The Observer

September 20, 1998

The Observer News Page; Pg. 32

Comment: Notebook: Hold on a minute...;

Why the FO is run by village idiots

NICK COHEN

Aung San Suu Kyi fits the Western liberal ideal of a noble dissident so perfectly that a Dickie Attenborough biopic must surely be in production. Suu Kyi is not a communist. She is not a fundamentalist. She has neither resorted to violence nor incited ethnic and religious hatred. She is the elected leader of Burma who has survived arrest and separation from a husband who happens to be, and again this helps, an Oxford don. The Nobel Peace Prize in 1991 and the higher honour of being shortlisted for the Today Personality of the Year in 1996 attest to her appeal.

No one who is not irredeemably warped ignores her urgent request that Western businesses should boycott Burma and stop funding a junta grown prosperous on bribes, the heroin trade and a slave economy condemned as a crime against humanity by the United Nations last month.

Before the election, New Labour idolised the Oxford housewife turned freedom fighter. In a voice heavy with piety, Tony Blair told the 1996 party conference: 'For reasons that everyone will understand, she cannot be with us. Let me invite her to come next year, a free citizen and an example to democrats all over the world!' He promised he would impose sanctions when he reached Downing Street. The pledge was well within spending limits. Only one British company Premier Oil, which employs few British workers has substantial investments in Burma. No real penalties followed Labour's victory, although the Foreign Office did persuade trusting newspapers to run stories last week saying Britain would try to do something about Burma after yet more opposition politicians were rounded up.

The feeble threat falls a long way short of the pre-election bombast, but it would still be welcome if Britain and the rest of the European Union were not beginning proceedings at the World Trade Organisation in Geneva on Tuesday against the state government of Massachusetts. The Americans' crime is to refuse to hire firms that trade with the junta. On Wednesday, a second assault will open in the Boston courts where the EU will support US companies which want to make an example of Massachusetts before the grassroots movement against doing business with Burma grows.

If the EU has its way, Americans and everyone else will be unable to vote for local politicians who challenge corporate immunity from democratic control. The penalties imposed on firms in the Eighties which dealt with South Africa would now be illegal.

Simon Billenness, from Boston's Franklin Research Development legal centre, summed it up. 'The EU and the free-market companies who are pulling its strings say the public can have no freedom of choice in the market.' British civil servants at the Washington embassy and the Boston consulate have been active in the campaign to protect generals who are, if we are talking frankly, drug lords and slave masters. John Jackson, from the London Burma Action Group, despairs of a British press that is letting the Government get away with 'incredible hypocrisy'. He points out that the EU is out to destroy the only effective sanctions against the junta. A Burmese general, Khin Nyunt, testified to the effectiveness of the stance taken by Massachusetts and 17 other US states and cities by admitting they were creating a crisis.

The EU was sunk in its usual secrecy last week and Leon Brittan, the Trade Commissioner, would not comment. The Foreign Office was more forthcoming. 'This is nothing to do with politics,' said a spokesman. 'We want to stop US states imposing their law on European companies. It is a point of principle.' As we listened to him burble, we thought that somewhere in Britain was a village which lost a first-class idiot when our man joined the diplomatic corps. What could be more unprincipled and nakedly political than aiding Burma's tyrants? But after further inquiry, we discovered he was not a madman but a sober propagator of a government line which holds that sanctions must be halted because of controversial American penalties against Europeans trading with Cuba.

But the two cases are not comparable. European firms who deal with Castro face the seizure of their US assets and the arrest of their executives. Companies that trade with Burma just lose orders from Americans who are choosing how to spend their own money. The EU is not defending Europe against American arrogance, as its alliance with US corporations shows.

Earlier this year, the generals realised they had an image problem and hired two firms of management consultants, Bain and Jefferson Waterman, to lobby governments and rebrand their dictatorship. During the makeover, the junta changed its name from the State Law and Order Restoration Council to the kinder, gentler State Peace and Development Council.

The lobbyists can now boast that an unresisting Britain has been pushed from the moral high ground and got on message. Perhaps we shouldn't be surprised. Today dropped the Personality of the Year awards after 1996 because, in the most pitiful example of gerrymandering in political history, New Labour had been caught trying to rig the polls so Tony Blair would win and Suu Kyi lose.