- Free Burma Coalition
Free Burma Coalition was created in 1995 as an umbrella organization for the Free Burma movement. Under the leadership of Dr.
Zarni , then a graduate student atUniversity of Wisconsin-Madison , it galvanized principally American students, attracted much media attention, and helped force over forty multinational corporations to withdraw from Burma, includingARCO ,PepsiCo , andTexaco .With Zarni's indefatigable organizing and charismatic leadership, the Free Burma Coalition became one of the largest and most effective human rights campaigns in the world, linking groups and individuals across many countries at its height, and using the boycott of Pepsi to highlight corporate complicity in human rights abuses by the military regime in Burma.
On April 26th, 1996,
USA Today published a cover story about theFree Burma Coalition with a front page picture of Zarni .Ralph Nader dubbed the Free Burma Coalition a "model citizens' activist movement."From 1995 to 1997, Free Burma Coalition took over the leadership of the existing boycott of
Pepsi .Free Burma Coalition activists ramped up the pressure onPepsiCo until 1997 when the company completely severed its remaining business ties in Burma. The Free Burma Coalition also campaigned successfully for the withdrawal of over forty corporations from Burma, including many apparel companies and several oil companies, such asArco ,Unocal , andTexaco .In 2003, Dr. Zarni started to express publicly his growing and deep disillusionment with
Aung San Suu Kyi 's leadership and her policy of sanctions and boycotts. He also attacked what he viewed as the "self-serving ways" of many of his former fellow activists in the Free Burma Coalition and the movement in general.Zarni and a group of Western-educated Burmese dissidents explored alternatives to what they termed as "the sanctions and boycott orthodoxy." In 2003, Zarni switched his position and started to claim that economic sanctions and political pressure by Western countries on Burma was counter-productive and futile as long as China, India, Thailand and other Asian countries continued to do business with and provide political support to the ruling regime.
Following Zarni's change in policy, the staff and virtually all the group's supporters and funders left the
Free Burma Coalition and founded theU.S. Campaign for Burma , which maintains theFree Burma Coalition 's original mission and policies.The Free Burma Coalition is now largely moribund. Zarni is now the organization's sole spokesperson. Its website is rarely updated.
External links
* [http://www.freeburmacoalition.org/ Free Burma Coalition]
* [http://www.uscampaignforburma.org/ US Campaign for Burma]
* [http://www.freeburma.org.au/ Australian Campaign for Burma]
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