U.S. Sending Envoys to Myanmar For Talks With Junta, Suu Kyi
RIGHTS:  Karen Fear Military Offensive Near Planned Dam in Burma
US Officials to Meet Junta, Opposition Leaders
U.S. diplomats to meet with Suu Kyi, Myanmar officials next week
US to send top envoys to Burma next week: official
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U.S. Sending Envoys to Myanmar For Talks With Junta, Suu Kyi
Associated Press

YANGON, Myanmar — Detained opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi is aware of an upcoming visit by two American officials and supports the new U.S. policy of engaging with Myanmar’s military rulers, her lawyer said Saturday.

Myanmar, meanwhile, has arrested about a dozen local journalists and documentary filmmakers over the past two weeks, relatives of those detained said Saturday, asking not to be identified for fear of retribution.

Assistant Secretary of State Kurt Campbell and a deputy will be in Myanmar, also known as Burma, for a two-day visit beginning Tuesday and are scheduled to meet with the government and the opposition, including Ms. Suu Kyi.

The trip is part of a new U.S. policy that reverses the Bush administration’ s shunning of Myanmar in favour of direct, high-level talks with a country that has been ruled by the military since 1962.

Mr. Campbell will be continuing talks he began in September in New York with senior Myanmar officials, the first such high-level contact in nearly a decade.

“We told Daw Aung San Suu Kyi about the visit of the U.S. officials and she is aware of the visit,” said Ms. Suu Kyi’s party spokesman and lawyer, Nyan Win, who met with her Thursday. “Since the U.S. diplomats are meeting both the government and opposition members, things are happening as she had wanted.”

Nyan Win said the U.S. Embassy in Yangon was making arrangements with Ms. Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy for the visiting U.S. officials to meet with party leaders.

Supporters of engagement argue that isolating the country has limited U.S. influence among Myanmar’s citizens and allowed China to establish a strong business and diplomatic foothold. Mr. Campbell says engaging Myanmar will enable the United States to learn more about the intentions of the leaders of a country it knows even less about than North Korea.

Critics say high-level U.S. attention validates a junta that has killed and abused its people for speaking out in opposition. The country is believed to hold more than 2,200 political detainees, according to human rights groups.

Security in Myanmar has been tight since September, which marked the two-year anniversary of massive pro-democracy demonstrations crushed by the junta. Nyan Win said the government has detained scores of activists.

The latest arrests, all made in Yangon, were journalists and bloggers. Among them were documentary filmmakers Aung Ko Ko and Myo Min Khin as well as freelance journalist Paing Soe Oo and the editor of the local journal, Foreign Affairs, Thant Zin Soe, according to friends and relatives who refused to be identified.

None of those interviewed said they knew why the journalists were detained nor where they are being held.

Washington has said it will maintain its tough political and economic sanctions against the regime. The U.S. and other Western nations apply sanctions because of Myanmar’s poor human rights record and its failure to turn over power to Ms. Suu Kyi’s party after it won the last elections in 1990.

Elections are scheduled for next year, but Ms. Suu Kyi, a Nobel Peace Prize laureate, will not be able to take part. In August, she was convicted and sentenced to an additional 18 months of house arrest for briefly sheltering an uninvited American man at her home.

The sentence drew international condemnation.

Ms. Suu Kyi has spent 14 of the last 20 years in detention.

Copyright © 2009 Associated Press   http://online. wsj.com/article/ SB12569954709022 0735.html
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RIGHTS:  Karen Fear Military Offensive Near Planned Dam in Burma
By Marwaan Macan-Markar

BANGKOK, Oct 31 (IPS) – With the annual monsoon rains ending, there is a growing fear among the Karen ethnic minority living along military-ruled Burma’s eastern border of a dry season offensive. The most vulnerable are villagers residing in the vicinity of the controversial Hat Gyi dam.

The Burmese military will use its proxy force, the Democratic Karen Buddhist Army (DKBA), to target the area along the Salween River that is essential to the Hat Gyi dam, environmentalists and human rights activists told IPS.

Besides driving out the unarmed Karen civilians, the offensive will also target the fifth brigade of the Karen National Liberation Army (KNLA), currently camped along the Salween River, which flows past the border that Burma shares with Thailand, they added.

The KNLA is the armed wing of the Karen National Union (KNU), which has been waging Asia’s longest separatist struggle—since 1949—to carve out an independent state for the Karen minority in Burma, also known as Myanmar. The DKBA is a breakaway group, splitting from the KNU in 1995 and joining forces with Burma’s oppressive regime.

“The attacks in the fifth brigade area to defeat the KNU and clear the area for the dam will result in thousands of Karen fleeing across the Thai border as refugee,” said David Thakerbaw, vice president of the KNU. “It will lead to more human rights violations, adding more suffering to what the people have already endured.”

“People in that area are opposed to the Hay Gyi dam for this reason,” he added during a telephone interview from an undisclosed location along the Thai-Burma border. “The dam area will become more militarised; the Burmese army will bring in more troops to keep the site under their control.”

Such a grim forecast stems from what happened in June, soon after the monsoon rains broke. The Tatmadaw, as Burma’s over 400,000-strong military is called, launched an offensive with the DKBA, vanquishing the important seventh brigade of the KNU. The surprise attack forced over 4,000 already displaced Karens to flee into Thailand.

This onslaught and the link it had to the planned Hat Gyi dam, which the Electricity Generating Authority of Thailand (EGAT) has agreed to partially finance, prompted the KNU to ask the Thai government of Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva to withdraw Bangkok’s support for the dam.

“There has been no proper survey to assess the environmental and social damage that the dam might cause,” wrote General Tamla Baw, president of the KNU, to Abhisit in an early August letter.

“The building of the dam at this time would bring many thousands of the junta’s troops who would perpetrate widespread human rights violations, such as forced labour, torture, extra-judicial executions, rape of women, looting of property (and) extortion.”

“The plan of the (Burmese regime) is to control KNLA positions for providing security to the construction of the dam,” revealed the letter, seen by IPS. “(This area) will become the centre for EGAT to transport construction materials to Yinbaing village, which is at the dam site.”

“I would like to appeal to you and your government not to repatriate the Karen refugees in Thailand and not to initiate construction of the Hat Gyi dam,” added Gen Tamla Baw.

The recent flow of Karen refugees from Burma added to the already 120,000 refugees who have been living in camps on the Thai side of the border for over two decades. Within Burma, the plight of the Karens is as dire. They are among the estimated 540,000 internally displaced people seeking refuge in forests and in the mountains after fleeing attacks by the Tatmadaw.

“The highest rates of recent displacement were reported in northern Karen areas and southern Shan Sate,” the Thailand Burma Border Consortium, a humanitarian organisation helping Burma’s ethnic minorities fleeing into Thailand, revealed this week. “Almost 60,000 Karen villagers are hiding in the mountains of Kyaukkgi, Thandaung and Papun Township, and a third of these civilians fled from artillery attacks from Burmese army patrols during the past year.”

The Karen, who make up an estimated seven million people of Burma’s 56 million population, are one of the largest ethnic minorities in this South-east Asian nation. The Shan and the Kachin are among the other groups in a country that has a patchwork of some 130 ethnic communities.

Burma’s military has been waging wars with nearly 20 ethnic rebel groups since it gained independence from the British colonisers in 1948. The Karen and militants in the Shan area have refused to kowtow to the military regime—unlike the 17 other ethnic separatist movements that signed ceasefire agreements two decades ago—consequently denying the Burmese regime total control of its land area.

Burma’s military regime has attracted interest from China and EGAT, Thailand’s state-run power utility, to invest in a cascade of dams along the 2,800 kilometre-long Salween, the longest untouched body of water flowing through South-east Asia. Its source is the mountains of Tibet, then coursing through China’s southern Yunan province, enters Burma, touches the Thai-Burma border, and then flows out into the Andaman Sea.

In June 2006, Burma’s department of electricity, EGAT and China’s Sinohydro Corporation, signed an agreement to build the Hat Gyi dam, which is expected to stand 33 metres tall. Much of its 1360 meggawatts of power will be destined to quench Thailand’s demand for energy.

“Thailand’s involvement in this dam means that the roads with close and direct access to the Thai border have become important for the Burmese military. That is why the dam area was targeted in June,” said Paul Seint Twa, director of Karen River Watch, an environment group based along the Thai-Burma border. “The Burmese army needs to make the dam site more attractive to the Thai investors.”

Till such attacks in June, the access road to the dam site was more circuitous—passing through central Burma—or through “areas held by the KNU, which controlled all movement,” added Seint Twa during a telephone interview from the Thai-Burma border. “But even after the June attacks, the area is not completely under the Burmese army’s control.”

The heavy human and environment cost to build the dam is turning the heat on the Abhisit administration. “The government has not decided. It is waiting for recommendations from a committee set up to listen to the concerns,” said Pianporn Deetes, coordinator of Living River Siam, a Thai green group based in the northern city of Chiang Mai. “Activists want the government to halt this project, but EGAT wants it to be built.”

The message to Bangkok from Thai environmentalists is the same as the Karen. “There is a link between the conflict and the dam,” Pianporn told IPS. “Our field surveys show the area around the dam is becoming more militarised.”

(END/2009) http://www.ipsnews. net/news. asp?idnews= 49086
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US Officials to Meet Junta, Opposition Leaders
By LAWI WENG     Saturday, October 31, 2009

A US delegation led by two senior officials will meet Burma’s pro-democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi and other executive members of the National League for Democracy (NLD) next week, a spokesperson for the party confirmed.

The US State Department reported on Friday that Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs Kurt Campbell and his deputy, Scot Marciel, will be in Burma on Tuesday and Wednesday to meet Burmese junta officials, detained Nobel laureate Suu Kyi and ethnic leaders.

US Assistant Secretary of State Kurt Campbell (Photo: Getty Images)
“Our executive committee members have already prepared what to discuss when they come. We were told that they will meet us on Nov. 4 at our headquarters,” party spokesman Nyan Win told The Irrawaddy on Saturday, adding that arrangements for the meeting were made by the US embassy in Rangoon.

According to Nyan Win, the US officials will hold a separate meeting with Suu Kyi. Another NLD source said that the delegation had requested permission from the Burmese regime to meet with Suu Kyi in her home instead of in a government guest house, where she usually meets with diplomats.

It will be the first visit to Burma by a senior delegation from the US State Department in more than a decade. The last senior US official to travel to the country was Madeleine Albright, who visited in 1995 when she was the US ambassador to the United Nations.

The US delegation is likely to meet Science and Technology Minister U Thaung, who is a former ambassador to Washington, during the trip. Campbell met him in New York in late September, soon after the US announced its new policy of engagement with the Burmese regime. However, he is unlikely to meet junta chief Snr-Gen Than Shwe.

The topics of the meetings with the military regime will probably include US sanctions on Burma, the junta’s planned election in 2010 and the participation of Suu Kyi and opposition groups in the election.

Nyan Win said the NLD welcomes the trip, but doesn’t expect it to result in any major changes. “We believe this is just first step,” he said.

Suu Kyi’s lawyer, Kyi Win, said on Thursday that she is “keenly monitoring” the planned visit.

After a policy review by the Obama administration, the US State Department announced in September that the US will have direct engagement with the Burmese junta, but will keep sanctions in place.

The junta has shown signs of willingness to engage in dialogue with the US and has also acknowledged that Suu Kyi should be involved in efforts to resolve Burma’s political problems.

Last week, at the Asean Summit in Thailand, Burmese Prime Minister Gen Thein Sein said that Suu Kyi had a “role to play” in the country’s national reconciliation efforts and in reaching a political resolution.

Suu Kyi has met with Burmese Labor Minister Aung Kyi, the junta’s liaison officer in charge of meeting with the opposition leader, twice since she sent a letter to Than Shwe expressing a desire to work together with the government to help lift sanctions. She was also allowed to meet with diplomats from the US, UK and Australia to discuss their countries’ sanctions policies.
Copyright © 2008 Irrawaddy Publishing Group | www.irrawaddy. org

http://www.irrawadd y.org/article. php?art_id= 17107
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U.S. diplomats to meet with Suu Kyi, Myanmar officials next week
WASHINGTON, Oct. 30 KYODO

Two senior-level U.S. diplomats will travel to Myanmar in early November in order to engage with junta officials and opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi, the State Department announced Friday.

Assistant Secretary of State for East Asia and Pacific Affairs Kurt Campbell and Ambassador for ASEAN Affairs Scot Marciel will be in Myanmar next Tuesday and Wednesday, State Department spokesman Robert Wood told reporters.

”They expect to meet with senior government officials and with members of the opposition, including Aung San Suu Kyi, as well as representatives of ethnic groups,” Wood said.
The upcoming trip is part of the Barack Obama administration’ s new policy of engagement that reverses the previous George W. Bush administration’ s stance of avoiding high-level contact with the repressive military regime.

While in Myanmar the U.S. diplomats will continue the dialogue that began when Campbell met with Myanmar Science, Technology and Labor Minister Thaung last month in New York, the highest-level U.S. contact with Myanmar in a decade.

For the United States, which is trying to promote democracy in the military-ruled country, meeting with long-detained pro-democracy icon Suu Kyi is an important part of its engagement of the junta.

”It was important that we were able to get a meeting with Aung San Suu Kyi and some of the other opposition leaders. That was certainly an important element,” Wood said.

The United States imposed heavy sanctions after the military junta conducted numerous crackdowns on demonstrators in 2007 and does not plan to relax them as part of its initial engagement policy.

”We will maintain our existing sanctions until we see concrete progress and continue to work with the international community to ensure that those sanctions are effectively coordinated, ” Campbell said last week.

Suu Kyi, the 1991 Nobel Peace laureate and leader of the opposition National League for Democracy, was sentenced in August to another 18-month stint under house arrest for allowing a U.S. intruder to stay at her home.

The sentence ensured that she will be unable to participate in the election scheduled for next year, the first in Myanmar in two decades. Her NLD won a sweeping victory in the 1990 election, but the junta never honored the results.

==Kyodo http://home. kyodo.co. jp/modules/ fstStory/ index.php? storyid=468098
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US to send top envoys to Burma next week: official

* Published: 31/10/2009 at 02:03 AM
* Online news: Asia

Two senior US officials will travel to Burma next week in the latest move by President Barack Obama’s administration to engage the reclusive military regime, the State Department said Friday.

Front of the US State Department in Washington, DC. Two senior US officials will travel to Burma next week to meet top members of the military junta and detained opposition icon Aung San Suu Kyi, the State Department said Friday.

Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs Kurt Campbell and his deputy, Scot Marciel, plan to visit the military-ruled country on Tuesday and Wednesday to meet top members of the military junta and detained opposition icon Aung San Suu Kyi.

“They expect to meet with senior government officials and with members of the opposition including Aung San Suu Kyi and representatives of ethnic groups,” said deputy State Department spokesman Robert Wood.

The talks are a follow-up to discussions last month in New York between US and Burma officials that marked the highest-level American contact with the regime in nearly a decade.

The Obama administration last month concluded that the longstanding US approach of isolating Burma had failed to bear fruit, but said it would not ease sanctions without progress on democracy and human rights.

In August, Burma’s military leader Than Shwe held an unprecedented meeting with a visiting US senator, Jim Webb, a leading advocate of engaging the junta. Webb also met with Suu Kyi.

A State Department official, Stephen Blake, quietly visited Burma in March to hold talks with both the junta and the opposition. It was the first trip by a US envoy to the country in more than seven years.

Campbell told a congressional panel last week that the dialogue would “supplement rather than replace” the sanctions regime.

“Engagement for its own sake is obviously not a goal for US policy,” he said.

The chief US diplomat for Asia acknowledged that the talks, which aim to press for democratic reform in Burma ahead of elections promised by the ruling generals for 2010, would be neither simple nor straightforward.

Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy (NLD) plans to shun the elections, the first since a 1990 vote that the party won in a landslide. The junta ignored that result, and has kept the democracy activist under house arrest for much of the past 20 years.

The junta has begun to show signs of willingness to engage in dialogue with the United States.

It placed 64-year-old Suu Kyi under a further 18 months’ house arrest in August, effectively barring her from taking part in the elections.

But the generals granted her two rare meetings with Labor Minister Aung Kyi, the official liaison between her and the junta in the first such talks since January 2008.

Suu Kyi also wrote a letter to Senior General Than Shwe in late September offering her co-operation in getting Western sanctions lifted, after years of favoring harsh measures against the generals. http://www.bangkokp ost.com/news/ asia/158643/ us-to-send- top-envoys- to-burma- next-week- official