The Boston Tea party revisited: Massachusetts boycotts Burma.

• Author: Stumberg, Robert

A state claims the right to boycott a repressive regime. Global trading companies oppose the state - with support from the European Union. The argument started in 1767.

Do states have the right to boycott a repressive regime? Such boycotts sparked the American Revolution, and they shaped the contours of federalism that exist to this day. In 1767, the Boston Town Meeting pledged to boycott British goods. The Massachusetts legislature passed resolutions supporting the boycott and urged other colonial assemblies to join the "nonimportation" campaign.

By 1773, the boycotts succeeded in pushing back the duties on all commodities except tea. In December of that year, the East India Company attempted to unload three ships full of tea in Boston, under a favorable trade pact with the British Parliament. The colonists defended the boycott with the Boston Tea Party, perhaps history's most enduring act of political theater. In addition to opposing "taxation without representation," many New England activists saw the boycotts as withdrawal of support for commerce that depended on indentured or slave labor.

Today, the Boston federal courthouse overlooks the harbor. With some irony, federal judge Joseph Tauro ruled in November 1998 that it is now unconstitutional for Massachusetts to boycott the repressive military regime in Burma and the companies that trade or invest there. The Massachusetts law imposes a 10 percent penalty on bids for contracts with the state from companies that do business in Burma. The law's sponsor, Representative Byron Rushing of Boston, modeled it on the state's successful participation in the anti-apartheid boycotts of South Africa 20 years ago.

PUBLIC PURCHASING, PUBLIC MORALITY

The premise of the Massachusetts boycott is that when states are spending taxpayer funds, they can - and must - base their spending on standards of public morality. Reports from the U.S. Department of State and human rights organizations document the fact that the government of Burma (which calls itself "Myanmar") systematically violates the standards of international human rights agreements with:

* Political repression. When the military government of Burma lost more than 80 percent of the seats in parliament to the National League for Democracy in 1990, it repudiated the election and began closing NLD offices and jailing the party's legislators. The government has waged war against rural ethnic minorities, who supported the NLD commitment to create a federal system with regional self-government.

* Forced labor. Burma is building its commercial infrastructure with labor forced at the point of a gun. In the previous decade, more than 5.5 million people have been forced to work on construction of airport runways, railroads, highways and agricultural irrigation systems. Seven percent of Burma's economy is based on this slavery.

* Rape and brutality. The most common form of forced labor is military portering. Even old people, women and teenagers are required to carry...