August 19: Bangkok: With Myanmar’s sought-after energy production set to take off, nations in both the East and West are stepping up their condemnation of the junta-run nation but quietly doing lucrative business with the generals.

This past week, Myanmar reported it would be upping its natural gas exports to Thailand and could raise production from just one field by 25 percent.

“Over the long term this is going to increase,” Vichitr Kuladejkhuna, an energy analyst with DBS Vickers Securities, said Friday. “There is significant potential for future development.”

Thailand joined in the chorus of tougher criticism leveled at Myanmar when Southeast Asian leaders and politicians gathered at regional conferences last month.

But barely a week later, Thai Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra paid a quiet visit to the country to meet the pariah regime’s supreme leader, Gen. Than Shwe, and asked for rights to develop its natural gas reserves.

For some this illustrates a conundrum. While the ruling military junta has brutally repressed political dissent and keeps pro-democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi in detention, the country also possesses an abundance of natural resources.

“You have this political lip service to the world,” said Asda Jayanama, Thailand’s former ambassador to the United Nations, speaking of the challenge Myanmar presents to the Thai leadership.

“We’re for democratization, we’re going to tell Than Shwe to let Suu Kyi out … (but) what decides our relationship with Myanmar is our economic interests,” Asda told The Associated Press.

As the U.S. and Europe exert more pressure on the Association of Southeast Asian Nations to reform Myanmar, also known as Burma, dignitaries took swipes at their troubled neighbor during the organization’s annual forum, held last month in Malaysia.

Malaysian Foreign Minister Syed Hamid Albar wrote in a Wall Street Journal column during the conference that it was no longer “possible to defend” the regime that threatens “ASEAN’s credibility and image.”

A statement issued by an ASEAN inter-parliamentary caucus composed of representatives from Malaysia, Indonesia, the Philippines, Singapore and Thailand called the regime “illegitimate” and an “embarrassment to its neighbors.”

But all the sharp rhetoric has done little to curb the business deals that activists claim enrich and empower the generals.

Two weeks after the ASEAN conference, Malaysia’s energy giant, Petroliam Berhard (Petronas), signed a memorandum of intent to cooperate with Myanmar on projects in the oil and gas industry, the Myanmar government reported.

But ASEAN is not alone.

Despite sanctions by the European Union and the U.S., French and American oil companies Total and Chevron continue to operate in Myanmar’s lucrative Yadana gas fields. Other Western nations make investment and engage in trade with Yangon.

And earlier this year Thailand’s MDX Group signed a US$6 million (euro4.7 million) contract to build a dam in Myanmar’s Shan State that will supply Thailand with electricity. The dam is one of five planned within Myanmar along the 2,800-kilometer (1,740-mile) Salween River. Environmentalists say the development will ravage a delicate ecosystem and activists say it threatens the existence of numerous marginalized ethnic groups.

But Thailand claims its policy of “constructive engagement” is helping speed Myanmar toward democratic and economic reforms by bringing it into the international community.

“Most of the cooperation programs we have with them go down to the grass roots. It involves local people, it involves local well-being. I think that would contribute not only to economic prosperity, but national reconciliation,” said Thailand’s Foreign Ministry spokesman, Kitti Wasinondh.

Not so, according to the group Karen Rivers Watch, which says the Myanmar military is currently engaged in an offensive that has already driven thousands of ethnic Karen from their homes, in part to open up the area for the building of the dams.

“Of all the business that is going into Burma … the amount that goes toward the health and education of the people is pathetic. Most of it just goes to the military junta and helps to strengthen their military power,” said Ka Hsaw Wa, the executive director of EarthRights International, a nonprofit group that documents human rights and environmental abuses.

“Clearly what many governments and corporations say and what they practice are completely different things,” he added.