The Rising Cost of Labor.(forced labor in Myanmar)(Statistical Data Included)

The small Burmese peasant with the red-stained teeth and the fearful eyes hardly seems capable of unnerving one of the world's most repressive military regimes. Maung is not a terrorist, a guerrilla or even a dissident. He is something that, in this era of globalization, can be even more troublesome: he is a plaintiff in a United States court case. And his target is none other than the American energy giant Unocal, one of Burma's biggest foreign investors.

Chewing on a wad of betel nut near his hideout in rural Thailand, Maung (not his real name) recalls the abuses that accompanied the arrival of the Yadana gas pipeline, a $1 billion project financed in part by Unocal. The trouble began in the early 1990s, he says, when an Army battalion assigned to protect the pipeline corridor set up base near his village in southern Burma. Soldiers slept in his home, stole his food and forced him to act as their mule, carrying backbreaking loads through the jungle for nothing but a bowl of uncooked rice. One day in 1994, a white man in a sleek pickup truck came to ask for the village's cooperation on the pipeline project. The military began forcing Maung, and all the other villagers, to work even harder, lugging supplies, building a railroad and--on one occasion--clearing the pipeline route itself. In two years, he says, he got paid only twice, for a total of about $3. "If there were no pipeline, my life wouldn't have turned out like this," says Maung, who fled Burma in 1996. "My village would not have suffered."

And if the pipeline had not been backed by American money, the world might not have cared. But as a plaintiff in the high-profile case against Unocal, Maung is shining a light on the most disturbing and dimly understood human-rights issue bedeviling Burma--forced labor. A decade ago, when the military was gunning down protesters, nullifying an opposition election victory and jailing the saintly Aung San Suu Kyi, both the regime and its opponents had more urgent problems to worry about. But the generals, panicked by an economic plunge mostly of their own doing, are slowly trying to reintroduce Burma into the world. And they are finding people like Maung--and the energetic community of international activists behind him--blocking the way.

The roots of forced labor in Burma are very deep, stretching back to the 13th-century Kingdom of Pagan. But the feudal practice has intensified under the current military rulers, who see themselves as 21st-century heirs to the kings. The problem is compounded by a rapidly expanding military: the Army has doubled in size over the past decade to more than 400,000 soldiers, whom the government last year admitted it could no longer afford to feed. An estimated 800,000 people in Burma (population: 52 million) are forced to work without pay, building roads, bridges, pagodas, even golf courses. The worst abuses take place in the fractious border regions, where ragtag Army units are forced to fend for themselves, with little or no supervision. Local battalions use villagers to carry supplies, clear roads, grow crops, build railroads or construct their military bases. "Forced labor has become a drug for these local commanders," says one foreign-aid worker in Burma. "They can't survive without it."

At the same time, the international outrage over such practices is only deepening Burma's debilitating isolation. In 1997, citing its frustrations with forced-labor and other human-rights abuses, Washington imposed sanctions that prohibit American companies from making new investments in Burma. The European Union has expanded its trade restrictions on the country. Last fall the United Nations' International Labor Organization passed a resolution asking all member countries to review their relationships with Burma to ensure that they did nothing to perpetuate its system of forced labor.

Because of a combination of sanctions and arbitrary economic policies in Burma, most American corporations that did business ...