IUF
Uniting Food, Farm and Hotel Workers World-Wide

Burma: Why the Boycott Continues

The Burmese military dictatorship has tended to slip from public scrutiny recently, and the generals are using the respite to try to regain lost economic and political ground. This cannot be allowed to happen, as the reasons for the international campaign to boycott tourism and foreign investment remain as valid as ever.

The military junta continues to rule by repression, torture, rape and murder. Children and adults are routinely conscripted to labour for the army and on infrastructure projects. The "dialogue" between the generals and the National League for Democracy, whose leader Daw Aung San Suu Kyi was released from house arrest last year, is going nowhere (if it is in fact taking place). In this situation, foreign investment and the hard currency which tourism brings inevitably finance and strengthen the apparatus of repression.

The National Coalition Government of the Union of Burma, representing the parliament elected by a huge majority of voters in 1990 but forced underground by the military coup, continues to call for an end to foreign investment in the country pending democratic civilian rule. So too does the underground trade union movement organized in the Federation of Trade Unions of Burma (FTUB).

Suu Kyi's release changes nothing in this regard, as she has repeatedly affirmed. But the charade of dialogue has opened the door to slippage by some governments formally committed to sanctioning the Burmese military. Thus it happened, for example, that the European Union, in violation of its own visa ban, hosted Burma's Deputy Foreign Minister at a recent Brussels ministerial meeting between the EU and representatives of ASEAN countries. European and international unions therefore joined with pro-democracy groups in a demonstration against the visit in a show of support for Burmese democracy.



Some 300 transnational companies are active in Burma, in direct or indirect partnership with the military (the list is available on the ICFTU web site). The IUF campaigned persistently for PepsiCo and the French-based Accor hotel group to disinvest. We will be stepping up the pressure on British-American Tobacco (BAT), the last significant TNC in our sectors to profit from repression in Burma. We support the tourism boycott.

The Burma boycott derives its legitimacy, its strength and its strategic purpose from its source: the Burmese people's sustained struggle for democracy. Solidarity obliges us to do all we can to ensure its effectiveness.