UN Secretary-general Ban Ki-moon has requested a meeting of the Group of Friends of Myanmar at the United Nations headquarters in New York on March 25, UN spokesperson Farhan Haq said on Thursday.

An emergency meeting had been requested by British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, who was quoted in a government press release on Tuesday saying he sent a letter to Ban requesting a meeting to discuss Myanmar’s new electoral laws for the first nationwide election to be held in 20 years.

However, the secretary-general told reporters on Tuesday that he had not received the letter.

Brown was also quoted as saying that he intends “to seek international support to impose an arms embargo” against the South Asian country.

“Burma has ignored the demands of the UN Security Council, the UN secretary-general, the U.S., EU (European Union) and its neighbors by imposing restrictive and unfair terms for the elections,” Brown’s statement said, using Myanmar’s former name.” The targeting of Aung San Suu Kyi and the NLD is particularly vindictive and callous. We will also seek international support to impose an arms embargo against Burma.”

The United Nations is a member of the “Group of Friends on Myanmar,” which includes the five permanent members of the UN Security Council: Britain, China, France, Russia and the United States.

The ruling Myanmar State Peace and Development Council (SPDC), which has not yet set a date for nationwide elections, enacted five electoral laws, the state Myanmar Radio and Television (MRTV) reported last week.

However, the UN secretary-general told reporters after the announcement that the new electoral laws “do not measure up to our expectations of what is needed for an inclusive political process. “Source: Xinhua

Romulo said he was disappointed with the meeting because Nyan Win “didn’t talk much.”

“He was just listening,” Romulo told reporters after the closed-door meeting in which he reiterated the Philippines’ call for Myanmar to revoke the law announced last week.

“He told me that that was the law,” Romulo said.

The new election law prohibits anyone convicted of a crime from being a member of a political party or a candidate in the elections.

The law makes Suu Kyi, who has spent 14 of the past 21 years under house arrest, ineligible to run for the elections not yet scheduled but expected later this year.

The new decree would also prevent Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy party from contesting the elections, even with another candidate, as long as she remains on its membership rolls, according to a party spokesman.

Romulo said Myanmar should live up to its commitment to institute political reforms in the country.

“The road map to democracy is Myanmar’s pledge to the Association of South-East Asian Nations [ASEAN] and to the world,” he said. “We are just asking them to implement their own road map to democracy”

Romulo said any election in Myanmar would only be credible if it “includes everybody.”

He said he would urge ASEAN foreign ministers to press Myanmar to withdraw the law when they meet in Vietnam on April 8.

The Philippines and Myanmar are members of ASEAN, which has often been criticised for failing to exert more influence over Yangon to implement democratic reforms.

YANGON, 17 March 2010 (IRIN) – A lack of capacity on several levels is likely to hamper Myanmar’s bid to change its political structure, diplomats and analysts say.

The military government this month took another step on the “roadmap” for what it says will be a transition to democracy when it unveiled laws for an election later this year, the country’s first in two decades.

The government has said the roadmap, launched in August 2003, will lead to a “discipline- flourishing democracy”.

Among the changes to be made will be the creation of a presidential system of government, a bicameral legislature and 14 regional governments and assemblies, which the International Crisis Group describes as “the most wide-ranging shake-up in a generation”.

But given the military’s reluctance to relinquish its grip on power and the long suppression of democratic activity in Myanmar, diplomats say the transition will face significant challenges – one of the most critical being whether the public service has the capacity to sustain the change.

A top-down decision-making process and limited development assistance and exposure to capacity-building programmes are among the factors that would hamper the ability of the public service to sustain a transition.

“There is obviously insufficient bureaucratic capacity in Myanmar today to manage and implement a ‘transition to democracy’,” Trevor Wilson, the Australian ambassador to Myanmar from 2000 to 2003, told IRIN.

Lack of experience

Myanmar has been under military rule since 1962, when military commander Ne Win seized power in a coup.

The lack of experience with a genuine parliamentary government since has contributed to a situation where “democratic processes of decision-making – involving open public debate, meaningful consultation, and responsive and caring structures – were almost unknown”, said Wilson.

“These processes cannot be introduced overnight, but need to be learned and practised,” he said.

“There are some excellent officials, with good technical knowledge and experience,” said a British diplomat based in Yangon. “But the worry is that this is an ageing demographic, close to retirement,” said the diplomat, who requested anonymity in line with British government policy.

“The younger generations, whilst committed and with a level of expertise, have lower qualifications and less experience or exposure,” the diplomat said.

Centralised decision-making

Myanmar is ruled by the State Peace and Development Council (SPDC), where power is concentrated in a group of high-ranking military officials who maintain tight control over political decisions.

“The structure of decision-making, highly centralised, also has an impact on the effectiveness of the public service as a whole, and the ability and morale of individuals within a structure that does not encourage personal responsibility or initiative,” said the British envoy.

Another Yangon-based diplomat said that while the public service had well-developed administrative processes, “considerable developmental support” in basic areas such as parliamentary services, public sector budgeting and policy development and application would be needed.

“Policy is issued in the form of orders and therefore tends not to have the benefit of cross-ministry coordinated consultation to ensure that the law itself is not in conflict with other policy areas,” he said, speaking on condition of anonymity.

Sanctions and international support

Unrealized public sector capacity is mainly due to chronic under-investment in education, but the withdrawal of international financial institutions (IFIs) has also hampered reform efforts.

The European Union imposed sanctions on Myanmar in 1996 and the US a year later, while international assistance has been restricted mostly to humanitarian programmes.

The persecution of Myanmar’s opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi – who has spent about 14 of the last 20 years in detention – and the harassment of her pro-democracy party, were the underlying rationale for the move.

“The system is badly in need of restructuring and this can really only come about with exposure, technical advice and financial input,” said the British diplomat.

The International Monetary Fund and World Bank blocked development lending to Myanmar as part of western sanctions, while senior officials only had limited contact with the organizations and opportunities to train and learn, said Wilson.

“Sanctionshave made a bad situation worse by cutting off much normal contact and exchange with democracies, ” he said.

David Steinberg, director of Asian Studies at Georgetown University in Washington, said the gap created by the absence of IFI training programmes should have been taken up by the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), of which Myanmar is a member.

ASEAN “would be the logical place to have them and they should have begun long ago”, Steinberg said.

But while sanctions are a factor, “the blame has also and fundamentally to be placed on the Burmese administration, which through thought control, censorship, and fear of alternative ideas has stifled creative thinking and scholarship” , he said.

MANILA, Philippines (Xinhua) – Philippine Foreign Affairs Secretary Alberto Romulo on Wednesday said he was not satisfied with the outcome of his meeting with Myanmar’s Foreign Minister when he sought for the official’s explanation on a law that will ban opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi from participating in the country’s national polls planned this year.

Romulo said Myanmar Foreign Minister Nyan Win “didn’t talk much ” on the issue when he met him at the sidelines of the special Non- Aligned Movement (NAM) meeting on interfaith cooperation.

“He was just listening. He didn’t say much so if you ask me and you didn’t say much will you be satisfied?” Romulo told reporters in a chance interview.

“He told me that that was the law,” he added.

Asked if he urged the government of Myanmar to recall the law, Romulo said: “It’s not asked but it was our statement. She should be included and she was included before and in fact she won overwhelmingly. ”

Romulo said Myanmar should live up to its commitment to institute reforms in the country.

“We’ve been saying this all along that the roadmap to democracy is Myanmar’s pledge to the Association of South East Asian Nations and to the world and that were just asking them to implement their own roadmap to democracy which is all inclusive and includes everybody and that it will be fair and free,” he said.

The Political Parties Registration Law prohibits any convicted lawbreaker from being in a political party and run for public office.

Aung San Suu Kyi, 63, who has spent more than 14 of the last 20 years in detention, was convicted last year for violating the terms of her house arrest after an American man illegally swam across a lake to her waterfront villa and sneaked into her compound for two nights. She was sentenced to three years of hard labor but the court “mitigated” the sentence to 18 months of house arrest.

Romulo said he will urge other Southeast Asian Foreign Ministers to press Myanmar to withdraw the law when they meet at the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) summit in Hanoi, Vietnam, on April 8.

But ASEAN has a standing policy of non-interference in members’ domestic affairs.

ASEAN groups Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam.

Amid opposition from the West, ASEAN supported the entry of Myanmar into the grouping as its 10th member in 1997.

IN THE mountains of Myanmar’s strife-torn Shan state, the colourful blossom of opium poppies has become a more frequent sight of late. A businessman based in the Shan state notes that the flowers now bloom more freely in areas under the control of the ruling junta than in the shrinking zones held by local rebels.

Increased opium cultivation and Myanmar’s unceasing export of heroin suggests that the army and their proxy militias are becoming more involved in the “Golden Triangle” drug trade.

This coincides with the army’s renewed efforts to force the rebels in this part of the country, who signed a series of ceasefire agreements in the early 1990s, to surrender—or, alternatively, to be integrated into official border units under the junta’s control. These rebels tend to be organised according to ethnicity. Both the Kachin Independent Army and the United Wa State Army (the UWSA), two of the groups with ceasefire accords, are insisting on keeping some degree of autonomy. Unless a new agreement can be reached, the ceasefires are in danger of failing—an outcome that China, which shares a long border with the Shan state, would like to avert.

The UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) publishes an annual survey on opium in Myanmar as part of its larger “Opium Poppy Cultivation in South-East Asia” report. The most recent, from December 2009, shows that cultivation has increased dramatically: by nearly 50% since 2006. This despite the free-for-all in Afghanistan which has turned that country into a market giant, driving down global prices and making it harder for producers elsewhere to compete. Yet more than 1m people in Myanmar are now involved in producing opium, up 27% from the year before.

The Palaung Women’s Organisation (PWO), an NGO that conducted an undercover survey in the Shan state, has published a report with a different emphasis. Theirs describes the role played by the pro-government militias who have, it says, displaced the rebel groups from the intensive cultivation of opium poppies. The poorly paid regular army and its militias count on drug money to boost their salaries, just as the warlords of the Wa had long done.

The UNODC has it instead “that opium-poppy cultivation took place in areas controlled by insurgency and by ceasefire groups”. While launching the most recent annual report, the UNODC’s executive director, Antonio Maria Costa, seemed to attribute the surge in opium cultivation exclusively to “the ceasefire groups—the autonomous ethnic militias like the Wa and the Kachin—[who] are selling drugs to buy weapons.”

The UN agency’s conclusion is at odds with other reports from NGOs and independent observers. Tom Kramer, a researcher who studies the opium trade in the Golden Triangle for the Transnational Institute, says he is sceptical of any report that assigns blame to a single side of the political conflict. Under strong pressure from China, various bans on opium-growing have been established in areas under the control of the Wa and Kokang ethnic armies.

The PWO’s report questions several of the UNODC’s findings. It cites the opium survey’s use of a map which shows two ethnic armed groups, including the PSLA (Palaung State Liberation Army), which signed a ceasefire, enjoying control of a major opium-growing area around the Mantong and Namkham townships of the Shan state. The map, which was supplied by Myanmar’s authorities, ignores the fact that the PSLA in fact surrendered to the army back in 2005.

The UNODC admits to relying on Myanmar’s authorities for data and information on narcotics, and especially drug eradication. As Gary Lewis, the UNODC’s regional director based in Bangkok, acknowledges: “We can’t rule out that the map is out of date or contains an error.”

The UNODC’s report also fails to mention the activity of a pro-government militia group from Monghsat township. Operating out of Punako village, just over the border from Chiang Rai, in northern Thailand, this militia exerts complete control over local opium fields. The Burmese army’s Light Infantry Battalions 553 and 554 are reported to be stationed just outside Punako.

Academics have cast doubt on the UNODC’s research; Mr Kramer says that their crop-monitoring data are inherently unreliable. Others have asked whether the agency actually tries to verify any of the information supplied by Myanmar’s police and army—which are, after all, the security apparatus of one of the world’s least transparent regimes.

Lway Aye Nang of the PWO says that “the Burmese militias set up by local authorities loyal to the junta are in full control. I don’t think the UN has ever been to our area.” The armed groups that profit by opium-farming there are, in her eyes, proxies of the state and have been for years.

Not that the Chinese-brokered ban on the cultivation of poppies has prevented the UWSA from maintaining a lucrative stake in the drug trade. Rebel Wa continue to manufacture and export heroin and methamphetamines to neighbouring countries, including China, Thailand and Laos.

As for the fields from which most of the raw material of this trade grows, a former UN drug-monitoring expert in Yangon remarked that “there is no possibility of eradicating opium-poppy cultivation unless there is peace and security.” Perversely, with a steady flow of drug money financing militias on all sides of the Shan state’s stalemate, there seems little chance of forging a peace.

Most people living outside Myanmar would agree the Southeast Asian nation is living in the dark ages.

Faced with a critical currency shortage the nation known formerly as Burma is proving this to be true, with a barter economy quickly displacing a cash economy due to an extreme shortage of bank notes coupled with virtually no coins in circulation.

Myanmar is a backward country ruled by a repressive military junta government. Although officially its kyat currency is valued at 5.5 to the U.S. dollar, in fact domestic consumer prices rose by an average of 24 percent a year between 2005 and 2009, according to a Feb. 10 Reuters news agency report.

Debit and credit cards don’t exist. Checks are seldom accepted. Although the government announced a new issue of 50- and 100-kyat coins would be released in late 2008 none are seen in circulation. Low denomination bank notes are in short supply and typically circulate in ragged condition, while according to Reuters and other reporting agencies it now appears the government has ceased printing even the highest denomination 5,000-kyat bank note.

Myanmar has not released data on the amount of money in circulation since fiscal year 1996-1997, when the amount in circulation was valued at 179.82 billion kyat. A Reuters request for more recent data met with the official response, “We cannot tell you. It’s a state secret.”

“Officially there are 13 denominations of notes in circulation – starting from 50 pya (one cent) up to 5,000 kyat. But only the three big notes (200, 500 and 1,000 kyat) are common. The rest are growing scarcer by the month,” Reuters reported.

A March 8, 2009, “Today in Myanmar” story stated, “Coins are extremely rare to find in Myanmar. The rarity of coins makes it a collector’s item as many street vendors in Yangon try to sell these coins and old kyat notes to foreigners.”

According to late 2008 Myanmar newspaper reports, the 50- and 100-kyat coins nobody seems to ever see each depict the traditional Burmese lion on the obverse, with the Naypvidaw Lotus Fountain on the reverse of the 50 kyat and the denomination value on the reverse of the 100 kyat. The 50 kyat is composed of copper, while the 100 kyat is composed of copper-nickel.

Regarding the notes in circulation, “Today in Myanmar” says: “One thing that strikes you when you arrived to Myanmar is the old, dirty, and worn out currency notes. Most small value kyat notes are very old, extremely dirty, and totally worn out with a lot of tears.”

The 5,000-kyat denomination was introduced Oct. 1, 2009, by the Central Bank of Myanmar, but the new denomination was met with cynicism rather than being welcomed. Although some people found it easier to carry one large denomination note rather than a sack of small denomination notes, others saw it as nothing more than fuel for inflation. The local black market reacted with an increase in the value of the dollar against the kyat.

According to “Today in Myanmar,” “The only way to buy things in Myanmar is to carry a large bag full of 1,000-kyat notes. To buy a car or a land you will have to carry a large bag full of currency notes, and it will take eternity to count all the money. Sometimes business people carry money in large plastic or cloth bags, a kind of bag used to carry things in supermarkets or in shops.”

The Feb. 10 Reuters report added, “In Sittwe, the capital of [the] western Rakhine state, teashop owners manufacture their own coupons to use as currency.”

Reuters quoted teashop owner Ko Aung Knine as saying, “It’s far more convenient to use these self-circulated notes instead of small items,” adding, “but you need to make sure coupons can’t be forged. Mostly we use a computer to print it with the name of the shop, face value, and signature of the shop owner.”

There have been reports that in the city of Yangon 100 kyat (about 10 cents US) in value is being bartered for a sachet of coffee mix or for a small container of shampoo, while a single cigarette, a piece of candy, or a packet of tissues may be bartered for 50 kyat (about 5 cents US) in value.

Money in modern Myanmar has been unusual for some time. During the socialist era bank notes were outlawed. On Nov. 10, 1985 it outlawed the 50- and 100-kyat bank notes, eventually allowing these denominations to be exchanged for new notes in the unwieldy denominations of 15, 25, 35, 45, and 75 kyat. Two years later these newer notes were outlawed, this time without any opportunity being given to exchange the existing notes for newer notes in denominations of 45 and 90 kyat. This was one of the reasons for the popular uprising of 1988 that ousted that government.

Today it appears the government has simply stopped printing bank notes while not bothering to explain why the announced coins have never materialized. An unnamed “retired economist from Yangon University” told Reuters, “So far as I know, they [Central Bank of Myanmar] print only 1,000 kyat notes now. The cost of printing is far higher than the face value of most small notes … so they now print just the biggest ones.”