– PART I –
IN an interesting development happening in Canada, Lukas Straumann of the Bruno Manser Fonds had initiated a lawsuit against a Canadian company owned by the daughter of the current Sarawak Governor, Tun Abdul Taib Mahmud.
Their allegations will be explored in a separate upcoming piece, and will be another interesting matter to expand. However, in this first part of the "Unmasking of the Real Lukas Straumann and the Bruno Manser Fonds", we will take you on a journey of discovery over what motivates people like Lukas Straumann and Bruno Manser to be so passionate about very certain minorities, but ignore others, no matter what their plights.
Below, we attach an open letter to Lukas Straumann, and we hope that he can answer us in due time. We have also posted the same message on the BMF official YouTube video of Mr Straumann
explaining the lawsuit - by his own understanding, of course - he initiated against the Canadian company,
Sakto Corporation - so that there would be no question as to Mr Straumann having knowledge of this open letter.
In this installment, we would like to highlight the contrast between Lukas Straumann's approach towards Nazi-linked Swiss companies, and his approach towards a company owned by the daughter of the Governor of Sarawak, the latter so far has not been convicted of any of the allegations that had been made by Mr Straumann, Ms Brown, and their manifest destiny organisations, BMF and Sarawak Report (SR), even after many, many years of global effort.
May they fail again.
To spare any further suspense, this story succinctly concludes with the notion that if you were a confirmed Nazi-linked Swiss company, you will get off with merely a private meeting and a short comment from Mr Straumann. Any lawsuit? No. Just a slap on the wrist and then they move on to relentlessly bother Sarawak instead - as if the State was the one with the atrocious Nazi past and all the attendant genocides and war crimes and not them. On the contrary, Sarawakians - including the Taib family are against any acts of genocide. We just can't say the same about Lukas Straumann and friends, as elaborated within the open letter attached below.
[UPDATE: October 19, 2017]
N.b., we checked again on the same YouTube video account, and found that our open letter to Lukas Straumann had not only been ignored, but duly deleted for reasons known only to themselves.
We rest our case on reaching out to Mr Straumann for any civil discussions as they are merely interested in blocking anyone who disagrees with or questions them instead of engaging in a fruitful and meaningful discussion. In fact, they would rather entertain groups of uncouth and foul-mouthed commenters on their various pages.
– The NINE QUESTIONS Panel
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AN OPEN LETTER TO LUKAS STRAUMANN
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SEPTEMBER 20, 2017
Dear Lukas Straumann,
Your interest in Sarawak issues is commendable - albeit self-serving. We wonder when will you be suing the Swiss chemical companies that were complicit with the Nazis during WWII one way or another, the case of which you investigated in
2001 (see attachment below). It is entirely baffling to see your sense of priorities, whereby given all these years you have still not taken any legal action to bring Swiss companies to justice for their profiteering from the plight and degradation of the persecuted minorities, especially the Jewish people of Europe, where Mr Straumann, a Swiss is from.
A private lawsuit is imperative in the case of Ciba AG, whereby its former Jewish owners, Syngala "wouldn't be able to sue" even as Ciba allegedly failed to complete the purchase payments. Someone such as Lukas Straumann, given the vast expanse of his passionate activism should be best positioned to fight for the former Jewish owners, or even to return it some sort of a common Jewish ownership, anything other than merely commenting, "It is from small and rare remarks like these that you deduct that there was indeed an awareness of wrongdoing", and leaving the matter to rest as if nothing ever happened. Did those lawsuits (Mr Straumann uncovered several other similar Swiss chemical companies) ever happen?
Yet, here we see Lukas Straumann, back in the private lawsuit game allegedly to restitute monies for the far-flung people of Sarawak, which they allege had been stolen and brought to Canada.
Mr Straumann, the Nazi involvement in Switzerland is more extensive than previously admitted by the Swiss, but your actions in whitewashing Nazi atrocities and later your relentless pursuit of a career in crusading faraway natives is at the very least, deeply unsettling. This is especially worrying considering that you have not spoken out - not even on one occasion - against the mistreatment of the Romas and other nomads of Europe. If you still prefer to go further afield in Asia, we don't see you speaking up against the genocide actually happening in Myanmar, where 400,000 Rohingyas have had to flee, mostly into Bangladesh.
Granted that these are actual cases of tribal persecution by the authorities, we don't see Mr Straumann bothering to lend his voice to those that actually need them. Yet, he has a strange fetish for the Penans of Sarawak, who aren't even close to experiencing such prosecutions and are in fact in the process of familiarising themselves with modern development.
What's that? The Nazis stole Jewish companies in Switzerland and this Swiss historian simply shrugs it off with merely a comment, and the Swiss would rather look further afield in Sarawak in order to save the world, or the Penans, or the Sarawakians and whatnot - and keep us in our jungle just the way they want us to?
It seems likely that Lukas prefers to whitewash Nazi Germany atrocities in Switzerland so that he can walk around pretending that they had fairly dealt with the matter, while pursuing some sort of a Revenge/Crusade/Activism project involving the peoples of Sarawak on behalf, it seems, of the Bruno Manser Fonds.
Lukas Straumann can make mountains of claims, but what they cannot deny is that Sarawak is an open developing society and anybody with a passport can visit and explore the land without restriction - other than the conventional law and order, of course.
In fact, there are thousands of Europeans and Americans - young and old - that do come and visit the Land of the Hornbills to see for themselves what Sarawak is all about behind the negative Western publicity usually churned out by the same people time and again. Mr Straumann and Clare Rewcastle Brown are partly to thank for that, certainly - although that is absolutely not their intention.
Is there a genocide or persecution against the Penan people, as alleged and hinted by the BMF this whole while? Is 90% of the forest really disappearing or has disappeared? People can choose to continue reading your propaganda, or people can choose to book the next Air Asia flight to Kuching and see for themselves.
It is not like Burma, as much as you like for people to think. :D
Contrasting the earlier point with your current lawsuit in Canada, we do think that you are still whitewashing Nazi atrocities while targeting alleged corruption cases from further afield just to have something to show in terms of your activism, and that there is a guiding hand behind your actions, which isn't exactly activism.
With that, we conclude with the Swissinfo.ch article in reference.
SWISS CHEMICAL FIRMS PUT PROFITS FIRST, STUDY FINDS -
REPORTED BY SWISSINFO.CH
December 30, 2001 –
Scrutiny of chemical firms' archives has provided key insights into the attitude of Swiss business in its dealings with the Nazis.
Switzerland's 20th century pharmaceutical giants - Ciba, Geigy, Sandoz (since merged to form Novartis) and Roche - have traditionally kept tight-lipped about their wartime past.
But that changed when the firms were ordered to open their archives to an Independent Commission of Experts (ICE), set up in 1996 to probe Switzerland's wartime past.
The study into "Swiss chemical subsidiaries in the Third Reich", by historians Lukas Straumann and Daniel Wildmann, was one of numerous studies published this year by the ICE, led by historian Jean-François Bergier.
The study reveals that the four Swiss parent companies, which were all based in Basel, had a greater control over their German subsidiaries during the period under consideration (1933 to 1945) than had hitherto been assumed.
Pressure to sack Jews
The 358-page study provides evidence that the firms did not come under Nazi pressure to sack Jews until 1938 - before that they were more or less free to employ and dismiss anyone they chose.
Nevertheless, the authors point out, Ciba, Geigy and Sandoz went out of their way as early as 1933 and 1934 to voluntarily "Aryanise" their German subsidiaries by sacking Jewish employees and replacing Jewish members of the board of directors.
Roche's subsidiary in Berlin, by contrast, only reluctantly replaced its Jewish staff, and did so only in 1938 when the Nazi regime intensified its anti-Semitic policies, allowing only "non-Jewish" companies to continue to operate.
The decisive factor in Roche's case was probably personal, the authors contend. [Roche director-general] Emil Barell had a Jewish wife, which meant that he was more sensitive to Nazi policies towards Jews than other people", Wildmann says.
Straumann adds: "We found documents in the Roche archive that describe details of Nazi 'aryanisation' policies, which proves there was an interest in the fate of Jews."
Forced to comply
Swiss enterprises have often justified their behaviour in Nazi Germany by saying they were obliged to comply with the Reich's policies as a condition of doing business.
But Wildmann's and Straumann's evidence belies such an interpretation. Roche didn't lose any business as a result of its loyalty towards Jewish employees - in fact the company boomed like no other during the war.
The report suggests that the chemical sector is particularly suited for studying the ethical standards of Swiss business as a whole during the war years.
The reason is because as a knowledge-based industry, the chemical sector had traditionally established closer ties between parent company and subsidiaries than was the case in other sectors. The industry probably also employed more Jews, especially as scientists.
The study probes other controversies surrounding the business practices of Swiss subsidiaries in Nazi Germany - their contribution to the German war-effort, their use of forced labour, and financial transfers.
German re-armament
Firms who relied on dyes and heavy chemicals, chiefly Geigy, did less well out of German re-armament and the war than subsidiaries that relied on pharmaceuticals.
Roche did particularly well thanks to its control of the German vitamin C market and its position as a major producer of opiate-based painkillers. Its sales almost trebled during the war from 8.8 million Reichmarks (roughly worth $100 million today) to 22 million Reichmarks.
Unlike other sectors, where Swiss investments in subsidiaries paid off after the war but not in the short-term, Swiss chemical firms managed to transfer large sums to Switzerland in the form of licence fees.
In addition, most of the German-based production relied on input materials from the parent company, the payments for which were also transferred freely to Switzerland.
But the most interesting aspect of the study is what the authors discovered about the moral choices faced by the companies' managers.
Polish ghetto
Wildmann tells of a situation where the management of Ciba dispatched one of its employees to track down a former client who had disappeared in the Jewish ghetto of Stenstochow, Poland - in order to recover a payment that Ciba was owed. On his return, the employee drew up a report but omitted any mention of the conditions in the ghetto.
When the Austrian drugs company Syngala was "aryanised" in 1938 and its Jewish owners forced to sell, Geigy saw an opportunity to expand into the pharmaceutical market.
Geigy agreed to buy the company from its Jewish owners, who escaped to the United States, but failed to meet all its payments.
When the issue was brought up in a boardroom discussion, Geigy's company lawyer remarked that Syngala's former owners wouldn't be able to sue. He later added to the minutes in handwriting that the point was "unimportant but worth a consideration".
"It is from small and rare remarks like these that you deduct that there was indeed an awareness of wrongdoing", Straumann says.
('Swiss Chemical Firms Put Profits First - Study Finds.' – SwissInfo.ch, December 30, 2001)
– END OF PART I –
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The NINE QUESTIONS Blog will return with more facts.
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