The United Nations Secretary General’s Special Envoy to Myanmar, former Australian foreign minister Julie Bishop, is in hot water for an alleged conflict of interest that has undermined the credibility of her human rights-protecting mission in Myanmar.
The scandal centers on Bishop and her consultancy firm, Julie Bishop & Partners, which recently accepted an engagement to provide strategic advice, stakeholder engagement and government relations to Australian firm Energy Transition Minerals (ETM) in a dispute with Greenland over a massive stalled uranium mining project.
The announcement of engagement was first made on January 13 in an ETM statement. Australia’s The Saturday Paper first reported on Bishop’s involvement on March 8.
The following day, the Justice for Myanmar (J4M) research group issued a statement criticizing the engagement with ETM as a conflict of interest, in part because of ETM’s business partnership with Chinese firm Shenghe Resources.
Shanghe Resources is a top backer of the said uranium venture and is “connected to various wings of the Chinese government,” according to The Saturday Paper report.
ETM announced in early 2019 that Shenghe Resources and the state-owned China National Nuclear Corporation (CNNC) – which is designated by the US Department of Defense as one of its listed “Communist Chinese military companies” – had co-invested in processing facilities for treatment of imported rare earth minerals in China, the same report said.
Any Bishop involvement with a Chinese business entity is necessarily a conflict of interest when Beijing is also supplying Myanmar’s State Administration Council (SAC) junta with weapons and is a major investor in Myanmar, including in mining ventures, a core interest of Bishop’s advisory firm.
The UN’s own Ethics Office defines conflict of interest as “when our private interests, such as outside relationships or financial assets, interfere-or appear to interfere-with the interests of the UN…(and that)…in the performance of our duties, may not seek or receive instructions or make representations on behalf of any Government, person, entity or cause external to the United Nations.”
This would suggest a conflict of interest exists between Bishop’s role as a UN envoy and her private work for an Australian energy company, even if the ETM case doesn’t directly involve Myanmar.
Perceptions of conflict of interest obviously vary; elites are always cloaked in entitlement and shielded by lawyers. A thorough and transparent investigation into the potential conflict of interest would be the professionally prudent move by the UN.
Bishop’s immediate resignation, if for no other reason the poor optics, would be the decent move. If Bishop is so profit-driven, then perhaps special envoy to Myanmar isn’t the right fit at the current time.
Bishop was appointed as UN Secretary General Special Envoy by António Guterres on April 5, 2024, after a gap of nearly nine months when her predecessor, Noeleen Heyzer, was dumped from the job.
From the start, the special envoy to Myanmar role was a part-time capacity, as Bishop also retained her position as chancellor of the Australian National University (ANU).
Still, Bishop’s selection was not without controversy, partly because of her involvement in granting tens of millions of contracts to aid contractor Palladium during her tenure as Australian foreign minister. She joined the company’s board just four months after leaving office.
The Australian Financial Review reported in late February that Bishop was also under scrutiny for her role in granting ANU contracts to Vinder Consulting, run by her former chief of staff Murray Hansen, who also works at Julie Bishop & Partners.
The chancellor’s official office in Perth, Bishop’s hometown, was renovated at a cost of AU$800,000 (US$503,662), with a monthly rent of AUS$15,000, and the two official ANU staff there are also employees of Julie Bishop & Partners. The ANU is in Canberra, 3,000 kilometers away.
It is not just the advisory scandal that makes Bishop no longer fit to serve as special envoy. Her attention wasn’t exactly seized by her brief, as it is just one of her several part-time roles, probably to position herself for a plum post-Guterres position in the UN.
Even if part-time, Bishop hasn’t exactly been idle, visiting key regional capitals and engaging in “multi-stakeholder” meetings for several months. It’s whether she has been effective that counts.
That won’t be easy to discern with the SAC’s stonewalling, and the Myanmar military’s 30 years of manipulating the UN and all the plenipotentiaries they dispatch.
Bishop visited Rohingya refugee camps in Bangladesh in recent weeks, followed soon after by the UN’s secretary general, to address the alarming humanitarian impact of slashed international aid to one million people there.
This dilemma, like all of Myanmar, probably deserves someone more “seized” of the matter than being distracted by a legal dispute over uranium mining in league with a Chinese firm in Greenland.
There are two equally important questions that arise from Bishop’s potential conflict of interest. First, why have a UN special envoy to Myanmar anyway? The gains of the so-called “good offices” efforts of special envoys over 30 years have been patchy, at best.
Bishop is the seventh envoy since 1995, coming on board at a time when international diplomacy on Myanmar writ large is widely discredited.
The failure of the Association of South East Asian Nations’ (ASEAN) Five-Point Consensus (5PC) is the most glaring deficit, but so too are all the efforts dedicated to pushing that ‘consensus’ and ASEAN’s lead.
Given the huge financial impact on people in need in Myanmar, why should millions of dollars be squandered on an envoy secretariat of several staffers who have been as equally ineffectual as their boss? Flogging a dead horse doesn’t even come close to describing the collective international diplomatic betrayal of Myanmar.
And second, what role has external diplomacy and solution-plotting played in solving Myanmar’s crisis? What success can be gleaned in public?
What can be seen is growing violence inside the country, complicated patchworks of various revolutionary alliances, ethnic armed organizations (EAOs) in China’s thrall and an opposition National Unity Government (NUG) obsessed with a Western windfall that just won’t come.
All the twilight secretive initiatives funded by various Western donors, diplomacy and conflict mediation have arguably been a reprehensible waste of funding and time.
The Bishop scandal provides impetus for Myanmar civil society, NUG and EAO leaders, and other resistance political organizations to demand a full accounting of foreign-led and financed mediation efforts.
Those various 290 organizations, J4M, the independent Myanmar media and civil society organizations engaged in peacebuilding should all demand answers from all those involved as to what they are actually achieving, and how that financial support can be better directed to assist Myanmar people in need.
This should be straightforward, as many of the organizations and individuals that were operating during the 2010-2020 political “transition”, advising Aung San Suu Kyi and her National League for Democracy (NLD), have been strategic advisors to the NUG and pro-Western EAOs such as the Karen National Union (KNU) and Karenni National Progressive Party (KNPP) since the 2021 military coup.
The people of Myanmar deserve to know what solutions in their name are being hatched by secretive, unaccountable and clearly ineffectual foreign “experts.”
Convening the same people, Myanmar intellectuals, Western plotters, NUG operators and the same Western-leaning EAO leaders or their “front persons” for four years has produced no gains.
It’s like being forced to watch reruns of a bad sitcom. NUG diplomacy has unfortunately failed, regardless of how many workshops Foreign Minister Zin Mar Aung attends.
The Center for Peace and Conflict Studies (CPCS) holds clandestine workshops in Siem Reap, Cambodia, but if they are having any meaningful impact, it’s a very well-kept secret.
A less charitable interpretation would call them a waste of time and money that could be going to urgently needed health care and humanitarian assistance in conflict areas.
This is no longer a matter of opinion. In the wake of the USAID cuts, the revolutionary complex can no longer afford specious exercises in solutions seeking.
The plethora of NUG advisors, such as the British scholar Michael Maret-Crosby, or activist Igor Blaževič, are arguably motivated by good, and should in no way be compared to Bishop, but their actual impact on Myanmar’s revolutionary progress is minimal at best.
They, and a host of others working behind the scenes, are likely impediments to urgently needed momentum and reform.
One of the other secretive outfits involved in behind-the-scenes maneuverings in Myanmar, Finland’s CMI (the Martti Ahtisaari Peace Foundation), had until recently “Make Peace Your Business” as its website’s slogan.
Bishop, as do so many others, likely understands that message well. Pretending to pursue peace can be good for business. But it certainly isn’t benefiting the people of Myanmar.
David Scott Mathieson is an independent analyst working on conflict, humanitarian, and human rights issues on Myanmar.
OMG Julie Bishop, Australia’s own Ursula VDL. Failing upwards