BURMA'S democracy movement and its leader, Aung San Suu Kyi, are being betrayed by the world's democracies.
Most western governments, together with Japan, are running what diplomats call a "two track" policy on Burma - offering public support for Suu Kyi while pursuing, often in secret, long term business links with the Burmese military dictatorship.
The Clinton administration has repeatedly attacked the human rights record of the Burmese regime, with Secretary of State Warren Christopher recently referring to "a new tide of repression in Burma". Yet US policy is business as usual, with millions of investment dollars transferred through back door tax havens like the British Virgin Islands.
In seeking to justify this, President Clinton's special envoy to Asia, William Brown, said in June that the "issue of forced labour in Burma has diminished". In the same week, the International Labour Organisation reported that the Burmese generals were forcing their people into a modern form of slavery "on a massive scale and under the cruellest of conditions".
However, it is Europe's duplicity that is most striking. For all the EU's posturing on human rights in Burma, European companies, undeterred and often secretly encouraged by their governments, are among the regime's biggest underwriters.
The German firm, Fritz Werner, has long supplied the junta with weapons grade machine tools. The huge German electronics firm Siemens is a major investor. So is the Dutch multinational Philips, along with Royal Dutch/Shell, and Britain's Premier Oil. Ireland is represented by Kirkland Oil, owned by Dragon Oil.
By far the biggest European investor is the French oil company Total. Part owned by the French government, Total is building a billion dollar gas pipeline for the junta in partnership with the US company Unocal.
Last January. I filmed children as young as 10 forced to work in temperatures of 35C on the "second death railway", an extension of the Second World War railway built by the Japanese using prisoners as slave labourers... The dew French built railway will allow the Burmese army to protect the pipeline. According to one estimate, the pipeline will add $400 million (stg£250 million) a year to the SLORC's treasury - almost half of which is spent on the military and, says Amnesty International, on making Burma "a prison without bars".
RECENT moves by the British government illustrate the "two track" policy.
While Nelson Mandela was in London, feted by a British establishment that once did everything in its power to undercut him, his fellow Nobel Peace Laureate, Aung San Suu Kyi - "Asia's Mandela" - was being effectively abandoned by the British government.
On June 11th, Suu Kyi appealed to the world not to do business with the SLORC, as the Burmese regime calls itself. She spoke out as the generals decreed 20 year prison sentences for those attending meetings outside her home or calling for democracy. On the following day the head of export sales at the Department of Trade in London, Mike Cohen, arrived in Rangoon to "evaluate the commercial prospects" of British support for the regime.
On the same day, the Foreign Office Minister, Jeremy Hanley, told the Commons Britain supported "democratic reform and human rights" in Burma. "We have made it clear to the SLORC," he said, "that the resumption of normal relations is conditional on progress in those key areas.
He added that the government had "pulled the plug" on future British trade mission to Rangoon.
What the minister neglected to say was that, even as he rose to address parliament, the most senior British official responsible for trade in Asia was flying into Rangoon to "evaluate" the next British trade mission and to sit down with his counterparts at the junta's investment agency.
In fact, the British government has funded two trade missions, on which Rolls Royce and the huge utility Powergen have been represented. It has also backed a seminar in London called. "An invitation to Burma - the latest tiger cub".
Last month in Jakarta, the seven governments that make up the Association of South East Asian States, ASEAN, decided to offer the Burmese regime full membership. This was hardly surprising; ASEAN is devoted to the promotion of business opportunities and has little interest in human rights and democracy.
An EU delegation was present, led by the Minister for Foreign Affairs, Mr Spring.
Mr Spring is one of the very few EU ministers to have shown a genuine, informed interest in human rights. He has recently spoken directly and boldly to the Indonesian dictatorship on East Timor. He was alone in raising the issue of East Timor at the ASEAN meeting.
Mr Spring has also spoken of the EU's "concerns" over Burma and he called for "dialogue" between the regime and Aung San Suu Kyi. He is said to have been blunt.
AFTER that, it seemed the mantle of Ireland's EU Presidency proved too much.
ASEAN's decision to admit Burma to its regional forum as implying an acceptance by the Rangoon generals of ASEAN's founding principles of human rights - when, as he knows, such "principles" are either non existent or have the lowest priority in Asia's club of profiteering autocrats and dictators, whose talk about "Asian democracy" is self serving nonsense.
Mr Spring also expressed the EU's willingness to wait and see how "constructive engagement" between ASEAN and the Burmese junta "worked".
The term "constructive engagement" was last used incidentally when the Reagan White House used it to cover its all out support for the apartheid regime in South Africa. In the Asian context, it means exactly the same when applied to the vicious regime in Burma.
Next February, when foreign ministers from the EU and ASEAN meet in Singapore to discuss ways of "separating" trade from human rights issues, Mr Spring has an ideal opportunity to say no to this latest example of "constructive engagement".
Mr Spring is undoubtedly constrained by the EU's "consensus" on Burma - which is designed not to upset European trade deals in Asian. But Ireland's representatives cannot have it both ways. They cannot be the bearers of Ireland's real and distinctive strength in the modern world - its reputation as a source of solidarity with the universally oppressed - while playing "diplomatic" games that allow tyrants time and their backers commercial carte blanche.
On Burma there is only one voice for the Irish Government to heed - that of the Burmese people, for whom the courageous Aung San Suu Kyi speaks with a legitimacy shared by virtually none of those in power in Asia. She is both the embodiment of her people's spirit and their democratically elected leader, albeit one who is prevented from taking office by the uniformed thugs in power.
"Repression in Burma," she said the other day, "is worse than ever and there is no doubt that so called `constructive engagement' has failed."
Like Nelson Mandela not long ago, she called for a trade boycott and sanctions, "in the name of decency".