The Yadana Pipeline

EarthRights International’s new report, The Human Cost of Energy: Chevron’s Continuing Role in Financing Oppression and Profiting From Human Rights Abuses in Military-Ruled Burma (Myanmar), documents Chevron’s ongoing role in financing and profiting from the military regime in Burma. This is the first comprehensive report on conditions in the Yadana pipeline region since Chevron acquired Unocal’s interest in 2005, and documents the continued serious human rights violations by pipeline security forces, including forced labor, murder, rape and torture. The report also describes Chevron’s continuing legal liability associated with abuses in the pipeline region. (See ERI's Press Release on the report.)

The Yadana Gas Pipeline Project represents the single largest foreign investment project in Burma and the single largest source of income for the Burmese military. Run by a consortium including Chevron, Thai company PTT Exploration and Production Public Company Limited (PTTEP), Total (operator), and the Myanmar Oil and Gas Enterprise (MOGE), the project does little to benefit the Burmese economy or its people.

Abuses including extrajudicial killings, torture, rape and extortion by pipeline security forces have dramatically increased since the Yadana Project was initiated in the early 1990s. Violations committed in furtherance of the project have included forced labor; forced portering, whereby villagers are made to carry arms and supplies for soldiers patrolling the pipeline route; and forced relocation of entire villages to clear the way for the pipeline and provide ready pools of forced laborers.

The influx of soldiers to the previously isolated region has also caused an increase in illegal hunting, logging, and wildlife trade. The Tenasserim region is one of the largest rainforest tracts left in mainland Southeast Asia, home to wild elephants, tigers, rhinos and great hornbills, to name just a few of the rare and important species that inhabit this region. It is also the home to numerous indigenous peoples, including the Mon, Karen, and Tavoyans. These peoples are experiencing the negative impacts of the environmental destruction as well as the human rights abuses that they must regularly suffer at the hands of the soldiers brought into the pipeline consortium partners, including Chevron and Total.

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