ReliefWeb – UN in Myanmar identifies strategic priorities for the future
Source: United Nations Country Team in Myanmar
Date: 15 Mar 2011

Yangon, 15 March 2011 —- Four strategic priorities and key elements of the new Strategic Framework for the United Nations in Myanmar were presented today at the monthly Humanitarian Partnership Group meeting, attended by over 80 experts, heads of missions and UN agencies, diplomats and aid workers.

The priorities, which are the result of extensive analysis of humanitarian and development challenges in the country, will guide UN engagement and programming and form the basis of a new Strategic Framework for the period 2012-2015. “The UN Strategic Framework aims to be a collective, coherent and integrated programming and monitoring framework for UN contributions in Myanmar, based on the UN’s comparative advantages.

The UN Strategic Framework is based on the analyses of the country’s situation, development challenges that it faces and opportunities ahead of it,” said Bishow Parajuli, UN Resident/Humanitarian Coordinator, who chaired the meeting.

The UN Resident/Humanitarian Coordinator explained that consultations had been held with focal points from all relevant government ministries, the latest in February. Based on these consultations it had been agreed that UN engagement would focus on four Strategic Priorities, namely:

1. Encourage inclusive growth (both rural and urban), including agricultural development and enhancement of employment opportunities
2. Increase equitable access to quality social services
3. Reduce vulnerability to natural disasters and climate change
4. Promote good governance and strengthen democratic institutions and rights.

Full_Report (pdf* format – 58.1 Kbytes)(http://www.reliefweb.int/rw/rwb.nsf/db900sid/KKAA-8EZ7LQ/$File/full_report.pdf)

VOA News – Karens Flee Fighting in Burma, But Live in Limbo in Thailand
Danielle Bernstein | Mae Sot  March 16, 2011

The European Commission visited Burmese refugee camps along the Thai-Burma border this week to evaluate a shift in priorities from basic relief services to longer-term sustainable assistance. But as aid workers on the border scramble to cope with the newest wave of ethnic Karen refugees fleeing war at home, questions remain about whether sustainable assistance is possible in such an unstable region.

More than 10,000 refugees from eastern Burma have crossed into Thailand since fighting erupted between government troops and the opposition Democratic Karen Buddhist Army in November after the country’s first national elections in two decades.

Thailand considers them to be illegal migrants, so they are not allowed in the refugee camps, and have little access to humanitarian aid. Instead, they seek shelter in the jungle or in squatter camps.

Four months of continuous fighting in border areas of Burma’s Karen State shows no signs of letting up. Sally Thompson, of the Thai/Burma Border Consortium says the election has made Thai authorities more reluctant to offer aid to refugees.

“The fact that the elections have been held is seen as the start of a new phase which is not more refugees,” Thompson said. “The hope from the Thai government and others is that the new phase is that the refugees will be able to gradually return back to Burma so there is not a willingness at this stage to put new mechanisms in place that are likely to attract more refugees to Thailand it would be seen from the Thai government’s perspective if they were to establish more official sites they consider that would be a pull factor.”

Thompson’s organization estimates more than 140,000 people from Burma live in 10 refugee camps along the border. Thousands more reside in nine camps inside Burma that the consortium monitors.

The lack of health care at home or in Thailand remains a critical issue for the refugees.

“Basically there’s no effective health system in eastern Burma and so people are coming to places like Mae Tao clinic because it’s the only place they can get any health care,” Thompson added. “There’s no health system that’s been put in place from the government’s side what people have access to is what the ethnic groups themselves have established.”

The Mae Tao clinic, founded by Dr. Cynthia Maung in Mae Sot, provides free health services to refugees. Lok Gwa, a trainee surgeon at the clinic, says since the border was closed in September, they have been seeing fewer patients. Hospital records confirm patient numbers have held at around 10,500 a month, about 2,000 less than usual.

The clinic’s staff says this indicates not that fewer people are sick, but that fewer can reach the clinic and either go without, or must have health care come to them.

Naw Paw Hser Mu Lar has spent the past 10 years as a member of the Backpack Health Worker Team, a network of more than 300 mobile health care providers who care for those living in conflict areas in Burma.

She says the fighting has led to a rise in malaria, diarrhea, maternal and child illnesses, and land mine injuries since November.

“Policy has not changed,” said Mu Lar. “I think more fighting than last year. More patients. More fighting means more patients, more serious cases.”

Mahn Mahn, the president of the Backpack Health Worker Team, has similar fears.

“In terms of before the election in Burma we expected there would be more conflict but nobody in the international community believed us,” Mahn Mahn said. “But anyway, before the election in Burma we started to prepare for after the election, and fighting started in Myawady and then we started to form the seven emergency backpack teams.”

Human rights activists and refugees say the conflict escalated after the election, as the Burmese army tries to gain control over more Karen territory.

Burma’s military government has signed peace agreements with several of the country’s ethnic militias, including the Democratic Karen Buddhist Army. But none of the ethnic groups agreed with a government demand that they become part of a national border guard, and as a result, fighting has flared in many parts of the country.

A European Union delegation plans to visit the border refugee camps this week. The team aims to evaluate new sustainable options for helping the Burmese, even as Thai officials look to repatriate them. Thompson sees the resolution to Burma’s refugee crisis as primarily a political one.

“Until the ethnic issue is resolved in Burma the conflict will be ongoing,” Thompson said. “It’s very unlikely in the short-term that the ethnic issue will be resolved so it’s very likely that we will see low intensity ongoing conflict in the ethnic areas which will continue to generate more arrivals into Thailand.”

Karen refugees began fleeing into Thailand 26 years ago, and aid workers say what originally was seen as temporary situation has become permanent. The EU says its delegation hopes to come up with ways to help the refugees rebuild their lives, and bring them health care, education and livelihoods.

Wednesday, Mar 16, 2011
The Hindu – ‘Maybe Myanmar is our Pakistan’
Nirupama Subramanian
U.S. pushed India on democracy; India was firm about engaging the junta.

Long before U.S. President Barack Obama publicly asked India to use its influence to do more for a return to democracy in Myanmar, U.S. officials were quietly, but unsuccessfully, pushing New Delhi to take a tougher line against the military junta.

At each push, Indian officials told the U.S. that while New Delhi also wanted to see a democratic government in Yangon, it believed this could be better done by engaging with the junta rather than cutting off ties with it. Moreover, India had its own important geopolitical reasons to develop ties with the military regime.

More than 40 U.S. Embassy cables classified from New Delhi and Yangon, spread over the period from 2003 to 2009 and accessed by The Hindu through WikiLeaks, confirm the reality that in diplomacy, national ideals are no competition to that thing called “strategic interest.”

India had no problem dumping old friend Aung San Suu Kyi (‘ASSK’) to romance Myanmar’s generals. The cables reflect U.S. frustration over the years at New Delhi’s flat-out refusal to toe its line on Myanmar because of India’s own concerns about growing Chinese influence in that country and safe havens in Myanmar for insurgents operating in north-eastern India.

In the cables, the U.S. comes out all for democracy in Myanmar – and for “ASSK.” But significantly, in the same time frame it was working behind the scenes to arrange an agreement between Pakistan’s military ruler Pervez Musharraf and Pakistan People’s Party leader Benazir Bhutto in order to give the military leader a democratic look.

Imperative for several reasons

One notable conversation between Ted Osius, Political Counselor at the New Delhi Embassy, and Mohan Kumar, MEA Joint Secretary dealing with Myanmar, is reported in a cable sent on February 20, 2007 ( 97303: confidential).

Mr. Kumar told the American diplomat that engagement with the Myanmar junta was an imperative for India for several reasons.

“The ULFA guys hiding in Burma are screwing the hell out of us!” he said, noting that “Burma is the only one helping us” to tackle the northeastern insurgency. “Tell Bangladesh to co-operate and I am happy to say bye bye Myanmar.”

India was also trying to deal with the insurgency by creating economic opportunities in the northeastern region, and Myanmar was crucial for this, too.

“Bangladesh’s stubbornness in allowing access to transit routes for trade leaves us with Burma as the only alternative to connect the northeast to ASEAN markets,” and provide an economic incentive for the United Liberation Front of Asom (ULFA) to lay down arms.

Mr. Kumar commented that the Association of South-East Asian Nations (ASEAN) and China maintained close ties with Myanmar but did not face the same pressure from the U.S. to refrain from engaging with it. “Do you want us to connect through China?” he asked. Tit for tat, he asked Mr. Osius why the U.S. was not pushing for democracy in Pakistan. “Why not pick on Musharraf? Where is democracy there?”

He compared India’s policy in Myanmar with the U.S. policy in Pakistan. “Maybe Myanmar is our Pakistan,” he is quoted as saying in a dubious, though memorable, formulation.
But Mr. Kumar also allowed that India had not given up on democracy altogether, stating that the government “continues to push them at every opportunity.”

One such opportunity apparently presented itself during an October 2004 visit of Senior General Than Shwe. Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) Joint Secretary Mitra Vasishtha told Political Counselor Geoffrey Pyatt on November 2, 2004 ( 22299: confidential) that Prime Minister Manmohan Singh had raised the issue of democracy with the General “in a much more intense way than could be expressed in the media,” despite the potential for a negative fallout on the bilateral relationship.

She said New Delhi had battled for the inclusion of a paragraph in the joint statement that expressed India’s support for “national reconciliation and an early transition to democracy in Myanmar,” and described it as a “coup for India.”

Ms. Vasishtha told the American diplomat that New Delhi decided to proceed with the visit even after the ouster of Prime Minister Khin Nyunt because India did not view his replacement as an indication of “which way the dust would fall” on democracy. Rather, it was an “internal struggle,” she remarked, speculating that the junta might be somewhat fragile.

As evidence, the Joint Secretary offered the interesting observation that “Than Shwe travelled with the wives of two other powerful generals, Thura Shwe Man and Soe Win, who she mused may have been used as ‘hostages’ to ensure tranquillity among the generals in Rangoon during Than Shwe’s absence.”

Reflecting the Indian worry about China’s influence in Myanmar, Ms. Vasishtha commented that “what you hear about the PLA [the Chinese People's Liberation Army] in Burma is only the tip of the iceberg.” She added that U.S. intelligence must surely know this. She said China took Myanmar for granted and this was why Myanmar wanted to engage with India.

Confirming a $20 million Indian grant to the junta for the development of energy and gas infrastructure, Ms. Vasishtha said the funds would be given “only if they do certain things.” She projected this as part of New Delhi’s people-to-people strategy to encourage democracy.

Ms. Vasishtha was of the view that the world had made democracy in Myanmar synonymous with Ms. Suu Kyi, and predicted this could “backfire.” She described the Nobel laureate as someone whose “day has come and gone.”

A cable sent on March 30, 2005 by the U.S. Embassy in Yangon ( 29750: confidential) is headlined “All Smiles: Indian Foreign Minister’s Visit to Burma.” It is an account of Natwar Singh’s March 24-27 trip.

“FM Singh knows Aung San Suu Kyi personally and, according to the Indian Embassy, ‘holds her in high esteem’. However, Singh made no reference to her or the democratic opposition during his four-day visit, an Indian pattern of engagement with the regime that sticks to platitudes and doesn’t rock the boat.”

The cable noted: “FM Singh achieved his dual objectives of maintaining dialogue with Burma at the political level and pushing for certain development projects of benefit to Mizoram, including the Kaladan multi-modal transport project (Rakhine State) and a GOI-funded road project to improve access to a border-trade crossing opened in January 2004 (Chin State).”

The author of the cable, Embassy Chief of Mission Carmen Martinez, commented that India’s “pragmatic” approach was “a severe blow to the leaders of Burma’s beleaguered democratic opposition, most of whom draw their inspiration from India’s historic struggle for independence and democracy.”

At one point, the Americans tried to push New Delhi to make a public declaration of its ban on arms sales to Myanmar, in a cable sent on November 7, 2007 ( 129067: confidential). Joint Secretary T.S. Tirumurti acknowledged that a Myanmar request for military equipment had been turned down, but when Political Counselor Osius suggested the government go public with this, he offered no response.

Instead, he noted that External Affairs Minister Pranab Mukherjee had sent a letter to the junta’s acting Prime Minister to give UN Special Envoy Ibrahim Gambari “maximum broad-based access” to leaders in Burmese society, reminding the regime that national reconciliation must be “broad-based.”

India did once give a glimmer of hope to the U.S. on Myanmar. Deputy Chief of Mission Robert Blake cabled on December 15, 2005 ( 47761: confidential), noting a shift from “months of wishy-washy Indian posturing on Burma” in Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s public call for the release of Aung San Suu Kyi.

Dr. Singh made the appeal on his return from the East Asia Summit in Kuala Lumpur, where he also said after a meeting with Myanmar Foreign Minister Soe Win that India “favors national reconciliation and the movement towards democracy, respect for fundamental human rights and allowing political activities to flourish.”

Mr. Blake commented that this is a “strong departure” from New Delhi’s “recent tactic of downplaying democracy concerns with the GOB [Government of Burma] in return for greater cooperation in energy and counter-insurgency operations near the shared border, and signals a greater Indian willingness to put public pressure on Burma’s military junta.” He described this as a “welcome development.”

But when Cyclone Nargis struck Myanmar in 2008, it was India’s influence with the junta that the U.S. fell back on (dealt with in cable 153452: confidential, sent on May 12, 2008) in order to reach international aid to the country. It is now known that very little of that aid actually reached the victims of the cyclone.

Scoop.co.nz – Myanmar: Council Urges to Address Grave Rights Abuses
Wednesday, 16 March 2011, 10:18 am
Press Release: Asian Human Rights Commission

HRC section: Item 4: Interactive Dialogue with the Special Rapporteur on Myanmar

An Oral Statement to the 16th Session of the UN Human Rights Council from the Asian Legal Resource Centre (ALRC), a non-governmental organization in general consultative status

Myanmar: Council urged to take strong, relevant action to address grave rights abuses

The Asian Legal Resource Centre (ALRC) welcomes the report and work of the Special Rapporteur on Myanmar. We deplore the authorities’ ongoing, unjustifiable obstruction of a country visit since February 2010.

The ALRC continues to document numerous cases of arbitrary detention, torture, forced disappearance, and the demented use of courts to arbitrarily sentence persons without any rational, legal justification. While welcoming the release of Daw Aung San Suu Kyi in November 2010, the ALRC condemns the sham elections that preceded it and sees no credible signs of any progress concerning human rights in the country since.

Those States that are working to weaken the Council’s action, citing the elections and the government’s alleged transformation process, are either incredibly ill-informed, or worse still, acting in bad faith and complicit in shielding perpetrators of systematic and widespread abuses.

Mr. Rapporteur, given the extreme nature of the un-rule of law in Myanmar, what do you recommend the Council prioritise in order to be relevant and effective in addressing the arbitrary, unpredictable and norm-free system there? Standard approaches and recommendations that may work elsewhere have repeatedly shown themselves to be futile in Myanmar.

The ALRC has submitted written information to this session explaining how the government’s gross misrepresentations during the country’s UPR are a consequence of its disconnection from any type of normative framework for the protection of rights, and indicative of its attitude towards the UPR process and the international system as a whole.

Myanmar claimed that “Torture is a grave crime and the Constitution prohibits torture” (paragraph 52). The statement is fiction. There is nowhere in the 2008 Constitution a prohibition of torture of any sort. Nor is there a prohibition in the Penal Code or in any other section of domestic law.

The ALRC urges the Council to take the government’s disconnection and deception into consideration when taking action. Propping up governments that grossly abuse the rights of their citizens has been shown to be flawed, immoral and unsustainable, in the Middle-East and North Africa, and these lessons must be applied to Myanmar, to bring to an end decades of fear and suffering.

People’s Daily Online – No change with aid project in Myanmar despite earthquake in Japan: JICA
13:53, March 16, 2011

There will be no change with the aid projects being implemented in Myanmar although Japan met with the worst earthquake and Tsunami currently, a local weekly quoted an official of the Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA) as reporting Wednesday.

Yasuyuki Sato, JICA Assistant Representative, told the Popular News on Tuesday that however, it is too early to say that under the present situation if the disaster in Japan could impact on the implementation of the projects done with the aid of JICA in the future.

JICA began involved with its aid programs in Myanmar 1981 and has carried out 24 projects in 11 cities, according to the agency’ s 2010 figures.

Meanwhile, Chairman of the Garment Entrepreneurs Association U Myint Soe was also quoted as saying that it is also hard to estimate the impact on Myanmar’s garment market since Japan takes up 70 percent of Myanmar’s garment order.

Asean
Thailand Business News – Can Jasmine People’s Revolution replicate in Myanmar?
March 16, 2011

If international community is anticipating a replication of Jasmine people’s revolution (Revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt) in the military-backed Asian nation of Myanmar, then it would certainly be a disappointment for them as it’s essentially a distant dream.

Release of democratic icon Nobel laureate Aung San Suu Kyi may be moment of cherish for international community and votaries of democracy but will hardly have any significant impact on the military-backed establishment.

There is no denying of the fact that governments in Tunisia and Egypt have been corrupt, badly governed, social provisioning system inadequate and repressive over many decades. Same is in the case of Myanmar. Government repressive measures can easily be measured with a simple example that, the possession of an unregistered fax machine in Myanmar is punishable by a prison sentence of up to 15 years.

Why the revolution took place in Tunisia and Egypt now and why it is not taking place in Myanmar?

Realistic assessment does reveal the fact that the trigger for massive uprising among the Jasmine people and subsequent regime change otherwise known as fourth wave of democratisation, was essentially due to the exorbitant hike in food prices prompting a vast gulf between the minuscule rich and vast majority of poor population.

These revolutions were channelized initially through the increased use of social networking media such as Facebook, Twitter, You Tube etc. that had prompted the media membership to come to the street. The role of communication network in a revolution can hardly be belittled as was the case with the Iranian “Green Revolution” in 2009 and Moldova revolution in the same year.

In the above light, possibility of such a revolution in Myanmar is a mere wishful thinking at least in the immediate future despite the corrupt and oppressive nature of the regime.
Firstly, food riot is not a possibility at least in the immediate future as the country has rich agricultural products.

Myanmar has only 400,000 internet users, who mostly rely on cyber cafés

Secondly, the absence of techs-savvy population in the country due to poor communication network also helps in the regime-sustenance. Additionally, the regime also has the capability to control internet communication network as they had done in 2007 to counter anti-government demonstrations.

The country has reportedly 400,000 internet users out of approximately 60 million total populations and users are mostly confined to major cities like Rangoon and Mandalay. As such, internet connectivity is very slow. However, supporters of the government are privileged few who have direct and unrestricted access to the internet use in the country. In general, very few have their own personal computers and mostly people rely on cyber cafés for internet access.

Cyber cafés are more vulnerable to regime-diktat. There are reports that military-backed government have instructed cyber cafe owners to install spying software on their computers to record anti-government online activities. Twitter has already been banned in the country.

Now in this case, the option is a charismatic leader needs to channelize the peoples anguish to anti-government tirade. But can Suu Kyi manage to do this?

The answer will be big `No’ due to her circumstances. Military-backed regime has already suppressed pro-democratic movement over the last two decades. Suppression of 2007 Saffron Revolution sparked due to fuel price-hike was a glaring example.

They were almost successful in isolating Suu Kyi and her party from the masses thus far. It is essential that Suu Kyi needs to reactivate its mass contact in order to be politically relevant. However, any kind of such activism is bound to incur the wrath of the regime and will be crushed firmly.

In order to be relevant amongst the masses and towards a genuine upliftment of her society, What Suu Kyi can try for is to channelize her influence amongst the western powers to remove sanctions against Myanmar, press for western investments towards opening up of the economy, press for increase in all humanitarian aid and massive financial allocation for human rights and democracy projects via country’s genuine independent civil society groups.

It is frustrating to know that the military regime had allegedly tinkered with the process of referendum, conducted election deliberately at a time when Myanmar was affected by the hurricane Nargis, and released Suu Kyi coinciding with the poll results to divert international attention from the rigged-poll. Despite the fact that the country has a newly-elected President and vice-president, including an ethnic Shan politician, genuine democracy is still a dream as the new government is dominated and controlled by ex-Myanmar generals.

However, one positive development of continuing democratisation process will be the likely growth of new elites and power-centre in the arena leading to different set of equations in the Myanmar’s power corridors.

Currently, international community is seemingly relying on two options- Engagement or Isolationism.

If they will pro-actively engage Myanmar with funds and lifting up sanctions then it would be helpful for country’s general economic growth and community self-sufficiency. This in turn will help them greater control over the political arena and the international community in collaboration with genuine civil society groups may initiate negotiation, accommodation and bargaining among the three key blocks–the armed forces, the fledgling democracy activists and the diverse armed ethnic opposition groups for ushering into genuine democratic state.

However, if they continue with the strategy of isolationism, it will undoubtedly accentuate poverty and prompt hungry people to revolt against the Government in future. According to the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) report, most people in Myanmar survive on less than $1 a day. Only last month, opposition parties called for an end to sanctions as a way of easing the economic burden.

The country ranks among the poorest countries in Asia and yet receives a fraction of the international aid spent in countries like Laos and Cambodia. If at all revolution will take place, overthrowing a dictatorial regime or military-backed democratic regime does not necessarily bring genuine democracy rather may bring even more repressive authority as was the case with countries like Cuba, Venezuela and Iran.

Maitreya Buddha Samantaray

(Regional Analyst-Asia, iJET Intelligent Risk Systems)

Maitreya Buddha Samantaray is a Regional Analyst-Asia, with US-based iJET Intelligent Risk Systems (www.ijet.com). Prior to that, he worked with Israeli company Max-Security Solutions, US-based At Risk Protection, International SOS and was a correspondent of The Indian Express, Jammu and Kashmir, India. He was the recipient of the Indian Council of Social Science Research (ICSSR) Doctoral fellowship for his PhD work in JNU. He has published a good number of articles in different magazines, journals and web portals of national and international repute and presented several papers in national and international seminars. Views expressed in the article are his own and purely personal. He can be reached at samantaray.maitreya@gmail.com

CALM Meeting with US Embassy
Posted in: Outreach — on March 16, 2011

On 16 March 2011, representatives of the New Zealand Campaign Against Landmines (CALM) met with officials from the United States (US) Embassy in Wellington. The meeting was part of a global action by members of the International Campaign to Ban Landmines, 1997 Nobel Peace laureate, to influence the ongoing US government review of its policy on banning landmines.

The US Embassy’s counsellor for political and economic affairs, Peter Tinsley, confirmed that the policy review is continuing and “no decision has been made yet.”  He said that as part of current policy, from January 1, 2011 onwards the US is no longer using so-called persistent or “dumb” mines (the typical type planted in the ground) anywhere in the world, including Korea.

On behalf of CALM, Mary Wareham expressed the expectation that the US relinquish all antipersonnel landmines as all 156 nations that are part of the Mine Ban Treaty have done. She urged a positive outcome to the review and not “half-measures.” Wareham also expressed thanks for the policy consultations that the US undertook during 2010 and urged the US to engage in 2011 meetings of the Mine Ban Treaty.

Naing Ko Ko, a Burmese dissident based in Wellington and Amnesty International NZ’s human rights defender, talked about the landmine problem in his country, which creates hundreds of new mine victims every year. In November 2010, Aung San Suu Kyi joined 15 other Nobel Peace laureates in a letter to President Obama that urged him to secure US accession to the Mine Ban Treaty.

Tinsley said that no matter what happens the US is committed to funding clearance and victim assistance programs around the world. The CALM delegation urged that this budget not be reduced by Congress due to hard economic times.

The US embassy is well aware that New Zealand is a champion of both the Mine Ban Treaty and Convention on Cluster Munitions. Officials are in contact with New Zealand government on landmine ban policy.

CALM said it has called on New Zealand’s Prime Minister John Key to communicate with President Obama the importance of US accession to the Mine Ban Treaty. Key was non-committal in his response to CALM, deferring the request to New Zealand’s Minister of Disarmament and Arms Control Hon. Georgina Te Heuheu.

Nuvo – Kimu: A taste of Burma in Greenwood
by Anne Laker

Kimu
1280 N. US 31
Greenwood IN 46142
893-2221

FOOD: 4 stars
ATMOSPHERE: 3 stars
SERVICE: 3.5 stars

Last month The New York Times ran a piece called “In Indianapolis, the World Comes to Eat,” detailing our vibrant international eateries on West 38th Street and beyond, including a Burmese restaurant in Greenwood. Lest NYT scoop NUVO, we hightailed it south, a smooth ride on I-65, to a strip mall west of Greenwood Park Mall.

A glance at Kimu’s concise menu of curries, stir-fries, and pho indicates that Burmese food is an amalgam of Chinese, Vietnamese and Indian influences. Our challenge was set: to taste the most Burmese items on the menu.

The first revelation: Burmese Sweet Hot Tea ($1.50). I can’t recall drinking anything this exciting. Its hue was a sumptuous caramel and its texture milky-thick. One sip was pleasingly bitter, the next sweet, by turns evoking chai, chocolate and chicory. I’ll return to Kimu for this kaleidoscopic tea alone.

An appetizer called Samusa (six pieces for $2.99) was the Burmese version of the meat pie — thankfully found in most every culture. A mixture of shredded chicken, potatoes and onion came in a wonton-like wrapper; we dipped them in a runny bright orange hot sauce. Tofu Kyaw ($2.99) were simply fried tofu squares served with the same sauce.

Our young server told us that her uncle, the owner, came to Indiana circa 2002, worked as a sushi chef, then took the leap to open Kimu four months ago. This info inspired us to order Tuna Nigiri (2 pieces for $3.50) and Caterpillar Sushi (about 12 pieces for $7.50). The tuna looked artificially pink, but the caterpillar sushi pleased both eye and palate with an artful arching arrangement and a contrast of cream cheese with crunchy sesame seeds.

We ordered a strategic variety of entrees on the advice of our server. My Kyeoo Soup ($8.95) was an earthy pho with a motley cast of characters: pork tongue, imitation crab, mini meatballs, quail eggs and bright bokchoy chards reaching toward harmony in a cloudy broth with rice noodles. It was better for lunch the next day.

Our friend Robert’s entrée, Combo Fried Rice ($8.95), was the most innocuous of the meal. Delicate jasmine rice, bits (and I do mean bits) of well-scrambled eggs, pork, chicken and beef made for comfort food without much oomph.

Husband Joe’s entree won the jackpot for Most Burmese, and best overall. Pork with Pickel Mango ($8.95) was a dazzling dish of pork shards caramelized in a honey-soy sauce, stir-fried up with green onions and electrifying chunks of pickled mango, served with a mound of white rice. Another instance of complex, contrasting flavors that I began to suspect as a trademark of Burmese cuisine.

There’s no dessert, but Kimu does serve breakfast, including Pee Puri (fried pastry stuffed with ginger, anise and pea paste, $1.50) and EiGyaKywe (a cruller, $1.50).

We can credit Kimu’s existence to the roughly 8,000 Burmese nationals who have fled ethnic persecution and now call Indy home, with assistance from groups such as Exodus Refugee Immigration. Welcome to Indianapolis, where the world comes to taste the wonders of Burmese sweet tea.

The Irrawaddy – Wikileaks Cables Reveal Burma Arms Deals
By SIMON ROUGHNEEN Tuesday, March 15, 2011

BANGKOK — As Burma’s neighbors continue to vie for influence in the one-time ‘breadbasket of Southeast Asia,’ a curious duplicity is emerging as foreign powers weigh up the financial gain of buttering up the regime against acting in good conscience.

While Burma is the region’s mine for oil, gas, gemstones and hydropower rather than rice and teak, these modern concerns are enough to encourage Asian governments to neglect their greater responsibilities by dealing with the repressive regime.

Eager to acquire some of these resources to bolster its growing economy, India is consciously anxious about the influence wielded by China in Burma, according to newly-released US diplomatic cables on Wikileaks. The country routinely described as “the world’s largest democracy” seems to be copying the world’s second largest economy with military and strategic inducements of its own. China recently overtook Thailand to become the largest investor in Burma and, although exact numbers are not available, China’s investment in and military sales to Burma seem to far outweigh India’s.

Nonetheless, US embassy staff are described in some of the leaked cables as questioning Indian officials about arms sales to Burma. In one document, dated May 30, 2007, and released on Tuesday, the Director of India’s Ministry of External Affairs claimed that military assistance to the junta was of the “non-lethal” variety. He added that bilateral military relations revolved around attacking a variety of Indian insurgent groups who have long been using remote ethnic minority regions of Burma as a retreat.

According to another cable, dated Feb. 20, 2007, one of India’s main officials working on the Burma portfolio told the Americans that Burma’s junta was needed to help quell the insurgencies, partly due to apparent willful indifference on the part of Bangladesh, whose geographic location makes it pivotal to India’s counterinsurgency planning. “The ULFA [United Liberation Front for Assam] guys hiding in Burma are screwing the hell out of us,” the official said, adding that “Burma is the only one helping us” to tackle the group. “Tell Bangladesh to co-operate and I am happy to say bye-bye to Myanmar,” he said.

In the cable accounts, the US seems dubious about explanations provided by Indian officials, and, most likely referring to its own intelligence gathering, said that “numerous sources
continued to report ongoing sales of military equipment.”

Siemon Wezeman is a researcher at the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), which produces a highly-regarded annual survey of global arms deals. He said, “in Oct. 2006, 75mm guns had already been delivered and 105mm guns were being delivered, while also T-55 tanks, armored vehicles, mortars, helicopters were being delivered or were to be delivered.”

However—as is often the case with arms deals in general and commercial dealings involving the Burmese regime—precise details of what was eventually transferred remain elusive. Wezeman told The Irrawaddy: “The only delivery we know for sure happened was two BN-2 light transport aircraft (with a possible two more)”. The SIPRI database estimates that the Burmese army received 10 T-55 tanks, 10 105mm guns and 10 MPV light armored vehicles from India, but SIPRI acknowledges that these details cannot be verified.

SIPRI’s latest arms survey, released earlier this week, ranked India as the world’s leading arms importer—ahead of China, which has a growing domestic arms industry. India gets most of its weapons from Russia, and it is thought that these constitute the bulk of the transfers onward to Burma. The US remains the world’s largest arms exporter, accounting for 30 percent of the world’s sales, followed by Russia and Germany.

The transition to an elected parliament in Burma has been widely criticized by many countries, mostly in the West. However, the election and formation of a new national parliament has been welcomed by the Indian Government, as well as Indian strategic analysts at various military-linked think tanks. A number of these were contacted for their assessment of the India-Burma military relationship, but have none have responded to The Irrawaddy at the time of writing.

The transition, deemed as a mere legitimization of continued army rule in Burma in most quarters, has possibly oiled the wheels of more military transfers from India to Burma, or at least spurred a revival of dormant older arrangements. According to Mr Wezeman: “In late 2010 it seems another India-Myanmarese agreement was signed on Indian military equipment as assistance, including rifles, armored vehicles and patrol craft.”

Burma’s rulers source weaponry from a variety of countries including China, former Soviet states and, most controversially, North Korea.

In context, India’s military assistance therefore comes across more like a strategic inducement or goodwill gesture, aimed at currying favor with the Burmese government. That said, there are some in Burma who would prefer that India offer help of a different kind to Burma’s people. In a Dec. 7, 2010, interview with the Press Trust of India, Aung San Suu Kyi said, “We would like India to play a more active role in trying to help in the process of democratization of Burma and I would like the Indian government to engage more with us … who are working more with democracy.”

However, India’s zeal to invest in Burma memorably extended to deals being struck during Burma’s most recent uprising against military rule. On Sept. 24, 2007, the country’s Oil Minister signed a deal with the Burmese military government allowing the state-run Overseas Natural Gas Corporation (ONGC) to collaborate on gas exploration off the Arakan State coast. The agreement was signed right in the middle of monk-led peaceful demonstrations against military rule in Burma, and came just days before the Burmese army attacked and dispersed the protestors, leading to an unknown death toll.

India has long-dismissed Suu Kyi as a viable or relevant player in Burma, dating back to a visit to India by Burma’s military dictator Sen-Gen Than Shwe in 2004. According to accounts contained in another leaked US diplomatic cable, India’s Prime Minister Manmohan Singh discussed democratic reform in Burma with Than Shwe “in a much more intense way than could be expressed in the media,” despite the potential for a negative fallout on the bilateral relationship. The official added that New Delhi had battled for the inclusion of a paragraph in the joint statement that expressed India’s support for “national reconciliation and an early transition to democracy in Myanmar,” and described it as a “coup for India.”

However, the same official said that the world had conflated democracy in Burma with Suu Kyi, a stance that could “backfire,” and described the Nobel laureate as someone whose “day has come and gone.” Perhaps a poor choice of words, given that in 2003 Suu Kyi narrowly survived an attack by a mob on her convoy at Depayin in Burma, which left scores of her supporters dead. The incident is widely believed to have been orchestrated by the Burmese military rulers.

Overall, the Americans seem dubious about India’s account of the bilateral relationship with Burma, with one cable remarking that “hesitance to be forthcoming on Burma is consistent with the GOI [Government of India] approach to discussing Burma.”

However, the US credits India with playing a role in persuading Burma’s rulers to allow international emergency relief aid to enter the country after the May, 2008, Cyclone Nargis
disaster, which left an estimated 147,000 dead in the Irrawaddy Delta. In the days following the disaster, External Affairs Minister Pranab Mukherjee spoke to junta counterpart Nyan Win, and said that India was willing to transport aid from the international community to Burma, if this would be more acceptable than direct assistance from Western governments.

Nyan Win replied that Burma was, by that stage, allowing countries to give aid directly, and that any country was welcome to provide disaster relief. However, the Burmese foreign minister added that the junta was not willing to allow foreigners into the country to distribute aid.

How far the US is willing to push India on Burma issues is unclear, but seems likely to be constrained by the same China factor that drives New Delhi’s relationship with the Burmese government. The US has made India a nuclear partner and sees India as a regional counterweight to a rising China, which recently announced a 12.7 percent hike in military spending.

India, for its part, can point to the US-Pakistan relationship, with Washington now providing around US $1.5 billion per annum in civilian and military aid to a country that India sees as complicit in numerous recent terrorist attacks on Indian soil and on Indian representatives in Afghanistan.

China too has growing interests in Pakistan, refurbishing the port of Gwadar as part of a so-called “string of pearls” strategy encompassing Burma and Sri Lanka. This is aimed at projecting its naval and commercial strength into the Indian Ocean, greatly alarming New Delhi and hardly going unnoticed in the US.

In a cable leaked in December, a US official wrote that India could act as a pull factor drawing Burma away from China’s growing regional sphere of influence, after being told by an Indian official that the junta “hates China” and welcomes India’s engagement as an alternative. In visiting India from July 25-29, 2010—before his official trip to China—Than Shwe hinted to China that he has an “India option,” should Beijing’s influence become overbearing to Burma’s rulers.

CONTRIBUTOR
The Irrawaddy – Experts Help to Rebrand Burma’s Failed Dictatorship
By DR ZARNI Wednesday, March 16, 2011

Every time Burma’s military dictatorship is framed as “new,” it is being rebranded, to use the lingo of corporate advertising. The spoils of the positive public relations are shared as it were between the experts and their organizations that prostitute themselves by spinning for their neo-liberal governmental patrons and corporate “donors” in the West and Burma’s despotic regime, the former’s actual and potential business partner.

“While the underlying power structures have shifted significantly, dramatic change is highly unlikely in the short term. … Change will be gradual, but will accelerate over time,” reads the latest report of the International Crisis Group (ICG), titled “Myanmar: Post-Election Landscape” and released on March 7. The report on the whole reads more like a series of astrological calculations—which are all-too-familiar to the Burmese—than an empirically verifiable, serious work of analysis.

This portrayal of the so-called post-election political landscape in my country as “significant” is an insult to the common sense of the ordinary men and women of Burma, if not to the commercial and political elites who have concluded that they have more to gain by collaborating with the dictatorship than by standing against it. The ICG’s rebranded image of “post-election Burma” stands in sharp contrast to the political and institutional realities lived by the Burmese public, including ethnic nationalities in the country’s cease-fire regions or active war zones and the dominant majority living under direct military rule.

The loose network of local and global actors framing what the Burmese public knows first-hand to be the same old dictatorship in new garb as something genuinely new needs to be subject to empirical scrutiny in terms of these framers’ ideologies, interests, and the substance of their arguments or lack thereof.

From high-level policy lobbies such as ICG and the Burma experts of Chatham House (see “Burma Elections: First Step Out of the Impasse”) and Singapore’s Institute of South East Asian Studies (see “The army’s new clothes”) to less articulate elements from within Burma’s local political and commercial elites, those who advocate for the normalization of “aid relations” (and in due course resumed and expanded commercial relations) view the opposition’s flagship organization, the National League for Democracy party (NLD) and its influential leader, Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, as a key obstacle to business engagement, economic development and even incremental reforms. Accordingly, these advocates are bent on chipping away the NLD’s legitimacy as the most representative voice.

One of their discursive strategies is to help reinforce the regime’s propaganda—a dictatorship under a new management evolving slowing in the right pro-democracy direction—while attacking the NLD’s claim as the last democratically elected party with a moral authority to speak for the Burmese public at large.

Two individuals stand out: Burmese writer Thant Myint-U, the grandson of the late UN Secretary General U Thant (and himself a second-generation former UN official), of Singapore’s quasi-autonomous Institute of South East Asia Studies; and Marie Lall, a senior lecturer with the University of London’s Institute of Education and an Associate Fellow of Chatham House.

In a recent New Yorker article by Joshua Hammer (“Letter from Burma: A Free Woman,” Jan. 24, 2011) Myint-U made assertions about Burma’s flagship opposition that are important but manifestly and verifiably false.

Specifically, he “believes that the NLD’s insistence on the full implementation of the annulled 1990 election results doomed any hope of progress.”

Yet it is Burma’s dictator, Snr-Gen Than Shwe, and his inner circle that have prevented progress and shown absolutely no indication of any desire to work with Suu Kyi and the NLD for the good of the country.

Tan Sri Razali Ismail, a former UN special envoy to Burma who made 12 trips to Burma on the specific mission of kick-starting a dialogue between the NLD and the military government, said in a public lecture on Burma at the London School of Economics two years ago that at the mere mention of Suu Kyi’s name, Than Shwe would, and did, end the audience with him.

In my two-hour face-to-face meeting with ranking officers of the military intelligence camp led by Gen Khin Nyunt in Rangoon on May 29, 2004, not even Brig-Gen Than Tun, then head of counterintelligence and the military’s chief liaison with the NLD leader, would say she was to be held responsible for the absence of dialogue and lack of political progress in our country.  Quite to the contrary, Than Tun emphatically stated—and I quote him verbatim—that “Daw Aung San Suu Kyi is an utterly innocent party here.” Col Hla Min, the regime’s spokesperson, who was present at the meeting at 16B Inya Road, can verify this if and when he is released from prison.

Instead, Than Shwe, who reportedly orchestrated a failed assassination attempt aimed at the traveling NLD leadership in May 2003, went on to eventually purge any deputies who showed even a remote desire to cooperate with Suu Kyi and the NLD. And the rest is history as they say.

Priscilla Clapp, the former US Chargé d’Affaires and chief of mission in Rangoon from 1999 to 2002, noted in her report to the United States Institute of Peace, “Burma’s Long Road to Democracy,” that Than Shwe overruled the deal that his then intelligence chief, Gen Khin Nyunt, had reached with Suu Kyi in 2004.

After her release last November, the NLD leader herself has verified that she had agreed to work with her captors in order not only to help bring about gradual political changes but also to help improve the socioeconomic conditions and education of the public.

A well-known fact circulating in Burma diplomatic circles is that Than Shwe and his inner circle are determined not to enter into dialogue, much less cooperate, with Suu Kyi and the NLD, come hell or high water.

And yet Myint-U, Lall and their like continue to blame the persecuted opposition party for the country’s lack of progress, while keeping silent about the regime, which doesn’t see any need for dialogue, reconciliation or reform. One wonders if Burma experts spinning for the dictatorship might change their narrative if the NLD were the visa-issuing authorities.

Dr Marie Lall is a German-French researcher who is also affiliated with Britain’s semi-autonomous government think tank Chatham House. On Nov. 3—exactly four days before the Burmese generals’ election, Lall was airing her expert comment on “the election” on Chatham House’s official website (see “Burma Elections: First Step Out of the Impasse”). “The elections are the first step out of the impasse between the military and the wider population,” wrote Lall. “The democratic hardliners are today fewer in number and are more likely to meet popular indifference than to lead any popular protest movement, even should Aung San Suu Kyi be released soon.”

In her own words, the National Unity Party, made up of Ne Win-era anti-democratic dinosaurs, “is not only set to beat the [junta-backed Union Solidarity and Development Party] in many constituencies, giving it real power at a national level, it is also likely to take a different stand to the current regime on many issues, starting with land-owning rights for the peasants.”

Five days after her expert comment, Lall’s favorite party suffered a resounding defeat in the clearly rigged election, winning only 5.6 percent of the total seats contested vis-à-vis the regime’s proxy party, which won 76.8 percent of all contested seats.

Other significant subsequent turns of events—the post-election fighting between the regime’s troops and a Karen cease-fire group, the heightened prospects of renewed armed conflicts in the ethnic minority areas, and the thousands of local Suu Kyi supporters who gathered to greet the NLD leader as she emerged from captivity on Nov. 13—proved how out of touch with public sentiment and local conditions Chatham House’s Burma expert has been.

Today’s pro-democracy lawmakers, who constitute an utterly insignificant minority in the regime-controlled nominal Parliament, find themselves in a situation where they are forced to withdraw whatever draft bills they might fancy being deliberated in the freshly minted “legislative” chambers in the junta’s capital of Naypyidaw.

So much for Burma’s “significant structural shift”!

Still, in her interview, “Time to drop Burma sanctions,” the Chatham House Burma expert is hard at work extolling what she considers the virtues of these new structures in “post-election” Burma, while complaining to the readership of The Diplomat, “the premier international current-affairs magazine for the Asia-Pacific region, (that) reaches an influential audience of commentators, policymakers and academics,” that “Western policies give too much weight to the NLD’s position [vis-à-vis the new opposition leaders who argue for unconditional collaboration and appeasement with the Burmese dictatorship] even though it’s no longer a legitimate political party and can only play the part of an extra-parliamentary opposition.”

In the same interview, Lall approvingly helped amplify the accusation that the NLD, not the country’s dictatorship, disenfranchised Rangoon’s political elite with its decision to boycott the generals’ election, which even the Philippines—not to mention liberal democracies of the West—officially denounced as a “farce”. In her own words: “Last year there was great anger among politically-minded Burmese in Rangoon when the NLD, at [Suu Kyi's] behest, decided not to take part in the elections. They felt disenfranchised.”

It is worth stressing that as a lecturer at the University of London Institute of Education who has helped organize crash courses in international relations for the junta’s Union Solidarity and Development Association, Lall’s “research and teaching visits” to Burma were initially funded by Japanese foundations, and subsequently sponsored by the highly controversial Myanmar Egress, which has been propped up with funding from German foundations, whose common, if unstated objective in funding Burma initiatives is to help secure export market niches in Burma for Japanese and German firms.

Lall’s other significant Burma connections are Robert H. Taylor, a founder of Myanmar Egress, sometime adviser to Britain’s Premier Oil and former London University School of Oriental and African Studies professor with well-known ties to Burma’s dictatorship since the days of Gen Ne Win, and Derek Tonkin, former British Ambassador to Thailand and one-time Burma investor for whose UK-based Network Myanmar Dr Lall serves as Secretary or Treasurer. She has written the sole commissioned paper on Burma (see “Ethnic Conflict and the 2010 Elections in Burma”) for Chatham House’s Burma Exchange program, funded by France’s Total oil company. Indeed Lall’s personal and professional associations are no less intriguing than her Burma doublespeak presented as expert analyses, comments and interviews.

Lall may, however, be forgiven for manufacturing her spin—namely “old-opposition-bad, new-junta-ok, opposition-renegades-best”—in light of the fact that such towering Western academics as Joseph Nye and Anthony Giddens, from Harvard and the London School of Economics, respectively, have recently been exposed for having played, wittingly or unwittingly, roles as academic white-washers for the four-decade-old regime of Libya’s Col Qaddafi (see “Spinning for Qaddafi” on CBS News, March 6, and “Despots and academia: more scandals ‘likely’,” The Independent, March 5).

If Qaddafi’s extremely influential network of academics and their institutions spanned across the Atlantic, the Burmese dictatorship and their “normalizers” are not doing too badly, either. After all, Than Shwe has produced neither the Burmese equivalent of Qaddafi’s “Green Book” nor a son or grandson of the caliber of Saif Gaddafi, who, armed with an Austrian MBA and an LSE “PhD,” effectively conned the Anglo-American political, commercial and intellectual establishments.

In addition to Chatham House’s Dr Lall and Dr Thant Myint-U, Than Shwe can boast quite an impressive list of individual and organizational white-washers, witting or not—from Nobel Prize-winning economic guru Joseph Stilglitz of Columbia University and former Thai foreign minister and present Asean Secretary General Dr Surin Pitsuwan to Dr Richard Horsey, former liaison officer of the International Labor Organization with the country’s regime and Open Society Institute Fellow, and other lesser known spin doctors masquerading as Burma Studies academics, “capacity builders,” “civil society representatives” and humanitarians.

It would be empirically incomplete, and intellectually dishonest, not to point out the all-too-obvious direct connection between Burma’s massive potential for commercial and aid-business opportunities and the calls for “normalizing aid relations” with the Burmese dictatorship. Jacob Ramsay, the senior Southeast Asia analyst at Control Risks, an independent risk consultancy, was more honest than these Burma experts.

He avoided all the lofty moral and strategic rhetoric surrounding the concerted efforts to rebrand Burma’s dictatorship as fit for normal aid relations—and business engagement. In a recent Reuters article (“For some, Myanmar is ultimate frontier market”), Ramsay was quoted as saying, “Everyone knows that fortunes will be made here once the sanctions are lifted and the economy opens up.”

Aside from these individual academics and Burma experts pushing for the embrace of Burma’s dictatorship, albeit under new management, in the name of incremental progress and regional stability, there are influential global networks such as ICG, the world’s largest think tank and high-level advocacy group, advocating a renormalization of Burma’s status quo and chipping away at the representational power and moral authority of Burmese dissidents and organizations of no less stature than Aung San Suu Kyi and the NLD.

By my own reading, the ICG’s latest Burma report is, both in terms of its content and analytical framework, at best intellectually incompetent and at worst empirically delusional. But this is a story for another day, and the subject of my next essay.

Is a people’s power movement possible in Burma?
Wednesday, 16 March 2011 16:55 Tun Tun

(Interview) New Delhi (Mizzima) – How likely is another nationwide uprising like the 8888 People’s Movement? Mizzima interviewed three pro-democracy leaders: National League for Democracy (NLD) leader Win Tin; National Democratic Force (NDF) party leader Khin Maung Swe; and Aung Thu Nyein of the Thai-based Vahu Development Organisation on the subject, especially in light of the democracy movements sweeping through the Middle East.

The interview covers the injustices in Burma, the threat of severe crackdowns and oppression on opposition groups, the role of the people in a mass movement, the possible role of Parliament, democratic evolution in Burma and the likelihood of a mass uprising spreading throughout the country.

Question: Do you believe a new popular uprising is likely in Burma?

Answer: Win Tin (National League for Democracy)

You can see our people are in abject poverty, even though there are exceptionally affluent families living in downtown Rangoon. Even forgetting about the people in the provinces, the people in Rangoon satellite townships such as South Dagon, North Dagon, etc, most of the people there are in poverty, in abject poverty. I see such poverty leading to a popular uprising. Nowadays there are only two classes in Burma: haves and have-nots.

Another factor is injustice in the society. Injustices of man to man, bullying, coercion and mistreatment are rampant across the country. The people are suffering and experiencing these injustices and hear about the experiences of other people through the media––so an uprising and unrest could break out at any time.

And another factor in this regard is ongoing unrest and turmoil in the Middle East countries of Egypt, Turkey, Tunisia, etc. The ripple effect of this unrest and turmoil can be felt in our county too, in this age of a global village and shrinking world. All of these factors are interconnected with each other.

I see that the butterfly affects are appearing in the country. These affects can be seen even in China, so it will have even more impact in Burma. There are many factors which could lead to a new popular uprising in our country.

Answer: Khin Maung Swe (National Democratic Force)

There is very little chance in Burma of a popular uprising. People are confused and vague on the outcome of the Parliament sessions. Moreover, the majority of our people are Buddhist so the thinking of the people is quite different from people in Muslim countries. This is one factor. People are reluctant to risk their lives and sacrifice for this movement.

And also, the unrest and uprisings in these despotic Middle East countries are the first ever in the past 30 years. There was no such unrest in these countries before. But Burma has had many periods of such unrest, and all of the uprisings were brutally suppressed by the government. The people understand this point. So even if there is another uprising here, I think the chance of such an uprising succeeding is very small.

And another point is about our neighbouring countries, which are only concerned about their own economy. They would be reluctant to encourage such an uprising in their neighbour country because it could affect their economic interests. Yes, the people are suffering here, and they are in abject poverty, but these factors are not enough yet to push them to take to the streets.

Answer: Aung Thu Nyein (Vahu Development Organisation)

I cannot say an uprising is impossible in Burma because there are many contributing factors. If you look at the current unrest and turmoil in the Middle East, you notice they are caused by people protesting a lack of human rights and dignity.

Another factor is widespread corruption in government. And the next point is the general suffering of the people and widening economic gaps in society. So you can see that all of these factors exist in Burma too.

And moreover, it is certain that almost the entire population wants to see change in this country. They are closely watching how much the ongoing Parliament sessions and debates can fulfill their aspirations. If the Parliament cannot fulfill their aspirations, they will turn to extra-parliamentary politics and activities.

Q: What do you see as the primary factors for a new uprising?

A: Win Tin

The abject poverty of the people, injustice, repression, restrictions, mistreating the people, forced labour, seizure of farmlands from the farmers, labour unrest due to non-payment of wages and unfair wages.

A: Khin Maung Swe

Those are the textbook causes. But uprisings are usually sparked or kindled by minor and unnoticed events. If such events seriously and deeply affect people’s feelings, it could cause an uprising and the people will revolt. But our people have unmatched endurance in their sufferings, maybe because of their Buddhist faith.

You know well how the people suffered when commodity prices were escalating. Those who once could have two eggs daily in their meals could not afford even a half egg in their daily meal. They had be content with one-fourth of an egg for each person, by sharing among the family members. It’s very hard to say, but I can’t say it’s impossible. An uprising could break out when the time is ripe, but the chances are low.

A: Aung Thu Nyein

Sometimes the uprisings were well-planned and well-organised but some were not. Sometimes the uprising broke out without any plan and preparation, broke out spontaneously by a coincidence of factors. You can’t speak precisely on the question.

Q: Which class in society is the most important in creating a popular uprising?

A: Win Tin

According to our Burmese experience, the primary role of such movements, especially popular uprisings, is played by  intellectuals and educated people. The students and student forces have been the main driving force in the uprisings since the 1920 university boycott movement. Students and young people have played a crucial role in our uprisings and demonstrations throughout Burma’s history. Students and youth are an intellectual class in our society. This is one factor. They are always at the forefront and spearhead these movements.

A: Khin Maung Swe

If the common or grassroots people lack all essential goods, they have nothing and no way out, when they are hopeless and helpless, then an uprising can break out. The students are part of the middle class that plays a crucial role in sparking an uprising, which can be clearly seen in our history. You can imagine the hardships faced by students now. But we also have to consider whether we really need a popular uprising or not.

A: Aung Thu Nyein

I think the prime force of the movement will be the discontented masses. I also think the middle class usually, and primarily, leads such a movement. They are called ‘opinion’ leaders. They have the vision, they can explain things to the people, they can convince others and they can lead. So the uprisings will break out when all of these factors mingle together at some critical time.

Q: What are the key factors for the success of a popular uprising?

A: Win Tin

I think the most important factor is the participation by the people. For instance, the 1988 uprising was based on people’s participation. It could not have broken out without people’s participation. You see, there were ruling party units and government-backed organizations everywhere, in every single town and ward. But regardless of the existence of these  organizations everywhere, it was only when masses of people joined the movement that the popular uprising broke out. I mean people of all classes, not only the students. It also included workers, peasants and urban people. The people walked out of their wards and joined the movement. So we can say the prime force and prime factor is the people and their participation. The uprising will be successful when the people join the movement.

A: Khin Maung Swe

You can look at the experiences in Thailand and Libya, especially in regard to the defence forces. The primary factor and prime mover is the defence forces, which side do they stand with, whether they play a neutral role, what role is played by the ruling class and do they make serious mistakes. How much do the people believe in their cause and how effectively can they lead a popular uprising. All of these are decisive factors.

A: Aung Thu Nyein

I think there are many factors in this regard. The main point and factor is the international political situation. And another factor is how united and organized are the people in such a movement. And the next factor is the leadership and what strategy they will use.

Q: What is the crucial factor for a successful transition to democracy in Burma?

A: Win Tin

The easiest way and the main factor in this regard is the destruction of the military dictatorship and the military bureaucratic rule through a popular uprising and a people’s power movement. We can say this is the main point. Then you can build a democratic system through democratic means.

In the democratisation and transition to democracy process, the most important factor is successfully removing the dictators, their dictatorship and their tyrannical rule, no matter the form of the dictatorship, a party or army or a group of people.

If we are afraid to fight against dictators, I think, the democratic struggle will be little more than marching in procession, and it cannot advance more than that stage.

A: Khin Maung Swe

Before I was imprisoned, my main aim and objective was to remove the military junta. But we could not have removed the junta. And now, it has changed its tactics by convening this Parliament and assuming control of the duly elected civilian government. So what shall we do at this stage? Shall we only try to remove the junta and dismantle their military rule or should we take part in the parliamentary movement to achieve economic democracy first and then gradually try to march along a democratic path, no matter what we think of the 2008 Constitution? All the stakeholders, all the politicians and all the political parties must choose and decide on which path to take, a painful road or a non-painful road in democratising our country.

As for Burma, we can see some progress has been made in an evolutionary way. Now the military regime has retreated. So we don’t need to topple the military regime. If a person still wants to topple the military regime, they must be living in a fantasy. We must be pragmatic. If we could not win in this past election, then we must try again in the next five years to establish a genuine people’s Parliament elected by the people in a concerted effort. Only in this way, can we get a real chance to gradually democratise the country.

A: Aung Thu Nyein

Everybody in Burma is talking about marching to democracy. Similarly, the ruling military regime also talks about democratisation by holding general elections. The opposition forces are talking about the same things in their democracy goals. So it will be better if we can find a common position and a common platform in achieving the common goals through consultation and coordination within all groups.

Even so, competitive politics in our country may exist in the future too.

UWSA can successfully resist BGF order, group told
Wednesday, 16 March 2011 21:30 Phanida

Chiang Mai (Mizzima) – Kyauk Win Kwan, the vice chairman of the United Wa State Party (UWSP), told a party conference that the Wa army can successfully resist the Burmese junta’s order to transform into a Border Guard Force.

The UWSP began a five-day party conference at its headquarters in Pangsang on Wednesday to review the group’s actions in 2010.

More than 213 members are attending the annual conference. Party chairman Bao Yu Xiang did not appear at the Wednesday opening session.

Vice chairman Kyauk Win Kuan told the conference that the group was united, and the United Wa State Army (UWSA) did not suffer any break-away groups in 2010.

Members heard reports from the the UWSP Agriculture and Irrigation Department, the Forestry Department and the Health Department.

The group will discuss its goals for 2011 in the coming days.

UWSA is the strongest ethnic armed group in Burma with more than 30,000 troops. It has rejected the junta’s Border Guard Force plan, but it is open to holding a political dialogue with the new parliamentary government, sources said.

On the other hand, the Burmese junta has rejected the UWSP proposal based on nine points including the designation of Pangsang (Pankham) and Wanhong townships as UWSA sub-military zone.

The new Constitution stipulated that a group of six townships, including Hopang, Mongma, Panwai, Nahpan, Metman and Pangsang (Pankham), would be formed as a Wa Self-Administered Division.

Within the six townships, the junta controls Hopang and Pangsang, the areas where most Wa residents live.

In May 2010, the Wa along with the Kachin Independence Army, National Democratic Alliance Army, Shan State Army-North, and New Mon State Party formed a political alliance to assist each other should one group be attacked by the junta.

Similarly, on February 17, 12 ethnic armed groups, not including the UWSA, formed the United Nationalities Federal Council to cooperate in defending against an attack by junta troops against the ethnic groups.

The UWSA separated from the Burma Communist Party in 1989 and signed a cease-fire agreement with the Burmese junta in the same year.

DVB News – Clamp tightened on MPs questions
Published: 16 March 2011

MPs in Burma have been given what appears to be a veiled warning about the submission of questions to parliament, in a move that could further stifle political debate in the military-ruled country.

Parliament began accepting questions for the first time on 10 March, six weeks after it first opened following the November elections last year.

Shwe Mann, speaker of the People’s Parliament and former top-ranking junta chief, told representatives yesterday that only questions with direct relevance to current affairs could be asked in the chamber, although little clarification was given to define the boundaries of discussion.

According to National Democratic Force (NDF) representative Kyi Myint, the powerful speaker was making reference to queries submitted by MPs regarding the controversial allocation of national budgets, some of which Shwe Mann claimed had “no relevance with the country’s situation”.

The announcement of a new government budget has drawn sharp rebukes from opposition parties in Burma, with nearly a quarter allocated to the military and the creation of a Special Funds Law that gives the commander-in-chief, currently Than Shwe, supreme authority to allocate unlimited additional money to the army without any notice, and without parliamentary consent.

The healthcare sector is meanwhile set to receive only 9.5 billion kyat ($US110 million), or 1.3 percent of the total budget. This equates to around $US2 per person per year.

Neighbouring Thailand meanwhile spends more than 10 percent of its annual budget on healthcare; among Shwe Mann’s instructions, Kyi Myint said, was that MPs in Burma shouldn’t make comparisons with neighbouring countries.

Five queries were raised by MPs in the People’s Parliament session yesterday, including the one directed to the education minister regarding the maintenance of basic education schools in Arakan state.

Hpone Myint Aung, the NDF’s representative in the National Parliament, said meanwhile that many queries submitted by MPs were turned down by the government under the ‘no relevancy’ pretext.

He said that MPs were stonewalled on topics related to finance, particularly when mooting the prospect of infrastructural projects such as roads and bridges which would require significant amounts of money.

Burma’s three parliaments are dominated by the junta-backed Union Solidarity and Development Party (USDP), of which Shwe Mann is a member and which swept 80 percent of the vote in the elections.

DVB News – FIFA chief dogged by controversy
By JOSEPH ALLCHIN
Published: 16 March 2011

The head of the world’s top footballing body, Sepp Blatter, arrived in Burma yesterday to promote the sport in the military-ruled country amid criticism that his visit supported a sanctions-listed business tycoon.

Blatter, who has held the FIFA presidency for 13 years, yesterday opened a football academy in Mandalay, and today met Burmese President Thein Sein. He has also met with Zaw Zaw, chairman of the Myanmar Football Federation (MFF), who said the trip was “essential for the development of our football standard”.

But that meeting is likely to attract criticism: Zaw Zaw is owner of the Max Myanmar company and Ayerwaddy Bank, as well as a multitude of other business interests. His strong connections to the Burmese junta have meant that he, his wife and his businesses are on US and EU sanctions lists, which Switzerland, where FIFA is based and where Blatter is a citizen, is subject to.

Blatter told a press conference in Rangoon yesterday evening, prior to his meeting with Thein Sein today, that he had “a very good impression on Myanmar [Burma] and people in the country are very nice”.

“Football cannot exist alone without the political and government support and therefore it’s absolutely necessary that I’m going to meet your prime minister…in the new capital of Naypyidaw tomorrow [today],” he said. “I am very glad to meet with him.”

As well as the Mandalay academy, FIFA will also fund a ‘Goal Hotel’ – essentially a headquarters for the MFF – in Rangoon and a stand at the Thuwunna stadium in Rangoon. The MFF’s media director, Soe Moe, told DVB that Blatter had been invited to Burma by Zaw Zaw when the two were at the World Cup in South Africa last year.

Zaw Zaw has been specifically implicated by the Thailand-based Karen Human Rights Group (KHRG) in the forcible confiscation of land in Burma’s eastern Mon state in 2008 for use as rubber plantations.

Accompanying the tycoon’s addition to the US sanctions list in 2009, the US Office of Foreign Assets Control said that “Max Myanmar has provided important services in support of the [Burmese] junta, particularly in the form of construction projects.”

When questioned by DVB about Blatter’s interactions with a sanctions-listed individual, Thomas Graf from the Swiss Federal Department of Economic Affairs (FDEA) said the MFF “is not listed and therefore not subject to Swiss sanctions”.

“Our sanctions are targeted and aimed only at those listed, for example Mr Zaw Zaw. The Myanmar Football Federation is not Mr Zaw Zaw’s private property and therefore our sanctions should not impact [on] the Federation.”

But Alex Stone, press officer at FIFA, told DVB that the organisation’s statutes “are very clear: the running of football organisations has to be autonomous from governments”.

US perceptions that Zaw Zaw has provided “important services” to the Burmese junta call into question whether he, and the MFF, contravene the statutes of FIFA.

Under Blatter, the footballing body has been no stranger to controversy, with regular accusations of bribery and corruption emerging in the press and a criticised trip to Sudan last year. The world of FIFA revolves around votes from representatives of its 208 member nations – analysts suspect that Blatter is now in the stages of seeking favourable votes from members to see off an attempt to unseat him as FIFA president, accusations that Blatter attributed to the “evils of the media”.

Football is by far Burma’s most popular sport, with huge viewing figures for televised English Premier League matches in particular. Last year, leaked US cables revealed that junta chief Than Shwe, whose grandson plays for Delta United, formerly owned by Zaw Zaw, considered buying Manchester United for somewhere in the region of $US1 billion while the country was still reeling from the devastating cyclone Nargis.

Instead however the senior general sufficed with creating an indigenous league, which the cable suggested would also act as suitable distraction for a disenfranchised population.
Meanwhile, days before Blatter’s visit, Burmese fans pelted opposing Indian players with stones and other missiles in Rangoon as the two teams met in a pre-Olympic qualifier, with limited security. Footballing website Goal.com described the event as “one of the worst displays of hospitality and hooligan behaviour at its best”.