Details continue to emerge around the nuclear ambitions of the ruling military junta in Burma, recently exposed in a five-year study [2] by the Democratic Voice of Burma and former UN nuclear inspector Robert Kelley.

Last week I posted an article on the Huffington Post [3] explaining Total and Chevron’s role in financing the world’s newest nuclear threat, including details of the companies’ obstinate refusals to publish their last 18 years of payments to the junta, despite the explicit request of a global coalition of over 160 NGOs, scholars, unions, investment firms, and world leaders. 

But beyond the role of Chevron and Total, and in an ironic twist of geopolitical madness, it would appear as though the Burmese military regime is developing its perverse weapons program in partnership with North Korea, perhaps using payments from South Korean firms.  

A UN report  [4]leaked last month claimed North Korea is exporting nuclear and ballistic missile technology to Burma using intermediaries, shell companies, and overseas criminal networks designed to circumvent UN sanctions against Pyongyang. DVB has top secret receipts from transactions between the two countries, showing payments in the millions. 

Meanwhile, South Korean firms are in the process of developing what will become the Burmese junta’s largest source of revenue, the Shwe Gas Project, involving construction of a transnational gas pipeline from western Burma to Yunnan Province, China, measuring at least twenty times longer than Total and Chevron’s notorious Yadana pipeline. The Shwe Gas Movement [5] (SGM) values the Shwe gas at a whopping $29 billion dollars; Daewoo International, the project’s operator, would have been making payments to the junta since at least 2000, when the company first signed an exploration agreement with the Burmese regime. 

Other Korean firms involved in the controversial project include the state-owned Korea Gas Corporation, and the Korean government itself: in a 2009 report, we exposed how Seoul’s Ministry of Knowledge Economy (MKE) provided Daewoo with a multimillion dollar loan [6] to proceed with the controversial Shwe project.  

Previously, I was part of a group that met directly with officials from the MKE in Seoul, a group that included EarthRights International’s Naing Htoo, SGM’s Wong Aung, representatives from Harvard law school, and the Korean House for International Solidarity. We asked officials in the Ministry what criteria they had for determining loan clearance, and if they factored into their decisions the ethical suitability of the business partner (in this case, the Burmese regime) or if they factored a project’s potential human rights impacts. The officials didn’t answer our questions. 

In June 2009, an unnamed Korean official [7] from the MKE shed additional light on the thinking of the Korean government’s role in Korean-led projects abroad. He told the readers of DVB that Korea didn’t investigate its companies’ human rights impacts abroad because it “costs of lot of money.” It was clear enough to us that the economic calculus had never been made – they weren’t thinking about human rights at all, let alone enough to analyze a cost-benefit, as crude as it would’ve been. 

But apart from lacking a demonstrated concern for direct human rights impacts of Korean-led projects abroad, or in developing a safeguard system against lending money for potentially harmful projects, the South Korean government and its corporations also appear to be ambivalent about financing a military regime intent on illegally acquiring nuclear weapons. 

The South Korean steelmaker POSCO is the newest Korean player set to become involved. The company is currently orchestrating a multi-billion dollar takeover of Daewoo, expressing a particular interest in Daewoo’s overseas natural resource development. (Some of POSCO’s largest shareholders are American, including Warren Buffet’s Berkshire Hathaway and the Bank of New York Mellon.)

And just last week a delegation young, first term South Korean parliamentarians were in Burma and reportedly came to an agreement [8] with the junta for new onshore gas development – these are elected officials.

It’s clearer than ever that the Burmese regime is not only a threat to the people of Burma, but also to international peace and security. Perhaps now South Korea and Daewoo can be persuaded to do what they should’ve done when reports of land confiscation and other abuses connected to the Shwe project first started to filter out of Burma: Immediately postpone new gas development projects in Burma. If the sale of Daewoo International to POSCO goes through, POSCO should do the same.