No official figures exist, but one Burma watcher estimates that 500,000 people provide unpaid, forced labor on any given day. After a period of labor, the 20 laborers are replaced by 20 others from the village. Some three million people are believed to have been subject to some form of such slave labor. Human rights groups such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have condemned Burma for its use of slave labor, as has the United Nations, the United States and the European Community. The Burmese government has repeatedly defended what it calls voluntary labor on cultural grounds.
People don t have to do it, but they do it because it is good for their villages and towns.
The pipeline is set to begin pumping in 1998, with an initial capacity of 130 million cubic feet per day, expanding to 525 million cubic feet per day by 2000. The pipeline will run undersea for 350 kilometers before making landfall, first at Heinze Island and then finally at Hpaungdaung Yaw. It will snake 65 kilometers across southern Burma s Tenasserim Division, through mangrove swamps, then up the Tavoy River valley and down the Zinba River valley before ascending the final 20 kilometers through densely forested mountains along the Thai-Burma border. Once over the border in Thailand, the pipeline will run 110 kilometers to an electrical generating plant in Ratchburi. In constructing the pipeline, Unocal has allied itself with a brutal and illegitimate government in its decades-long war against three ethnic groups, the Mon, the Karen and the Tavoyan peoples.