BURMA RELATED NEWS – AUGUST 26-28, 2010
Aug 29th, 2010
Sat Aug 28, 8:00 am ET
YANGON (AFP) – A major reshuffle by Myanmar’s ruling junta marks the biggest shift within the military in decades, with changes to more than 70 senior army officers’ positions, an officer said Saturday.
News emerged from the country Friday that some senior leaders, including army number three Thura Shwe Mann, had retired from their military posts to stand in the November 7 poll — the first held in the country in twenty years.
“More than 70 senior military officers’ posts were changed. We can say that it’s the biggest change within the military in decades,” an army officer, who declined to be named, told AFP.
“Our leaders have been planning for a long time to keep the military active with the new generation,” he added.
Win Min, a Myanmar academic based in Thailand, echoed the officer’s comments saying the changes mark “the biggest military reshuffle since 1988″.
Initial news reports on Friday said the junta chief Than Shwe — who has ruled the country with an iron-fist since 1992 — and his number two Maung Aye had stepped down from the army, but this was denied by a government official.
An unnamed government officer close to the regime said on Saturday that the 77-year-old and his deputy were “likely to retire soon”.
“The order hasn’t come out yet in paper though they have planned it,” he said. “It’s likely to be after the election.”
The reshuffle was not officially announced by the Myanmar media and state television was silent on the subject.
It comes as the country gears up for its first elections since democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy (NLD) was denied office by the junta after winning a landslide victory in 1990.
Critics and the West have said the upcoming vote, which will guarantee a quarter of the legislature for the army, is a sham aimed at putting a civilian mask on the junta.
The new military retirees are expected to join the junta-backed Union Solidarity and Development Party (USDP) to run in the polls.
Prime Minister Thein Sein and other ministers stepped down from the military in April to contest the vote as the USDP, which is unconstrained by the financial and campaigning barriers faced by other parties.
The USDP has merged with the Union Solidarity and Development Association (USDA), a pro-junta group with deep pockets and up to 27 million members, including civil servants compelled to join for the good of their careers.
Nobel Peace laureate Suu Kyi has been in detention for much of the last twenty years and is barred from standing in the election because she is a serving prisoner.
Her NLD party — which would have been the greatest threat to the junta — is boycotting the upcoming poll, saying the rules are unfair. As a result, it was forcibly disbanded by the ruling generals.
A new democratic party, the National Democracy Force (NDF), was formed by former NLD members who decided to participate in the vote although it does not have the support of Suu Kyi, who favoured a boycott.
So far around 40 political parties have been given permission to stand in the polls, but some have expressed concerns, including over intimidation of their members.
Election hopefuls face a formidable set of hurdles, including a tight timetable for registering candidates as well as restrictions on campaigning.
Myanmar has been the focus of international concern in recent weeks, with Western nations dismissing the planned election as not free and fair, while reports that the country had nuclear weapons ambitions also raised tensions.
AFP – Friday, August 27
DANANG, Vietnam — The European Union expects to conclude a free trade deal with Singapore by the end of next year and is likely to begin talks with other Southeast Asian nations soon, a top official said on Friday.
The EU’s trade commissioner, Karel De Gucht, also said Europe still hopes to ultimately reach a region-wide deal with the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN).
He said a regional pact has not been possible partly because of military-ruled Myanmar, which is under European sanctions.
Another hindrance was the differing levels of economic development within the 10-member ASEAN, he told reporters after talks with Southeast Asian economic ministers.
Attempts to reach a pact with all of the ASEAN members except Myanmar, Cambodia and Laos were suspended last year, after which the EU began looking at bilateral pacts.
De Gucht said two rounds of talks have been held with Singapore — the region’s most developed economy — and a third is to take place next month.
“Negotiations with Singapore are going well,” he said. “We expect these negotiations being closed and having come to a positive end before the end of next year.”
He added that formal free trade talks with Vietnam are likely to begin before the end of this year, followed by other countries “in the coming months.”
De Gucht declined to name the other nations but he told AFP that each of the seven that participated in the earlier suspended talks “have expressed in one way or another interest”.
ASEAN itself is working towards a single market and manufacturing base by 2015.
De Gucht said that once such an integrated market is achieved it would make sense for the region’s bilateral trade pacts to be consolidated into a region-wide deal.
Asked whether such a deal could, however, be reached unless the human rights situation in Myanmar improves, he told AFP: “It’s obvious that we are not ready, the European Union is not ready, to negotiate with Myanmar but who knows what the political situation will be in Myanmar in five years or in seven years.”
The EU is the bloc’s largest foreign investor, and second-largest trade partner, with two-way trade worth almost 172 billion dollars last year.
Fri Aug 27, 8:54 am ET
YANGON, Myanmar (AP) – Myanmar’s junta carried out a major military reshuffle Friday that retired more than a dozen senior leaders, officials said, in an apparent move to prepare for November national elections.
There were conflicting reports about whether the top two junta leaders — Senior Gen. Than Shwe and his second-in-command, Gen. Maung Aye — also stepped down from the military while retaining their respective posts as the junta’s chairman and vice chairman. The reports could not be immediately confirmed.
Than Shwe has ruled the country since 1992.
The elections are portrayed by the regime as a key step to shifting to civilian rule after five decades of military domination, but critics call them a sham and say the military shows little sign of relinquishing control.
The reshuffle is the second since April, when 27 senior officials, including Prime Minister Gen. Thein Sein, retired from the military. The leaders are widely believed to be retiring from their military posts so they can run in the Nov. 7 polls, the first in two decades.
Friday’s reshuffle included the junta’s third- and fourth-ranking generals, Thura Shwe Mann, who served as Joint Chief of Staff, and Tin Aung Myint Oo, who was the army’s Quartermaster General, said the officials who are close to the military but could not be named because the reshuffle was not formally announced.
The reshuffle also involved regional commanders and injected fresh blood into the Ministry of Defense, the officials said.
The new No. 3 in command will be Lt. Gen. Min Aung Hlaing who is chief of Bureau of Special Operations.
The chief of Military Affairs Security, Lt. Gen. Ye Myint, who had been involved in partly successful negotiations to persuade armed ethnic groups to transform into border guards ahead of elections, was replaced by Yangon Division Commander Maj. Gen. Win Myint.
Under the country’s new constitution, the newly created 440-member House of Representatives will have 110 military representatives along with 330 elected civilians. If retiring generals run for parliament they would not be counted in the military’s quota although they are likely to enhance the army’s influence in parliament.
The polls will take place without the country’s leading opposition party, headed by detained democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi.
Myanmar had its last election in 1990. Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy opposition party topped the polls, but the military refused to recognize the results. The party expected to win the most votes this time is backed by the junta.
Suu Kyi’s party decided against registering for this year’s elections, which is tantamount to boycotting the polls. The party says the election laws are unfair and undemocratic. Smaller opposition groups are running but lack a national presence.
Thu Aug 26, 2010 8:29am GMT
BEIJING Aug 26 (Reuters) – China is planning three oil product pipelines in the southwestern border province of Yunnan as it prepares to receive crude oil from its neighbour, Myanmar, local reports said on Thursday.
The Yunnan Information Daily said the local branch company of the China National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC) had already drawn up environmental impact assessments for a network of three product oil pipelines connecting the provincial capital, Kunming, with the cities of Anning, Quqing, Chuxiong, Dali, Yuxi and Baoshan.
Citing a local company official, the report said construction of the pipelines was likely to begin next year and be completed within three years.
CNPC, the parent of PetroChina (0857.HK: Quote)(601857.SS: Quote)(PTR.N: Quote), is also building a 200,000 bpd refinery in the city of Anning that is designed to process crude delivered via Myanmar. It will be completed within three years.
It is also building 16 oil storage facilities throughout Yunnan, the report said.
CNPC began building a crude oil port on Maday island on Myanmar’s western coast in November 2009. It launched the construction of a crude oil pipeline connecting the port with the Chinese border town of Ruili in June this year.
The pipeline, scheduled to be completed in 2012, is designed to carry 12 million tonnes of crude oil a year into China.
The project is part of China’s efforts to diversify its sources of supply as well as to bypass the congested Malacca Strait, a vulnerable chokepoint between Malaysia and Indonesia through which about 80 percent of China’s imports now pass.
Another pipeline delivering 12 billion cubic metres of natural gas will also be built.
8/27/2010 7:35 PM ET
(RTTNews) – As many as 15 of Myanmar’s top generals who constitute its ruling military junta have reportedly stepped down from their posts ahead of the upcoming general elections.
Apparently the move is meant to facilitate their formal entry into politics by contesting the polls.
Gen. Thura Shwe Mann, the third senior most general in the Myanmarese government is among those said to have put in their papers.
Although it was initially indicated that Gen Than Shwe, currently Myanmar’s ruler, and his deputy Gen Maung Aye were among those had resigned, this was subsequently denied by sources in the establishment.
It is believed that the army personel who quit their military posts will join the pro-junta Solidarity and Development Party (USDP) and will take part in the election.
Meanwhile, the opposition-backed Democratic Voice of Burma website said both Gen Than Shwe and Gen Maung Aye were all set to become president and vice-president of USDP.
The November 7 polls are the first to be held in the reclusive South East Asian nation in almost 20 years.
Last time when Myanmar went to the polls in 1990, the National League for Democracy (NLD) led by Nobel laureate and opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi, came on top with a landslide victory.
However, the NLD was never allowed to assume power by the military despite its huge mandate. This time round, the NLD is not even in the fray, owing to its political boycott.
Earlier this year, the NLD was formally disbanded by Myanmerese officials for its failure to register with authorities to contest the forthcoming elections. Dealing a further blow to its political future, a breakaway faction formed a new party, the National Democratic Force (NDF), headed by a former NLD executive member Than Nyein.
The move to de-recognize NLD came after the junta issued a decree banning people serving prison terms from remaining members of political parties, thereby virtually shutting the door on Suu Kyi’s participation in the polls.
Although Myanmar’s powerful generals have allowed voting to take place, the elections are expected to be closely monitored and regulated. The new constitution brought in by the regime to replace the old one reserves one-fourth of seats in the new parliament for the military.
Political commentators say the junta has more than ensured its continued stranglehold over the country’s future governance and its influence would remain unassailable.
Meanwhile, Suu Kyi who remains under detention at her residence in the capital Yangon is expected to be freed by November 27. The NLD leader, who is the daughter of Aung San widely regarded as the father of modern-day Myanmar, has been incarcerated for 15 of the past 20 years.
Even though she was to have been released in May last year, her house arrest was extended for allegedly breaching the terms of confinement after an American man illegally entered her house. In October, a lower court rejected an appeal filed on Suu Kyi’s behalf.
Subsequently in February this year, Myanamar’s Supreme Court threw out an appeal by Suu Kyi to end her prolonged house arrest.
Critics allege that the political exercise is an eye-wash intended to give legality to the military’s ignoble plans.
Published: Aug. 27, 2010 at 1:00 PM
YANGON, Myanmar, Aug. 27 (UPI) — Military leaders in Myanmar are said to be resigning in numbers in order to compete in general elections scheduled for November, local reports said.
The Irrawaddy Web site and the Democratic Voice of Burma Web site both report Friday that Gen. Than Shwe and his deputy Gen. Maung Aye were among key military leaders who resigned ahead of November elections, the first in years.
The military leadership in Myanmar described the upcoming elections as a key step toward transferring power from a military to a civilian authority.
Myanmar is under scrutiny for the continued detention of Nobel Peace Prize-winner Aung Suu Kyi. Her National League for Democracy won a huge victory in elections in 1990, but the military rulers never accepted the results.
Suu Kyi has been under house arrest for most of the past two decades and cannot take part in elections.
Also barred from running for office are religious groups, a move that disallows Buddhist monks whose 2007 protests stretched the patience of military leaders.
The election is expected to be tightly controlled and carefully monitored by an elections commission appointed by military leaders.
BBC correspondents monitoring the developments said many activists and critics believe much of the power will rest in the same hands after the election.
A constitution adopted recently in the country gives Parliament the right to elect a new president. One-quarter of the seats are reserved for military officials.
London, Aug.28 : Burma’s reclusive and ailing dictator, Than Shwe, has resigned from his military post, exiled Burmese media have reported, paving the way for him to become Burma’s president after this year’s general elections
Shwe, the despot who has brutally ruled Southeast Asia’’s poorest country as commander-in-chief of the armed forces since 1992, yesterday handed control of the army to his adjutant general.
However, according to The Telegraph, the 77-year-old will remain head of the Burmese government.
More than a dozen other senior military officers also resigned, in an ominous sign for the country’’s forthcoming elections.
Inside Burma, Shwe’’s resignation of his military role is being seen as a significant step towards ensuring he and his military cadres remain in charge after the November 7 elections, the first to be held in Burma for two decades.
“I think this means only one thing – he wants to be president,” a source inside Burma told The Guardian.
The country’’s new constitution says a civilian can only hold the presidency, but it does insist the president and vice-president “shall be well acquainted with the affairs of the Union, such as … the military”.
It is the second major reshuffle since April, when 27 senior military figures, including the prime minister, Thein Sein, resigned to lead the USDP.
The main opposition party, the National League for Democracy, led by Aung San Suu Kyi, won Burma’s last elections, in 1990, overwhelmingly. But the junta refused to recognise the result and Aung San Suu Kyi has spent most of the past two decades in detention.
The constitution, the election commission and rules and regulations about political parties and candidates are weapons in the hands of the military to secure a majority in parliament. Further restrictions are envisaged for the upcoming election on 7 November. Forty parties are running, but not Aung …
Saturday, August 28, 2010
By Asia News
New Delhi – When Myanmar’s military junta announced elections for 7 November, the first in 20 years, it also announced further restrictions on the poll, raising doubts among ordinary Burmese about the process itself. Under a 13-point regulation, presented as a way to ensure “free and fair” elections, candidates who want to speak publicly must apply for a permit seven days in advance. Such initiatives cannot in any event disturb public order or cause traffic problems.
Even though the new constitution has already prevented opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi from running, she will remain under house arrest during the election. Meanwhile, Myanmar’s military regime, which has been in power since 1962, has already ensured that it would control the new government since the upper house of the new parliament, whose members will be largely chosen by the military, will have veto power.
More than 40 parties are running, including the junta’s Union Solidarity and Development Party. By contrast, Aung San Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy, which won the elections 20 years ago that the military never acknowledged, has decided to boycott the vote. Parties can pick their candidates until 30 August.
AsiaNews spoke to Tint Swe, a member of the cabinet of the National Coalition Government of the Union of Burma (NCGUB) set up after the 1990 elections. After fleeing to India in 1990, he has lived in New Delhi since 21 December 1991.
If one looks at a particular exercise like the election on 7 November in Burma it is clear that it is neither free nor fair. The election is ruled by a constitution that is restricted and exclusive. The Election Commission that is going to oversee the election is controlled and exclusive too. Now, more recent instructions imposed on political parties and candidates are also restricted, controlled, and exclusive.
After deliberately excluding the people’s choice in the 1990 election, namely the National League for Democracy (NLD) and its leader Aung San Suu Kyi, from contesting the election, parties that have registered to run this year face a number of challenges.
A political party needs 500 brave members in regional elections and 1,000 in national elections. However, intimidation and a culture of fear are in place and organisers must risk their lives and future. A candidate has to deposit 500,000 Kyat (US$ 500) in a country where all the money is in the hands of generals and their cronies. There are 40 political parties, including five that ran in the 1990 election.
This poll is strangely different from that of 1990 when seats were based on population. Now in Mandalay Division, a candidate will need more than 100,000 votes to be elected. In Chin State, a candidate will need less than 50,000. Believe it or not, in Nayphydaw, the reclusive city where only senior general Than Shwe and his regime live will elect five Members of Parliament, each requiring only 1,000 voters. It is clear that new rules are based on the interests of the junta.
Applicants and candidates have to meet all sorts of unnecessary criteria to stand for office. Even then, their application could be rejected. If a candidate is lucky enough to get through, he or she is not allowed to march and show party flag or placards. Everyone must shut their mouths. Publications and printed materials must go through double censorship.
The official campaign period has yet to be announced but the Election Commission will finish its scrutiny of candidates by 10 September. Public spaces and buildings are not allowed for political gatherings. However, the government’s party, the Union Solidarity and Development Party (USDP), has been using all possible venues for free.
At present, the international community is only offering recommendations and criticisms. The United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon has called on the Burmese authorities to hold free and fair elections. The US administration and EU parliamentarians have called for the creation of a United Nations Commission of Inquiry into crimes against humanity and war crimes in Burma.
Sat, Aug 28th, 2010 3:11 pm BdST
Dhaka, Aug 28 (bdnews24.com) — Eight Myanmar citizens and a Bangladeshi were arrested from a residential hotel under the capital’s Shahbagh Police Station.
Metropolitan detective branch police arrested the Myanmar citizens, including a young female, from Segunbagicha’s Nazma Hotel in the early hours of Saturday.
Police claimed that one of the arrestees, Mohammed Yasin, 25, son Cox’s Bazar’s Abdus Shukur, is the leader of a women’s trafficking gang.
DB deputy police commissioner Mainul Hossain told journalists that the Myanmar citizens were living in Teknaf as Rohingyas.
“They were kept at the hotel to be trafficked abroad with fake Bangladeshi passports. They talk among themselves in local languages of Teknaf and Myanmar,” he also said.
The detained Myanmar citizens are Mohammad Abdul Quader, 32, Mohammad Alam, 40, Mohammad Rafiq, 20, Mohammad Abdul Malek, 30, Mohammad Shafiq, 21, Mohammad Jannat Ullah, 18, Jane Alam, 23, and Rehana Akter, 18.
By Peter Popham
11:51 AM Saturday Aug 28, 2010
The world’s largest tiger reserve, in the wilds of northern Myanmar, is being rapidly eroded as a businessman with links to the junta replaces trees with cash crops, according to a report.
The Hukaung Valley Tiger Reserve in Kachin State was created in 2001 with the support of the Wildlife Conservation Society. When it was expanded in 2004, the society hailed it as “the biggest tiger reserve in the world”.
“In the northernmost stretches of Myanmar,” the society’s latest newsletter reported this month, “a valley exists where tigers can just be tigers. Country officials have declared the entire Hukaung Valley a protected tiger area. With 22,000sq km in which to roam, hunt and hopefully breed, the region’s remaining tigers have a chance too few of their kind currently enjoy.”
But according to a report by the Kachin Development Networking Group, there has been wholesale destruction of large areas of forest for mono-crop development.
Yuzana, a company owned by U Htay Myint, a wealthy businessman close to Myanmar’s ruling generals, has taken over 800sq km in the south of the reserve. The Yuzana Integrated Agricultural Project began in 2007 with the junta’s blessing.
The company is building a “green zone” enclave, within the project area, containing workers’ barracks, a factory and a supermarket and surrounded by a 2m-high concrete wall.
Clashes have broken out between the company and villagers within the project area, and more than 160 families have been forced to move, the report said. It said with the villagers out of the way, the forest greenery was killed off with herbicide. Then Yuzana’s bulldozers and excavators dug out and hauled away the debris, leaving large swathes of flattened and denuded land.
Only the tiger reserve’s signposts remained in the cleared areas. “When there are many forests, it is a hot-spot for biodiversity,” reads one of the signs. Another sign said: “Mountains and forests are deep; the animals have a good home and food.”
The machines then carved deep irrigation canals between the eviscerated blocks of land, allegedly bisecting all but one of the tiger corridors running through the park which are meant to allow tigers and other wild animals to roam and hunt.
In 2007 BirdLife International, a global partnership of conservation organisations, reported on Yuzana’s incursions. In March 2008 the organisation said that a strip of forest up to 2.5km wide that ran for 80km had been almost completely felled and re-planted with sugar cane and jatropha biofuel plantations.
The authors of the new report say that “as of February 2010 [we] were unable to see any remaining forests in animal corridor areas [within the agricultural zone]. Only the signboards of the forest department and the Wildlife Conservation Society were left standing.” Ah Nan, spokesperson for KDNG, said: “The destruction in Hukaung makes a mockery of the tiger reserve. Yuzana is doing whatever it likes with the aid of the generals and the silence of the conservationists.”
In plans to be submitted to next month’s Global Tiger Summit in St Petersburg, Myanmar’s military regime boasts that it will double the country’s tiger population by 2022. But last October WCS said that there were fewer than 100 tigers left in the Hukaung Valley Tiger Reserve, a decline from the previous figure of 150.
WCS was not available for comment.
PTI – New Delhi, August 26, 2010
China has assured India that its nuclear cooperation with Pakistan is for peaceful purposes, External Affairs Minister S.M. Krishna today said in the Rajya Sabha.
He said during Question Hour that India is keeping a close watch on nuclear cooperation between China and Pakistan and has taken up the issue with Beijing.
“China has assured us that its nuclear cooperation with Pakistan is for peaceful purposes,” he said.
Mr. Krishna was responding to BJP member Ram Jethmalani’s concern over supply of two nuclear reactors by China to Pakistan recently.
“We do realise the seriousness of this development.
Pakistan’s acquisition of nuclear reactors is of serious concern to us and we are keeping a close watch on this,” he said.
To a query by Ravi Shankar Prasad (BJP) about nuclear activities being undertaken by Pakistan and China, Mr. Krishna said, “this is something where we make assessment. We know Pakistan and China have nuclear facilities and we are also aware of clandestine proliferation efforts of countries like Iran and Libya.
“We also know about the activities of the A Q Khan (the disgraced Pakistan nuclear scientist) group. We monitor these activities and take appropriate steps to ensure that national security is not jeopardised.”
On Myanmar’s denial of media reports about its nuclear activities, Mr. Krishna said, “If a country like Myanmar with which India has bilateral relations, asserts a denial (about its nuclear programmes), then India will have to believe.”
At the same time, he added, “The government is trying to gather information about such peripheral activities. We monitor such activities closely as we are concerned about security of the country.”
The Straits Times – India ‘monitoring’ Myanmar
NEW DELHI – INDIA is keeping an eye on neighbouring Myanmar after recent reports about an alleged nuclear weapons programme in the military-run country, Foreign Minister SM Krishna said on Thursday.
‘The government is trying to gather information about such peripheral activities. We monitor such activities closely as we are concerned about security of the country (India),’ he told the upper house of parliament.
Recent media reports and a documentary by the Norwegian-based news group Democratic Voice of Burma (DVB) have alleged that Myanmar is attempting to build an atomic bomb with North Korean help.
Myanmar’s ruling junta has dismissed the reports as baseless.
Myanmar, which has been ruled with an iron fist for nearly 50 years, has promised to hold first elections since 1990 later this year.
Myanmar’s military ruler Than Shwe visited India in July to strengthen bilateral ties and trade relations between the countries. India began engaging the junta in the mid-1990s as security, energy and strategic priorities came to the fore.
The Straits Times – Myanmar opposition in disarray
YANGON – BOYCOTTS, draconian election laws and resignations of opposition figures have put Myanmar’s ruling generals within easy grasp to sweep the first polls in two decades, just two weeks after setting an election date.
Myanmar’s politically marginalised opposition appears in total disarray in the run up to the much-criticised Nov 7 polls, experts say, playing into the hands of a military regime with no intention to give up its 48-year grip on power.
The leader of the National Democratic Force (NDF) party, Khin Muang Swe, said late on Thursday he would not run for a parliamentary seat, while influential Nobel Peace Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi on Tuesday called on members of her now-defunct National League for Democracy (NLD) party to abstain from voting.
The moves, whether tactical or retaliatory, come as parties grapple with huge registration fees, strict campaign rules, intimidation by military agents and barely any time to recruit enough members to contest the election.
According to rules announced last week, campaign gatherings and publications will require official approval, criticism of the military is outlawed and election authorities are empowered to ban acts of ‘holding flags and chanting slogans’.
‘This is just what the regime wants and has planned all along,’ said Aung Naing Oo, a Burmese academic based in neighbouring Thailand.
Sat, 2010-08-28 05:04 — editor
By Zin Linn
Burma’s junta is to hold parliamentary elections on Nov. 7. According to the 2008 Constitution, the country has a bicameral parliament at the national level and a regional parliament in each of the seven states and seven divisions.
On Aug.11, the Union Election Commission announced the constituencies of all the parliaments in its (85/2010) statement. The 7th November elections will be for 330 civilian seats in the 440-member House of Representatives. Under the 2008 constitution, military personnel will be appointed to the remaining 110 seats. In the 224-seat House of Nationalities, 168 will be elected, and 56 will be appointed by the armed forces.
The size of the regional parliaments will be different depending on the size of each state or division. Every township obtains two seats for the respective regional parliament. The minority ethnic groups living in each state and division which has 0.1 percent of the country’s population will get one seat in the regional parliament. In 14 regional parliaments, there will be a total of 660 seats, plus 29 seats for minority ethnic groups in the respective areas. In total, there will be 1,187 seats in the national and regional parliaments elected by the people.
Moreover, the current junta’s legal structure for the polls, including five laws issued in March and Directive No.2/2010 issued in June 2010 are totally unjust and difficult to deal with. Those unjust laws or restrictions may be the manifestation of the military regime’s inner thinking.
According to the National Political Alliances (NPA), political parties that planned to contest countrywide are now in hot water, as they have run into financial limitations in paying candidate fees of 500,000 kyat (US $510) per candidate, time limitations, EC restrictions, and surveillance and harassment by local authorities. Thus, NPA even cannot consider running for 10 seats in the polls.
However, the junta-backed USDP has planned to contest all the constituencies of the union parliament, as well as in the state assemblies of the country in the upcoming election.
Many parties have confirmed that due to financial constraints they cannot afford to contest in all the parliamentary constituencies. A party-candidate has to deposit US$510 as registration fee. Hence, if a political party wants to contest in 100 constituencies, it needs US$50,1000 excluding other expenses.
Ethnic parties have complained that the USDP is obstructing the efforts of other parties. Candidates say the USDP is enjoying special treatment by the Election Commission and are granted approval to canvass in the polls early on, while other parties struggled with the registration process and large finances required to run.
Meanwhile, Burma’s detained opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi has recommended that people who want to support her disbanded party in upcoming elections refrain from voting, her lawyer Nyan Win informed after meeting with her on 24 August.
“She said just don’t vote if people want to vote only for the NLD,” the lawyer said by telephone after a visit to her lakeside home on 24 August.
She said that she agreed with her party’s decision to boycott Burma’s November 7 elections and urged members and the public to monitor on fairness of the polling process, her lawyer Nyan Win said.
In her reminder to the people, citizens ought to understand the 2008 constitution plus current election laws and regulations. Without knowing what the meaning of the laws, just voting is pointless. Besides, people should object to the EC since it did not allow freedom of press and freedom of expression. She also pointed out that after the elections the president will clutch the supreme power while the parliaments are powerless. People must also observe about the unfairness of the current laws.
“Although the electoral rules are unfair, we still need to watch the polls to know whether the military regime follows its own laws or not. If the authorities failed to follow their own laws, we can call them anarchists,” Nyan Win quoted Suu Kyi as saying.
The rejoinder came during a two-hour meeting between the National League for Democracy (NLD) party general secretary Aung San Suu Kyi and her laywers, Nyan Win, Kyi Win and Khin Htay Kywe, at her residence in Rangoon, from 2 p.m. on 24 August.
Political parties in Burma have complained the government has not given them sufficient time to find funding to register their candidates before August-30 closing date. The Election Commission said their offices will continue open over the weekend for candidates to register, but it is not be enough for many to raise the 510-dollar registration fee.
But, two more days is not a sufficient time for candidates for some were taking into account selling their properties so as to pay registration fee. However, they have little time left to do so, analysts criticized. Many parties have complained that the registration fee is severely expensive in a poor country where the per capita income is less than 220 US dollars a year. It looks like a premeditated minefield for democratic parties.
42 parties have been allowed to contest the polls up to date. Few people expect to be free and fair election. The pro-junta Union Solidarity and Development Party is expected to field all 1,187 candidates in the polls for lower, upper and regional houses, compared with a total of about 500 candidates from the pro-democracy parties.
Meanwhile, the junta has carried out a major military reshuffle, retiring more than a dozen senior military generals ahead of upcoming national elections, an official close to the junta reports on condition of anonymity. The generals are widely said to be retiring from their military positions in order to run in the Nov. 7 polls as the junta has systematically arranged.
It is believed that the retirement from the military of Senior General Than Shwe and Vice- Senior General Maung Aye will soon tag along.
The reshuffle is the second since April, when 27 senior military officials including Prime Minister Gen. Thein Sein retired from the services. August 27 or Friday’s reshuffle included the junta’s third- and fourth-ranking generals, Thura Shwe Mann and Tin Aung Myint Oo. Thura Shwe Mann is most likely turn into president after the election.
It seems the aggressive generals start the game of changing new face to hold on power incessantly.
N Balakrishnan
Last Updated: August 26. 2010 11:36PM UAE / August 26. 2010 7:36PM GMT
Until 1937, Britain ruled Myanmar as part of British India and some of the richest merchants in Myanmar were Indians. That was then. Now Myanmar is independent and isolated, and the rich Indian merchants are no more, although nearly a million people of Indian origin still live in Myanmar.
The economic relations between the Myanmar and India are now starting to improve again, but from a different base and for different reasons. The weak link in India’s “Look East” policy always has been the lack of physical infrastructure linking India with its South East Asian neighbours. Of all the South East Asian countries only Myanmar shares a land border with India, but unfortunately Myanmar is also one of the poorest countries in the region, and it suffers from appalling infrastructure.
But with economic and business relations between Myanmar and India improving and both countries engaging in the development of ports, roads and railways connecting the two countries, Myanmar may soon be able to resume its historical role as the “bridge” between India and South East Asia.
General Than Shwe, Myanmar’s head of state, recently made his second visit to India in six years. A number of trade and loan agreements were signed which, when developed in a few years, have the potential to dramatically increase the flow of trade and investment between the two countries, which now amount to about a US$1 billion (Dh3.67bn) a year.
Aung San Suu Kyi, perhaps the world’s most famous political prisoner, is still in custody in Myanmar and she has many supporters in India where she did part of her studies. But the Indian government policy now is to improve the state-to-state relations regardless of what the domestic political situation in Myanmar might be.
Elections are scheduled in Myanmar later this year and, depending on how fairly they are conducted, may well mark a turning point in its relations with the rest of the world. Right now the US and EU have imposed economic sanctions and this makes business and investment in Myanmar, especially in sectors such as gas and petroleum, difficult for foreign investors.
More than trade is at stake for India as it improves its relations with Myanmar. A look at the map of India will show that north-eastern states such as Assam and Mizoram are connected only by a thin strip of land to mainland India and suffer from poor connectivity to the rest of the country. In fact, the nearest ports are in Myanmar.
Isolated by the US and EU, Myanmar has developed good trade, political and investment relations with China. However, it is notoriously sensitive about retaining its sovereignty and independence and seems to be getting worried about being too reliant on China. That is another factor motivating Myanmar to develop better relations with its other giant neighbour – India.
Bangladesh, which sits between India and its north-eastern states, has until recently refused transit rights to Indian road and rail transport. But Bangladesh has also now agreed to transit rights with India. This, together with the opening up of Indian diplomatic relations with Myanmar, has the potential to transform the economic development of the poorer north east of India. India’s north-eastern states have fertile soils and receive good rainfall – in fact the place with the most rainfall in the world, Cherrapunji, is situated there – but have remained economically undeveloped because of lack of access to developed markets and even mainland India.
Myanmar is also reported to have one of the world’s biggest gas reserves, which are estimated to be more than 90 trillion cubic feet. Energy-hungry India is interested in that. The Indian government-owned Oil and Natural Gas Commission and the Gas Authority of India hold a 30 per cent stake in the exploration and production of gas in Myanmar’s offshore blocks, located in the Sittwe area of Arakan state.
BY KANAKO MIYAJIMA THE ASAHI SHIMBUN
2010/08/28
MERA REFUGEE CAMP, Thailand–Their dreams about starting a new life in Japan range from providing a future for their children to riding in a car.
Others simply want to get away from the oppression in Myanmar (Burma) that led them to the Mera refugee camp in northwest Thailand.
Twenty-seven refugees from five families–all members of minority Karen tribe–will be relocated from the camp to Japan in late September. They will be the first group to arrive under a “third-country” resettlement program adopted by Japan, which has long been criticized as closed to refugees.
The program is designed to help refugees in camps outside their home countries.
The Mera refugee camp is more like a town, dotted with houses with eucalyptus-thatched roofs.
About 39,000 Karen people who fled Myanmar’s military government live in the camp, which was built in 1984. Food, wood and other supplies are provided by nonprofit organizations.
One narrow path in the camp is lined with grocery stores and bamboo houses. Children in school uniforms can be heard speaking in Burmese, Karen, Thai and English.
The camp has 22 day-care centers, 17 elementary schools, three junior high schools and seven high schools, all built by nongovernmental organizations. Special schools that teach English and economics also exist.
At one day-care building, members of a family who will resettle in Japan greeted me with “konnichiwa” (hello) and “hajimemashite (Pleased to meet you).
The 24-year-old father said he was 4 years old when he fled his home in Myanmar during a military attack. After moving from one refugee camp to another, he arrived in Mera in 1995, where he met his wife, now 23.
They have two daughters, aged 4 and 2.
“We have no worries as long as we stay here,” he said in Karen, as he sat on his knees. “But I want to see our lives improve. I want my children to have goals and dreams. I will go to Japan to live a new life.”
He said he wanted to farm in Japan. “I believe I will manage if I make the effort.”
Since late July, those accepted under the resettlement program have been taking one-month training courses from the International Organization for Migration, which was commissioned by the Japanese government.
Initially, 32 members of six families were accepted, but a family of five decided not to move because of Japan’s high prices.
A 36-year-old man in a family of seven did not hide his anxieties about living in Japan.
“Away from Myanmar, without knowing the language, how can I possibly find a job soon?” he said. “But there is no future in this camp. I will do my best trying to become a naturalized citizen.”
An 8-year-old girl has also set goals for her life in a new country.
“I want to go to school and make many friends. I want to get in a car, too,” she said.
Japan plans to accept about 90 refugees from Myanmar in three years from this fiscal year.
By BA KAUNG – Saturday, August 28, 2010
When Than Shwe reportedly stepped down as the head of Burma’s military yesterday, few inside Burma saw the move as a radical break with the past. It was, rather, a familiar maneuver that reminded many of the machinations of former dictator Ne Win.
Although it remains unconfirmed whether Than Shwe has indeed taken the leap into civilian status, most veteran political observers said the news came as no surprise. According to official sources and media reports, Than Shwe on Friday renounced his post as commander-in-chief of the armed forces, but will continue to head the ruling State Peace and Development Council.
The state-controlled media has made no mention of changes at the top level, but sources have confirmed that the junta’s third- and fourth-ranking members, Lt-Gen Shwe Mann and Lt-Gen Tin Aung Myint Oo, have both quit their military positions, even if Than Shwe and his deputy, Maung Aye, have not made any similar changes.
The news was greeted in Burmese political circles as a sign that Than Shwe has decided to take the well-worn path of another former military strongman who shed his uniform to prolong his hold on power.
“There is no indication that Than Shwe will give up power. I think he will continue to rule in civilian clothes, just like Ne Win,” said Thu Wai, the chairman of the Democratic Party (Myanmar), a Rangoon-based opposition party that will contest in this year’s election in November.
In 1974, 12 years after seizing power from a civilian government in a military coup, Gen Ne Win retired from the army and proclaimed himself president of the Socialist Republic of the Union of Burma. Although he later gave up the presidency, he remained as the supreme authority until his resignation in 1988.
It is speculated that Than Shwe will similarly become the civilian president of the Republic of the Union of Myanmar—as the country will officially be known after the election—to ensure that all his close subordinates, both in the army and in the elected government, remain in charge of the country.
As president, he would also head the National Defense and Security Council (NDSC), which will exercise executive power as the most powerful entity created by the new Constitution that will come into effect after the election. Detained pro-democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi recently said that the future civilian government would be incapable of reining in the broad-ranging powers of the president.
“I think Than Shwe is eying the leadership of the NDSC,” said Aye Thar Aung, the secretary of the Committee Representing People’s Parliament, an umbrella group of political and ethnic groups that won seats in Burma’s last election in 1990.
Aye Thar Aung dismissed reports of the recent round of military resignations as meaningless, even if they are true. “These changes of military personnel will not produce better conditions for our country,” he said.
But Win Tin, a senior member of Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy, which has boycotted the election, said that the timing of Than Shwe’s military retirement could leave him exposed.
“It will be difficult for him to control the army now, especially with the issue of ethnic armed groups still unresolved,” he said, referring to the regime’s unsuccessful efforts to integrate ethnic cease-fire groups into the Burmese military as border guard forces.
Other observers also noted that Than Shwe remained vulnerable to pressure from other quarters.
“Than Shwe is now in a position to do whatever he wants to do, except retire,” said Chan Tun, a 90-year-old veteran politician, adding that the aging and ailing dictator would find it difficult to give up power entirely even if he wanted to because of possible opposition from family members who want to maintain the status quo.
Chan Tun was also reluctant to rule out the possibility of real political change eventually resulting from Than Shwe’s “discipline-flourishing multiparty democracy,” which he contrasted with Ne Win’s one-party system.
Despite the unfairness of the current election, which is weighted heavily in favor of the junta-backed Union Solidarity and Development Party, “It may one day be possible for elected representatives of other political parties to become prime minster under this system,” he said.
For now, however, Than Shwe’s greatest fear is probably not a return to genuine democracy, but a fate similar to that of his predecessor, Ne Win, who died under house arrest after his son-in-law and grandsons were accused of plotting against the current regime.
As the author of Ne Win’s eventual downfall, Than Shwe knows only too well how quickly trust can turn to treachery once a dictator begins to lose his grip.
By ZIN MIN MAUNG /NAYPYIDAW – Friday, August 27, 2010
It didn’t take long for Burma’s new capital, Naypyidaw, to develop a red light district, where sex can be bought at brothels masquerading as beauty salons, massage parlors, karaoke lounges and even restaurants.
The seamy district, Paung Laung, is on the main road leading into the city. Nearly 100 establishments where girls can be bought by the hour or the night line the road. But sex comes at a high price—between 100,000 kyat (US $100) and 200,000 kyat ($200).
Such prices can only be afforded by well-heeled businessmen and members of Naypyidaw’s top brass, who not only patronize the brothels but are said to have invested in many of them.
Business is brisk, spawning the development of a cheaper red light zone along the 30 mile stretch of highway between Naypyidaw and the next town. Before Burma’s new capital moved to Naypyidaw, less than half a dozen brothels were in business along the roadside—today there are more than 70.
Most are just makeshift tents and bamboo huts, where 20 minutes with a sex worker costs 6,000 kyat ($6). Young boys working on commission tout for trade from passing motorists and motorcyclists.
One sex worker, from Lewe, near Naypyidaw, told me she resorted to prostitution because her family’s land was expropriated by the authorities when the new capital was built. Her mother contributed to the household budget by selling rice at a local market.
The girl said her meager earnings have to cover a daily “fee” of 7,000 kyat ($7) demanded by police, who are at the bottom end of a systematic racket.
One sergeant serving at Naypyidaw’s military headquarters accused the capital’s commander, Maj-Gen Wai Lwin of encouraging the spread of prostitution in and around the city.
“He told his men to avoid brothels but then allowed them to get involved in the beauty parlor business,” the sergeant told me on condition of anonymity.
“All understood what he meant and that he was giving a green light to running massage businesses.”
Senior military officers and high-ranking officials reportedly own buildings in which massage parlors and beauty salons operate and where sex is also sold.
One top officer close to junta head Snr-Gen Than Shwe was granted ownership of a share in a hotel, the Myint-Moe-Nan Motel, which was built on Naypydaw’s main street despite a ban on hotels within the city. Brig-Gen Soe Shein’s involvement in the hotel project was regarded as a way for the consortium of owners to get official protection.
By SAW YAN NAING – Saturday, August 28, 2010
Burma’s military junta has warned ethnic cease-fire armies that they will come under attack if they don’t transform their troops into border guard forces by next month, raising tensions over the issue as a number of ethnic armies continue to resist the order.
The KNU/KNLA Peace Council, an ethnic Karen breakaway group led by Maj-Gen Htain Maung, and the New Mon State Party (NMSP), a Mon cease-fire militia, have both been told they must accept the border guard force (BGF) plan by Sept. 1 or face attack, according to sources.
“They [the KNU/KNLA Peace Council] were warned and surrounded. They will be driven out of their base” if they don’t accept the order, said a Karen source on the Thai-Burmese border.
“But Htain Maung said he will not join the BGF. He will fight back,” the source added.
The KNU/KNLA Peace Council, a splinter group of the Karen National Union (KNU) that signed a cease-fire agreement with the Burmese regime in 2007, has about 300 armed fighters.
The renewed pressure came as about 100 members of the Democratic Karen Buddhist Army (DKBA), a cease-fire group whose leaders agreed to form a BGF under Burmese army command, reportedly defected to a breakaway faction opposed to the plan.
Earlier this month, DKBA Brigade 5, led by Col Saw Lah Pwe, announced that it would not accept the BGF plan. Around 1,500 soldiers under Saw Lah Pwe joined the mass defection, which leaves the DKBA with five remaining brigades.
Karen sources reported that the Burmese authorities have tried to persuade DKBA Brigade 5 to maintain its relationship with the regime. However, Saw Lah Pwe reportedly rejected the offer, saying that he would fight back if his troops come under attack.
According to reports, Saw Lah Pwe’s group has formed an alliance with the KNU’s armed wing, the Karen National Liberation Army (KNLA). The DKBA broke away from the KNU in 1995.
Meanwhile, in a meeting on Aug. 23, Maj-Gen Thet Naing Win of the Burmese army’s Southeastern Regional Command told NMSP leaders that the Mon cease-fire group will face conditions similar to those that prevailed before the two sides ended hostilities in 1995 if it doesn’t meet the new BGF deadline.
Thet Naing Win also warned the NMSP leaders not to disrupt the upcoming election on Nov. 7 in Mon State, southern Burma. The NMSP is estimated to have 600 fighters.
Some observers said the warnings signaled that the regime was planning to take action against relatively weak cease-fire groups before going after larger groups such as the United Wa State Army (UWSA) and Kachin Independence Army (KIA).
Last August, the regime launched an attack against an ethnic Kokang militia group that was seen as a warning to other groups to accept the BGF plan.
In a meeting in Tangyan, northern Shan State, on Aug. 20, Burmese intelligence chief Lt-Gen Ye Myint told the UWSA that if it doesn’t join the BGF by the first week of September, it will be declared an “illegal organization.”
A UWSA official at the group’s headquarters in Panghsang said: “We told them we won’t become a border guard force or disarm. We don’t know what they will do next. Our reaction will depend on their next move.”
Sources on the Sino-Burmese border also reported that the UWSA bought new military trucks from China recently. They said the move may be in preparation for fighting if the group is attacked by Burmese military troops.
The National Democratic Alliance Army, another armed group allied to the UWSA, has also been ordered to become a BGF by the first week of September.
Friday, August 27, 2010
In the lead up to Burma’s first election in two decades, senior officials of the junta-backed Union Solidarity and Development Party (USDP) have stepped up campaigning in Pegu Division by making donations and providing health services and other benefits to the public, according to local sources.
A resident in Thayawaddy Township said Col. Myint Htun, the director-general of the Myanmar Fire Brigade who is a candidate for the township seat, donated 300,000 kyat (US $306) to each village school on Tueday.
The director-general’s donation followed a visit by the junta’s incumbent Prime Minister Thein Sein, the head of the USDP, to several townships in Pegu Division, in which he urged his fellow USDP members to systematically organize campaigns to try to win the election.
A resident of a village that received a donation said, “Political parties have to inform and seek permission from local authorities prior to their donations to schools or road constructions projects, but the USDP doesn’t do that. Maybe the USDP is using state funds and that’s why it doesn’t need any permission.”
Meanwhile, ex-Brig-Gen Win Myint, the deputy minister of the Ministry of Electric Power No. 2 who is a candidate in Latpantan Township, has reportedly visited Latpantan twice a week, and also visited nearby villages.
“The deputy minister, a Latpantan native, doesn’t talk about politics and the election. He just asks villagers what they need and then donates. People are thankful to him because they are in need of help,” a Latpantan resident told The Irrawaddy.
He said Win Myint has installed new electricity transformers, set up concrete lamp posts, replaced outdated electrical cables and donated 10 million kyat (US 10,204) to help provide education to poor children in the town.
Last week, a team led by Nyan Win, the incumbent foreign minister, and his wife reportedly visited his native Zeekone Township, where he is a candidate, and local residents took advantage of a three-day service for free eye examinations and the distribution of eyeglasses.
“Minister Nyan Win told eye patients that the service was sponsored by a company based in Rangoon, and he was just lending a hand. He did not mention the name of the company,” a Zeekone resident told The Irrawaddy.
A number of residents in Pegu told the The Irrawaddy they suspected the USDP candidates used state funds in their election campaigning.
Thein Sein and 26 other ministers and senior officials of the regime resigned from their military posts and formed the USDP on April 29 to take part in the election that will be held on Nov. 7.
Saturday, 28 August 2010 02:02 Phanida
Chiang Mai (Mizzima) – A majority of participants at a congress of ethnic Kachin groups has rejected disarming despite a Burmese military junta threat to end the ceasefire between the two sides, a spokesman said. Meanwhile, the main Kachin militia are gearing up for war, a soldier told Mizzima.
The junta deadline for the Kachin Independence Organisation (KIO) to reply to its order for the group’s estimated 20,000 troops to disarm is September 1. The congress opened today in the Kachin stronghold of Laiza, a town near the Chinese border in Burma’s far north, and will end tomorrow (Saturday).
The 140 delegates from 18 districts who attended the congress all passed on their views that the KIO should retain its arms, one of the participants aid.
“The congress will continue tomorrow as we haven’t made a final decision. The aim of today’s meeting was just to collect the opinions from the delegates. From my point of view, we shouldn’t hand over our guns to the junta,” the KIO spokesman said.
Delegates from the KIO’s armed wing, the Kachin Independence Army (KIA), were absent because they were preparing for war, a KIA soldier told Mizzima.
The deadline was delivered on Sunday at a meeting between the junta’s main negotiator with ethnic armed groups, Military Affairs Security chief Lieutenant General Ye Myint, and KIO delegates, at the Burmese Army’s Northern Command headquarters in Myitkyina, the state capital. He told the KIO that if the KIA failed to surrender its arms in the time allotted, the ceasefire would end.
Ye Myint went on to meet Zone Teet Yame from the junta’s Border Guard Force (BGF) and Lasang Aung Was from the people’s militia and told them to arrest former KIO staff from the beginning of next month, an officer from the militia, who attended the meeting, said on condition of anonymity.
The KIO had said it would neither contest nor disturb the forthcoming elections on November 7.
It held a meeting with Kachin leaders and Christian leaders to gain their input from August 14 to 16, views that will be taken into account while reaching the final decision at this weekend’s congress.
In the last month, Ye Myint has been touring the country, pressuring armed ethnic ceasefire groups to bring themselves under junta command within the Burmese Army’s BGF and imposed the same September 1 (next Wednesday) deadline on the New Mon State Party (NMSP).
Last Friday he told United Wa State Army leaders in Tangyang that the junta would send the army into four townships in Wa-controlled territory the same day as security for electoral commissioners. The Wa leaders said they would defy the move.
Friday, 27 August 2010 00:55 Kyaw Kha
Chiang Mai (Mizzima) – At least 40 child soldiers have joined the ranks of the Burmese regime’s new border forces, after a number of Democratic Karen Buddhist Army battalions this month came under junta command, a fellow soldier revealed today.
“In the past, they [the children] were DKBA soldiers but now they have become BGF soldiers,” a soldier from the Border Guard Force (BGF) central office told Mizzima. “As far as I know, there are about 40 child soldiers in the 999th Brigade and Kalohtoobaw’s battalion alone,” he added.
Some officers and soldiers from the DKBA (which reportedly had more than 7,000 troops) resigned, some retired and some joined the BGF, so it is estimated that about 1,000 DKBA troops have rejected the junta’s proposal to join the force.
A former DKBA soldier from the 7th battalion under the 999th Brigade said: “The force’s priority is to accept the youths. Some are about 16 years old, but they appear older than 20. Some children were forced to join the DKBA and some joined of their own accord.”
The DKBA recruited many child soldiers, Aung Myo Min, director of the Human Rights Education Institute of Burma (HREIB) based in Thailand, said.
“DKBA has become a subordinate of the junta’s army, so handling the child soldiers’ case has become the duty of the State Peace and Development Council [SPDC, Burma’s ruling military junta]. If it really wants to eliminate child-soldier cases, it must not allow this [accepting child soldiers into the BGF] to happen,” Aung Myo Min said.
“The SPDC … should give those children immediate help and send them home. The junta has the duty not to accept the children in the Border Guard Force”, he added.
Burma signed the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child in 1992, so if the Burmese Army, or the BGF, used child soldiers, they could be charged with violation of that convention, he said.
The junta formed the committee for the prevention of military recruitment of underage children on January 5, 2004, with the co-operation of UN, but since then observers and some UN reports have said the committee had taken no action and that the Burmese Army was still recruiting child soldiers. The UN labour organisation, the ILO, has reported widespread cases of kidnapping used in such “recruiting”.
By JOSEPH ALLCHIN
Published: 27 August 2010
“…in pursuit of the fundamental US goals of peace, democracy and reconciliation in Burma.”- US Congressional Statement, October 2009.
The Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) chief was asked to come to the transmissions room in the US embassy in Rangoon. It was 1992 and Richard Horn had only recently been made DEA chief in what was then the world’s largest producer of heroin, Burma.
“A day or two after Horn had this conversation over the phone with another DEA agent, a guy at the embassy that runs all the transmissions told Horn that he may want to look at something. It was a cable from Huddle to Huddle’s headquarters, quoting verbatim a conversation that Horn had had two nights before,” says Brian Leighton, Richard Horn’s lawyer for one of the longest-running court cases in US history, Horn vs. Huddle & Brown.
Huddle and Brown were officially State Department, but in reality Brown worked for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), one of the US’ many intelligence bodies with a long history in Southeast Asia, whilst Huddle assisted the agency from his position as Charges d’Affaires of the Rangoon embassy.
“The lawsuit was a class action in which they were accusing the CIA of interfering with their anti-drug activities,” explains investigative journalist Dennis Bernstein.
“Horn’s confrontation came in Burma when he was trying to cut a deal through the UN to get a crop substitution program in place. He had people he was working with towards that end, not in a legal way but in a quiet way because so much of this was controversial with the military; a monster of a dictatorship, a narco-dictatorship really.”
Leighton continues: “[Arthur] Brown, the CIA official, requested Horn to introduce him to his liaison with the Burmese government, introduce him to his informants, then they requested the DEA to provide in documents the names and dates of birth of their informants, allegedly so the CIA knows that if they deal with a person they know that he or she is also an informant for DEA, which is bullshit.”
One informant was a man named U Saw Lu, a Wa ethnic leader who was a DEA ‘asset’. He inspired Horn with the ‘novel’ drug eradication plan that involved crop substitution and foreign aid to wean drug-producing areas away from manufacturing.
What the Horn case documents is a spat between US government departments or the people representing them which resulted in a 16-year legal battle, a US$3 million payout for the plaintiff, and which saw the CIA lie in court about Brown’s security status, claiming at the time that he was covert when in actual fact he was not.
In any case nobody in the CIA was held accountable and the reasons for the spat are even murkier still. Despite having represented Horn for 16 years, Leighton knows little about the situation in Burma during the time his client was allegedly bugged by the CIA. Horn also refused to speak when approached by DVB.
The dispute is therefore presented as a simple case of an anti-drugs agency, the DEA, trying pragmatically to work with the Burmese government to fight ethnic rebels who are opposed to the despotic, yet drug-free junta, whom the CIA wants to remove. But this, it seems, could not be further from the truth.
US-trained torturers
Khun Myint Tun is an MP-elect from the 1990 elections for Thaton in Mon state, running for the National League for Democracy (NLD). As it became apparent that the NLD would win the polls, the military government prevented parliament from sitting, and the rest, as they say, is history.
But like many MP’s, Khun Myint Tun was arrested for the so-called crime of being selected by a democratic mandate, and like many prisoners in Burma, his welcome to captivity was torture. During his torture however his captors, members of Burma’s military intelligence (MI) – at the time known as the Directorate of Defence Services Intelligence (DDSI) – told him that they had been trained in the US.
Why had members of a military intelligence under the Burmese Path to Socialism era been trained in the bastion of ‘freedom and democracy’, possibly in torture techniques, almost certainly in how to interrogate peaceable democrats?
One such American-trained intelligence officer is a man named Aung Lynn Htut, who has since defected and now resides in the US. He told DVB that he had studied in the US on a “special course…with the CIA. I studied VIP special security course – at that time I studied a shooting course, driving course, incident management”.
This was in 1987, a year before Burmese students would take to the streets and the world would start to roundly condemn the brutal dictatorship controlling the country.
“Before 1988 our intelligence and American intelligence was very close,” he says, before adding however that the now-defunct DDSI had later ferried CIA agents around Burma in their helicopters on trips to see northern ethnic rebels. “At that time in our intelligence office there were around 30 officers who had taken the course with the CIA in the US. But the CIA recommended me, and between 1992 and at least 2000, we did an opium yield survey with the CIA agents.”
Other sources speak of a close relationship between the agents of the CIA and the DDSI during the nineties, as the two played tennis together and enjoyed a social relationship outside of work; or, as prominent Burma journalist and scholar, Bertil Lintner, put it, the CIA were “practically in bed with the [DDSI]”.
So after 1988 the CIA was actively working with both DDSI and the DEA on its counter-narcotics operations. As Huddle was fishing around for information on Horn’s “assets”, and during the time that courts reveal that Horn was bugged, one of these so-called assets, U Saw Lu, is believed to have informed Horn of the business dealings of a DDSI officer. He allegedly told Horn that the late Major Than Aye was involved in the drugs trade. Major Than Aye was based in Lashio in Burma’s eastern Shan state where the majority of the heroin is produced.
“Major Than Aye was one of my bosses, he was very close with the ethnics along the northern border” says Aung Lynn Htut. “I remember U Saw Lu – at the time he was very close with the DEA chief, Richard Horn. Richard was very tough; Horn and CIA was a problem!”
Indeed before long Major Than Aye had caught up with U Saw Lu and the whistleblower was captured. According to investigative journalist Dennis Bernstein, U Saw Lu was hung upside down for 56 days with 220 electrodes clipped to his body; when he passed out, a doctor was on hand to revive him by pouring a bucket of urine over his face. Major Than Aye oversaw the torture; a vindictive punishment, perhaps combined with the ‘refined’ techniques of the world’s most omnipresent intelligence agency.
On death’s door U Saw Lu was saved by the Wa leader Chao Ngi Lai, who phoned then-head of DDSI, Khin Nyunt, and said the ceasefire deal between the United Wa State Army (UWSA), Burma’s largest ethnic army, and the junta was over unless U Saw Lu was released. Needless to say, the junta knew how much money the Wa and other northern drug producers had: a number of banks owned by them and their business cronies are widely believed to have laundered money for them in Rangoon. The junta therefore knew how many guns the Wa could buy, and U Saw Lu was released.
Indeed Major Than Aye was said to have been dealing with none other than Lo Hsing Han, a man who started his career in the CIA-backed Kuomintang (KMT) Chinese nationalists who fought out of the Shan hills in their failed attempts at raiding communist China. Their major source of income was the heroin trade, which as prominent historian Alfred McCoy has exhaustively documented, was ferried to markets in the CIA’s infamous Air America airline.
Lo’s underground businesses went from strength to strength and his ‘legitimate’ enterprise, the sanctions-listed Asia World Company, was set up with the profits from the drugs and which he ran with elements of the Burmese state.
Asia World is now a major recipient of contracts from the junta, with its fingers in the Shwe gas pipeline, the Myitsone dam and other lucrative, and often Chinese-funded, projects, and through such patronage is one of Burma’s largest conglomerates. Its ample wealth is enough to support Lo’s son, Steven Law, as he races round Rangoon and Singapore in his Lamborghini.
So how had Major Than Aye known that U Saw Lu was a DEA asset and that he had informed them of his activities? Could a bugged conversation between Horn and Saw Lu have been the subject of discussion over a post-tennis whiskey between CIA and DDSI agents, just as Horn’s conversations were with colleagues back in Washington?
Khin Nyunt meanwhile was at this time an important player in the Burmese junta, both as Prime Minister and intelligence chief, and seen as number three in the chain of command. He was also thought to be a fairly approachable character for the west; as Dr Zarni of the London School of Economics (LSE) notes, he was viewed as “the only general in the country whom the outside world could do business with”.
Cautious belief in Khin Nyunt was fairly common, even though his intelligence network was an imposing enemy of anybody pushing for progressive change in Burma, as well as involvement in the brutal suppression of activists which included torture of the sort meted upon U Saw Lu with training from the CIA. However it is believed that his network of spies had become too powerful and too friendly with western diplomats and interests, and may have sought to betray Than Shwe’s established order.
As Aung Lynn Htut recalls, “Khin Nyunt and parties tried to approach the US government via the CIA and other people. They wanted understanding between the American and Burmese government”.
In any case Khin Nyunt would have been a key player in arranging for his spooks to get training from the CIA in the States, even though this was a long-running program. His style was very different to the reclusive Than Shwe’s: Lintner recalls him as “flamboyant” and hungry for attention.
Khin Nyunt was renowned for making strategic ententes with opposition blocks, a facet that was extremely successful at neutralising any serious alliance between the ethnic armies and the democracy movement, as ethnic armies signed a slew of treaties with the junta which sidelined them to the feudal warlording and narco-business that has entombed many regions in medieval poverty, while a few families traipse the countryside in huge 4-wheel drives.
The intelligence chief’s connections in the US meanwhile were deep, particularly in the early 2000s when he worked to repair relations with Washington. This time was seen as the most hopeful for Washington-backed reform in Burma. Then, it all seemingly dried up as Khin Nyunt was removed from office by Than Shwe in 2004, initially on the pretense of “health reasons”.
So was the CIA really working to fight drugs and defend human rights? If the personnel they chose to associate with are anything to go by, these considerations were far from their priority.
Vested interests
The thaw of the Cold War has hardly set in in the hills of northern Burma, where the battles between communists and western-backed groups have heirs everywhere. But could the US be fighting a new cold war or, in the parlance of our days, a ’soft war’ against China?
In the 1930s, shortly after the crash of 1929, the capitalist system had heaped distress upon working people the world over and the Soviet Union looked like it could dominate the rest of the century with its apparently starkly different system. The ensuing post-war period gave the world the Cold War in which in all corners of the globe, the two protagonists battled it out for client states. The architecture of that war is still in place, with US nuclear weapons still waiting to the south and west of Russia and thousands of US forces stationed globally. The intelligence services however were as integral to that war as any faculty of either force.
In fighting this war, intelligence services backed enemies of enemies seemingly without consideration for justice or any semblance of concern for the desires of the inhabitants of the client states, spawning such movements as the Mujahedeen in Afghanistan, dictators like Augusto Pinochet in Chile, Joseph Mobutu in Zaire, or the Contra rebels in Nicaragua. In Burma, leaders such as Ne Win were quietly supported, whilst the anti-Mao KMT forces were allowed, and apparently even assisted, to produce narcotics to fight the enemy to north.
Such information is often the result of exhaustive journalistic endeavours, ones that, as the case of Gary Webb demonstrate, sometimes come at great cost. And so it is that our times and this region have been wracked by stand-offs in areas like the South China Sea as both powers posture and seduce the smaller nations of the region like cheap wrestlers at a dubious fair.
With each small nation on a veritable swing-ometer of allegiance, the US recently celebrated the 15th anniversary of its normalisation of relations with Vietnam, a small nation deemed so “terrifying” 50 years ago that it induced the dropping of 300 tons of bombs for every man, woman and child of that country, by sending a nuclear-powered ’super carrier’, the USS George Washington, to its waters: a sadly ironic gesture given the brutality that continuation of hegemony requires.
As US-based intelligence firm Stratfor notes, “there is the added fear that as China becomes stronger, the United States will become more aggressive.”
The impetus to combat China can easily be seen and it is this that Bernstein suspects is a primary motive of US intelligence in the post-war period. “The CIA was really interested in something else; they wanted to use [Burma]. This is the emerging China century, the CIA is interested in the border, they are interested in the influences China has in the region…
So the CIA is being more like a corporate frontline police force, ‘cleansing’ to make way for business. They weren’t interested in crop substitution or trying to end the poppy trade or trying to end the flow of heroin into the US – that was the cross-purpose; that’s how Horn came into this and in the process several of Horn’s sources were brutally tortured.”
That Burma is a strategic goal for China is undeniable: the Shwe gas pipeline is ample evidence, and this context provides little reason why the US can afford not to take action.
Lintner corroborates that “covertly cooperation continues [between the Burmese intelligence and CIA after 1988] and the main reason for that is China”, but he contends that the relationship goes back right the way to the Burmese Path to Socialism and Ne Win, a man whom Lintner describes as a “fascist” and whose fight with communism was armed by the west, most prominently the US.
Dr Zarni sees it differently: “If US intelligence was interested in Burma vis-a-vis China’s influence, the opposition would be getting everything it needs to change the regime.”
So why hasn’t the CIA backed the opposition in its attempts to hedge out China? Lintner talks of CIA officials in Burma lampooning him and other journalists for giving the junta “bad press” during their blood-soaked suppression of opposition protests in 1988. “The CIA has always had its own agenda and it has nothing to do with democracy or human rights or anything like that,” he tells DVB. “It’s other issues like China.” As the backing of Ne Win, or the examples of Laos and Cambodia demonstrate, the CIA is not prone to back neutralist open governments; reactionary, violent men like Khin Nyunt, Chiang Kai-shek, Suharto and Ne Win serve them the best.
So as the chords of America’s founding father’s echo in the speeches and statements of elected leaders, it seems that the CIA is, in reality, the ‘pragmatist’ hidden beneath a vocal, sugar-coated crust, with little real impetus or effect. As Aung Lynn Htut told DVB, “the CIA is a policy maker” fashioning policies as devoid of ideals and justice as any political body, and with the singular ruthless aim of furthering US strategic and political power whatever the cost.
“Government is not reason, it is not eloquence — it is force! Like fire, it is a dangerous servant and a fearful master. Never for a moment should it be left to irresponsible action” – George Washington, 1st President of the United States
Published: 27 August 2010
The Burmese junta’s third-in-command, General Shwe Mann, has retired from his post in preparation for taking the top position after elections this year, government sources say.
The Joint Chief-of-Staff privately announced his retirement to senior cabinet members last night, and becomes the latest top-level junta official to step down from the military to pursue a ministerial position in post-election Burma.
It is rumoured that the retirement from the military of Senior General Than Shwe and vice-chairperson Maung Aye will shortly follow, an official at Burma’s foreign ministry told DVB on condition of anonymity.
Current Burmese prime minister, Thein Sein, will become the new vice president, while Than Shwe and Maung Aye will become the official president and vice president of the Union Solidarity and Development Party (USDP), which is currently headed by Prime Minister Thein Sein, who quit his military post in April. The two however will play no official role in the government or army, but instead act as patrons of the party.
The USDP has been widely tipped to win controversial elections slated for 7 November, and the foreign ministry official said that the party may stay in power for two terms, equating to 10 years.
It is not known who will take the place of the 77-year-old Than Shwe as army chief, but the current Chief of Bureau of Special Operation – 2, Min Aung Hlaing, will be promoted to Adjutant General, the official said, ranking at around sixth in the military hierarchy.
Thein Htay, who heads Defence Industry 1 and who accompanied Shwe Mann on a top-secret visit to North Korea in 2008, will become Chief of Military Ordinance, while Wai Lwin, from the Regional Military Command, will become Quartermaster General.
A number of other senior Regional Military Command members have also been promoted: Light Infantry Division (LID) 33 commander Aung Kyaw Zaw becomes the Northeastern Regional Military Commander (RMC), while LID 88 commander, whose name is not known, will become the Southern RMC. LID 99 commander Khin Maung Htay will become the Coastal Region Military Commander, and LID 101 commmander Sein Win has been transferred to the ministry of foreign affairs. The previous RMCs have all been moved to the Bureau of Special Operations (BSO) to replace their predecessors who have now retired.
The government has stipulated that no one older than 60 shall serve as the commander-in-chief of Burma’s 500,000-strong army, who’s various leaders have ruled the Southeast Asian pariah since a coup in 1962.
The Burmese junta has launched a wholesale reshuffle of its ranks in recent months, starting with Thein Sein’s resignation in April. It is only two months until the country’s first elections in 20 years, and conditions surrounding the polls appear to have been carefully orchestrated to ensure that while a cosmetic change takes place at the top of the government, the same people will continue to pull the strings after November.
The re-positioning is also apparently in accordance with a clause in the 2008 constitution that says that both the vice president and president “shall be well acquainted with the affairs of the Union, such as…military”, implying that experience in the army may be a prerequisite for the top jobs.
Moreover, the constitution rules that 25 percent of parliamentary seats must been given to military personnel, which may be a key reason behind the reshuffle.
This would rule out the vast majority of candidates running in the elections, and seems to reinforce concerns that Burma’s future is being planned before polls even take place.
Forty-one parties have so far been approved to compete, but many of the smaller groups have complained that the 500,000 kyat (US$500) registration fee for each candidate is well beyond their reach, and therefore are forced to significantly reduce the number of candidates they’ll be fielding.