Foreign Firms Still Aiding Aviation Fuel Shipments to Myanmar Military – The Diplomat

Shipments of aviation gas proceed to achieve military-ruled Myanmar with the involvement of corporations from Asia and Europe, a brand new report claims, at the same time as junta air raids proceed to drive 1000’s of civilians from their properties.

In a brief report printed as we speak, Amnesty Worldwide, International Witness, and Burma Marketing campaign UK stated that that they had recognized extra international corporations concerned in supplying the Myanmar Air Pressure with gas, following a current Amnesty report that examined the function of international and multinational corporations within the nation’s aviation gas provide chains.

“We’ve got traced new shipments of aviation gas which have possible ended up within the fingers of Myanmar’s navy, which has constantly carried out illegal air strikes,” Montse Ferrer, Amnesty Worldwide’s researcher and adviser on enterprise and human rights, stated in a press release accompanying the report’s launch.

“For the reason that navy’s coup in 2021, it has brutally suppressed its critics and attacked civilians from the bottom and the air. Provides of aviation gas reaching the navy allow these battle crimes. These shipments should cease now.”

Since not lengthy after the navy takeover, activists have been calling for international governments to limit the navy’s entry to aviation gas. The requests have grown extra pressing because the navy junta, struggling to quash the nationwide resistance to its rule, has used its air drive in opposition to civilian populations in varied elements of the nation. In keeping with the United Nations, the navy carried out no less than 670 air assaults final yr, 12 occasions greater than the 54 recorded in 2021. Statistics from the Myanmar Institute for Peace and Safety that have been cited within the Amnesty assertion claimed that the navy carried out 243 air strikes in 2022, up from 104 the yr earlier than.

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Right this moment’s report follows an investigation into the aviation gas provide chain that Amnesty printed final November, with help from different Myanmar-focused civil society teams. This revealed that gas supposed for civilian aviation was being diverted to the navy. It additionally documented how shipments from international companies, together with main oil corporations like ExxonMobil, Thai Oil, PetroChina, and Rosneft, had facilitated the Myanmar air drive’s devastating assaults on civilian populations.

One cargo documented within the new report concerned the oil tanker Prime V, which sailed from Sikka in India on November 28 of final yr, and later offloaded Jet A-1 grade aviation gas terminal within the port of Thilawa in Myanmar. The report recognized plenty of international companies concerned within the transaction, together with Reliance Industries Ltd of India, which owns the terminal from which Prime V departed; Sea Commerce Marine, a Greek firm, which is the useful proprietor of Prime V; and Japan’s P&I Membership, which offered it with safety and indemnity insurance coverage. The report additionally documented the same separate cargo that left the Bangchak Oil Refinery in Bangkok Port in Thailand round October 8 and unloaded a cargo of jet gas at Thilawa every week or so later. The report claimed that this cargo concerned corporations primarily based in Thailand and Luxembourg.

The gas terminal in Thilawa was beforehand operated by Puma Power Aviation Solar Co. Ltd. (PEAS), which was largely owned by the worldwide commodity buying and selling big Trafigura. Amnesty’s report from final yr described Puma Power as “the principle international enterprise concerned within the dealing with, storage, and distribution of aviation gas in Myanmar.”

Puma Power introduced final October it was withdrawing from Myanmar after promoting its property to a “regionally owned personal firm,” which it stated would guarantee compliance with human rights requirements. However the eventual purchaser of the property was a Myanmar-based agency known as Shoon Power, beforehand referred to as Asia Solar Aviation, a number of members of which have been sanctioned by the UK and European Union. Given the shut relationship between Shoon Power and the Myanmar navy, Amnesty stated that Puma’s assurance of human rights compliance was “primarily meaningless.”

In comparison with the big oil corporations named in Amnesty’s report in November, the companies recognized within the report are comparatively marginal, and in some instances concerned solely tangentially within the provide chain, akin to within the provision of insurance coverage for gas shipments. This speaks to the complexity of the worldwide provide chains that join Myanmar’s navy to a constellation of out of doors suppliers, insurance coverage brokers, sub-contractors, and maritime transport providers, one thing that has each benefits and downsides for these looking for to choke off the navy’s entry to very important assets like gas.

Whereas the Tatmadaw’s reliance on worldwide provide chains creates a possible stress level for out of doors actors, particularly highly effective Western governments, unpicking this tangle of interdependencies may be each virtually and politically troublesome.