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Thursday 4 December 2008

Business as usual with the Burmese generals

Elliot Wilson explains why international condemnation of Burma’s brutal military leaders is so ineffectual: because many other countries are eager to do deals with them

More odious still is the position of Singapore, a city-state that likes to present itself as a haven of transparency, untainted by corruption. Yet analysts and spooks consistently highlight the depth of Singapore corporate involvement in Burma. In 2001 Matthew Sim, a Singapore diplomat who had served in Rangoon, published Myanmar on My Mind. Nominated by the Far Eastern Economic Review as ‘the most politically incorrect book of the year’, it counsels any Singaporean who kills a pedestrian while at the wheel of a vehicle in Burma to ‘pay a local citizen to take the blame by declaring he was the driver’.

As The Spectator’s respected Jarkarta-based contributor Eric Ellis has also pointed out, more disturbing still is the almost complete institutionalisation of Singaporean investment in the country. William Ashton, an authority on Burma’s military, has described in Jane’s Defence Weekly how a group of corporations collectively known as ‘Singapore Inc’ have shipped all manner of military equipment to the junta. The brains of this operation is provided by the state investment firm Temasek, together with arms suppliers such as Singapore Technologies. The gaggle of corporations comprising Singapore Inc has an estimated £1.5 billion invested in Burma. Credit cards used in Burma are almost always routed via Singapore for authorisation.

And the door opens both ways. In exchange for allowing unfettered access for Singaporean hoteliers and tour operators, Burma uses the Lion City as its window to the world. Singapore has aided Burma’s top brass in all sorts of ways: for example, providing the ailing leader, Senior General Than Shwe, with medical help as he battles cancer. Perhaps unsurprisingly, with so much illicit cash flooding into and out of Burma, urban myths easily take root. One — hard to corroborate, but widely told — concerns cash coming from China via Singapore and Thailand to fund testing of new drugs and medical equipment on unsuspecting and unwilling Burmese peasants, mirroring the situation in Africa portrayed in John le Carré’s The Constant Gardener. Given the junta’s cavalier disregard for the lives of its own people, anything seems possible.

Meanwhile, things just seem to get worse for Burma’s 55 million citizens. The Economist Intelligence Unit has tipped GDP growth to fall from 3.3 per cent in 2007 to 1.5 per cent this year, while a post-Nargis fall in agricultural production could push inflation to 42 per cent. Meanwhile domestic consumption, such as it is, will continue to fall, with the Burmese preferring to keep their savings locked up in gems and precious metals. That’s due to the junta’s predilection for disguising the ruin they have wrought by periodically knocking a couple of zeroes off the local currency, the kyat. Presumably, to this loathsome regime, that embodies their cock-eyed devotion to ‘peace’ and ‘development’.

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