Burma Update

scmp - Saturday, January 29, 2005

ASSOCIATED PRESS in Bangkok
Tension has erupted among the leaders of military-ruled Myanmar, but no coup d'etat has taken place, Thai Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra said yesterday.

Mr Thaksin was responding to questions about rumours of a leadership change that have been sweeping the Myanmese capital, Yangon, in the past few days.

"I was informed that there is political tension in Myanmar," said Mr Thaksin, who added that the information was confusing and still being checked.

"There is tension and conflict but not at the level of a coup d'etat," he said.

Myanmese officials have not commented on the rumours.

Mr Thaksin's comments are significant because Thai officials were first to announce that Myanmar's former prime minister, General Khin Nyunt, was forced out last October. Myanmar later confirmed the statement.

The rumours of political tensions among Myanmar's military rulers have been fuelled by the disappearance of reports in state media about the activities of the prime minister, Lieutenant-General Soe Win, who took up the job just last October.

The last report about General Soe Win was a picture that showed him at a January 11 meeting with visiting Indian officials, though his signature has since appeared on letters congratulating foreign countries on their national days.

Diplomats in Yangon said they expected General Soe Win to lose his position, though it was unknown what differences he might have with the rest of the military leadership.

Adding to the sense of political unease is the unexplained death of Bo Win Tun, the personal assistant to Maung Aye, the junta's second-ranking leader after Than Shwe.

His obituary, published in two state-run newspapers, said he died on January 21 "while serving the country".

It said he would be cremated "with military honours".

Although it is widely believed that he took his own life, for reasons unknown, a report by the opposition Democratic Voice of Burma radio station, based in Norway, suggested he died in a shootout.

General Soe Win succeeded General Khin Nyunt, whose removal from office was announced on October 19 last year.

The original announcement said General Khin Nyunt was "permitted to retire for health reasons", a euphemism used in the past for the forced removal of cabinet members.

Makaysiakini, Jan 25, 05

Fauwaz Abdul Aziz

The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) has hit out at the leaders of last week’s demonstration by Chin Burmese refugees, saying it holds them responsible for the arrest of the 164 protestors. The leaders themselves have evaded arrest.

“The UNHCR is of the opinion that the organisers should have known - and should have informed the participants of - the consequences of their actions,” a protection officer told malaysiakini today.

“It was irresponsible. They have responsibility for the 164 who have been arrested. Now, what has been achieved?”

The group had staged a protest in front of the Burmese embassy off Jalan Ampang in Kuala Lumpur against their government’s persecution of their community. In particular, they cited alleged destruction on Jan 3 of a concrete cross in Matupi township in southern Burma.

Those arrested have been remanded for 10 days at the Jalan Hang Tuah city police headquarters pending completion of investigations for illegal assembly

Yesterday, a UNHCR delegation visited the lock-up to check on the condition of 12 of the protestors, as they are registered as refugees.

The protection officer said the protestors “seemed to have been misinformed or misled” into believing their actions would not lead to arrest and detention.

“We advise persons registered with us to respect Malaysian laws. We inform such persons as much as we can (about this). Definitely, the persons who organised the event had a responsibility to provide the (relevant) information.”

The officer also said the standard UNHCR letter issued to refugees who are seeking asylum states they have “the obligation to respect national laws and not to engage in any criminal activities”.

According to Section 27 (5) of the Police Act, a gathering of more than three people without a police permit is deemed unlawful assembly, leading to possible arrest and/or a fine. For undocumented migrants, it could also mean deportation to their country of origin.

Apology extended

Contacted earlier, a spokesperson for the Chin here, known only as Pau, said last Monday’s demonstration was an act of desperation to highlight the plight of the minority group in Burma, who are being slowly ‘cleansed’ by the predominantly ethnic-Burmese military.

He also said those arrested for unlawful assembly knew that such protests are against Malaysian law.

“We want to apologise. We know that what we did was wrong, but you have to understand that we (our community) are suffering. In the village that we lived, religious rights are not there. It is hard there,” he said.

“We wanted to show the world what the Burmese government is doing. After the military destroyed the cross, they held up the Burmese flag as a sign of victory, to show that the land (of Chin state) is under their control. They are trying to eliminate us through different means. It is part of their ethnic cleansing programme.”

Echoing Pau’s statements, Young Men’s Chin Christian Association head Salai San Aung urged the UNHCR to intervene before the Chin detainees are found guilty of illegal assembly and deported.

“If those people arrested get sent back, they will simply die,” said Salai, urging the agency to grant protection letters to the 152 protestors who have not yet been ‘recognised’ by the UNHCR.

In response, the protection officer stressed that the UNHCR would seek to ensure that those registered with the agency and granted recognition as refugees from a conflict will not be deported.

“For those who are registered with us as asylum seekers, we make sure the authorities are aware of their status and advocate and intervene so that they are protected from deportation under any circumstances,” she said.

“It is one of the most salient points of international refugee laws. Deportation in such cases is very rare and is a most serious violation of refugee laws.”

In the absence of registration with the UNHCR the remaining protestors are not likely to receive the agency’s protection and could in all probability be deported.

The New Statesman, London
20 January 2005


I tried to phone her the other day. I still have a number she gave me,
which I could call infrequently and exchange a few words. It was
fruitless to try this time; the hurried click at the other end was an
echo of her Kafkaesque oppression. The isolation of Aung San Suu Kyi is
now complete, in the tenth year of her detention. The last time I got
through, I asked her what was happening outside her house. "Oh, the
road is blocked and there are soldiers all over the street... for my
own security, of course!"

She thanked me for the books I had sent her, hand-carried through the
underground that now struggles to maintain contact. "It has been a joy
to read widely again," she said. I had sent her a collection of her
favourite T S Eliot, as well as Jonathan Coe's political novel, What a
Carve Up!, whose gentle irony must have seemed strange in jackbooted
Rangoon. She told me she relished biographies of those who had also
suffered through isolation: Mandela, Sakharov. Little has reached her
since then, and it is not known if she still has her old Grundig
shortwave radio. The regime has now removed her personal security
guards from her compound beside Inya Lake. Having tortured and killed
her closest allies, they must believe that, if the world looks the
other way, they can do the same to her.

"For the media, Burma is seldom fashionable," she told me. "But the
important thing to remember about a struggle like ours is that it
endures, whether or not the spotlight is on, and it can't be turned
back." For one so alone, these are salutary words; I recommend them to
those who lose heart when their participation in one demonstration
fails to stop an invasion. Fortunately, Aung San Suu Kyi and the
democracy movement she leads are supported by a tenacious solidarity
network throughout the world; and I am indebted to John Jackson and
Yvette Mahon of the Burma Campaign UK for never letting us forget that,
if the often debased cry of democracy means anything, its true test is
Burma. In the current issue of Metta, the campaign's journal, Desmond
Tutu reminds us that Aung San Suu Kyi and her party, the National
League for Democracy, won 82 per cent of the parliamentary seats in
Burma's 1990 election, the signal for a military junta to hunt,
imprison, torture and murder the victors, and enslave much of the
nation. "Suu Kyi and the people of Burma," writes Tutu, "have not
called for a military coalition to invade their country. They have
simply asked for the maximum diplomatic and economic pressure against
Burma's brutal dictators."

As the public's response to the tsunami and the invasion of Iraq has
shown, the fastest-growing division in the world is between people and
those in power claiming to act morally in their name. Burma exemplifies
this. Take the European Union's disgusting policy. Clearly with an eye
to its vast Asian market, the EU, promoter of "human rights" when the
price is right, has shamelessly appeased the Burmese junta. Consider
what happens in Burma today. Rape is used as a weapon of the state
against ethnic woman and children. Forced labour is widespread,
described by the UN's International Labour Organisation as a "crime
against humanity". The junta holds more that 1,350 political prisoners,
many of whom are routinely tortured. Up to a million people have been
forced from their land. Half the national budget is spent on a brutal,
peacock military whose only enemy is its own people, while next to
nothing is spent on health; one in ten Burmese babies die in infancy.
And the true leader, elected in a landslide, is incarcerated, rising at
four o'clock every morning to meditate on such an epic injustice.

Meanwhile, the EU shores up the regime by increasing imports, worth
around 4bn dollars between 1998 and 2002. Last October, the fifth
summit of the 39-state Asia-Europe Meeting (Asem) was held in Hanoi and
attended by representatives of the junta for the first time. Instead of
announcing a boycott, the Europeans turned up and said nothing. Rather,
France's president, Jacques Chirac, said he hoped stronger sanctions
would not be necessary because they "will hurt the poorest people". For
"poorest people" read Total Oil Company, part-owned by the French
government, the largest foreign investor in Burma, where the oil
companies' infrastructure of roads and railway access have long been
the subject of allegations of forced labour. Total's euros allow the
junta to re-equip its state of fear. "None of the EU officials I have
met," says John Jackson, "denies that foreign investment and military
spending in Burma are closely linked. In the week the regime received
its first payment for gas due to be piped to Thailand from a gas field
operated by Total Oil, it made a 130m dollar down-payment on ten MiG-29
jet fighters."

Jackson points to the farce of present EU sanctions. After as many as
100 of Suu Kyi's supporters were publicly beaten to death by soldiers
in 2003, the EU extended its visa ban to the junta and Germany froze no
less than 86 euros of German-based Burmese assets. In contrast, and
through direct action, the international campaign has chalked up major
disinvestments, such as Premier Oil, Heineken, PepsiCo, British Home
Stores. The current "dirty list" of investors includes the oil
companies Total and Unocal, Rolls-Royce, Lloyd's of London and
so-called prestige travel companies such as Bales, Road to Mandalay and
Orient Express. The bestselling Lonely Planet guidebook is a fixture on
the list. Lonely Planet has long made a fool of itself by claiming, in
the words of one of its writers, that Burma is "better off" today, and
that although the junta is "abominable", "political imprisonment,
torture" and "involuntary civilian service to the state" are not new
and "have been around for centuries".

Tell that to the people of Pagan, the ancient capital, which used to
have a population of 4,000. Given a few weeks to leave, their homes
were bulldozed and they were marched at gunpoint to a waterless stubble
that is a dustbowl in the summer, and runs with mud in the winter.
Their dispossession was to make way for foreign tourists. "I shall
welcome tourists and investors," said Aung San Suu Kyi, "when we are
free." There is an abundance of evidence that foreign tourism has
benefited the regime, not the Burmese people, and that much of the
tourist infrastructure was built with "involuntary civilian service" ?
an idiotic euphemism for bonded or outright slave labour.

Filming secretly in Burma nine years ago, I came upon what might have
been a tableau from Dickensian England. Near the town of Tavoy, in the
south, gangs of people were building a railway viaduct, guarded by
soldiers. These were slave labourers, and many were children. I watched
one small girl in a long blue dress struggle to wield a hoe taller than
herself, falling back exhausted, in pain, holding her shoulder. "How
old are you?" I asked her. "Eleven," came the reply.

Just as we should not forget the people of Fallujah and Najaf and
Baghdad, and Ramallah and Gaza, so we should not forget this little
girl, and her people, and their leader, who ask for the most basic
rights and deserve our support.

scmp - Wednesday, January 19, 2005

AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE in Khao Lak
Updated at 12.53pm:
Myanmar migrant workers in Thailand were the forgotten victims of the tsunamis and non-governmental organisations — who say thousands are dead and missing — believe their fate will continue to be ignored.

Achai Saw Hlaing, a Myanmar labourer with a valid Thai work permit, was the sole survivor from a hotel building site on the beach at Khao Lak which was swept away by the tsunamis on December 26.

Unlike his 10 companions, 43-year-old Mr Hlaing managed to climb on top of a roof and avoid the giant killer waves.

When the sea subsided, he hid in a slum 10 kilometres from Khao Lak, his home for eight years, bundled together with 100 compatriots.

“The Thai authorities did not even come and ask how many Myanmar nationals were dead,” said Mr Hlaing, a grim picture of skin and bones with hollowed cheeks and bloodshot eyes.

“They made lists of the Thai dead, of foreigners, but did not give a damn about Myanmar,” he said.

“Even though my papers were in order, I dared not go to the police for fear they would arrest me.”

Next to him, a woman from Myanmar told how she lost her daughter in the catastrophe. Someone said to her the next day that the girl’s body was lying on the beach but she said the Thai police stopped her from going to look.

The corpse had probably been dispatched to the morgue next to the temple at Yanyao further south, she said.

Myanmar non-governmental organisations (NGOs) based in Thailand said that thousands of migrant workers in the fishing and construction industries in the area were killed by the tsunamis and thousands more were missing.

A total of 2,500 people from Myanmar were killed by the tsunami in Phang Nga province, Moe Swe, the general secretary of the Yaung Chi Oo Workers Association based in western Thailand, said.

And 4,000 Myanmar migrants had gone missing, and among them many were presumed dead, he said. Some are believed to have moved to other provinces and others are thought to have gone back to Myanmar, said Moe Swe, whose group does advocacy work for Myanmar migrants.

Htoo Chit, co-ordinator of the Grassroots Human Rights, Education and Development Association based in Kanchanaburi, said the migrant death toll may have reached 3,000, with between 5,000 and 7,000 missing.

The assessments were based on a one-week series of interviews and information collected on the ground with Myanmar labourers, Thai employers and local villagers, the organisations said.

The NGOs were unable to say immediately if the Myanmar dead were counted among Thailand’s official casualty total of 8,500 dead or missing.

But there was little chance that the Myanmar victims would ever be recognised as such, they said.

“The military government in Myanmar does not even care about Burmese people in Burma,” said Myint Myint San, a member of the Burmese Women Union NGO based in Chiang Mai in northern Thailand. Myanmar was formerly called Burma.

malaysiakini.com
Roshan Jason
Jan 17, 05 12:04pm

About 160 Burmese Chin immigrants, including several women, were arrested by the police this morning for demonstrating outside the Burmese embassy off Jalan Ampang, Kuala Lumpur.

The group, protesting against the Burmese government’s alleged persecution of Christians, were hauled up after failing to adhere to the police's order to disperse.

Realising that arrest was imminent, the protestors began to congregate in prayer. Soon after, the 30-odd police personnel, headed by Pudu police station chief Mohd Asri Mohd Yunus, swung into action.

A few tried to struggle but the rest were taken to the waiting police trucks without much fuss. Later in the day, they have been taken to be remanded at the Kuala Lumpur remand centre in Pudu.

Earlier, Mohd Asri had given the protestors 15 minutes to disperse. He warned them that they were in breach of Malaysian law and could face arrest for an illegal assembly.

“You must respect our law. There are more than three of you gathered which amounts to an illegal assembly. This is a public area and you are disturbing the peace. If u don’t leave, I will disperse all of you by force or by arresting you,” he told them in English.

The police chief had initially asked a Burmese embassy personnel - only known as Zaw - standing inside the building’s guarded gates to translate what he had said. However, the official said the protestors “were all educated” and refused to get involved.

Religious repression

The protestors had failed to convince Mohd Asri to allow them a day long protest. They were in turn accused of causing a ruckus, in the semi-residential area, with their chants.

It is unclear whether those arrested have refugee status. Those found not to have valid travel documents are likely to be deported.

The protestors arrived at the embassy at 10.50am in three bus loads. Soon after setting up a protest parameter using pink ribbons, they began their protest against the human rights violations in their homeland.

Wearing large pink and red paper crosses on their t-shirts, the group chanted, in Burmese and English, calling for the end to religious repression back home and in the world at large.

They flashed banners which read “Malaysian government’s concern over religious persecution and human rights violations in Myanmar is much needed”, “Refugees are amounting in Myanmar” and “Myanmar government has no mercy on tsunami victims”.

Cross demolished

Community spokesperson and the Young Men Chin Christian Association leader Salai San Aung told reporters that the protest was also against the Burmese military leadership’s recent demolition of a large concrete cross in Matupi (in Burma’s southern Chin state) on Jan 3 this year.

“We are persecuted. The cross - a symbol erected by all Christian denominations - was destroyed by the junta. We are refugees. We fled from the Burmese jungles but are now forced to live in Malaysian jungles,” he said adding that they urged involvement from the international community to end abuses against all Burmese.

“We can’t go back to our country. We can’t do anything. We are refugees now in Malaysia.”

Salai ‘disappeared’ soon before the arrests began.

As the scene cleared, traces of their protest remained - in the form of broken and trampled-on crosses belonging to the protestors - on the street outside the Burmese embassy.

The Burmese military regime has long been accused of rights and political abuses ever since it assumed power in 1962.

The most internationally condemned incidents being the killings of pro-democracy demonstrators in 1988 and the continued imprisonment of democracy icon Aung San Suu Kyi.

scmp - Saturday, January 8, 2005

ASSOCIATED PRESS in Yangon
International aid agencies working in Myanmar told foreign diplomats that the military government's accounts of minimal damage and casualties from the tsunami were accurate, and that the disaster killed between 60 and 80 people.

They also said authorities had taken active, swift and effective measures to handle the emergency.

Parts of Myanmar are close to the quake's epicentre, off Sumatra, which initially raised fears the country might have been badly hit. Because the military government curbs press freedom and restricts the flow of information, official accounts of limited damage had been met with scepticism.

United Nations agencies and private aid groups, jointly operating as the Tsunami Assistance Co-ordination Group, said the country had been largely spared the tsunami devastation like that suffered in neighbouring Thailand, confirming unofficial assessments made a day earlier.

The group said the catastrophe killed between 60 and 80 people in Myanmar. It said the government's assessment of the impact was in line with the group's.

It added, however, that between 10,000 and 15,000 people required recovery assistance - 5,000 to 7,000 of them urgently.

The aid groups gave their assessment to the diplomatic community in a closed-door briefing. They made the same assessment as the government, a diplomat said.

"Reports indicate that the wave force reaching the coast of Myanmar...was already greatly reduced," said the group.

Sonny Inbaraj

BANGKOK, Jan 5 (IPS) - It remains one of the greatest mysteries so far on how Burma, with over 2,000 kilometers of its coastline along the Andaman Sea directly exposed to the devastating tsunami waves that killed over 140,000 people in the region the day after Christmas, managed to escape with minimal damage.

A simulation produced by the Japan-based National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology showed the tsunami waves, which on Dec. 26 were spawned by a huge undersea quake in northern Sumatra, hitting the coast of Burma's Arakan state and the Irrawaddy and Tenasserim divisions.

Logically speaking, southern Burma should have been hit as bad as neighbouring Thailand - where the death toll is currently more than 5,200.

But no, says Anthony Banbury, the World Food Programme's regional director for Asia.

''It's hard to explain and I honestly have no explanation at all why that coast was spared compared to other areas that have had tremendous damage from the tsunami,'' he told a press conference on Wednesday.

On Tuesday the WFP managed to get an assessment team into Tenasserim division's Kawthaung, at the southernmost tip of Burma directly facing the Andaman Sea, and reported that the damage was minimal.

''The WFP team reports that Kawthaung has escaped damage from the tsunami. Life is going on as normal there; there are Thai tourists in the town - and there are less than 10 deaths reported,'' said Banbury.

''The team was allowed to move a little bit along the coast and saw a number of coastal villages that were left unscathed after the tsunami,'' he added.

Burma's military junta has put the number of dead at 59, a figure that Banbury said was ''fairly accurate.''

''The reports of deaths that we're aware of and which we believe are accurate are a total of between 30 to 60 deaths caused by the tsunami,'' he said.

But the WFP director said the estimate was by no means conclusive and the U.N. agency would be doing more assessments on how to bring emergency food aid to the affected areas.

''We have identified approximately 10,000 people in the Irrawaddy division, which is the delta area south of the capital Rangoon, in need of food assistance,'' Banbury pointed out. ''These 10,000 are people affected by the tsunami and they need immediate aid.''

U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell said in the Thai island resort of Phuket, where current search and rescue operations are going on, that satellite photographs suggested Burma escaped the worst ravages of the tsunami.

But he said he had no idea whether Burma's military rulers were telling the truth about the death toll.

Powell is now in Jakarta, where he will join U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan and senior politicians around the world in Thursday's donors meeting to focus of rebuilding efforts in the aftermath of the devastating tsunamis.

In the meantime, the Australian Labor federal opposition has called on Prime Minister John Howard to pressure Burma's military regime to provide more details about the impact of the tsunami in that country.

Labor's foreign affairs spokesman, Kevin Rudd, said it is an issue that must be raised during Thursday's donors' summit in Jakarta.

''As Mr. Howard heads to Jakarta for the summit on the tsunami impact on the region, he can urge ASEAN (the Association of South-east Asian Nations) -- of which Burma is a member -- to apply some leverage on the regime in Rangoon to come clean with what precisely has occurred in the aftermath of the tsunami,'' he told the 'Australian Broadcasting Corporation.'

Suspicions were raised when on Dec. 27, the day following the disaster, the junta-controlled 'New Light of Myanmar' reported only ''messages of sympathy'' sent to by the generals to neighbouring countries, while giving no report on local impact.

''It took two full days for the regime to officially report a minimal of 36 deaths, 45 injured, 14 missing, and 788 homeless displaced, and 17 coastal villages destroyed,'' said the Burma lobby group ALTSEAN in a report on the tsunami impact on the country..

''On Jan. 1, the regime updated these figures to 59 dead, 43 injured and 3,205 made homeless,'' added the report.

ALTSEAN said this delay in announcing the causality figures was indicative of the regime's desire to ''bury the event and its impact on the local population..''

''This irresponsible behaviour poses a serious threat to the health of local populations and hampers international relief assistance.. Burma's military regime must be held accountable for its lack of attention to its population,'' ALTSEAN's Debbie Stothart told IPS.

But what's worrying is that the situation has been less clear on Burma's islands. This is where the regime together with the Chinese armed forces have their military installations. So for obvious reasons these areas will remain off-limits to relief agencies.

The Norway-based Democratic Voice of Burma (DVB) reported that army radar installations on Coco Islands, in the Indian Ocean, had been partly destroyed by the tsunami and Chinese military officers were among the victims.

According to the DVB, military radar installations in the Mergui Archipelago and Heingyi Island could also have been destroyed together with an illegal Thai gambling casino operating under the regime's consent on an island in southern Burma. (END/2005)