Episode #169: Leaving On A Jet Plane
Back in 2021, we aired an interview with Pyae Phyo Kyaw, a Mandalay-based doctor who set up a mobile medical clinic in Karenni state. During that discussion, he described the first time he experienced an airstrike.
“I had never heard any explosion, before the coup,” he recalled. “When I first heard this explosion, I was restless and really afraid, and I couldn't sleep at all! I walked back and forth, back and forth, and I was really nervous. I was so afraid that would it fall all over me. I prepared my packages, and I just walked around the camp.”
Since then, the military has only ramped up its air assaults across the country; the terror and helplessness that Phae Phyo Kyaw faced continues unabated for millions. Indeed, airstrikes are the primary cause for displacement since the coup. But while the Burmese population can do little to escape an approaching air attack, some activists and researchers outside the country have begun to look into how the military’s use of this weapon of terror can be curtailed.
“The only way you can power a fighter jet is with aviation fuel, it’s as simple as that,” Montse Ferrer explains. “So in order to minimize the ability of the Myanmar military to conduct such airstrikes, many of which are unlawful and have caused terrible impacts on communities, [we need to limit] the ability of these airstrikes to be conducted by the Myanmar military.”
As Amnesty International’s Interim Deputy Regional Director for Research in the Asia and Pacific, Ferrer has been on a mission to discover the secret of how jet fuel is getting into the country, and recently published a report on her findings.
Because Myanmar does not have the technology to refine crude oil into international grade aviation fuel, the military’s fighter jets need outside access to it in order to fly. However, unlike weapons, which can only be used for destructive purposes and are subject to trade restrictions, jet fuel is known as a “dual use” good; commercial and other non-military flights also rely on it. So it can be tricky to tease apart these two supply chains. Ferrer notes that although fighter jets perform better using a higher grade fuel, they can mostly manage on commercial fuel, which makes the issue more challenging to untangle.
However, Ferrer and her team realized that because jet fuel is a legal commodity, that is something that can be used to their advantage in trying to figure out how the flow of jet fuel eventually reaches the Burmese military, since the movement of legal goods across borders leaves a clear paper trail. So Amnesty went about tracking every shipment of jet fuel that has arrived following the coup; they found that most of them departed via Singapore, and arrived at the Thilawa Port in Than Lyin outside of Yangon.
This enabled them to further tease apart the complex thread. They found that Puma Energy is by far the most important player in this trade route. Puma Energy, in turn, is owned by Trafigura, one of the world’s largest independent oil and petroleum products traders. It turns out that Trafigura benefited from an exclusive contract some years ago to update—and in some cases create—Myanmar’s ports infrastructure; this included Thilawa. In return, Trafigura was given the sole rights to import jet fuel into the country, and as noted above, this trade is mainly funneled through Thilawa. Moreover, the fuel is transported from there by affiliates at Puma Energy…who are linked to the military regime.
Ferrer explains that shipments of fuel into Thilawa are not separated according to military or civilian use, but rather kept in a shared facility. From there, it is then diverted to either a commercial or military use as needed. So in essence, it is virtually impossible to cut off jet fuel to the military without also significantly limiting the country’s non-military air traffic. For their part, the energy companies claim they are selling their product legally, and have no prior knowledge of, and certainly no control over, the military’s decisions to use any particular shipment of fuel in whatever manner it chooses. In other words, Ferrer explains, “Whoever was requesting aviation fuel was not telling this the supplier, ‘Hey, by the way, when it gets here, we're going to use it for the military!’” And by the letter of the law, they are correct.
However, Ferrer is skeptical that oil company executives are not following latest international headlines at least to some degree. She believes they likely do have some sense of how much devastation the Tatmadaw’s airstrikes are causing in Myanmar, and it’s not like they couldn’t connect the dots in their head, that it’s their own fuel that the Burmese military is using. Still, legally speaking, it is an uphill battle. “There are no obligations for companies to conduct human rights due diligence,” she says sadly. “So a company can say, ‘Oops, I didn't know.’ And that's it! That's the end of the story. Unless you can show that this company intended for the ultimate outcome, this company is off the hook.”
However, Ferrer notes how suspecting something to be true and proving it in a court of law are two different things. “You need to prove something called linkage,” she says, “For example, the sale of Shipment Eight, whatever, actually is linked to a war crime! Linkage is always very hard.” Beyond this, there has to be clear evidence of intent as well. “By mental state, we're talking about intent. Did the company, when it sold these goods, intend for there to be a crime at the end of the supply chain? Did it intend to sell aviation fuel, knowing that it would be used to commit war crimes? So it's an extremely high bar!”
And the complexity doesn't end here! Amnesty found that a single shipment might include the product of up to twenty different oil companies; then there is the vessel, itself, which is owned and operated by a different set of corporations. And beyond the actual business of transporting the goods, Ferrer highlights the insurance covering the shipments. “There will be nothing moving… without that good, and the means of transportation, being insured. But no one really talks about insurance,” she notes. “If you take out insurance, nothing happens… I do believe that as an industry, the role that insurance plays is much larger than the public as a whole has acknowledged.” Taken together, Amnesty’s report indicates that over 100 different companies are involved in some way in the transit of jet fuel to Thilawa!
Activists have long looked into the possibility of sanctions, but Ferrer described the challenge with that. “There is a hesitancy to place sanctions that could have impacts on people in Myanmar,” Ferrer notes, referring to the role that jet fuel plays in the commercial and even humanitarian sectors. “And to put it in a different way, there is hesitancy to impose any sanctions that could have an impact… on US interests. And that's true of any sanctions regime.”
Ferrer explains that sanctions are always evaluated very carefully by the international community as to their possible “unintended consequences,” and says that it takes enormous political will to proceed accordingly. While rare, this does happen, such as the European countries that have accepted higher energy costs in their support of Ukraine. “Unfortunately, there is no such political will in Myanmar,” she explains. “There isn't a willingness to take action the same way that there is in other contexts.”
However, there are signs of hope. Ferrer notes that, amazingly, most of the companies named in their report have not taken part in further shipments of jet fuel to Myanmar. “They were not repeat offenders,” she says. While she can’t uncover what exactly drove their decision, she explains how companies typically weigh profit against legal consequences and reputational risk. In this particular case, it’s likely that at the end of the day, for many of them, it simply wasn’t worth the cost of business.
That said, Ferrer can’t conclusively affirm that any less jet fuel is entering the country. And given the large stockpiles of fuel that the military likely has access to, one can’t even speculate that their ability to launch airstrikes has decreased in any appreciable way. All she knows for certain is that the ability to acquire fuel has now become slightly more difficult for the Tatmadaw, and that they may need to begin thinking about rationing it.
“There's a massive human factor here,” she says in closing. “At the end of this very technical supply chain is a massive displacement of communities, families broken down and a lot of death and a lot of injuries. And a lot of misery.”