Unocal’s pipeline dream

Pact with oppressive regime draws unwanted spotlight

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.


Last February, when Unocal of Los Angeles and France’s Total inked a $1 billion contract with the dictatorship of Burma to build a 250-mile gas pipeline to Thailand, they must have figured they could weather any public relations storm.

They knew the country’s creepily named State Law and Order Restoration Council had a brutal record. The U.S. State Department has reported that the SLORC “forced hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of ordinary Burmese…to ‘contribute’ their labor, often under harsh working conditions, to construction projects.”

But the oil giants were also aware that press coverage of Burma had been scant. Who’d notice a little business deal? Still, when the SLORC began clearing a path for the pipeline, allegations immediately surfaced from human rights watchers that the SLORC’s workforce actually comprised slave labor pulled from nearby fields.

In May, a small but vocal group of Unocal stockholders protested the pipeline deal, unsuccessfully urging the company to follow other U.S. corporations (Eddie Bauer, Levi Strauss) and pull out of Burma. Then in July, the SLORC ended the six-year imprisonment of Nobel laureate Aung San Suu Kyi, following intense international pressure. (The leader of Burma’s democracy movement, she supports trade sanctions against the junta.) A month later, director John Boorman’s Beyond Rangoon introduced Burma’s fledgling democracy movement to a worldwide audience.

And while Unocal and Total claim they have no knowledge of slave labor being used on the construction project, the location of the pipeline offers a troubling omen. It was just kilometers away, after all, that Japan maintained the brutal POW camps immortalized in yet another film, The Bridge on the River Kwai.

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate