Word: burma
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...company has been battered at home and abroad over the past four years by a series of scandals: a high-profile corruption trial that last month sent former top managers to jail, allegations that in the mid-'90s, the company used forced labor to build a gas pipeline in Burma (renamed Myanmar by the regime) - which Total vigorously denies - and the 1999 wreck of the tanker Erika, which created a devastating oil spill that polluted some of France's best-loved beaches. "They had a lot of dodgy relationships [with governments] and the whole system was opaque," says Gavin Hayman...
...farmers and fishermen who live in jungle villages along the southern coast of Burma were long overlooked and neglected by their government. And they liked it that way, given the notorious methods of the country's military dictatorship. But their lives changed horribly, they say, after two oil companies, the U.S. giant Unocal and its French partner Total, began exploiting natural-gas deposits offshore. The gas discovery prompted construction of a $1.2 billion pipeline through hundreds of miles of rain forest to an electrical plant in neighboring Thailand. At that point, villagers contend, the government began to view them...
...York - A Unocal consultant warned Unocal in 1992 that "throughout Burma, the government habitually makes use of forced labor" and that "in such circumstances Unocal and its partners will have little freedom of maneuver," TIME's Adam Zagorin reports. TIME has obtained recently unsealed court documents that challenge U.S. oil giant Unocal's assertion that "if there were any possibility" that their oil pipeline project in Burma "was connected with human rights abuses, this would absolutely be unacceptable...
...later memo, written by another adviser, informed the company that the Burmese military was indeed committing abuses connected directly to the project. The adviser, a former U.S. military attach? in Burma, told Unocal of "forced relocation without compensation of families from land near/along the pipeline route; forced labor to work on infrastructure projects supporting the pipeline ... and imprisonment and/or execution by the army of those opposing such actions." The consultant added, "Unocal, by seeming to have accepted the {Burmese military's} version of events, appears at best naive and at worst a willing partner in the situation...
...million years Age of an ankle bone belonging to a tree-climbing anthropoid discovered in Burma. French scientists announced last week that this suggests man's earliest ancestors could be from Asia rather than Africa...