The decision to gazette the Myinmoletkat Nature Reserve in the central Tenasserim Division has raised concerns about the extent to which the regime's renewed interest in environmental protection is being driven by its desire to relocate populations that might pose a security risk to key infrastructure projects (ERI/SAIN, 1996). An international consortium, comprising Unocal of the United States, Total of France, and the government, is developing the offshore Yadana natural gas field. This field is expected to earn the regime $150 million annually when it comes fully on-line in 2000. According to a reliable source, the decision to gazette Myinmoletkat was originally proposed by Unocal. The limits of the proposed protected area were apparently enlarged by Rangoon to include the onshore segment of the pipeline 666 km long that will ship gas to Thailand starting in July 1998. Protecting the pipeline, which runs to the south of Mon State, through villages inhabited by ethnic Mon and Karen, is thus of strategic importance to the regime. Myinmoletkat also covers a planned highway linking Thailand with a deep-sea port in Tavoy. In July 1996, the U.S. Embassy in Rangoon observed that the consortium had been criticized for forced relocations of populations along the planned pipeline route and for using forced labor provided by the army in its surveying and construction. The consortium has denied these allegations, but serious human rights abuses were reported by The Observer (1997).
Copyright © 1998. Logging Burma's Frontier Forests: Resources and the Regime (Washington, DC: World Resources Institute). This posting does not use the adopted name "Myanmar," given to Burma by the State Law and Order Restoration Council (SLORC) in 1988. The name Burma is used in accordance with the Burmese National League for Democracy, the United States Government and many other countries, and leading publications including The Washington Post, Bangkok Post, The Nation, and The Far Eastern Economic Review.