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Show Slave labor and the Russian gas pipeline BY U.S. Congressman Jim Hansen President Reagan's decision to expand ex-pand the ban on the export of U.S. equipment for the construction of the Soviet natural gas pipeline to non-American non-American firms using U.S. licenses is being attacked by many Americans and Europeans as short sighted and unwise. They assert President Reagan's position posi-tion is too ideologically rigid. They claim the Europeans know what is in their best interests. The pipeline will be built anyway, so why rock the boat and harm the NATO alliance, they ask. The public debate over the Yamal natural gas pipeline from Siberia to W estern Europe has focused on three important areas: 1. The Western Europeans will become dangerously dependent on Soviet natural gas. Thus, they will be open to political blackmail. 2. The Soviets will obtain billions in hard currency for the sale of the natural gas. They will use the hard currency cur-rency to further build up their military. :i. The Western European governments govern-ments are subsidizing the loans to the Soviets. The going interest rate is over 15 percent, but the Western Europeans, in their eagerness to quickly stimulate their economies, are literally giving the Soviets loans at the ridiculously low rate of 8 percent. In essence then, the Western Europeans are underwriting the Soviets' construction of the pipeline. In a free market situation, the pipeline would never be built. Without subsidies it would not be a profit-making venture. However, another argument against the pipeline has been raised in recent Congressional hearings which, if 'true, is the most compelling argument of all-and all-and that is that "slave" labor may possibly be used to build much of the pipeline. The testimony which has been given is so unbelievable and so repulsive to freedom-loving people that it is hard' to accept. However, I believe that you will be interested in the reports and testimony which have been given, so you can make your own analysis. In recent testimony before the Senate Subcommittee on International Finance and Monetary Policy, ex-Vietnamese ex-Vietnamese government officials told how "many hundreds of thousands" of their countrymen have been 'loaned' to the Soviet Union to perform heavy labor in Siberia. Mr. Doan Van Toai, a former communist com-munist official in Vietnam, told the Subcommittee Sub-committee that most of those sent to Siberia are former South Vietnamese government officials and their families. They have been sent to Siberia as payment pay-ment for Hanoi's war debt to Moscow. An article last year in the prestigious London Economist reported that as many as 500,000 Vietnamese men, women and children have been shipped off to the Gulag in Siberia. Vietnamese officials openly admit that they have deported between 24,500 and 50,000 so-called workers to the Soviet Union. Vietnam's Minister of Labor, Dao Thiun Thi, claims that the workers are being sent to cities with warm climates in Southern Russia. However, the greatest demand for manpower is in energy-rich Siberia where temperatures range from 40 to 60 degrees below zero in the winter, and may rise to only 50 degrees in the summer. sum-mer. It is unlikely that workers accustomed ac-customed to tropical climates will survive sur-vive long under these conditions. Michael Makerenko, a Russian human rights' activist who spent eight years in Soviet forced labor camps, told the Senate Subcommittee that it would be "impossible" for the Soviets to build the Yamal pipeline with massive use of forced labor. He predicted that more than one million prisoners would die during the pipeline's construction. Makarenko's testimony was supported sup-ported by Zdzislaw Rurarz, former Polish Ambassador to Japan prior to his defection to the United States after martial law was imposed on his country. coun-try. Rurarz, an internationally known economist, said that the Soviets could not build the pipeline without slave labor and almost certainly couldn't build it without Western credits and technology. Like a black hole in outer space, light and truth are swallowed up by the totalitarian systems of the Soviet Union and Vietnam. Millions die in concentration concentra-tion camps and we in the West seldom hear of the tragedies. According to many experts, the Soviet forced labor system currently holds approximately 15 million political prisoners. Yet. most of the news of human rights' violations is concentrated on abuses by authoritarian countries in Latin America. If these reports about the use of slave labor to build the Y'amal pipeline are true, they are compelling moral arguments against its construction. When added to the other three arguments against the pipeline, the slave labor question is yet another reason to support President Reagan's pipeline sanctions. |
