World View: Slaves and wage slaves (1996)

From the September 1996 issue of the Socialist Standard

Earlier this year, the writer and TV broadcaster John Pilger visited Burma and talked with the Nobel Peace Prize winner, Aung San Suu Kyi. He also managed to secretly visit a vast labour camp and construction site in Mon State, between the towns of Yeand Tavoy and the Andaman Sea.

“Scores of people were building embankments and a bridge across a dry river bed." says Pilger. "The skilled were paid 60 cents a day. The majority were slave labourers, of whom many were children . . . The children carried heavy loads of mud mixed with straw in baskets and dishes on their heads and clearly agonised under the weight of it."

Every village in the area must give labour "voluntarily" regardless of the age or state of health of the villagers. When Pilger asked one villager why she was being forced to work in this way, she replied that they had heard that they were having to build a railway so that a French oil company could run a pipeline through.

The oil company, according to John Pilger, is Total, “which is part-owned by the French Government. In partnership with the American Unocal company, Total is building a $1.3 billion pipeline that will carry Burma’s natural gas into Thailand.

The deal will give the Rangoon generals $400 million a year over 30 years. Since they put an end to democracy in 1990, it is estimated that the Slorc have received 65 per cent of their financial backing from foreign oil companies" (West Australian, 8 June).

Also six years ago, 6,000 people who lived in the city of Pagan, "one of the last wonders of the ancient world”, were forced, at between two weeks and a few days, from their homes which were subsequently bulldozed, and they were marched at gunpoint to a shadeless area out of sight of tour buses.

And for why? “The city was being opened to mass tourism and only guides and the staff of a planned strip of hotels were permitted to stay" (West Australian, 8 June).

As always, profits and the lure of profits for the few come before the many. And the military rulers of Burma and Indonesia, like the ruling class elsewhere, have been learning fast.

Peter E. Newell