The French oil group Total announced on Sunday April 4 that it was maintaining its controversial presence in Burma, where the crackdown on the military coup has already claimed hundreds of lives. Total is also committed to funding human rights organizations in the country. More than 550 civilians, including women and children, have been killed by security forces since the coup of 1is February which overthrew the civilian government of Aung San Suu Kyi, according to the Association for Assistance to Political Prisoners (AAPP).
The toll could be much higher after some 2,700 people have been arrested. Many, held incommunicado and without access to their relatives or a lawyer, are missing. The army and the police fire live ammunition day and night, reports the AAPP, and four civilians were still shot during the day on Saturday. Faced with the constant deterioration of the situation, international and local NGOs, supported by certain politicians in France, called on Total, present in Burma since 1992, to leave the country.
The company will maintain its production of gas which “supplies electricity to a large population in Yangon,” the economic capital, its CEO, Patrick Pouyanné said on Sunday. The group does not want to expose its employees on site to the risk of “forced labor”, if he left.
Total paid around $ 230 million to the Burmese authorities in 2019 and 176 in 2020, in the form of taxes and “production rights”, according to its financial documents. Blocking our payments would expose “the managers of our subsidiary to the risk of being arrested and imprisoned,” said Patrick Pouyanné in this column published in the French weekly. Sunday Newspaper. He has pledged to fund human rights NGOs at the level of what he will pay to the Burmese state.
Messages broadcast on anti-junta Easter eggs
Despite the junta’s bloody repression, pro-democracy mobilization continues, with tens of thousands of workers on strike and entire sectors of the economy paralyzed. On this Easter Sunday, the civil disobedience movement has found a new solution: to distribute photos of eggs on social networks decorated with small messages. “Save Burma”, “We want democracy”, “Let us get rid of MAH”, the powerful junta leader Min Aung Hlain, one could read.
While access to the Internet remains cut off for a large majority of the population, the generals are also tightening their judicial grip on Aung San Suu Kyi, accused in particular of corruption and of having violated a law on state secrets dating from the colonial era. If she is found guilty, the 75-year-old former leader, detained incommunicado but “in good health”, according to her lawyers, risks being banned from political life and faces long years in prison.
Arrest warrants have also been issued for 40 Burmese celebrities, singers, models and influencers on social media, who are accused of disseminating information likely to provoke mutinies in the armed forces. Three family members who spoke to a CNN correspondent who came to interview junta officials were arrested.
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