her, I was mesmerized by her quiet resolve.
And I was convinced by her absolute insistence that economic sanctions were, despite the hardships they entail, the only way to help her long-suffering country. She was prepared to pay the price personally, too — she had sacrificed her family to make her stand, and continues to do so today.
I wonder whether the CEOs who run the world's big corporations really understand what that kind of heroism is about.
