EU cancels visit after request to meet Suu Kyi denied
Monday, 28 June 2010 21:48 Perry Santanachote
Chiang Mai (Mizzima) – A scheduled European Union high-level visit to Burma was cancelled recently after the Burmese ruling junta denied a request from the EU Presidency Council to meet pro-democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi.
German ambassador to Burma, Julius Georg Luy, representing the EU presidency currently held by Spain, had on June 15 asked State Peace and Development Council (SPDC) Foreign Affairs Minister Nyan Win in Naypyidaw for a meeting with Suu Kyi, the world’s most well-known political prisoner. It was to be part of a high-level EU visit but the junta declined the request, months ahead of its as yet unscheduled elections.
The SPDC is the Burmese ruling junta’s self-styled title.
“I cannot comment whether the meeting’s been cancelled because of [the] SPDC’s refusal to allow access to Aung San Suu Kyi or other reasons,” EU regional delegation spokeswoman Suvi Seppalainen said.
She added that the high-level meeting would not take place during the Spanish presidency of the EU, which ends on Wednesday, but was unable to speculate whether it would be tabled again. She was also without the agenda for the proposed meeting and had no knowledge of what was to be discussed with Suu Kyi.
“I think it’s quite clear why it would be high on their wish list to meet with ‘The Lady’ herself,” she said. “But unfortunately this request was not transferred [sic] by the government.”
The junta’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs could not be reached for comment.
In response to the junta’s decision to bar EU access to Suu Kyi, the National Council of the Union of Burma (NCUB), a coalition of Burmese pro-democracy groups and political dissidents, released a statement condemning the military regime.
The council’s joint general secretary No.1, Myint Thein of the National League for Democracy (Liberated Area), called upon the EU to reaffirm international demands and denounce the junta’s upcoming election and its results.
“They still don’t have any plans to release Daw Aung San Suu Kyi and the other political prisoners,” he said of the military regime. “They have refused proposals from all world leaders to release her and have dialogue.”
Myint Thein said the election would neither be free nor fair and that the military had repeatedly refused to take any steps towards changing the political situation in Burma. For those reasons he called on the international community, including the EU, to take a stronger stance against the junta. However the EU is not yet talking about rejecting any election results.
“That would be premature,” Seppalainen said, adding however that the EU was standing its ground. “We’ve been calling for free and fair elections; this has been the EU line for a while and this has not changed.”
Nobel Peace laureate Suu Kyi remains under house arrest after spending around 15 of the past 21 years held by the Burmese junta in various forms of detention. Her National League for Democracy Party won the last elections in 1990 by a landslide but the junta refused to allow the party to form a government and jailed many NLD members.
The party on May 6 was declared illegal and disbanded by the ruling military junta after the NLD chose not to re-register for upcoming elections under electoral laws it deemed unfair and unjust as they were targetted to exclude anyone serving a prison sentence, automatically excluding the party’s leader and imprisoned members.
Monday, 28 June 2010 21:48 Perry Santanachote
Chiang Mai (Mizzima) – A scheduled European Union high-level visit to Burma was cancelled recently after the Burmese ruling junta denied a request from the EU Presidency Council to meet pro-democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi.
German ambassador to Burma, Julius Georg Luy, representing the EU presidency currently held by Spain, had on June 15 asked State Peace and Development Council (SPDC) Foreign Affairs Minister Nyan Win in Naypyidaw for a meeting with Suu Kyi, the world’s most well-known political prisoner. It was to be part of a high-level EU visit but the junta declined the request, months ahead of its as yet unscheduled elections.
The SPDC is the Burmese ruling junta’s self-styled title.
“I cannot comment whether the meeting’s been cancelled because of [the] SPDC’s refusal to allow access to Aung San Suu Kyi or other reasons,” EU regional delegation spokeswoman Suvi Seppalainen said.
She added that the high-level meeting would not take place during the Spanish presidency of the EU, which ends on Wednesday, but was unable to speculate whether it would be tabled again. She was also without the agenda for the proposed meeting and had no knowledge of what was to be discussed with Suu Kyi.
“I think it’s quite clear why it would be high on their wish list to meet with ‘The Lady’ herself,” she said. “But unfortunately this request was not transferred [sic] by the government.”
The junta’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs could not be reached for comment.
In response to the junta’s decision to bar EU access to Suu Kyi, the National Council of the Union of Burma (NCUB), a coalition of Burmese pro-democracy groups and political dissidents, released a statement condemning the military regime.
The council’s joint general secretary No.1, Myint Thein of the National League for Democracy (Liberated Area), called upon the EU to reaffirm international demands and denounce the junta’s upcoming election and its results.
“They still don’t have any plans to release Daw Aung San Suu Kyi and the other political prisoners,” he said of the military regime. “They have refused proposals from all world leaders to release her and have dialogue.”
Myint Thein said the election would neither be free nor fair and that the military had repeatedly refused to take any steps towards changing the political situation in Burma. For those reasons he called on the international community, including the EU, to take a stronger stance against the junta. However the EU is not yet talking about rejecting any election results.
“That would be premature,” Seppalainen said, adding however that the EU was standing its ground. “We’ve been calling for free and fair elections; this has been the EU line for a while and this has not changed.”
Nobel Peace laureate Suu Kyi remains under house arrest after spending around 15 of the past 21 years held by the Burmese junta in various forms of detention. Her National League for Democracy Party won the last elections in 1990 by a landslide but the junta refused to allow the party to form a government and jailed many NLD members.
The party on May 6 was declared illegal and disbanded by the ruling military junta after the NLD chose not to re-register for upcoming elections under electoral laws it deemed unfair and unjust as they were targetted to exclude anyone serving a prison sentence, automatically excluding the party’s leader and imprisoned members.
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The New Statesman - A light won’t go out in Burma
Peter Popham
Published 28 June 2010
Her party has been dissolved, and she is banned from taking part in this year’s Burmese elections. But Aung San Suu Kyi, at the age of 65, remains the most potent force fighting to preserve the opposition in her country.
Suddenly she has begun to look her age. Aung San Suu Kyi was nearly 45 when her party won a landslide victory in Burma's historic general election of 1990, but she looked 15 years younger. Despite years of privation and isolation inside her disintegrating lakeside villa on University Avenue in Rangoon, she continued to look far younger than she was. But last November, when she was photographed arriving for a meeting at a Rangoon hotel with President Obama's assistant secretary of state Kurt Campbell, she looked a woman of a certain age.
Daw Aung San Suu Kyi - daw is the Burmese honorific for an older woman - turned 65 on 19 June. If it was a less dismal occasion than her 64th, which she spent in Rangoon's huge, British-built Insein Prison, while awaiting trial for allowing a deluded American called John Yettaw (who had swum across Lake Inya using home-made wooden flippers) to spend two nights in her home, her personal and political prospects were scarcely less gloomy.
The good news: the military regime, led by Senior General Than Shwe, is committed to holding a general election before the end of the year. It will be the first since 1990, when Aung San Suu Kyi's party, the National League for Democracy (NLD), won the vote by an overwhelming margin - a victory that the regime ignored. The bad news: there is no chance of that result being repeated this time. The NLD, the most important organised opposition force in Burma, will not be participating.
One of the rules of this election is that parties whose membership includes political prisoners are barred from registering. The NLD was faced with the obligation of expelling its leader and more than 400 members who are still in prison. Aung San Suu Kyi made it clear that taking part on such terms was unthinkable. She wanted party members to know that, should they participate in the election, "the party would have no dignity", her lawyer and spokesman Nyan Win said. After a painful debate, the NLD agreed with her assessment. When the 6 May deadline passed, it became a non-party, a political phantom.
Since her victory in Burma's first multiparty elections in 30 years in 1990, and particularly since she was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize the following year, Aung San Suu Kyi has become, to the west, the symbol of opposition. Now the caprice of the regime has robbed her of that automatic primacy. Inside Burma, too, many are said to be puzzled and confused by the NLD's decision not to compete.
Like the constitutional referendum of 2008, which the regime claimed to have won with the support of more than 90 per cent of voters, the election will probably be rigged. But that does not mean it is without significance. "Despite the very obvious flaws in the process," says the international think tank Transnational Institute in a new report anticipating the poll, "it represents the most significant political transformation for a generation."
Senior General Than Shwe, now almost 80, is likely to retire, along with other high-ranking colleagues. "New leaders and a new political landscape will emerge," the institute writes, "giving rise to opportunities to press for change, as well as a new set of challenges."
It is tempting to see Aung San Suu Kyi as one of the elders who will now shuffle off into the shadows, to be replaced by vigorous new champions of democracy, the generational shift sweeping her away as surely as her nemesis Than Shwe. But this is to misunderstand the situation in Burma. First, the electoral process has been fiendishly designed to make it almost impossible for figures critical of the regime, even if they succeed in getting elected, to make their voices heard. There is no provision in the parliament for an opposition - only for the government, which must be led by a former army man. The election will not be accompanied by any loosening of the rigid controls on the media; on the contrary, the regime has recently invested millions of dollars in a hi-tech system for censoring newspapers and magazines. It will be a criminal offence, punishable by a jail sentence, for any MP in the new national assembly to criticise the constitution - and anything he or she says on the subject will be erased from the record. The regime clearly has no intention of allowing new MPs the sort of holiday from government control that Aung San Suu Kyi and her colleagues enjoyed during the democratic spring of 1988-89.
The second reason she will not be fading away is that Aung San Suu Kyi remains an immensely potent force. That is why the regime has gone to such extravagant lengths to marginalise her. Three times before - in 1990, 1995 and 2002 - it made the mistake of underestimating her appeal. The first time, the NLD humiliated the regime's proxy, the National Unity Party, by winning 80 per cent of the seats in parliament. The second time, when she was released from her first spell of house arrest, thousands risked jail every week to squat outside the gates of her home and listen to her speak. The third time, when, after months of delay, she was at last allowed to travel outside Rangoon, peasants walked through the jungle for days for a chance to see her.
Seven years have now passed since her convoy was attacked by regime goons on 30 May 2003 and she again disappeared from view. Her latest spell in detention is the longest to date, and in March the UN's working group on arbitrary detention condemned it as being in contravention of Articles 9, 10, 19 and 20 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights - the sixth time it has published such a view.
This has been not only the longest spell of house arrest she has endured, but also the most restrictive. The regime has rigidly limited her access to foreign diplomats, senior members of her party and, for a while, even her doctor. A year ago, Ban Ki-moon, the UN secretary general, was barred from seeing her at Insein jail. She has been photographed only a handful of times in the past seven years, most recently on 10 May, when she and Assistant Secretary of State Campbell held a conference under umbrellas in the garden of a government guest house to avoid having their conversation bugged. As recently as 2007, rebel monks succeeded in paying a visit to her home, but today the whole of University Avenue is barricaded off, and the only view of her house is from the other side of Lake Inya.
The tight control on her comings and goings is matched by a ban on all but the most dismissive and hostile mentions of her in the state-controlled press. The time in 1994 when she was welcomed amid the gleaming varnish and antimacassars of a government reception room by Generals Than Shwe and Khin Nyunt, both smiling fit to bust (the photo was splashed across the front page of New Light of Myanmar), seems to belong to an altogether different era.
Aung San Suu Kyi seems to have disappeared from the consciousness of ordinary Burmese people. There are no photos of her on display; there are no books by or about her in the bookshops (though titles about Nelson Mandela and other democratic heroes are plentiful); her name is never mentioned by tour guides or taxi drivers or hotel staff. It is as if she had never existed. However, she has not been forgotten, but is locked away in people's hearts and minds and interior rooms as securely and invisibly as she is locked in her own house.
At the home of an intellectual in Mandalay, an oil portrait of her hangs on the wall of his shabby kitchen. Another presides over a small private library in the same city that has somehow escaped the regime's attentions. Htein Lin, an artist who spent years in jail and who now lives in exile in London, contrived to paint portraits of her secretly in his cell and get them smuggled to the outside world. In Rangoon, we were given an introduction to a beaming elf of a man in his seventies, living with his family in a shack near a rubbish dump on the city's northern outskirts. He had spent years in jail for petty political offences, as had his son. A small photo of Aung San Suu Kyi in her 1989 prime was pinned to the wall of their home. It is not surprising that Suu the Unyielding should continue to be the icon of activists. But her appeal extends more widely, as became clear during the nationwide rebellion of September 2007 when, in reaction to a steep increase in fuel prices, tens of thousands of monks marched through Burma's towns and cities.
In the most poignant of these processions, a line of monks persuaded soldiers guarding Aung San Suu Kyi's house to let them through. They made it to the gate of her home; she came out in tears to greet them. The meeting was captured on a mobile-phone camera. Two days later, the bloody crackdown began.
The encounter had a special significance that was not readily appreciated outside Burma. In this overwhelmingly Buddhist country, the great majority of boys are inducted as monks while they are still children, and spend weeks or months learning the disciplines of the monastery. For centuries, the monks have had a special relationship with power in the land, and specifically with the king: by recognising his right to rule, they conferred religious legitimacy on him, while for his part the king provided funds for monasteries, pagodas and images of the Buddha. This symbiotic relationship was destroyed when the British sent Burma's last king, Thibaw Min, into exile in 1885, which helps explain why monks were prominent among Burmese rebels against British rule from early on. It was they, deprived of patronage, who most keenly felt the downfall of the monarchy.
Burma's post-independence prime minister, U Nu, was a pious Buddhist and was quick to restore the relationship with the clergy, but when General Ne Win seized power in a coup d'état in 1962, he brushed aside the Sangha, the organisation of monks, as an archaic irrelevance. Into the patronage vacuum stepped pious laypeople who, over the years, set up meditation centres and supported charismatic monks who, in return, instructed them in dharma (the teachings of the Buddha) and the techniques of meditation.
By the time Ne Win realised what he had done, the lay meditation organisations had established strong ties with the monks - ties that persist to this day. On the face of it, there is nothing political about these organisations; but just as the Sangha, numbering close on half a million monks and nuns, is the only organisation in Burma that rivals the army, the existence of these lay organisations is a passive but ominous menace to the army's monopoly on power.
Aung San Suu Kyi has taken her own daily meditation practice very seriously since her first years of house arrest. "It has helped to strengthen me spiritually," she told Alan Clements, author of a book of interviews with her entitled The Voice of Hope. "What you do when you meditate is you learn to control your mind through developing awareness." She confided to a friend that meditation had "saved me from depression in the worst moments of my life . . . It's what enabled me always to hold my head high." So when, in 2007, the monks came to her gate to greet her, it was an acknowledgement by the Sangha of the power that she had won through the ballot box in 1990 but of which she had been deprived ever since. And millions of Burmese would have recognised the significance of the meeting.
With its innumerable spies, the regime is surely well informed about the extent to which Aung San Suu Kyi still enjoys the silent but overwhelming support of her people, which is why it remains loath to grant her any space. But how, despite nearly 15 years of house arrest and enforced silence and invisibility, has she been able to hang on to this support? And what difference has it made?
In the first place, it was necessary for her to be who she is: the daughter of Aung San, the father of the army and creator of independent Burma, the young firebrand who managed to hop from the Japanese to the Allied side in the middle of the Second World War and, at the end of it, persuade Lord Mountbatten that he was his nation's best hope. He negotiated Burma's independence in London but was assassinated in 1947 before his work could be crowned with success - and was thereby untainted by all the mess that followed, becoming the new nation's one radiant, immaculate hero.
At the start, in 1988, the name was everything: if Aung San Suu Kyi's elder brother Aung San Oo, an engineer who lives in the US, had chosen to rise to the challenge, he would have enjoyed just as strong a following as she did, but he had no interest in politics. As with Benazir in Pakistan, Indira in India and all the other widows and daughters in post-colonial southern and south-east Asia, the blood was crucial. It guaranteed popular legitimacy and gave the uprising its figurehead.
Yet she became much more than that, and is still there - still fighting - over 20 years later. This is the product of her own extraordinary strength of will and purpose. Her name and fame have so far deterred the regime from killing her, though on at least two occasions
it seems to have come close to it. At any time since she was first locked up, she could have decided to put her own life and that of her family first and fled the country, never to return. Instead, she threw herself into Burma's struggle, and for all the regime's efforts to thrust her into the shadowy margins, she is still in the thick of it. Because, to quote her hero Gandhi: "The combat itself is the victory."
So, what difference has she made? A generation ago, the regime's opponents saw their only hope of changing the country in joining one or other of the insurgencies raging on the borders. Taking up arms was seen as the only option. Aung San Suu Kyi's courage and commitment have changed that. For the first time since Ne Win's 1962 coup d'état, Burma had a plausible alternative ruler - and one who insisted that the struggle against the regime must be a peaceful one.
Her critics argue that this commitment condemns her movement to failure: non-violence may have enjoyed some success as a strategy against the Raj in India, but it is bound to fail against a regime as ruthless and as little concerned about its foreign reputation as Burma's. In response, her supporters point out that the revolution she is seeking to ignite is as much moral and spiritual as political. And if it has not yet had any appreciable softening effect on the generals, it has changed the attitudes of a generation of Burmese activists.
As long as she is still there among them, and still fighting, it gives them hope.
Peter Popham is on the staff of the Independent and is writing a biography of Aung San Suu Kyi, to be published by Rider in 2011.
Peter Popham
Published 28 June 2010
Her party has been dissolved, and she is banned from taking part in this year’s Burmese elections. But Aung San Suu Kyi, at the age of 65, remains the most potent force fighting to preserve the opposition in her country.
Suddenly she has begun to look her age. Aung San Suu Kyi was nearly 45 when her party won a landslide victory in Burma's historic general election of 1990, but she looked 15 years younger. Despite years of privation and isolation inside her disintegrating lakeside villa on University Avenue in Rangoon, she continued to look far younger than she was. But last November, when she was photographed arriving for a meeting at a Rangoon hotel with President Obama's assistant secretary of state Kurt Campbell, she looked a woman of a certain age.
Daw Aung San Suu Kyi - daw is the Burmese honorific for an older woman - turned 65 on 19 June. If it was a less dismal occasion than her 64th, which she spent in Rangoon's huge, British-built Insein Prison, while awaiting trial for allowing a deluded American called John Yettaw (who had swum across Lake Inya using home-made wooden flippers) to spend two nights in her home, her personal and political prospects were scarcely less gloomy.
The good news: the military regime, led by Senior General Than Shwe, is committed to holding a general election before the end of the year. It will be the first since 1990, when Aung San Suu Kyi's party, the National League for Democracy (NLD), won the vote by an overwhelming margin - a victory that the regime ignored. The bad news: there is no chance of that result being repeated this time. The NLD, the most important organised opposition force in Burma, will not be participating.
One of the rules of this election is that parties whose membership includes political prisoners are barred from registering. The NLD was faced with the obligation of expelling its leader and more than 400 members who are still in prison. Aung San Suu Kyi made it clear that taking part on such terms was unthinkable. She wanted party members to know that, should they participate in the election, "the party would have no dignity", her lawyer and spokesman Nyan Win said. After a painful debate, the NLD agreed with her assessment. When the 6 May deadline passed, it became a non-party, a political phantom.
Since her victory in Burma's first multiparty elections in 30 years in 1990, and particularly since she was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize the following year, Aung San Suu Kyi has become, to the west, the symbol of opposition. Now the caprice of the regime has robbed her of that automatic primacy. Inside Burma, too, many are said to be puzzled and confused by the NLD's decision not to compete.
Like the constitutional referendum of 2008, which the regime claimed to have won with the support of more than 90 per cent of voters, the election will probably be rigged. But that does not mean it is without significance. "Despite the very obvious flaws in the process," says the international think tank Transnational Institute in a new report anticipating the poll, "it represents the most significant political transformation for a generation."
Senior General Than Shwe, now almost 80, is likely to retire, along with other high-ranking colleagues. "New leaders and a new political landscape will emerge," the institute writes, "giving rise to opportunities to press for change, as well as a new set of challenges."
It is tempting to see Aung San Suu Kyi as one of the elders who will now shuffle off into the shadows, to be replaced by vigorous new champions of democracy, the generational shift sweeping her away as surely as her nemesis Than Shwe. But this is to misunderstand the situation in Burma. First, the electoral process has been fiendishly designed to make it almost impossible for figures critical of the regime, even if they succeed in getting elected, to make their voices heard. There is no provision in the parliament for an opposition - only for the government, which must be led by a former army man. The election will not be accompanied by any loosening of the rigid controls on the media; on the contrary, the regime has recently invested millions of dollars in a hi-tech system for censoring newspapers and magazines. It will be a criminal offence, punishable by a jail sentence, for any MP in the new national assembly to criticise the constitution - and anything he or she says on the subject will be erased from the record. The regime clearly has no intention of allowing new MPs the sort of holiday from government control that Aung San Suu Kyi and her colleagues enjoyed during the democratic spring of 1988-89.
The second reason she will not be fading away is that Aung San Suu Kyi remains an immensely potent force. That is why the regime has gone to such extravagant lengths to marginalise her. Three times before - in 1990, 1995 and 2002 - it made the mistake of underestimating her appeal. The first time, the NLD humiliated the regime's proxy, the National Unity Party, by winning 80 per cent of the seats in parliament. The second time, when she was released from her first spell of house arrest, thousands risked jail every week to squat outside the gates of her home and listen to her speak. The third time, when, after months of delay, she was at last allowed to travel outside Rangoon, peasants walked through the jungle for days for a chance to see her.
Seven years have now passed since her convoy was attacked by regime goons on 30 May 2003 and she again disappeared from view. Her latest spell in detention is the longest to date, and in March the UN's working group on arbitrary detention condemned it as being in contravention of Articles 9, 10, 19 and 20 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights - the sixth time it has published such a view.
This has been not only the longest spell of house arrest she has endured, but also the most restrictive. The regime has rigidly limited her access to foreign diplomats, senior members of her party and, for a while, even her doctor. A year ago, Ban Ki-moon, the UN secretary general, was barred from seeing her at Insein jail. She has been photographed only a handful of times in the past seven years, most recently on 10 May, when she and Assistant Secretary of State Campbell held a conference under umbrellas in the garden of a government guest house to avoid having their conversation bugged. As recently as 2007, rebel monks succeeded in paying a visit to her home, but today the whole of University Avenue is barricaded off, and the only view of her house is from the other side of Lake Inya.
The tight control on her comings and goings is matched by a ban on all but the most dismissive and hostile mentions of her in the state-controlled press. The time in 1994 when she was welcomed amid the gleaming varnish and antimacassars of a government reception room by Generals Than Shwe and Khin Nyunt, both smiling fit to bust (the photo was splashed across the front page of New Light of Myanmar), seems to belong to an altogether different era.
Aung San Suu Kyi seems to have disappeared from the consciousness of ordinary Burmese people. There are no photos of her on display; there are no books by or about her in the bookshops (though titles about Nelson Mandela and other democratic heroes are plentiful); her name is never mentioned by tour guides or taxi drivers or hotel staff. It is as if she had never existed. However, she has not been forgotten, but is locked away in people's hearts and minds and interior rooms as securely and invisibly as she is locked in her own house.
At the home of an intellectual in Mandalay, an oil portrait of her hangs on the wall of his shabby kitchen. Another presides over a small private library in the same city that has somehow escaped the regime's attentions. Htein Lin, an artist who spent years in jail and who now lives in exile in London, contrived to paint portraits of her secretly in his cell and get them smuggled to the outside world. In Rangoon, we were given an introduction to a beaming elf of a man in his seventies, living with his family in a shack near a rubbish dump on the city's northern outskirts. He had spent years in jail for petty political offences, as had his son. A small photo of Aung San Suu Kyi in her 1989 prime was pinned to the wall of their home. It is not surprising that Suu the Unyielding should continue to be the icon of activists. But her appeal extends more widely, as became clear during the nationwide rebellion of September 2007 when, in reaction to a steep increase in fuel prices, tens of thousands of monks marched through Burma's towns and cities.
In the most poignant of these processions, a line of monks persuaded soldiers guarding Aung San Suu Kyi's house to let them through. They made it to the gate of her home; she came out in tears to greet them. The meeting was captured on a mobile-phone camera. Two days later, the bloody crackdown began.
The encounter had a special significance that was not readily appreciated outside Burma. In this overwhelmingly Buddhist country, the great majority of boys are inducted as monks while they are still children, and spend weeks or months learning the disciplines of the monastery. For centuries, the monks have had a special relationship with power in the land, and specifically with the king: by recognising his right to rule, they conferred religious legitimacy on him, while for his part the king provided funds for monasteries, pagodas and images of the Buddha. This symbiotic relationship was destroyed when the British sent Burma's last king, Thibaw Min, into exile in 1885, which helps explain why monks were prominent among Burmese rebels against British rule from early on. It was they, deprived of patronage, who most keenly felt the downfall of the monarchy.
Burma's post-independence prime minister, U Nu, was a pious Buddhist and was quick to restore the relationship with the clergy, but when General Ne Win seized power in a coup d'état in 1962, he brushed aside the Sangha, the organisation of monks, as an archaic irrelevance. Into the patronage vacuum stepped pious laypeople who, over the years, set up meditation centres and supported charismatic monks who, in return, instructed them in dharma (the teachings of the Buddha) and the techniques of meditation.
By the time Ne Win realised what he had done, the lay meditation organisations had established strong ties with the monks - ties that persist to this day. On the face of it, there is nothing political about these organisations; but just as the Sangha, numbering close on half a million monks and nuns, is the only organisation in Burma that rivals the army, the existence of these lay organisations is a passive but ominous menace to the army's monopoly on power.
Aung San Suu Kyi has taken her own daily meditation practice very seriously since her first years of house arrest. "It has helped to strengthen me spiritually," she told Alan Clements, author of a book of interviews with her entitled The Voice of Hope. "What you do when you meditate is you learn to control your mind through developing awareness." She confided to a friend that meditation had "saved me from depression in the worst moments of my life . . . It's what enabled me always to hold my head high." So when, in 2007, the monks came to her gate to greet her, it was an acknowledgement by the Sangha of the power that she had won through the ballot box in 1990 but of which she had been deprived ever since. And millions of Burmese would have recognised the significance of the meeting.
With its innumerable spies, the regime is surely well informed about the extent to which Aung San Suu Kyi still enjoys the silent but overwhelming support of her people, which is why it remains loath to grant her any space. But how, despite nearly 15 years of house arrest and enforced silence and invisibility, has she been able to hang on to this support? And what difference has it made?
In the first place, it was necessary for her to be who she is: the daughter of Aung San, the father of the army and creator of independent Burma, the young firebrand who managed to hop from the Japanese to the Allied side in the middle of the Second World War and, at the end of it, persuade Lord Mountbatten that he was his nation's best hope. He negotiated Burma's independence in London but was assassinated in 1947 before his work could be crowned with success - and was thereby untainted by all the mess that followed, becoming the new nation's one radiant, immaculate hero.
At the start, in 1988, the name was everything: if Aung San Suu Kyi's elder brother Aung San Oo, an engineer who lives in the US, had chosen to rise to the challenge, he would have enjoyed just as strong a following as she did, but he had no interest in politics. As with Benazir in Pakistan, Indira in India and all the other widows and daughters in post-colonial southern and south-east Asia, the blood was crucial. It guaranteed popular legitimacy and gave the uprising its figurehead.
Yet she became much more than that, and is still there - still fighting - over 20 years later. This is the product of her own extraordinary strength of will and purpose. Her name and fame have so far deterred the regime from killing her, though on at least two occasions
it seems to have come close to it. At any time since she was first locked up, she could have decided to put her own life and that of her family first and fled the country, never to return. Instead, she threw herself into Burma's struggle, and for all the regime's efforts to thrust her into the shadowy margins, she is still in the thick of it. Because, to quote her hero Gandhi: "The combat itself is the victory."
So, what difference has she made? A generation ago, the regime's opponents saw their only hope of changing the country in joining one or other of the insurgencies raging on the borders. Taking up arms was seen as the only option. Aung San Suu Kyi's courage and commitment have changed that. For the first time since Ne Win's 1962 coup d'état, Burma had a plausible alternative ruler - and one who insisted that the struggle against the regime must be a peaceful one.
Her critics argue that this commitment condemns her movement to failure: non-violence may have enjoyed some success as a strategy against the Raj in India, but it is bound to fail against a regime as ruthless and as little concerned about its foreign reputation as Burma's. In response, her supporters point out that the revolution she is seeking to ignite is as much moral and spiritual as political. And if it has not yet had any appreciable softening effect on the generals, it has changed the attitudes of a generation of Burmese activists.
As long as she is still there among them, and still fighting, it gives them hope.
Peter Popham is on the staff of the Independent and is writing a biography of Aung San Suu Kyi, to be published by Rider in 2011.
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Defence Professionals - Rocket Artillery in Myanmar
07:40 GMT, June 28, 2010
NAYPYIDAW, Myanmar | North Korean-made truck-mounted multiple launch rocket systems were recently delivered to missile operation commands in Mohnyin in Kachin State, Naungcho and Kengtung in Shan State, and Kyaukpadaung in Mandalay Division.
At least 14 units of 240mm truck-mounted multiple launch rocket systems were delivered initially, followed by a further 30 similar launchers.
These provide a major increase in firepower over the 107mm Type 63 and 122mm Type 90 multiple-launch rocket previously obtained from China.
07:40 GMT, June 28, 2010
NAYPYIDAW, Myanmar | North Korean-made truck-mounted multiple launch rocket systems were recently delivered to missile operation commands in Mohnyin in Kachin State, Naungcho and Kengtung in Shan State, and Kyaukpadaung in Mandalay Division.
At least 14 units of 240mm truck-mounted multiple launch rocket systems were delivered initially, followed by a further 30 similar launchers.
These provide a major increase in firepower over the 107mm Type 63 and 122mm Type 90 multiple-launch rocket previously obtained from China.
*********************************************************
Daily Dispatch Online - Burma poll will entrench brutality
2010/06/28
INSIGHT
Shirin Ebadi and Jody Williams
ELECTIONS in Burma are expected for some time in 2010. The military government claims that this is a step towards real democracy, but all signs point to the contrary.
Under the leadership of our sister peace laureate, Aung San Suu Kyi, the main opposition party, the National League of Democracy, recently chose to dissolve rather than take part in a flawed electoral process. They believe the elections will be a sham, and further entrench the military junta’s fierce grip on power. Under this regime, violence and abuse of basic human rights have been a daily reality in Burma for decades.
Meanwhile, Suu Kyi marked her 65th birthday (on June 19), as well as her 14th year under house arrest and almost 20 years since she was democratically elected by the people of Burma to be their leader.
Her story is extraordinary, but also emblematic of the suffering of hundreds of thousands of women in Burma. Like Aung San Suu Kyi, they are trapped in a life of misery under a brutal military regime, in the world’s largest-running, but often forgotten, civil war.
We met some of those women recently when we sat as judges at the International Tribunal on Crimes Against Women of Burma in New York. We heard harrowing testimony from 12 courageous women, who told of their experiences of human rights violations at the hands of the military regime in their country.
Chang Chang spoke of being attacked and gang-raped in her village by a group of Burmese military soldiers. As if that was not torture enough, she was then shamed and expelled by her community when news of the attack spread.
Naw Ruth Tha described long days of being forced by soldiers to carry heavy loads on her back, and long nights being raped by the same soldiers. She was five months pregnant at the time.
Ma Pu Sein wept as she recalled the soldiers who burnt down her entire village.
One young woman opened her testimony saying, “I share with you a common story that in its commonness has, in time, become normal.”
Indeed, each of these women stands for the thousands of women, children, and men who, for decades, have struggled under the oppression of the junta. Their stories range from the imprisonment and torture of political dissenters to the conscription of civilians to be used as sexual slaves and human landmine sweepers.
Brutality on this level should never be accepted as normal. But with the exception of rare instances of international attention, the world mostly watches in silence while the regime continues to act with impunity. The testimonies we heard at the tribunal reconfirm that the regime’s actions amount to war crimes, crimes against humanity, and crimes subject to universal jurisdiction. These human rights violations – including those that target women – must not be allowed to continue. The international community must act now for justice in Burma.
One path of action would be for the UN Security Council to consider the establishment of a Commission of Inquiry into possible crimes against humanity and war crimes in Burma. Such a commission could be the first step in the long journey to the International Criminal Court for the military junta. The United Nations Special Rapporteur on Human Rights in Burma, Tomas Quintana, has called for the creation of such a commission, which has been publicly supported by the United Kingdom, Australia, Sweden, and the Czech Republic. Along with our fellow tribunal judges, we also called upon the Security Council to begin the process of referring Burma to the International Criminal Court through the establishment of a Commission of Inquiry.
The upcoming Burmese elections are another arena for international action. Elections will be based on a constitution that was created and ratified without consultation with civil society, including the women of Burma. The constitution also effectively hinders the participation of women in political office – including the generation of women inspired by the example of Aung San Suu Kyi. The recent dissolution of the legitimate governing party and the official opposition is further evidence of the gravity of the problem.
Under such circumstances and in the face of decades of crimes and abuses against the peoples of Burma by the military regime, the international community should unite in their refusal to accept either the upcoming elections or any government that results from them as legitimate.
It is time for the international community to show at least as much courage as the women of Burma. Their leader, Aung San Suu Kyi, has dedicated her life – one of great personal loss and privation – for democracy for her country. The women who testified at the tribunal in New York also refuse to silently accept non-action. Instead, they are speaking out, in the hope that doing so will lead to real change for their country. We believe that it will.
In honour of Aung San Suu Kyi and the resilient women of Burma, the international community must stand with the people of Burma in their struggle for justice and democracy. It is time not only for the establishment of a Commission of Inquiry but also for the international community to denounce the upcoming elections as the sham that they are.
Jody Williams was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1997. Shirin Ebadi was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2003. They are co-founders of the Nobel Women’s Initiative, a global organisation based in Ottawa. The Executive Summary of the International Tribunal on Crimes Against Women of Burma, including the complete Statement of Findings and Recommendations of the Judges, can be found at www.nobelwomensinitiative.org.
*********************************************************
2010/06/28
INSIGHT
Shirin Ebadi and Jody Williams
ELECTIONS in Burma are expected for some time in 2010. The military government claims that this is a step towards real democracy, but all signs point to the contrary.
Under the leadership of our sister peace laureate, Aung San Suu Kyi, the main opposition party, the National League of Democracy, recently chose to dissolve rather than take part in a flawed electoral process. They believe the elections will be a sham, and further entrench the military junta’s fierce grip on power. Under this regime, violence and abuse of basic human rights have been a daily reality in Burma for decades.
Meanwhile, Suu Kyi marked her 65th birthday (on June 19), as well as her 14th year under house arrest and almost 20 years since she was democratically elected by the people of Burma to be their leader.
Her story is extraordinary, but also emblematic of the suffering of hundreds of thousands of women in Burma. Like Aung San Suu Kyi, they are trapped in a life of misery under a brutal military regime, in the world’s largest-running, but often forgotten, civil war.
We met some of those women recently when we sat as judges at the International Tribunal on Crimes Against Women of Burma in New York. We heard harrowing testimony from 12 courageous women, who told of their experiences of human rights violations at the hands of the military regime in their country.
Chang Chang spoke of being attacked and gang-raped in her village by a group of Burmese military soldiers. As if that was not torture enough, she was then shamed and expelled by her community when news of the attack spread.
Naw Ruth Tha described long days of being forced by soldiers to carry heavy loads on her back, and long nights being raped by the same soldiers. She was five months pregnant at the time.
Ma Pu Sein wept as she recalled the soldiers who burnt down her entire village.
One young woman opened her testimony saying, “I share with you a common story that in its commonness has, in time, become normal.”
Indeed, each of these women stands for the thousands of women, children, and men who, for decades, have struggled under the oppression of the junta. Their stories range from the imprisonment and torture of political dissenters to the conscription of civilians to be used as sexual slaves and human landmine sweepers.
Brutality on this level should never be accepted as normal. But with the exception of rare instances of international attention, the world mostly watches in silence while the regime continues to act with impunity. The testimonies we heard at the tribunal reconfirm that the regime’s actions amount to war crimes, crimes against humanity, and crimes subject to universal jurisdiction. These human rights violations – including those that target women – must not be allowed to continue. The international community must act now for justice in Burma.
One path of action would be for the UN Security Council to consider the establishment of a Commission of Inquiry into possible crimes against humanity and war crimes in Burma. Such a commission could be the first step in the long journey to the International Criminal Court for the military junta. The United Nations Special Rapporteur on Human Rights in Burma, Tomas Quintana, has called for the creation of such a commission, which has been publicly supported by the United Kingdom, Australia, Sweden, and the Czech Republic. Along with our fellow tribunal judges, we also called upon the Security Council to begin the process of referring Burma to the International Criminal Court through the establishment of a Commission of Inquiry.
The upcoming Burmese elections are another arena for international action. Elections will be based on a constitution that was created and ratified without consultation with civil society, including the women of Burma. The constitution also effectively hinders the participation of women in political office – including the generation of women inspired by the example of Aung San Suu Kyi. The recent dissolution of the legitimate governing party and the official opposition is further evidence of the gravity of the problem.
Under such circumstances and in the face of decades of crimes and abuses against the peoples of Burma by the military regime, the international community should unite in their refusal to accept either the upcoming elections or any government that results from them as legitimate.
It is time for the international community to show at least as much courage as the women of Burma. Their leader, Aung San Suu Kyi, has dedicated her life – one of great personal loss and privation – for democracy for her country. The women who testified at the tribunal in New York also refuse to silently accept non-action. Instead, they are speaking out, in the hope that doing so will lead to real change for their country. We believe that it will.
In honour of Aung San Suu Kyi and the resilient women of Burma, the international community must stand with the people of Burma in their struggle for justice and democracy. It is time not only for the establishment of a Commission of Inquiry but also for the international community to denounce the upcoming elections as the sham that they are.
Jody Williams was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1997. Shirin Ebadi was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2003. They are co-founders of the Nobel Women’s Initiative, a global organisation based in Ottawa. The Executive Summary of the International Tribunal on Crimes Against Women of Burma, including the complete Statement of Findings and Recommendations of the Judges, can be found at www.nobelwomensinitiative.org.
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People's Daily Online - Over 10,000 jade lots attract visitors to Myanmar special gems emporium
20:21, June 28, 2010
A total of 11,500 jade lots are on sale at a Myanmar special gems emporium being held at the Convention Center (MCC) in Yangon, the emporium sources said on Monday.
Over 300 state-owned and private-run companies as well as gold and jewelry shops joined the 13-day gems emporium selling their products on the basis of competitive bidding, the sources said, adding that the event has attracted more foreign buyers than the last 47th annual one held in March this year.
The Myanmar special gems emporium which opened here last Friday will run till July 7.
Meanwhile, Myanmar has earned over 400 million euros from the sale of nearly 7,000 jade lots and gems at the March annual gems emporium.
Myanmar started to hold gem shows annually in 1964, introducing the mid-year one in 1992 and the special one in 2004.
Myanmar, a well-known producer of gems in the world, boasts ruby, diamond, cat's eye, emerald, topaz, pearl, sapphire, coral and a variety of garnet tinged with yellow.
The government's Central Statistical Organization revealed that in the fiscal year 2009-10, Myanmar so far produced over 22,600 tons of jade and 9.5 million carats of gems which include ruby, sapphire, spinel and peridot, as well as 229,951 mommis (862.3 kilograms) of pearl.
20:21, June 28, 2010
A total of 11,500 jade lots are on sale at a Myanmar special gems emporium being held at the Convention Center (MCC) in Yangon, the emporium sources said on Monday.
Over 300 state-owned and private-run companies as well as gold and jewelry shops joined the 13-day gems emporium selling their products on the basis of competitive bidding, the sources said, adding that the event has attracted more foreign buyers than the last 47th annual one held in March this year.
The Myanmar special gems emporium which opened here last Friday will run till July 7.
Meanwhile, Myanmar has earned over 400 million euros from the sale of nearly 7,000 jade lots and gems at the March annual gems emporium.
Myanmar started to hold gem shows annually in 1964, introducing the mid-year one in 1992 and the special one in 2004.
Myanmar, a well-known producer of gems in the world, boasts ruby, diamond, cat's eye, emerald, topaz, pearl, sapphire, coral and a variety of garnet tinged with yellow.
The government's Central Statistical Organization revealed that in the fiscal year 2009-10, Myanmar so far produced over 22,600 tons of jade and 9.5 million carats of gems which include ruby, sapphire, spinel and peridot, as well as 229,951 mommis (862.3 kilograms) of pearl.
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People's Daily Online - Myanmar seeks Pakistani market for arts, crafts
14:29, June 27, 2010
Myanmar is seeking market in Pakistan for its domestic arts and crafts in addition to that of some foreign countries, a local weekly reported in this week's issue.
Myanmar brass and silver-made arts and crafts have been exported to China, Japan, Thailand, Singapore, England and United States, the Pyi Myanmar said.
To attract buyers from across the world, the country has held arts and crafts exhibition at home and participated some arts and sculpture festivals abroad.
In April, Myanmar took part in arts and sculpture festival in Beijing, China displaying wooden sculptures of various designs carved with stems and trees toppled by cyclone Nargis.
Earlier in January, Myanmar had also held an arts and crafts exhibition. On sale at the fair were 2,000 huge woodcarving, including Myanmar and Chinese traditional style's, European Union style's and model styles of animals as well as furniture, created by 200 wood curvers from across the country using wood and stems downed by cyclone Nargis in May 2008.
14:29, June 27, 2010
Myanmar is seeking market in Pakistan for its domestic arts and crafts in addition to that of some foreign countries, a local weekly reported in this week's issue.
Myanmar brass and silver-made arts and crafts have been exported to China, Japan, Thailand, Singapore, England and United States, the Pyi Myanmar said.
To attract buyers from across the world, the country has held arts and crafts exhibition at home and participated some arts and sculpture festivals abroad.
In April, Myanmar took part in arts and sculpture festival in Beijing, China displaying wooden sculptures of various designs carved with stems and trees toppled by cyclone Nargis.
Earlier in January, Myanmar had also held an arts and crafts exhibition. On sale at the fair were 2,000 huge woodcarving, including Myanmar and Chinese traditional style's, European Union style's and model styles of animals as well as furniture, created by 200 wood curvers from across the country using wood and stems downed by cyclone Nargis in May 2008.
*********************************************************
More Korean language proficiency test to be launched in 2 Myanmar cities
English.news.cn 2010-06-27 11:06:44
YANGON, June 27 (Xinhua) -- A Korean language proficiency test for Myanmar citizens studying the language will be launched in two Myanmar cities -- Yangon and Mandalay in late September, according to education circle here on Sunday.
Sponsored by the South Korean Embassy here, the Test of Proficiency in Korean (TOPIK) will take place on Sept. 12 at the Myanmar Info Tech in Yangon and Swan Hotel in Mandalay simultaneously.
The test will be divided into three levels -- basic, intermediate and advance, said sources from the education circle, adding that the test includes vocabulary, grammar, writing, listening and reading.
The application will close on July 14, the sources quoted the embassy as saying.
Such kind of Korean language test was also held in September last year, earlier report said.
According to an agreement between labor ministries of Myanmar and South Korea signed in November 2007 on employment of Myanmar workers in the East Asian country, Myanmar workers seeking jobs there with employment permit system are required to pass the Korean language test carried out by the two ministries.
Myanmar and South Korea have been stepping up cooperation in education sector with the Department of Education of Chonnam National University of Korea offering to conduct Korean language course, testing of the language, compilation and distribution of Myanmar-Korean language dictionary among others.
Under a memorandum of understanding on the set-up, the Korean university offers Korean language and business management courses, taught by Korean instructors, and graduate students from the center are arranged to further study in South Korea to acquire master degrees, advance diplomas and higher certifications.
Besides, a technology, culture and business education center was jointly established in Myanmar by the Korean university and the Union of Myanmar Federation of Chambers of Commerce and Industry in 2006.
English.news.cn 2010-06-27 11:06:44
YANGON, June 27 (Xinhua) -- A Korean language proficiency test for Myanmar citizens studying the language will be launched in two Myanmar cities -- Yangon and Mandalay in late September, according to education circle here on Sunday.
Sponsored by the South Korean Embassy here, the Test of Proficiency in Korean (TOPIK) will take place on Sept. 12 at the Myanmar Info Tech in Yangon and Swan Hotel in Mandalay simultaneously.
The test will be divided into three levels -- basic, intermediate and advance, said sources from the education circle, adding that the test includes vocabulary, grammar, writing, listening and reading.
The application will close on July 14, the sources quoted the embassy as saying.
Such kind of Korean language test was also held in September last year, earlier report said.
According to an agreement between labor ministries of Myanmar and South Korea signed in November 2007 on employment of Myanmar workers in the East Asian country, Myanmar workers seeking jobs there with employment permit system are required to pass the Korean language test carried out by the two ministries.
Myanmar and South Korea have been stepping up cooperation in education sector with the Department of Education of Chonnam National University of Korea offering to conduct Korean language course, testing of the language, compilation and distribution of Myanmar-Korean language dictionary among others.
Under a memorandum of understanding on the set-up, the Korean university offers Korean language and business management courses, taught by Korean instructors, and graduate students from the center are arranged to further study in South Korea to acquire master degrees, advance diplomas and higher certifications.
Besides, a technology, culture and business education center was jointly established in Myanmar by the Korean university and the Union of Myanmar Federation of Chambers of Commerce and Industry in 2006.
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The Nation - Sun rises from the west for tavoy
By Sasithorn Ongdee
Published on June 28, 2010
Tavoy Port (Dawei Port) in Burma is shining again as a deep-sea port on the West after the government last week agreed on promoting it as a main port while Pak Bara in Satun will be used as a minor port due mainly to environmental concerns.
The port is expected to link with inland routes in the Greater mekong Sub-region (GMS), in which Thailand is the centre of every economic cooperation initiative, with lower transport costs and shortened times in a bid to tranship goods and products from the East to the West.
The country's strategic plan for national logistics development took shape when the National Logistics Development Committee chaired by Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva held its first meeting last week.
"Using inland routes via the Tavoy-Kanchanaburi land bridge will help shorten the transhipping time between South China and Andaman seas to six days, compared with 16-18 days by sea via the congested Malacca Strait," a logistics expert said.
Pak Bara Port will then be a local port, carrying not more than 1 million 20-foot equivalent unit containers (TEUs) a year.
Tavoy Port is part of a mega-investment project in Tavoy in the southeast of Burma, which is expected to cost more than Bt300 billion. Besides the Bt50-billion port, there will be an industrial zone nearby and a building complex on 200,000 rai of land, including a road and railway network.
Construction is expected to start this year and be completed in 2020. It is an initiative of Italian-Thai Development, Thailand's largest construction firm, which would seek strategic investment partners for the project.
The company got involved in the project in 2008 when it won a contract from Burmese authorities to survey and construct an inland road linking Tavoy Port to Kanchanaburi, or the Tavoy-Kanchanaburi Highway, as a new land bridge in Southeast Asia.
The four-lane highway is expected to start construction soon with completion in 2013.
Deputy Commerce Minister Alongkorn Ponlaboot has visited Burma several times since early this year to negotiate with Burmese authorities on increasing border trade between the two countries at checkpoints in Kanchanaburi, as well as on resuming the highway project.
This will not only facilitate a freer flow of cement, building materials and equipment for construction in Burma by Thai contractors, but also pave the way for a multi-modal shift from the land bridge in Thailand to the Andaman Sea via Tavoy Port.
The Tavoy-Kanchanaburi land bridge can link with many inland routes, both roads and railways, such as the East-West Economic Corridor (Highway R9), Southern Economic Corridor and North-South Economic Corridor, connecting southern China to Singapore via Laos or Vietnam, Thailand and Malaysia.
political issues
Tavoy Port will be capable of docking any vessel with a 300,000-TEU load. However, the government's decision on a national logistics strategy this time disappointed some logistics operators as they thought the government had a political motive.
The Tavoy deep-sea port was highlighted as the main port due to political issues. The government still does not dare touch Pak Bara Port, as people in the South are concerned about the environmental impact on the tourism industry, a logistics industry source said. One stone can kill many birds if the government uses Tavoy Port as a main port, another source said.
Surely, Burma will benefit the most.
Second, shipping liners who are feeders in the Gulf of Thailand will also benefit from Tavoy Port by getting more work in the Andaman Sea.
Third, industrial estate developers will have more opportunities to invest there. The government will come under less pressure on the pollution problem in Rayong's Map Ta Phut Industrial Estate in the Eastern Seaboard if some manufacturers move their production base in Rayong to Tavoy.
The government will not have to face new pressure that could arise if it goes ahead with building Pak Bara Port as the main deep-sea port because of environmental concerns.
"The government should create its own main port as a western gateway even in the far future, as well as the southern seaboard industrial zone," said Krirkkla Sonthimas, president of the Thai Federation on Logistics.
"Eventually, we must breathe by using our own nose," he said.
Assoc Prof Ruth Banomyong, director of Thammasat Business School, said it depended upon what strategy the country will employ.
"If we believe in the success of regional cooperation, saying that Asean will become a single market in 2020, Tavoy in Burma can act as an alternative main port and gateway towards western markets such as India, the Middle East and Bimstec countries."
Tanit Sorat, vice chairman of the Federation of Thai Industries, said in a recent paper that the shipping route passing the Malacca Strait is now congested. In 10 years, there might be a change in the marine transport model from "land to sea" or "sea to land" to "sea-land bridge" - another choice for economies-of-scale logistics.
"Thailand needs to have a master plan and also an action plan in regard to using and keeping benefits from marine-related transport," he said.
However, to be a regional logistics hub, Thailand should have a clearer logistics plan integrating all transport modes, as well as a deep-sea port that can link the east and west, logistics operators said.
The government should also draw up development plans for a national shipping line and shipyard industry and related industries.
By Sasithorn Ongdee
Published on June 28, 2010
Tavoy Port (Dawei Port) in Burma is shining again as a deep-sea port on the West after the government last week agreed on promoting it as a main port while Pak Bara in Satun will be used as a minor port due mainly to environmental concerns.
The port is expected to link with inland routes in the Greater mekong Sub-region (GMS), in which Thailand is the centre of every economic cooperation initiative, with lower transport costs and shortened times in a bid to tranship goods and products from the East to the West.
The country's strategic plan for national logistics development took shape when the National Logistics Development Committee chaired by Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva held its first meeting last week.
"Using inland routes via the Tavoy-Kanchanaburi land bridge will help shorten the transhipping time between South China and Andaman seas to six days, compared with 16-18 days by sea via the congested Malacca Strait," a logistics expert said.
Pak Bara Port will then be a local port, carrying not more than 1 million 20-foot equivalent unit containers (TEUs) a year.
Tavoy Port is part of a mega-investment project in Tavoy in the southeast of Burma, which is expected to cost more than Bt300 billion. Besides the Bt50-billion port, there will be an industrial zone nearby and a building complex on 200,000 rai of land, including a road and railway network.
Construction is expected to start this year and be completed in 2020. It is an initiative of Italian-Thai Development, Thailand's largest construction firm, which would seek strategic investment partners for the project.
The company got involved in the project in 2008 when it won a contract from Burmese authorities to survey and construct an inland road linking Tavoy Port to Kanchanaburi, or the Tavoy-Kanchanaburi Highway, as a new land bridge in Southeast Asia.
The four-lane highway is expected to start construction soon with completion in 2013.
Deputy Commerce Minister Alongkorn Ponlaboot has visited Burma several times since early this year to negotiate with Burmese authorities on increasing border trade between the two countries at checkpoints in Kanchanaburi, as well as on resuming the highway project.
This will not only facilitate a freer flow of cement, building materials and equipment for construction in Burma by Thai contractors, but also pave the way for a multi-modal shift from the land bridge in Thailand to the Andaman Sea via Tavoy Port.
The Tavoy-Kanchanaburi land bridge can link with many inland routes, both roads and railways, such as the East-West Economic Corridor (Highway R9), Southern Economic Corridor and North-South Economic Corridor, connecting southern China to Singapore via Laos or Vietnam, Thailand and Malaysia.
political issues
Tavoy Port will be capable of docking any vessel with a 300,000-TEU load. However, the government's decision on a national logistics strategy this time disappointed some logistics operators as they thought the government had a political motive.
The Tavoy deep-sea port was highlighted as the main port due to political issues. The government still does not dare touch Pak Bara Port, as people in the South are concerned about the environmental impact on the tourism industry, a logistics industry source said. One stone can kill many birds if the government uses Tavoy Port as a main port, another source said.
Surely, Burma will benefit the most.
Second, shipping liners who are feeders in the Gulf of Thailand will also benefit from Tavoy Port by getting more work in the Andaman Sea.
Third, industrial estate developers will have more opportunities to invest there. The government will come under less pressure on the pollution problem in Rayong's Map Ta Phut Industrial Estate in the Eastern Seaboard if some manufacturers move their production base in Rayong to Tavoy.
The government will not have to face new pressure that could arise if it goes ahead with building Pak Bara Port as the main deep-sea port because of environmental concerns.
"The government should create its own main port as a western gateway even in the far future, as well as the southern seaboard industrial zone," said Krirkkla Sonthimas, president of the Thai Federation on Logistics.
"Eventually, we must breathe by using our own nose," he said.
Assoc Prof Ruth Banomyong, director of Thammasat Business School, said it depended upon what strategy the country will employ.
"If we believe in the success of regional cooperation, saying that Asean will become a single market in 2020, Tavoy in Burma can act as an alternative main port and gateway towards western markets such as India, the Middle East and Bimstec countries."
Tanit Sorat, vice chairman of the Federation of Thai Industries, said in a recent paper that the shipping route passing the Malacca Strait is now congested. In 10 years, there might be a change in the marine transport model from "land to sea" or "sea to land" to "sea-land bridge" - another choice for economies-of-scale logistics.
"Thailand needs to have a master plan and also an action plan in regard to using and keeping benefits from marine-related transport," he said.
However, to be a regional logistics hub, Thailand should have a clearer logistics plan integrating all transport modes, as well as a deep-sea port that can link the east and west, logistics operators said.
The government should also draw up development plans for a national shipping line and shipyard industry and related industries.
*********************************************************
The Christian Science Monitor - Burma election: Are activists the new Third Force in politics?
The Burma election this year is widely expected to reinforce the junta’s power. But some nonprofits support the vote, and dozens of political parties are taking part, in hopes of chipping away at military rule.
By a correspondent / June 28, 2010
Rangoon, Burma
Inside a humid room, rows of neatly dressed Burmese students are quizzing their guest lecturer. The class is Social Entrepreneurship and the topic is the European Union, where the lecturer comes from.
Why is Switzerland not in the EU? Why is marijuana legal in some countries but not in others? “Good questions,” the teacher nods.
The class is run by Myanmar Egress, a nonprofit organization that has become a one-stop shop for civil society activism in military-ruled Burma (Myanmar). Founded in 2006 by academics and businesspeople, it offers paid courses from Development Economics to Public Speaking Skills to Team Building. It also has a public policy research arm and conducts humanitarian relief assessments, while quietly extending into political education.
But the group also takes a conciliatory stance toward the unpopular junta, raising hackles among some democracy activists. It allegedly has close ties to the regime, and supports the controversial elections set for later this year, part of a seven-stage road map toward a “discipline-flourishing democracy.”
Critics say these elections, the first to be held in 20 years, will simply perpetuate military rule behind a civilian façade. The US has warned that voting is unlikely to be free and fair.
Some analysts have identified Myanmar Egress and other moderate groups as a new “Third Force” that seeks to steer a path between the regime and its opponents, including detained leader Aung San Suu Kyi, whose National League for Democracy is boycotting the vote.
Others doubt that Myanmar Egress is a force for democratic change because of its alleged close ties with the junta, says Aung Zaw, editor of the Irrawaddy, a magazine published in Thailand by exiled Burmese activists. “It’s a very controversial group of people. They appear to be supporting the regime’s road map and the elections.”
Tin Maung Thann, a co-founder of Myanmar Egress, says it would be naïve to expect a swift reversion to democracy after nearly 50 years of military rule. He argues that reform can begin at the margins, then move into the mainstream once the rules of the game are established.
Training young people in fields like rural development, and securing the best and brightest to study overseas, is one way to seed this change, he says. “We know how to create the (political) space.”
To engage or to boycott?
A similar debate on how to tackle Burma has played out in international politics. The Obama administration has sought to engage Burma’s rulers, with little visible success. Its demands for the release of Ms. Suu Kyi and other political prisoners have been ignored. The US and other Western powers have imposed economic sanctions on Burma, but its neighbors, led by Thailand and China, have stepped up trade and investment.
Western diplomats admit that sanctions haven’t undermined the regime. They say that an election and handover to civilian rule, however circumscribed, could trigger a review. But much will depend on the treatment of Suu Kyi, whose current sentence ends in February 2011 and who remains an international icon, though her political party recently split over whether to participate in elections. A breakaway group has registered as a new party.
Phyo Min Thein, a student union leader, was imprisoned for 14 years for subversion. He leads the Union Democratic Party, which aims to contest at least half the national seats in parliament. He criticizes what he calls unfair advantages given to the pro-junta Union Solidarity and Development Party, which is favored to beat out the 42 other parties that have registered so far. Among its advantages, USDP has spent years building a mass membership while other parties were not yet allowed to organize, and its logo is used on government projects. Yet Phyo Min Thein is determined to compete in the elections and use the parliament to push an opposition platform.
Western sanctions haven’t worked, he agrees. But to end them now would be premature. “If the government holds free and fair elections and convenes parliament, then sanctions should be lifted. But this government always breaks its promises,” he says.
Among ordinary Burmese, the upcoming elections evoke reactions of skepticism, apathy, and apprehension. Some shrug off the notion that anything will change at the ballot box. Others say it’s too dangerous to talk politics.
A small businessman who bemoans the regime’s mishandling of the economy says any change would be beneficial, as long as it eases the military out of policymaking. A slow, painful transition to civilian control is the only way for the country to progress, he argues. For that reason, he has no appetite for an opposition victory at the polls, as in 1990. That result was later annulled by the junta, paralyzing the political process for a generation.
“We must give [the military] a proper exit,” he says. “If we don’t, they will fight back like a cornered dog.”
The Burma election this year is widely expected to reinforce the junta’s power. But some nonprofits support the vote, and dozens of political parties are taking part, in hopes of chipping away at military rule.
By a correspondent / June 28, 2010
Rangoon, Burma
Inside a humid room, rows of neatly dressed Burmese students are quizzing their guest lecturer. The class is Social Entrepreneurship and the topic is the European Union, where the lecturer comes from.
Why is Switzerland not in the EU? Why is marijuana legal in some countries but not in others? “Good questions,” the teacher nods.
The class is run by Myanmar Egress, a nonprofit organization that has become a one-stop shop for civil society activism in military-ruled Burma (Myanmar). Founded in 2006 by academics and businesspeople, it offers paid courses from Development Economics to Public Speaking Skills to Team Building. It also has a public policy research arm and conducts humanitarian relief assessments, while quietly extending into political education.
But the group also takes a conciliatory stance toward the unpopular junta, raising hackles among some democracy activists. It allegedly has close ties to the regime, and supports the controversial elections set for later this year, part of a seven-stage road map toward a “discipline-flourishing democracy.”
Critics say these elections, the first to be held in 20 years, will simply perpetuate military rule behind a civilian façade. The US has warned that voting is unlikely to be free and fair.
Some analysts have identified Myanmar Egress and other moderate groups as a new “Third Force” that seeks to steer a path between the regime and its opponents, including detained leader Aung San Suu Kyi, whose National League for Democracy is boycotting the vote.
Others doubt that Myanmar Egress is a force for democratic change because of its alleged close ties with the junta, says Aung Zaw, editor of the Irrawaddy, a magazine published in Thailand by exiled Burmese activists. “It’s a very controversial group of people. They appear to be supporting the regime’s road map and the elections.”
Tin Maung Thann, a co-founder of Myanmar Egress, says it would be naïve to expect a swift reversion to democracy after nearly 50 years of military rule. He argues that reform can begin at the margins, then move into the mainstream once the rules of the game are established.
Training young people in fields like rural development, and securing the best and brightest to study overseas, is one way to seed this change, he says. “We know how to create the (political) space.”
To engage or to boycott?
A similar debate on how to tackle Burma has played out in international politics. The Obama administration has sought to engage Burma’s rulers, with little visible success. Its demands for the release of Ms. Suu Kyi and other political prisoners have been ignored. The US and other Western powers have imposed economic sanctions on Burma, but its neighbors, led by Thailand and China, have stepped up trade and investment.
Western diplomats admit that sanctions haven’t undermined the regime. They say that an election and handover to civilian rule, however circumscribed, could trigger a review. But much will depend on the treatment of Suu Kyi, whose current sentence ends in February 2011 and who remains an international icon, though her political party recently split over whether to participate in elections. A breakaway group has registered as a new party.
Phyo Min Thein, a student union leader, was imprisoned for 14 years for subversion. He leads the Union Democratic Party, which aims to contest at least half the national seats in parliament. He criticizes what he calls unfair advantages given to the pro-junta Union Solidarity and Development Party, which is favored to beat out the 42 other parties that have registered so far. Among its advantages, USDP has spent years building a mass membership while other parties were not yet allowed to organize, and its logo is used on government projects. Yet Phyo Min Thein is determined to compete in the elections and use the parliament to push an opposition platform.
Western sanctions haven’t worked, he agrees. But to end them now would be premature. “If the government holds free and fair elections and convenes parliament, then sanctions should be lifted. But this government always breaks its promises,” he says.
Among ordinary Burmese, the upcoming elections evoke reactions of skepticism, apathy, and apprehension. Some shrug off the notion that anything will change at the ballot box. Others say it’s too dangerous to talk politics.
A small businessman who bemoans the regime’s mishandling of the economy says any change would be beneficial, as long as it eases the military out of policymaking. A slow, painful transition to civilian control is the only way for the country to progress, he argues. For that reason, he has no appetite for an opposition victory at the polls, as in 1990. That result was later annulled by the junta, paralyzing the political process for a generation.
“We must give [the military] a proper exit,” he says. “If we don’t, they will fight back like a cornered dog.”
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EarthTimes - Myanmar private airlines to expand fleets for tourism
Posted : Sun, 27 Jun 2010 06:50:54 GMT
Yangon - Myanmar's two private airlines have announced plans to purchase new aircraft to service new routes in time for the coming peak tourism season, media reports said Sunday.
Both Air Bagan and Air Mandalay said they expand their limited fleets in time for the peak period of November to February, the Myanmar Times reported.
Air Bagan plans to buy two Airbus A-320s to service regional destinations such as Bangkok, Phuket, Siem Reap, Kuala Lumpur and Singapore, and two AIR 72-500 for its domestic routes.
"The company will purchase four new aircraft in time for the upcoming peak season but we haven't decided exactly when the new aircraft will be purchased and where they will be acquired from," an Air Bagan spokesperson told the weekly newspaper.
Companies in Myanmar, a pariah state among most Western democracies, are sometimes prevented from making purchases by economic sanctions on the ruling military regime and private firms close to the generals.
Air Bagan currently has six aircraft in operation - two ATR-72s, two ATR-42s and two Fokker 100s - as well as two Airbus A-310s in storage at Yangon International Airport.
Air Mandalay reportedly announced plans to add two new ATR-72s to expand its domestic services.
Myanmar saw a 39 per cent jump in international tourist arrivals during the first three months of this year, according to the Pacific Asia Travel Association.
Posted : Sun, 27 Jun 2010 06:50:54 GMT
Yangon - Myanmar's two private airlines have announced plans to purchase new aircraft to service new routes in time for the coming peak tourism season, media reports said Sunday.
Both Air Bagan and Air Mandalay said they expand their limited fleets in time for the peak period of November to February, the Myanmar Times reported.
Air Bagan plans to buy two Airbus A-320s to service regional destinations such as Bangkok, Phuket, Siem Reap, Kuala Lumpur and Singapore, and two AIR 72-500 for its domestic routes.
"The company will purchase four new aircraft in time for the upcoming peak season but we haven't decided exactly when the new aircraft will be purchased and where they will be acquired from," an Air Bagan spokesperson told the weekly newspaper.
Companies in Myanmar, a pariah state among most Western democracies, are sometimes prevented from making purchases by economic sanctions on the ruling military regime and private firms close to the generals.
Air Bagan currently has six aircraft in operation - two ATR-72s, two ATR-42s and two Fokker 100s - as well as two Airbus A-310s in storage at Yangon International Airport.
Air Mandalay reportedly announced plans to add two new ATR-72s to expand its domestic services.
Myanmar saw a 39 per cent jump in international tourist arrivals during the first three months of this year, according to the Pacific Asia Travel Association.
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StrategyPage - Illegal Drugs And Terrorism
June 28, 2010: The U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime, which collects statistics on drug use worldwide, has released its latest report on drug production and use. Production and distribution of these drugs is a major cause of unrest and corruption worldwide, with drug use a major public health problem as well. However, the most widely used drug in the world is still marijuana (and it's refined version, hashish), which is considered no worse than alcohol. Most cultures disagree. There are about 160 million users of marijuana and hashish worldwide, down a few percent in the last year. Many users live in rural areas where marijuana grows wild and legal restrictions are not energetically enforced. But in many urban areas, marijuana is a major source of income for gangsters, and some terrorist groups. Not as profitable as cocaine and heroin, and harder to smuggle (because of the bulk), it is still a major threat because it has such a large market.
Marijuana has been used by humans for over 5,000 years. It's been used for medicinal purposes, to enhance food recipes or religious ceremonies and, well, to just get high. Because cannabis is not as powerful as opium (another ancient drug, but much more expensive to produce), and a lot easier to get (it grows wild in many parts of the world, especially Central Asia) societies, and governments, tended to ignore its impact. Alcoholic beverages were seen as more of a public menace. That perception has reversed in the last century or so.
Hashish, however, can be potent stuff. Especially if it is extracted from strains of cannabis bred to have higher amounts of THC (the major active ingredient that gives you the buzz). This breeding effort has more than tripled the THC content of commercial cannabis strains over the last three decades. For Afghan farmers, cannabis is cheaper and easier to grow than poppies (the source of opium and heroin), and less likely to attract the attention of NATO or Afghan drug control forces. Cannabis is not as profitable as poppies, but it's still more profitable than wheat. Who really gets hurt by this switch are the drug gangs, which make a lot less money on hashish, compared to heroin. That means less money for their Taliban allies as well. Thus while indoor growing of potent Cannabis strains is more popular in Industrialized countries, rural nations are producing more outdoor crops, and converting more of it to easily smuggled hashish. This has become a growing source of income for criminal gangs in Afghanistan, Central Asia, Mexico and South America.
There are about 30 million users of cocaine, heroin and other hard drugs. These are the most profitable drugs, because they command the highest prices. Heroin, which funds much of the violence in Afghanistan, is largely (60 percent) consumed in three nearby markets (West Europe, Russia and China). Smaller, but significant markets are in the Persian Gulf and North America. Some 40 percent of the heroin is being smuggled out via Pakistan (which has millions of addicts of the cheaper opium, which in refined form is heroin). Pakistan is now the favored smuggling route because Iran and Turkey have become very effective in intercepting the smugglers.
Afghanistan produces 89 percent of the world's heroin, although that is likely to dip ten percent or more because of a plant disease (poppy blight) that has destroyed much of the recent crop. More heroin is coming out of the traditional big producers in the Golden Triangle (Myanmar/Burma), as well as new producers in Mexico and Colombia.
Cocaine continues to come mainly from South America (Colombia, Peru and Bolivia), and the biggest market (42 percent of sales) is North America. But Europe is catching up (39 percent of sales). In fact, the number of cocaine users in North America has declined by half in the last three decades, while the number has increased in Europe and other markets. Because of the growth in the European market, the cocaine gangs have established a smuggling route that goes through West Africa and the Sahara Desert (where the drugs are guarded by Islamic terrorists, who need the money). As if West Africa was not corrupt enough, now it has cocaine, and cocaine money, to worry about. Another growing market for cocaine is Latin America, which has about half as many users as North America's 5.3 million. Other growth markets are the Persian Gulf and East Asia (where cocaine is still relatively exotic.)
The biggest growth area is for synthetic drugs like methamphetamine and Ecstasy (and even more exotic formulations). Production of this stuff was up 20 percent in the last year. These drugs are less likely to fund rebels or terrorists, although some Arab migrants in the West have been found dealing these drugs, and sending some of their profits to Islamic terrorist organizations.
June 28, 2010: The U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime, which collects statistics on drug use worldwide, has released its latest report on drug production and use. Production and distribution of these drugs is a major cause of unrest and corruption worldwide, with drug use a major public health problem as well. However, the most widely used drug in the world is still marijuana (and it's refined version, hashish), which is considered no worse than alcohol. Most cultures disagree. There are about 160 million users of marijuana and hashish worldwide, down a few percent in the last year. Many users live in rural areas where marijuana grows wild and legal restrictions are not energetically enforced. But in many urban areas, marijuana is a major source of income for gangsters, and some terrorist groups. Not as profitable as cocaine and heroin, and harder to smuggle (because of the bulk), it is still a major threat because it has such a large market.
Marijuana has been used by humans for over 5,000 years. It's been used for medicinal purposes, to enhance food recipes or religious ceremonies and, well, to just get high. Because cannabis is not as powerful as opium (another ancient drug, but much more expensive to produce), and a lot easier to get (it grows wild in many parts of the world, especially Central Asia) societies, and governments, tended to ignore its impact. Alcoholic beverages were seen as more of a public menace. That perception has reversed in the last century or so.
Hashish, however, can be potent stuff. Especially if it is extracted from strains of cannabis bred to have higher amounts of THC (the major active ingredient that gives you the buzz). This breeding effort has more than tripled the THC content of commercial cannabis strains over the last three decades. For Afghan farmers, cannabis is cheaper and easier to grow than poppies (the source of opium and heroin), and less likely to attract the attention of NATO or Afghan drug control forces. Cannabis is not as profitable as poppies, but it's still more profitable than wheat. Who really gets hurt by this switch are the drug gangs, which make a lot less money on hashish, compared to heroin. That means less money for their Taliban allies as well. Thus while indoor growing of potent Cannabis strains is more popular in Industrialized countries, rural nations are producing more outdoor crops, and converting more of it to easily smuggled hashish. This has become a growing source of income for criminal gangs in Afghanistan, Central Asia, Mexico and South America.
There are about 30 million users of cocaine, heroin and other hard drugs. These are the most profitable drugs, because they command the highest prices. Heroin, which funds much of the violence in Afghanistan, is largely (60 percent) consumed in three nearby markets (West Europe, Russia and China). Smaller, but significant markets are in the Persian Gulf and North America. Some 40 percent of the heroin is being smuggled out via Pakistan (which has millions of addicts of the cheaper opium, which in refined form is heroin). Pakistan is now the favored smuggling route because Iran and Turkey have become very effective in intercepting the smugglers.
Afghanistan produces 89 percent of the world's heroin, although that is likely to dip ten percent or more because of a plant disease (poppy blight) that has destroyed much of the recent crop. More heroin is coming out of the traditional big producers in the Golden Triangle (Myanmar/Burma), as well as new producers in Mexico and Colombia.
Cocaine continues to come mainly from South America (Colombia, Peru and Bolivia), and the biggest market (42 percent of sales) is North America. But Europe is catching up (39 percent of sales). In fact, the number of cocaine users in North America has declined by half in the last three decades, while the number has increased in Europe and other markets. Because of the growth in the European market, the cocaine gangs have established a smuggling route that goes through West Africa and the Sahara Desert (where the drugs are guarded by Islamic terrorists, who need the money). As if West Africa was not corrupt enough, now it has cocaine, and cocaine money, to worry about. Another growing market for cocaine is Latin America, which has about half as many users as North America's 5.3 million. Other growth markets are the Persian Gulf and East Asia (where cocaine is still relatively exotic.)
The biggest growth area is for synthetic drugs like methamphetamine and Ecstasy (and even more exotic formulations). Production of this stuff was up 20 percent in the last year. These drugs are less likely to fund rebels or terrorists, although some Arab migrants in the West have been found dealing these drugs, and sending some of their profits to Islamic terrorist organizations.
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June 28, 2010
ISRIA - ASEAN Hands-over Recovery Projects to Cyclone Nargis Survivors
Three Post-Nargis Recovery projects implemented by ASEAN Volunteers and implementing partners were handed over to the Nargis-affected community today by the Deputy Secretary-General of ASEAN for ASEAN Socio-Cultural Community, Dato’ Misran Karmain, in Myanmar.
The projects provided support in livelihoods, disaster risk reduction and access to safe water and sanitation for at least 5,000 households in the Kungyangon, Kwahmu, Labutta and Pyapon townships. Funded by Norway and Timor-Leste, the project activities are community-driven and centred on supporting under-assisted communities, especially those most vulnerable.
As part of the handover ceremony, Dato' Misran, ASEAN Volunteers and implementing partners inaugurated a bridge and distributed boats with engines, water tanks, artesian wells and rice mills to the villagers in Kungyangon township. Senior members of the Tripartite Core Group (TCG) were also present at the inauguration. The TCG comprises representatives from ASEAN, the Government of Myanmar and the United Nations.
“ASEAN is honoured to transfer ownership of the projects to these communities,” said Dato’ Misran at the ceremony. “The projects have rebuilt people’s livelihoods and enhanced their capacity on reducing disaster risks. We hope that these outcomes will be sustained,” he added.
The three projects were implemented between November 2009 and June 2010 by Border Areas Development Association, Agency for Technical Cooperation and Development (ACTED) and ActionAid International- Myanmar/Aung Yadanar Social Association, with the support of 20 ASEAN Volunteers from Brunei Darussalam, Cambodia, Malaysia, Myanmar, Singapore and Thailand.
Dato’ Misran also commended the ASEAN Volunteers for their contribution. “The ASEAN Volunteers from different parts of the region who came to lend helping hands to the people of Myanmar and to exchange knowledge have demonstrated the principle of a caring and sharing ASEAN Community,” he said. “I am proud of them and their active commitment in local capacity building. Their spirit of volunteerism should be promoted across and beyond the region,” he added.
ISRIA - ASEAN Hands-over Recovery Projects to Cyclone Nargis Survivors
Three Post-Nargis Recovery projects implemented by ASEAN Volunteers and implementing partners were handed over to the Nargis-affected community today by the Deputy Secretary-General of ASEAN for ASEAN Socio-Cultural Community, Dato’ Misran Karmain, in Myanmar.
The projects provided support in livelihoods, disaster risk reduction and access to safe water and sanitation for at least 5,000 households in the Kungyangon, Kwahmu, Labutta and Pyapon townships. Funded by Norway and Timor-Leste, the project activities are community-driven and centred on supporting under-assisted communities, especially those most vulnerable.
As part of the handover ceremony, Dato' Misran, ASEAN Volunteers and implementing partners inaugurated a bridge and distributed boats with engines, water tanks, artesian wells and rice mills to the villagers in Kungyangon township. Senior members of the Tripartite Core Group (TCG) were also present at the inauguration. The TCG comprises representatives from ASEAN, the Government of Myanmar and the United Nations.
“ASEAN is honoured to transfer ownership of the projects to these communities,” said Dato’ Misran at the ceremony. “The projects have rebuilt people’s livelihoods and enhanced their capacity on reducing disaster risks. We hope that these outcomes will be sustained,” he added.
The three projects were implemented between November 2009 and June 2010 by Border Areas Development Association, Agency for Technical Cooperation and Development (ACTED) and ActionAid International- Myanmar/Aung Yadanar Social Association, with the support of 20 ASEAN Volunteers from Brunei Darussalam, Cambodia, Malaysia, Myanmar, Singapore and Thailand.
Dato’ Misran also commended the ASEAN Volunteers for their contribution. “The ASEAN Volunteers from different parts of the region who came to lend helping hands to the people of Myanmar and to exchange knowledge have demonstrated the principle of a caring and sharing ASEAN Community,” he said. “I am proud of them and their active commitment in local capacity building. Their spirit of volunteerism should be promoted across and beyond the region,” he added.
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The Irrawaddy - European Commission Urged to Fund Cross-Border Aid
Monday, June 28, 2010
More than 1,000 supporters of Burma Campaign UK have written letters to Kristalina Georgieva, the European commissioner responsible for European Union aid, calling on the European Commission to review its policy of refusing to fund cross-border aid to Burmese refugees living along the Thai-Burmese border.
Zoya Phan, the International Coordinator for Burma Campaign UK and previously an internally displaced person (IDP) from Karen State, said in a Burma Campaign UK statement released on Monday, “The European Commission should be funding aid on the basis of need and not allow the dictatorship to stop aid to ethnic people for political reasons.”
“Rather than let people die because of restrictions by the dictatorship, the commission must fund cross-border aid as an alternative which will save lives. We should not have a situation where the generals in Burma have more control over who gets aid than European taxpayers and members of the European Parliament,” said Zoya Phan.
Since 2009, the European Commission has refused to fund cross-border aid provided by NGOs working on behalf of Burmese refugees along the Thai-Burmese border. Two such aid organizations are the Thailand Burma Border Consortium, an umbrella group of aid agencies that supplies a high percentage of humanitarian aid to IDPs, and the Mae Tao Clinic in Mae Sot, which provides medical health care for Burmese refugees and others.
There are around 100,000 IDP's in eastern Burma who are in need of cross-border aid, according to the Burma Campaign UK statement. “In particular, cross-border medical aid to eastern Burma is desperately needed. The area has levels of poverty and disease as bad as those in the worst conflict-hit African countries,” the statement said.
In addition, residents in eastern Burma are still living under threats related to the ongoing civil war between the Burmese military and the Karen National Union.
The European Parliament has repeatedly called on the European Commission to fund cross-border aid to help Burmese refugees along the Thai-Burmese border, but has been ignored by the commission, according to Burma Campaign UK.
Burma Campaign UK said that the European Commission has consistently refused to fund such aid and has failed to provide an adequate explanation for their refusal, instead making vague statements about accountability and monitoring. The argument is not credible, said Burma Campaign UK, as the British government and other EU members with strict monitoring requirements are satisfied.
Monday, June 28, 2010
More than 1,000 supporters of Burma Campaign UK have written letters to Kristalina Georgieva, the European commissioner responsible for European Union aid, calling on the European Commission to review its policy of refusing to fund cross-border aid to Burmese refugees living along the Thai-Burmese border.
Zoya Phan, the International Coordinator for Burma Campaign UK and previously an internally displaced person (IDP) from Karen State, said in a Burma Campaign UK statement released on Monday, “The European Commission should be funding aid on the basis of need and not allow the dictatorship to stop aid to ethnic people for political reasons.”
“Rather than let people die because of restrictions by the dictatorship, the commission must fund cross-border aid as an alternative which will save lives. We should not have a situation where the generals in Burma have more control over who gets aid than European taxpayers and members of the European Parliament,” said Zoya Phan.
Since 2009, the European Commission has refused to fund cross-border aid provided by NGOs working on behalf of Burmese refugees along the Thai-Burmese border. Two such aid organizations are the Thailand Burma Border Consortium, an umbrella group of aid agencies that supplies a high percentage of humanitarian aid to IDPs, and the Mae Tao Clinic in Mae Sot, which provides medical health care for Burmese refugees and others.
There are around 100,000 IDP's in eastern Burma who are in need of cross-border aid, according to the Burma Campaign UK statement. “In particular, cross-border medical aid to eastern Burma is desperately needed. The area has levels of poverty and disease as bad as those in the worst conflict-hit African countries,” the statement said.
In addition, residents in eastern Burma are still living under threats related to the ongoing civil war between the Burmese military and the Karen National Union.
The European Parliament has repeatedly called on the European Commission to fund cross-border aid to help Burmese refugees along the Thai-Burmese border, but has been ignored by the commission, according to Burma Campaign UK.
Burma Campaign UK said that the European Commission has consistently refused to fund such aid and has failed to provide an adequate explanation for their refusal, instead making vague statements about accountability and monitoring. The argument is not credible, said Burma Campaign UK, as the British government and other EU members with strict monitoring requirements are satisfied.
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The Irrawaddy - Junta Censors News about Inle Lake
By ZARNI MANN Monday, June 28, 2010
Burma's military junta has ordered public servants not to respond to questions raised by domestic and exiled media related to Inle Lake, which dried up during this summer's drought.
Aye Myint Kyu, deputy of the Ministry of Hotels and Tourism (MHT), instructed departments and offices in Taunggyi, the capital of Shan State, and Nyaung Shwe Township not to answer questions about Inle Lake after news reports that included photos of the dried-up lake were carried by domestic news journals, according to sources in the hotel and tourism business.
The water level recently at Inle Lake. (Source: Weekly Eleven Journal)
“We are not allowed to say anything when journals and guests ask about the lake. I am not sure if there was an official order, but we were told that it was an instruction from the deputy minister,” said a hotel and tourism staff worker from Nyaung Shwe Township.
Apart from offices under the MHT, offices in the agriculture, meteorology and hydrology, irrigation and forest departments received the same instruction, office staff said.
Both news journals inside Burma and exiled media groups have previously reported on this year's drought and water shortages across the country caused by high temperatures and late monsoon rains, as well as about a severe drop in Inle Lake's water level. But now they are being stonewalled by the government.
“When we asked people from the departments about Inle Lake, they said they were not allowed to say anything. They said we had to contact Nyapyidaw if we wanted to find anything out about the lake,” said a reporter based in Rangoon.
News journals carrying reports related to educational activities for the greening of Inle Lake and nearby areas have faced censorship by the regime's Press Scrutiny and Registration Division, reporters said.
“Many of the writings in news and articles regarding the current condition of the lake and its impact have been censored. Educational articles without this information will be meaningless,” said a journal editor.
“People will know what they should be doing only when we can tell them openly what is happening in our area and what we are doing to recover the situation. Educational programs will then be effective. Preventing news about such efforts will not bring any successful achievement,” said a person working on greening Inle lake and nearby areas.
Inle Lake locals said that due to rains in recent days, some areas of the lake that had previously been dry now have some water.
“The water level is still low, although there is water in the lake. Foreigners and visitors coming to the temple have seen it [the dry lake], so we can't hide the fact. We have no choice but to explain what had happened when foreigners ask us, even though we were told to shut up,” said a local guide.
Located in southern Shan State, Inle Lake is one of the most scenic places and most popular tourist attractions in Burma. The lake is known for its floating gardens and markets, the Phaundaw Oo pagoda and locals who row boats by wrapping one leg around an oar.
By ZARNI MANN Monday, June 28, 2010
Burma's military junta has ordered public servants not to respond to questions raised by domestic and exiled media related to Inle Lake, which dried up during this summer's drought.
Aye Myint Kyu, deputy of the Ministry of Hotels and Tourism (MHT), instructed departments and offices in Taunggyi, the capital of Shan State, and Nyaung Shwe Township not to answer questions about Inle Lake after news reports that included photos of the dried-up lake were carried by domestic news journals, according to sources in the hotel and tourism business.
The water level recently at Inle Lake. (Source: Weekly Eleven Journal)
“We are not allowed to say anything when journals and guests ask about the lake. I am not sure if there was an official order, but we were told that it was an instruction from the deputy minister,” said a hotel and tourism staff worker from Nyaung Shwe Township.
Apart from offices under the MHT, offices in the agriculture, meteorology and hydrology, irrigation and forest departments received the same instruction, office staff said.
Both news journals inside Burma and exiled media groups have previously reported on this year's drought and water shortages across the country caused by high temperatures and late monsoon rains, as well as about a severe drop in Inle Lake's water level. But now they are being stonewalled by the government.
“When we asked people from the departments about Inle Lake, they said they were not allowed to say anything. They said we had to contact Nyapyidaw if we wanted to find anything out about the lake,” said a reporter based in Rangoon.
News journals carrying reports related to educational activities for the greening of Inle Lake and nearby areas have faced censorship by the regime's Press Scrutiny and Registration Division, reporters said.
“Many of the writings in news and articles regarding the current condition of the lake and its impact have been censored. Educational articles without this information will be meaningless,” said a journal editor.
“People will know what they should be doing only when we can tell them openly what is happening in our area and what we are doing to recover the situation. Educational programs will then be effective. Preventing news about such efforts will not bring any successful achievement,” said a person working on greening Inle lake and nearby areas.
Inle Lake locals said that due to rains in recent days, some areas of the lake that had previously been dry now have some water.
“The water level is still low, although there is water in the lake. Foreigners and visitors coming to the temple have seen it [the dry lake], so we can't hide the fact. We have no choice but to explain what had happened when foreigners ask us, even though we were told to shut up,” said a local guide.
Located in southern Shan State, Inle Lake is one of the most scenic places and most popular tourist attractions in Burma. The lake is known for its floating gardens and markets, the Phaundaw Oo pagoda and locals who row boats by wrapping one leg around an oar.
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The Irrawaddy - Tay Za to Form Proxy Airline
By WAI MOE - Monday, June 28, 2010
Burmese tycoon Tay Za is to establish a proxy airline company in order to avoid the US sanctions that have been imposed on his current airline, Air Bagan, according to business sources in Rangoon.
The sources said that since Air Bagan was blacklisted by the US and other Western countries, it has faced problems transferring finances and has been denied insurance. To evade the restrictions, Tay Za has reportedly registered another airline company with the Burmese aviation authority and plans to buy more aircraft for domestic and international routes in that company's name.
“Businessmen here are saying that Tay Za’s new aviation company will likely be called 'Ever Win,'” said a business source who spoke to The Irrawaddy on condition of anonymity. “It is now in the registration process at the aviation authority. Tay Za’s new company would be officially under different ownership since his name is on the [Western countries'] sanctions list. However, the company will be run with his money.”
The US imposed sanctions on Tay Za and other associates of the ruling Burmese generals following the Burmese junta’s crackdown on mass demonstrations in September 2007. According to the blacklist issued by the US Department of the Treasury, two of Tay Za's family members, as well as his private companies including Htoo Trading Company, Air Bagan and his Singapore-based Pavo Trading Pte Ltd, are included in the sanctions.
In February 2008, the US extended its sanctions policy to include the Htoo Group of Companies, Myanmar Avia Export Co. Ltd, and Ayer Shwe Wah Co. Ltd, directed by Aung Thet Mann, the son of the junta No.3 Gen Shwe Mann.
“We are tightening financial sanctions against Tay Za, an arms dealer and financial henchman of Burma’s repressive junta,” said Adam J. Szubin, the director of the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control, in a statement at the time.
Another allegation against Tay Za among the Burmese business community is that junta chief Snr-Gen Than Shwe’s family has financial stakes in his companies.
Tay Za is also the owner of one of Burma's major football clubs, Yangon United FC.
Despite the Western sanctions against Tay Za and other military cronies, Naypyidaw has recently granted several of them business opportunities in newly privatized state assets, including banks.
Private journals in Rangoon recently reported that Tay Za’s Air Bagan is to purchase two Airbus aircraft as it expands routes to neighborinAC countries, as well as purchasing two AIR 72-500 for domestic destinations. Both aviation makers are based in Europe.
By WAI MOE - Monday, June 28, 2010
Burmese tycoon Tay Za is to establish a proxy airline company in order to avoid the US sanctions that have been imposed on his current airline, Air Bagan, according to business sources in Rangoon.
The sources said that since Air Bagan was blacklisted by the US and other Western countries, it has faced problems transferring finances and has been denied insurance. To evade the restrictions, Tay Za has reportedly registered another airline company with the Burmese aviation authority and plans to buy more aircraft for domestic and international routes in that company's name.
“Businessmen here are saying that Tay Za’s new aviation company will likely be called 'Ever Win,'” said a business source who spoke to The Irrawaddy on condition of anonymity. “It is now in the registration process at the aviation authority. Tay Za’s new company would be officially under different ownership since his name is on the [Western countries'] sanctions list. However, the company will be run with his money.”
The US imposed sanctions on Tay Za and other associates of the ruling Burmese generals following the Burmese junta’s crackdown on mass demonstrations in September 2007. According to the blacklist issued by the US Department of the Treasury, two of Tay Za's family members, as well as his private companies including Htoo Trading Company, Air Bagan and his Singapore-based Pavo Trading Pte Ltd, are included in the sanctions.
In February 2008, the US extended its sanctions policy to include the Htoo Group of Companies, Myanmar Avia Export Co. Ltd, and Ayer Shwe Wah Co. Ltd, directed by Aung Thet Mann, the son of the junta No.3 Gen Shwe Mann.
“We are tightening financial sanctions against Tay Za, an arms dealer and financial henchman of Burma’s repressive junta,” said Adam J. Szubin, the director of the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control, in a statement at the time.
Another allegation against Tay Za among the Burmese business community is that junta chief Snr-Gen Than Shwe’s family has financial stakes in his companies.
Tay Za is also the owner of one of Burma's major football clubs, Yangon United FC.
Despite the Western sanctions against Tay Za and other military cronies, Naypyidaw has recently granted several of them business opportunities in newly privatized state assets, including banks.
Private journals in Rangoon recently reported that Tay Za’s Air Bagan is to purchase two Airbus aircraft as it expands routes to neighborinAC countries, as well as purchasing two AIR 72-500 for domestic destinations. Both aviation makers are based in Europe.
*********************************************************
DVB News - UN ignores Burma junta’s drugs role
By BERTIL LINTNER
Published: 28 June 2010
The UN’s annual day against drugs is usually celebrated with claims of great strides in the campaign to eradicate the worldwide production of narcotics and fanciful reports on how governments around the globe are successfully cooperating in this noble effort. This year, however, it seems that at least some realism has seeped into the largely fictitious picture of the situation in the drug-producing countries that the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) usually presents to the outside world.
Burma’s drug production has surged over the past year, Gary Lewis, a representative of the UNODC, told reporters in Bangkok two days before the annual event. Burma, he said, had experienced a “steep and dramatic” increase in opium cultivation, with 31,700 hectares, or 78,300 acres, of land under poppy cultivation in 2009, up by almost half since 2006.
At the same time, the production of synthetic drugs such as methamphetamine in the Burmese sector of the Golden Triangle has increased equally dramatically. According to Thai military sources, between 300 and 400 million pills will be produced this year, or almost double the amount in 2009. The main market for all these drugs is Thailand, but significant quantities are also smuggled into China, Laos, Vietnam, Cambodia and India. Some Burmese heroin, but very little methamphetamine, can also be found in Australia and North America.
The reason for this surge, Lewis told reporters, is that ethnic armies which once fought the Burmese army and now have entered into ceasefire agreements with the government, are coming under pressure to convert themselves into Border Guard Forces under central command. Most drugs in Burma are produced in areas controlled by the United Wa State Army (UWSA) and its allies, some of whom are smaller groups which also once formed part of the now defunct Communist Party of Burma (CPB). The UWSA and its allies are preparing for war: “They are getting ready to fight. They are selling more and more drugs so they can buy weapons to fight the government,” the Guardian last week quoted Lewis as saying.
Statements such as these show that the UNODC may have changed its previous, glossy image of the UWSA and its allies — and so has the Burmese government. It is often forgotten that the first huge increase in Burma’s production of opium and its derivative heroin occurred after the collapse of the CPB in 1989. In the wake of the 1988 uprising in the Burmese heartland, and the subsequent massacres in the then capital Rangoon and elsewhere, more than 8,000 pro-democracy activists fled the urban centres for the border areas near Thailand, where a multitude of ethnic insurgencies not involved in the drug trade were active. Significantly, the main drug gang operating along the Thai border, Khun Sa and his private army, refused to shelter any dissidents; his main interest was business, not to fight the Burmese government.
The Burmese military now feared a renewed, politically dangerous insurgency along its frontiers: a possible alliance between the ethnic rebels and the pro-democracy activists from Rangoon and other towns and cities. But these Thai-border-based groups – Karen, Mon, Karenni, and Pa-O – were unable to provide the urban dissidents with more than a handful of weapons. None of the ethnic armies could match the strength of the CPB, which then fielded more than 15,000 soldiers and controlled a 20,000-square-kilometre territory along the China-Burma border in the northeast. Unlike the ethnic rebels, the CPB had vast quantities of arms and ammunition supplied by China from 1968 to 1978, when it was Beijing’s policy to support communist insurrections in Southeast Asia. Although the aid had almost ceased by 1980, the CPB still head enough munitions to last for at least ten years of guerrilla warfare against the central government.
Despite the Burmese military’s claim of a “communist conspiracy” behind the 1988 uprising – which then intelligence chief Khin Nyunt concocted in a lengthy speech on 5 August 1989 – there was at that time no linkage between the anti-totalitarian, pro-democracy movement in central Burma, and the orthodox, Marxist-Leninist leadership of the CPB. However, given the strong desire for revenge for the bloody events of 1988, it is plausible to assume that the urban dissidents would have accepted arms from any source. Thus, it became imperative for the ruling military to neutralise as many of the border insurgencies as possible, especially the CPB’s.
A situation which was potentially even more dangerous for the military regime arose in March and April 1989 when the hill-tribe rank-and-file of the CPB, led by the military commanders who also came from the various ethnic minorities in the northeastern base area, mutinied against the party’s ageing, mostly Burman political leadership. On 17 April 1989, ethnic Wa mutineers stormed party headquarters at Panghsang and drove the old leaders and their families, about 300 people, across the border into China.
The former CPB army split along ethnic lines, and formed four different, regional resistance armies, of which the now 30,000-strong United Wa State Army (UWSA) was by far the most powerful. Suddenly, there were no longer any communist insurgents in Burma, only ethnic rebels, and the junta worried about potential collaboration between the new, well-armed forces in the northeast and the minority groups along the Thai border – and the urban dissidents who had taken refuge there.
Within weeks of the CPB mutiny, Khin Nyunt helicoptered up to the northeastern border areas, met the leaders of the mutiny, and made them an offer. In exchange for ceasefire agreements with the government, and to sever any ties with any other rebels, the UWSA and other CPB mutineers were granted unofficial permission to engage in any kind of business to sustain themselves – which in Burma’s remote and underdeveloped hill areas inevitably meant opium production.
According to estimates by the US government, Burma’s opium production soared from 836 tons in 1987 to 2,340 tons by 1995. Satellite imagery showed that the area under poppy cultivation increased from 92,300 hectares to 154,000 during the same period. For the first time, heroin refineries, which previously had been located only along the Thai border, were established along the Chinese frontier, and the ceasefire agreements with the government enabled the traffickers to move narcotics freely along major roads and highways.
However, by the early 2000s, opium production began to decline after the boom years immediately after the CPB mutiny, but by then huge quantities of methamphetamines – in the past unknown in the Burmese sector of the Golden Triangle – were produced in laboratories in areas controlled by the UWSA and other former CPB groups. Burma remains one of the world’s biggest producers of illicit narcotics, and its production of opium and heroin is still significant, as the latest figures from the UNODC show.
The political threat from the border areas was thwarted, the regime was safe, and vast amounts of money derived from the drug trade were invested in Burma’s legal economy. Some of Burma’s most profitable business conglomerates and banks were established by drug barons allied with the UWSA and other ceasefire groups. All along, the Burmese military turned a blind eye to the traffic, and benefited from it economically. Apart from being invested in various sectors of the national economy, drug money also ended up in the pockets of many army officers, some of whom became immensely wealthy.
But simply neutralising the border insurgencies was only the first step; today, 20 years later, the government believes that the time has come to integrate the former rebel armies, and the election that is supposed to take place this year provided the ruling military with an excellent opportunity to press this demand. The ceasefire groups have been told to transform their armies into Border Guard Forces before the election so their political wings can form legitimate political parties to take part in the polls. But, as it turned out, the ceasefire groups were not prepared to accept this offer.
In August last year, the Burmese army attacked Kokang in northeastern Shan State, until then controlled by one of the smaller former CPB forces, which had resisted the demand to accept the status as a Border Guard Force. Huge amounts of drugs were seized in the operation against the local militia in Kokang which, until it ceased being an ally and broke with the government, had been praised by the authorities for its “drug-suppression efforts.”
The UNODC and its predecessor, the UNFDAC (the UN Fund for Drug Abuse Control), also used to praise the drug armies in similar terms. In January 1991, UNFDAC’s Don MacIntosh was present at a drug-burning show in northern Burma where he declared: “I am pleased to be in Shan state and have the opportunity to [attend] this important drug eradication exercise.” The ceremony was presided over by Peng Jiasheng – the druglord who was chased out of Kokang in August last year.
In more recent years, Jeremy Milsom, a former consultant to the UNODC, has openly defended the UWSA leadership, including some of its most notorious druglords. In his contribution to a book called Trouble in the Triangle: Opium and Conflict in Burma, Milsom stated that “Wei Xuegang [a Wa drugs baron who was close to intelligence chief Khin Nyunt], is an interesting figure with respect to the WSR [Wa Special Region]. Having helped the region immensely both in times of conflict and more recently by being the principal provider of social and economic development assistance to poor Wa farmers in the south, there is considerable respect for him. To add to this view, according to senior Wa sources, a condition of Wei Xuegang joining the UWSA in 1995 was that he not be involved in drug trafficking anymore and work with the WCA [Wa Central Authority] to help phase out drugs.”
The last sentence is puzzling, to say the least, as Wei has been involved with the UWSA since its formation in 1989. And, after giving up his involvement in the drug trade, Wei appears to have became a philanthropist, Milsom contends: “Ironically, Wei Xuegang has done more to support impoverished poppy farmers break their dependence on the crop than any other single person or institution in Burma, and this has been done by putting past drug profits back into the people as he perhaps tries to move into the mainstream economy.” To most others, Wei is the driving force behind most of the drug production in the Golden Triangle. He is wanted by both US and Thai authorities, which have indicted him on drug trafficking charges.
Remarkably, Milsom treats all the leaders of the UWSA as if they were representatives of the governments of Canada or Norway, taking all their outlandish claims at face value. He even questions whether the methamphetamine production in the Golden Triangle is controlled by the UWSA and its officers. The UNODC, it seems, needs to check on its personnel in Burma. Or, at the very least, encourage them to learn more about the country – and the Was and the geopolitical complexities of local insurgencies and the role of the drug trade in those conflicts – before they depart for their “project zone.”
Until recently, the Burmese government routinely praised the same druglords as well. Major General Thein Sein, then commander of the Burmese army’s Golden Triangle Region Command, said in a speech before local leaders at the drug-trafficking centre on Mong La on 9 May, 2001: “I was in Mong Ton and Mong Hsat for two weeks. U Wei Xuegang and U Bao Youri from the Wa groups are real friends.”
Bao Youri is another UWSA leader who has been indicted by a US federal court. Thein Sein is the current prime minister of Burma and the country’s fourth-highest ranking general. Official complicity in the drug trade is another question that the UN has ignored since it first became involved in Burma in the late 1970s.
It is too early to say whether the new tunes from the UNODC will result in any actual policy changes. But, at long last, the UNODC has publicly acknowledged that Burma’s drug problem cannot be separated from its decades-long ethnic conflicts. The UWSA and its allies may be financing their respective armed forces with income from the drug trade – but their very existence is also the direct result of the ethnic strife and the anarchy that has been tearing Burma apart for decades. It is about time the UNODC now recognises that no anti-drug policy in Burma has any chance of success unless it is linked to a real political solution to the civil war – and a meaningful democratic process in the entire country. The alternative is what we have today: never-ending internal ethnic and political conflicts, which will only keep drugs flowing.
By BERTIL LINTNER
Published: 28 June 2010
The UN’s annual day against drugs is usually celebrated with claims of great strides in the campaign to eradicate the worldwide production of narcotics and fanciful reports on how governments around the globe are successfully cooperating in this noble effort. This year, however, it seems that at least some realism has seeped into the largely fictitious picture of the situation in the drug-producing countries that the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) usually presents to the outside world.
Burma’s drug production has surged over the past year, Gary Lewis, a representative of the UNODC, told reporters in Bangkok two days before the annual event. Burma, he said, had experienced a “steep and dramatic” increase in opium cultivation, with 31,700 hectares, or 78,300 acres, of land under poppy cultivation in 2009, up by almost half since 2006.
At the same time, the production of synthetic drugs such as methamphetamine in the Burmese sector of the Golden Triangle has increased equally dramatically. According to Thai military sources, between 300 and 400 million pills will be produced this year, or almost double the amount in 2009. The main market for all these drugs is Thailand, but significant quantities are also smuggled into China, Laos, Vietnam, Cambodia and India. Some Burmese heroin, but very little methamphetamine, can also be found in Australia and North America.
The reason for this surge, Lewis told reporters, is that ethnic armies which once fought the Burmese army and now have entered into ceasefire agreements with the government, are coming under pressure to convert themselves into Border Guard Forces under central command. Most drugs in Burma are produced in areas controlled by the United Wa State Army (UWSA) and its allies, some of whom are smaller groups which also once formed part of the now defunct Communist Party of Burma (CPB). The UWSA and its allies are preparing for war: “They are getting ready to fight. They are selling more and more drugs so they can buy weapons to fight the government,” the Guardian last week quoted Lewis as saying.
Statements such as these show that the UNODC may have changed its previous, glossy image of the UWSA and its allies — and so has the Burmese government. It is often forgotten that the first huge increase in Burma’s production of opium and its derivative heroin occurred after the collapse of the CPB in 1989. In the wake of the 1988 uprising in the Burmese heartland, and the subsequent massacres in the then capital Rangoon and elsewhere, more than 8,000 pro-democracy activists fled the urban centres for the border areas near Thailand, where a multitude of ethnic insurgencies not involved in the drug trade were active. Significantly, the main drug gang operating along the Thai border, Khun Sa and his private army, refused to shelter any dissidents; his main interest was business, not to fight the Burmese government.
The Burmese military now feared a renewed, politically dangerous insurgency along its frontiers: a possible alliance between the ethnic rebels and the pro-democracy activists from Rangoon and other towns and cities. But these Thai-border-based groups – Karen, Mon, Karenni, and Pa-O – were unable to provide the urban dissidents with more than a handful of weapons. None of the ethnic armies could match the strength of the CPB, which then fielded more than 15,000 soldiers and controlled a 20,000-square-kilometre territory along the China-Burma border in the northeast. Unlike the ethnic rebels, the CPB had vast quantities of arms and ammunition supplied by China from 1968 to 1978, when it was Beijing’s policy to support communist insurrections in Southeast Asia. Although the aid had almost ceased by 1980, the CPB still head enough munitions to last for at least ten years of guerrilla warfare against the central government.
Despite the Burmese military’s claim of a “communist conspiracy” behind the 1988 uprising – which then intelligence chief Khin Nyunt concocted in a lengthy speech on 5 August 1989 – there was at that time no linkage between the anti-totalitarian, pro-democracy movement in central Burma, and the orthodox, Marxist-Leninist leadership of the CPB. However, given the strong desire for revenge for the bloody events of 1988, it is plausible to assume that the urban dissidents would have accepted arms from any source. Thus, it became imperative for the ruling military to neutralise as many of the border insurgencies as possible, especially the CPB’s.
A situation which was potentially even more dangerous for the military regime arose in March and April 1989 when the hill-tribe rank-and-file of the CPB, led by the military commanders who also came from the various ethnic minorities in the northeastern base area, mutinied against the party’s ageing, mostly Burman political leadership. On 17 April 1989, ethnic Wa mutineers stormed party headquarters at Panghsang and drove the old leaders and their families, about 300 people, across the border into China.
The former CPB army split along ethnic lines, and formed four different, regional resistance armies, of which the now 30,000-strong United Wa State Army (UWSA) was by far the most powerful. Suddenly, there were no longer any communist insurgents in Burma, only ethnic rebels, and the junta worried about potential collaboration between the new, well-armed forces in the northeast and the minority groups along the Thai border – and the urban dissidents who had taken refuge there.
Within weeks of the CPB mutiny, Khin Nyunt helicoptered up to the northeastern border areas, met the leaders of the mutiny, and made them an offer. In exchange for ceasefire agreements with the government, and to sever any ties with any other rebels, the UWSA and other CPB mutineers were granted unofficial permission to engage in any kind of business to sustain themselves – which in Burma’s remote and underdeveloped hill areas inevitably meant opium production.
According to estimates by the US government, Burma’s opium production soared from 836 tons in 1987 to 2,340 tons by 1995. Satellite imagery showed that the area under poppy cultivation increased from 92,300 hectares to 154,000 during the same period. For the first time, heroin refineries, which previously had been located only along the Thai border, were established along the Chinese frontier, and the ceasefire agreements with the government enabled the traffickers to move narcotics freely along major roads and highways.
However, by the early 2000s, opium production began to decline after the boom years immediately after the CPB mutiny, but by then huge quantities of methamphetamines – in the past unknown in the Burmese sector of the Golden Triangle – were produced in laboratories in areas controlled by the UWSA and other former CPB groups. Burma remains one of the world’s biggest producers of illicit narcotics, and its production of opium and heroin is still significant, as the latest figures from the UNODC show.
The political threat from the border areas was thwarted, the regime was safe, and vast amounts of money derived from the drug trade were invested in Burma’s legal economy. Some of Burma’s most profitable business conglomerates and banks were established by drug barons allied with the UWSA and other ceasefire groups. All along, the Burmese military turned a blind eye to the traffic, and benefited from it economically. Apart from being invested in various sectors of the national economy, drug money also ended up in the pockets of many army officers, some of whom became immensely wealthy.
But simply neutralising the border insurgencies was only the first step; today, 20 years later, the government believes that the time has come to integrate the former rebel armies, and the election that is supposed to take place this year provided the ruling military with an excellent opportunity to press this demand. The ceasefire groups have been told to transform their armies into Border Guard Forces before the election so their political wings can form legitimate political parties to take part in the polls. But, as it turned out, the ceasefire groups were not prepared to accept this offer.
In August last year, the Burmese army attacked Kokang in northeastern Shan State, until then controlled by one of the smaller former CPB forces, which had resisted the demand to accept the status as a Border Guard Force. Huge amounts of drugs were seized in the operation against the local militia in Kokang which, until it ceased being an ally and broke with the government, had been praised by the authorities for its “drug-suppression efforts.”
The UNODC and its predecessor, the UNFDAC (the UN Fund for Drug Abuse Control), also used to praise the drug armies in similar terms. In January 1991, UNFDAC’s Don MacIntosh was present at a drug-burning show in northern Burma where he declared: “I am pleased to be in Shan state and have the opportunity to [attend] this important drug eradication exercise.” The ceremony was presided over by Peng Jiasheng – the druglord who was chased out of Kokang in August last year.
In more recent years, Jeremy Milsom, a former consultant to the UNODC, has openly defended the UWSA leadership, including some of its most notorious druglords. In his contribution to a book called Trouble in the Triangle: Opium and Conflict in Burma, Milsom stated that “Wei Xuegang [a Wa drugs baron who was close to intelligence chief Khin Nyunt], is an interesting figure with respect to the WSR [Wa Special Region]. Having helped the region immensely both in times of conflict and more recently by being the principal provider of social and economic development assistance to poor Wa farmers in the south, there is considerable respect for him. To add to this view, according to senior Wa sources, a condition of Wei Xuegang joining the UWSA in 1995 was that he not be involved in drug trafficking anymore and work with the WCA [Wa Central Authority] to help phase out drugs.”
The last sentence is puzzling, to say the least, as Wei has been involved with the UWSA since its formation in 1989. And, after giving up his involvement in the drug trade, Wei appears to have became a philanthropist, Milsom contends: “Ironically, Wei Xuegang has done more to support impoverished poppy farmers break their dependence on the crop than any other single person or institution in Burma, and this has been done by putting past drug profits back into the people as he perhaps tries to move into the mainstream economy.” To most others, Wei is the driving force behind most of the drug production in the Golden Triangle. He is wanted by both US and Thai authorities, which have indicted him on drug trafficking charges.
Remarkably, Milsom treats all the leaders of the UWSA as if they were representatives of the governments of Canada or Norway, taking all their outlandish claims at face value. He even questions whether the methamphetamine production in the Golden Triangle is controlled by the UWSA and its officers. The UNODC, it seems, needs to check on its personnel in Burma. Or, at the very least, encourage them to learn more about the country – and the Was and the geopolitical complexities of local insurgencies and the role of the drug trade in those conflicts – before they depart for their “project zone.”
Until recently, the Burmese government routinely praised the same druglords as well. Major General Thein Sein, then commander of the Burmese army’s Golden Triangle Region Command, said in a speech before local leaders at the drug-trafficking centre on Mong La on 9 May, 2001: “I was in Mong Ton and Mong Hsat for two weeks. U Wei Xuegang and U Bao Youri from the Wa groups are real friends.”
Bao Youri is another UWSA leader who has been indicted by a US federal court. Thein Sein is the current prime minister of Burma and the country’s fourth-highest ranking general. Official complicity in the drug trade is another question that the UN has ignored since it first became involved in Burma in the late 1970s.
It is too early to say whether the new tunes from the UNODC will result in any actual policy changes. But, at long last, the UNODC has publicly acknowledged that Burma’s drug problem cannot be separated from its decades-long ethnic conflicts. The UWSA and its allies may be financing their respective armed forces with income from the drug trade – but their very existence is also the direct result of the ethnic strife and the anarchy that has been tearing Burma apart for decades. It is about time the UNODC now recognises that no anti-drug policy in Burma has any chance of success unless it is linked to a real political solution to the civil war – and a meaningful democratic process in the entire country. The alternative is what we have today: never-ending internal ethnic and political conflicts, which will only keep drugs flowing.
*********************************************************
DVB News - ‘Unprecedented’ censorship rules enacted
By AHUNT PHONE MYAT
Published: 28 June 2010
A wave of new censorship ruless, unprecedented in their severity, were today introduced in Burma as a first step in the government’s quest to control news flows in the build-up to elections this year.
A ‘news branch’ has been set up within the government’s Press Scrutiny and Registration Division (PSRD), led by a lieutenant within the Burmese army, Myo Myint Aung. The laws become active today.
Rangoon-based journalists told DVB that the new unit, made up of 12 members, will look to fill existing loopholes in current press laws in Burma, which are already among the strictest in the world. In March, the Paris-based media watchdog Reporters Sans Frontieres (RSF) ranked Burma one of 12 “enemies of the internet”, while the pariah state consistently ranks at the tail-end of global media freedom indexes.
“Even with last-minute news, we have to go through the censor board first before publishing. Now, even when we [request] permission, the board will allow only two pages and states that there shouldn’t be any political news,” said a journal news editor.
He added that the censor board will standardise levels of censorship across all publications, meaning that some newspapers and journals which had been able to operate comparatively freely will be subject to uniform laws.
Some publications however have had to stop publication altogether after the censor board stripped them of the majority of their content. The nationwide Monitor Journal last week submitted a 20-page draft to the censor board, which then rejected 12 pages, forcing it to cancel that week’s issue.
“The censorship is getting stricter this month, worse than before,” said the editor, adding that the country was returning to the days of Major Aye Tun, who resided over the censor board and was the architect of some of the junta’s most draconian media laws.
Different publications are also being favoured by the board’s two directors, the editor said. “The new director is from the navy and he has no literature background. He only views things from the military angle and only prioritises the government agenda. Major Tint Swe, on the other hand, likes to take risks.
“[Tint Swe] only approves material of those whom he gets along with. So the more privilege one gets from [the director], the more material one can get approved and attract public interest.”
If a little more responsibility was taken by those in charge of the censor board, then life would be easier for journalist, another news editor said. “It’s okay for them to censor, but the problem is that the last person to run through the material [before approving] usually doesn’t want to take responsibility [for the final edit].”
Now however the director is less likely to take the decision and instead “will just bluntly turn down the approval”, the editor said. “I think now we are heading far from the day when could publish articles about politics, news and opinions,”
There is now a feeling among Rangoon journalists that media in the country will soon lose all rights and independence, while advocacy groups such as the exiled Burma Media Association will steadily become less able to lobby and negotiate.
By AHUNT PHONE MYAT
Published: 28 June 2010
A wave of new censorship ruless, unprecedented in their severity, were today introduced in Burma as a first step in the government’s quest to control news flows in the build-up to elections this year.
A ‘news branch’ has been set up within the government’s Press Scrutiny and Registration Division (PSRD), led by a lieutenant within the Burmese army, Myo Myint Aung. The laws become active today.
Rangoon-based journalists told DVB that the new unit, made up of 12 members, will look to fill existing loopholes in current press laws in Burma, which are already among the strictest in the world. In March, the Paris-based media watchdog Reporters Sans Frontieres (RSF) ranked Burma one of 12 “enemies of the internet”, while the pariah state consistently ranks at the tail-end of global media freedom indexes.
“Even with last-minute news, we have to go through the censor board first before publishing. Now, even when we [request] permission, the board will allow only two pages and states that there shouldn’t be any political news,” said a journal news editor.
He added that the censor board will standardise levels of censorship across all publications, meaning that some newspapers and journals which had been able to operate comparatively freely will be subject to uniform laws.
Some publications however have had to stop publication altogether after the censor board stripped them of the majority of their content. The nationwide Monitor Journal last week submitted a 20-page draft to the censor board, which then rejected 12 pages, forcing it to cancel that week’s issue.
“The censorship is getting stricter this month, worse than before,” said the editor, adding that the country was returning to the days of Major Aye Tun, who resided over the censor board and was the architect of some of the junta’s most draconian media laws.
Different publications are also being favoured by the board’s two directors, the editor said. “The new director is from the navy and he has no literature background. He only views things from the military angle and only prioritises the government agenda. Major Tint Swe, on the other hand, likes to take risks.
“[Tint Swe] only approves material of those whom he gets along with. So the more privilege one gets from [the director], the more material one can get approved and attract public interest.”
If a little more responsibility was taken by those in charge of the censor board, then life would be easier for journalist, another news editor said. “It’s okay for them to censor, but the problem is that the last person to run through the material [before approving] usually doesn’t want to take responsibility [for the final edit].”
Now however the director is less likely to take the decision and instead “will just bluntly turn down the approval”, the editor said. “I think now we are heading far from the day when could publish articles about politics, news and opinions,”
There is now a feeling among Rangoon journalists that media in the country will soon lose all rights and independence, while advocacy groups such as the exiled Burma Media Association will steadily become less able to lobby and negotiate.
*********************************************************
DVB News - Suu Kyi’s lawyer warned on reporting
By KHIN HNIN HTET
Published: 28 June 2010
The lawyer for detained Burmese opposition icon Aung San Suu Kyi has been warned by the government not to relay her opinions about the upcoming elections to media outlets.
Nyan Win, one of the few people permitted by the military junta to visit Suu Kyi, told the Thailand-based Irrawaddy magazine last week that in a recent meeting with the Nobel laureate, she said that Burmese people had the right to choose whether or not to vote.
“The last time I met with Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, she talked about some legal facts – that by law a voter has the right to vote and the right to not vote. I told this to the media and they reported it but now I’ve been warned against doing this again,” he said.
Suu Kyi’s response to the warning was one of “disappointment”, Nyan Win said. “She also said it was just ‘educating about law’, and that the government has the responsibility to help people understand the law. She said she will complain to those concerned and asked me to find facts.”
He added that authorities told him he was restricted to reporting about her response to her court case; in May, Suu Kyi launched a final appeal against her house arrest, which was handed down in August last year after she was found guilty of ‘sheltering’ US citizen John Yettaw.
Courts are yet to respond to the appeal, but the lawyers who met with Suu Kyi on the 25 June showed her the draft statement that they will present to the court, which the recently-turned 65-year-old made some amendments to.
The Burmese government today enacted an unprecedentedly severe raft of media censorship rules that will curtail the freedom of publications inside Burma to report on the elections, slated for later this year.
Burma already has some of the world’s strictest media laws, and authorities are expected to clamp down on reporters working for exiled media groups as the polls near.
Already some 15 journalists are behind bars in the pariah state, some serving sentences as long as 35 years.
By KHIN HNIN HTET
Published: 28 June 2010
The lawyer for detained Burmese opposition icon Aung San Suu Kyi has been warned by the government not to relay her opinions about the upcoming elections to media outlets.
Nyan Win, one of the few people permitted by the military junta to visit Suu Kyi, told the Thailand-based Irrawaddy magazine last week that in a recent meeting with the Nobel laureate, she said that Burmese people had the right to choose whether or not to vote.
“The last time I met with Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, she talked about some legal facts – that by law a voter has the right to vote and the right to not vote. I told this to the media and they reported it but now I’ve been warned against doing this again,” he said.
Suu Kyi’s response to the warning was one of “disappointment”, Nyan Win said. “She also said it was just ‘educating about law’, and that the government has the responsibility to help people understand the law. She said she will complain to those concerned and asked me to find facts.”
He added that authorities told him he was restricted to reporting about her response to her court case; in May, Suu Kyi launched a final appeal against her house arrest, which was handed down in August last year after she was found guilty of ‘sheltering’ US citizen John Yettaw.
Courts are yet to respond to the appeal, but the lawyers who met with Suu Kyi on the 25 June showed her the draft statement that they will present to the court, which the recently-turned 65-year-old made some amendments to.
The Burmese government today enacted an unprecedentedly severe raft of media censorship rules that will curtail the freedom of publications inside Burma to report on the elections, slated for later this year.
Burma already has some of the world’s strictest media laws, and authorities are expected to clamp down on reporters working for exiled media groups as the polls near.
Already some 15 journalists are behind bars in the pariah state, some serving sentences as long as 35 years.
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