Shahid Bolsen discusses the #WeAreAllRohingyaNow campaign

We need to broaden the meaning of social responsibility to include how corporations use their economic and political power.

In 2017, Shahid Bolson began working with the We Are All Rohingya Now campaign founded by Jamila Hanaan and a collective of activists.

Multinational corporations have enormous power and influence over state policy. Any company that commits itself to help resolve this issue will see its value in the market increase, and any company that remains silent will damage its reputation.

They began pioneering a strategy of lobbying multinational corporations to use their investments in Myanmar to pressure the government to halt the genocide.

We need to include the extent to which a company is responsive to the concerns and reflects the values of the populations that form their consumer constituencies. You have to speak in the language of the internal logic of a corporation. That means that you have to impact their bottom line. They will begin to understand that the that the democratization of their political influence will be a crucial element in their own profitability. This is the basic strategy and philosophy behind the We Are All Rohingya Now campaign.

It grew out of my connection with Jamila Hanan based in The UK. She's been involved in the Rohingya issue for many years and done tremendous work. We're reaching out to major western multinational corporations who are invested in Myanmar, and we're asking them to take a public stand in support of the Rohingya. A positive stance by major companies, of course, will itself have a ripple effect, potentially impacting the positions of governments, media coverage, of course, and the general dialogue about the issue. Once we've gotten enough companies to take a stand, we can leverage their public statements to pressure them to take more proactive steps.

Now we're not taking the conventional sort of adversarial approach, ultimatums and threats and this sort of thing. We refer to what we do as outreach, not pressure. We tell them, we want your business to succeed. We want you to do well. We want you to profit, But it's a bad business decision to be quiet about genocide, particularly in this region.

These companies are investing in Myanmar because they want to penetrate the regional market. They want to increase their market share in the ASEAN region. This is putting them in a catch 22 situation. This is our argument. It's putting them in a catch 22 situation because they're investing in Myanmar so that they can increase their market share in this region.

But by investing in Myanmar, they potentially are alienating the market in this region. We inaugurated the campaign by approaching Unilever. Again, the third largest consumer goods company in the world. It's massive. Our choice of Unilever was quite calculated because it's a company that has experienced several scandals in the past, and they've become highly sensitive about their public image in terms of social responsibility.

They also are focusing on their business expansion plans, focusing on their developing markets, called, particularly in Asia. We contacted Paul Pullman, the CEO of Unilever, and he responded almost immediately. It shows how sensitive they are. He basically told us, think that Unilever has done enough as a company on this issue, and we would like you to go away and bother someone else. We didn't.

We campaigned on through social media, basically calling on Unilever to walk the walk that they had talked. Live up to what you say publicly about your commitment to these issues. And because in December, Paul Pullman signed a letter of concern on the Rohingya issue along with several Nobel laureates and also Richard Branson. But he signed it as Paul Pullman business leader, not as a representative of Unilever. No doubt that was he was required to say that.

The the marketing department of Unilever would not allow him to put Unilever's name on that statement. Well, as a direct result of our campaigning, Unilever did issue a statement pledging their firm support for the protection of the Rohingya and their commitment to the United Nations recommendations for resolving the conflict.

Yesterday, Paul Pullman took a very exemplary and honorable stand in support of the Rohingya and have brought us one step closer to ending the genocide in Myanmar. He took the bold step of joining the we are all Rohingya now hashtag on Twitter, made a very good statement in support of the Rohingya, and signaled his support for our campaign. When the United Nations speaks or when heads of state speak, as we have seen, the government in Myanmar can ignore them. This is because, foreign direct investment continues to flow into the country. When they speak, they speak without consequence.

Their statements, have no impact on the behavior of the private sector. When someone like Paul Pullman speaks, no one can ignore that. Unilever has a bigger budget than the United Nations. They have a tremendous amount of money invested in Myanmar. The decisions that Paul Pullman or someone like Paul Pullman makes, have a direct impact on the economy of Myanmar and the stability of the regime, and, it's likely that other business leaders from around the world will follow the lead of someone like Paul Pullman.

We have to show Unilever shareholders and their board of directors that what Paul Pullman did is not only good from a moral perspective, but from a business perspective. That means that we have to help increase their revenues. We have to try to get their share prices up. We have to see to it that their next quarterly report will show a spike in revenues directly connected to Paul Bowman's statement. This is how we can recruit corporate power to support peace and justice and the issues that we care about, and this is how we can, inshallah, bring an end to the genocide in Myanmar.

They align themselves as a company to the right side of this issue. That was a a massive victory. Later down the line, we're going to be able to use that public statement, that public commitment to entice them to take more proactive steps, inshallah. We're not asking companies to leave Burma. We're not asking them to leave Myanmar.

We want them to stay there. If they leave, if they withdraw, they will be replaced by companies from China, from Singapore, and it will be much more difficult for us to influence those companies. We're also using both a negative and a positive approach, incentive. It's not just, you know, do what we say or we're going to boycott you. We want to be able to deliver or to deny a company customer loyalty.

Companies are designed to deal with challenges in the market. They're designed to deal with competition. And when you penalize them, boycott or something like this, essentially, what you're doing is just creating a kind of ghost competitor to their company and causing them to lose customers, you know, any assortment of other companies, any company other than theirs. When someone is rewarded for doing something, they will continue to do it because they want to get the reward, because the reward is reliable, the reward is known that they want to get it, so they will continue to do it because they want the reward. Companies operate the same way.

If you reward them for their behavior, there's no reason why they will change that behavior. They have a reliable way of boosting their profits. They're not gonna jeopardize that. So rewarding a company is an essential element of changing their behavior. It's an essential strategy for changing their behavior.

So if they are actually taking positions that are reflective of your interest and your concerns, buy their things. After Unilever, we moved on to Norwegian telecom company Telenor. They sort they sort of try to present themselves as very concerned about social responsibility. The CEO did not respond. No one from the social responsibility depart department responded except to actually block some of our activists on Twitter.

Has actually even taken some steps that were quite negative. They initiated an educational program in Myanmar that is being carried out through the monastic schools, through the Buddhist monastic schools, essentially excluding religious and ethnic minorities from being able to participate in this program, essentially aligning themselves with the divisive elements and the divisive agenda of the government. They own Digi, the telecom here in Malaysia, Digi. We have now escalated to the point of asking people to switch their telecom provider to dump Digi so that we we hope that by the next financial quarter statement, they will see the impact. In October, we'll be able to see the results of any organizing or mobilization that we're able to do in terms of getting people to change from Digi.

That October, however, just as the campaign was ramping up its efforts to engage with Telenor and other multinationals, an armed group calling themselves the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army carried out an attack against a military check point in Myanmar, thereby changing the whole dynamic of the Rohingya crisis and the viability of continuing the campaign to recruit corporate cooperation.

And he made the brilliant statement that if the government didn't give them their rights, were willing to fight until basically the last of the Rohingya are slaughtered. You're willing to, what, facilitate the genocide going hand in hand with the plans of the military to slaughter the population? We ask actually and we call upon all Rohingya organizations to condemn this and to turn away from violence. Believe me, if the Rohingya issue turns into an armed insurgency of any kind, international support, international help is going to fade away very quickly. The We All Rohingya Now campaign will certainly be disbanded, and I can't imagine that anyone is going to want to be involved with that struggle anymore if it becomes violent.

He goes later on to say in the interview that Su Ki should do something about their situation, but she's afraid to do anything about the situation because if she does anything, then the army will do something against her. Well, we know that. That's why with our campaign, we're not appealing to her or anyone in the government. We, in our campaign, are appealing to reaching out to multinational corporations to whom the military cannot say no, whose influence and power exceeds that of the military, and whom the military needs whom the military needs, whom the regime needs, whom the government needs desperately. We're appealing to them and we're reaching out to them so that we can help to find a solution to this problem.

With the emergence of armed groups among the Rohingya, Bolson made the difficult decision to distance himself from the cause as he firmly rejects violence as a means for change.

It was disappointing to say the least. I mean, we'll never know what might have been accomplished using that strategy and what the campaign could have potentially achieved. Not only for actually helping to resolve the situation in Myanmar for the Rohingya, but also for actually, you know, establishing a workable and successful strategy of democratizing corporate influence, democratizing corporate power. I didn't really see that there was any other option. I mean, once you once you open that artillery box, it's a Pandora's box.

And, you know, foreign intelligence, dodgy financiers, money laundering, terrorism, all sorts of things come out of the woodwork. And you can't really trust the cause itself anymore and the people who are at the forefront of of the cause. You can't trust it anymore because you don't know who they're really working for and what their motives are and you know even authentic information is hard to come by as to what the situation is on the ground because they they now have an interest in a certain type of propaganda. And obviously, you know, for this campaign and for this strategy of engaging with corporations, this is the last thing that corporations want. So they're looking for any excuse, for any reason to delegitimize you, to discredit you, and to get you off their back.

So as soon as a conflict becomes violent and it you know, obviously, the conflict in in Myanmar was already violent, but it was one-sided violence, which is bad enough, obviously. But the fact that it's one-sided violence and the fact that the Rohingya were exclusively victims, it makes them sympathetic, obviously, and it makes it uncontroversial to support them for, you know, a mainstream multinational corporation. A multinational corporation does not want to be seen supporting a cause that can be accused of being associated with terrorism or terrorists. Obviously, you you completely lose any chance of corporations working with you. Because they themselves I mean, you you could you could easily get accused of financing terrorism, of funding terrorism, of being associated, or give providing material support to terrorists.

So nobody wants to be involved in something like that. As soon as it becomes violent, everybody needs to distance themselves. And it doesn't even matter. It's, you know, it was very disappointing to me because a lot of the Rohingya advocacy people and human rights organizations and whatnot who are supporting the Rohingya refused to condemn ARSA and what ARSA was doing on the basis of the right of self defense. Okay.

Sure. Everyone knows you have a right to defend yourself. Everyone knows what the rationale is, what the justification is for the creation of a group like ARSA and their rationale behind, armed struggle. Everybody knows and understands that. But because you have the right to do something doesn't mean it's the right thing to do.

And in this case, it was definitely not the right thing to do in my opinion. I mean, it certainly hasn't worked, has it? Certainly hasn't made the situation better, has it? So, you know, you didn't help anything, you didn't solve any problems, you didn't defend anybody, you haven't saved anybody by by doing this. You have completely crippled the ability of activists and organizers and human rights organizations and NGOs to practically support you.

And obviously, one of those was our campaign. It was you know, as soon as as soon as it becomes a violent and armed struggle and armed conflict and armed resistance, there's nothing that we can do anymore because you you we've completely lost any ability to stand in front of a CEO or a board of directors and ask them, for support when your cause is now also being advocated by what could be regarded as terrorists. It's not fair, but that's the way it is. So we'll never know what could have happened, what could have been accomplished, but I still believe in this strategy. It could still even potentially be applied in the case of the Rohingya, but I think it can be applied in almost any type of a scenario because, again, what I've talked about many times, the real power structure is a corporate power structure.

The real power in society is in the private sector, not in the government sector, not in the public sector, in most countries, certainly in the West. And so if you wanna have any influence over policy, if you wanna have any influence in the society, then you need to recruit corporate power, and you need to democratize corporate power by one way or another, and you need to redirect your political activism away from the public sector and start focusing on the private sector. I don't really see any other way that you can, accomplish anything meaningful.