BurmaNet News: August 20 2003

[editor at burmanet.org]

August 20 2003 Issue #2309

INTERNATIONAL
AFP: China denounces sanctions against Myanmar

DRUGS
Nation: Thaksin threatens to raid Burma drug sites
AFP: Thai forces kill nine drug smugglers in Myanmar border clash

MONEY
Independent: ‘Dirty List’ Firms to Pull Out of Burma
Asia Pulse: China’s Fujian Province to Increase Investment in ASEAN

REGIONAL
Kaladan: Bangladesh Account Trade With Burma Hangs in The Balance

EDITORIALS
Vancouver Sun: Boycott of Burma punishes the workers

INSIDE BURMA
Time Asia: The Outsider, by Wendy Law-Yone


INTERNATIONAL

Agence France Presse   August 20, 2003
China denounces sanctions against Myanmar

BEIJING: China Wednesday denounced sanctions against Myanmar, just days
before aggressive new US trade restrictions take effect, state media said.

The stance was taken by State Councilor Tang Jaixuan at a meeting with
Deputy Senior General Maung Aye, the junta's visiting number-two leader,
the Xinhua news agency reported.

"The current domestic situation in Myanmar is the country's internal
affairs, and China will not agree to foreign interference or to sanctions
and isolation," Xinhua said, quoting Tang, a former foreign minister.

The people of Myanmar are "intelligent and capable" enough to handle the
relevant issues and push forward its internal preace process, Tang said.

Myanmar is resisting an intense international push to release opposition
leader Aung San Suu Kyi who was detained on May 30 following clashes
between her supporters and a junta-backed mob.

China has repeatedly refused to apply pressure on its neighbour, prompting
sharp criticism from the United States.

Tough new US sanctions are to kick in August 28, a month after US
President George W. Bush signed the "Burmese Freedom and Democracy Act of
2003" aimed at punishing Myanmar's military regime for its crackdown on
the opposition.

The European Union and Canada have all slapped new sanctions on the regime
while Japan, its largest donor, has suspended new economic aid.

China is one of the few countries which maintains political ties with
Myanmar and has recently boosted its economic influence in the country.

The Chinese government sees friendship with Myanmar as an important
strategic asset, offering the country its only direct access to the Indian
Ocean.


DRUGS

The Nation (Thailand)   August 21, 2003
Thaksin threatens to raid Burma drug sites

Prime Minister Thaksin Shina-watra yesterday threatened to send troops
into Burma to destroy drug factories unless Rangoon sorts out its drug
problem.

The prime minister made the threat following a bloody clash yesterday
between border police and Wa militia, that left nine drug traffickers
dead.

If Rangoon has no time to take out these illicit plants, Thaksin said, "we
will go there and do it ourselves."

He said Wa troops were producing methamphetamine pills about 20 kilometres
from the Thai border and that Rangoon had been told about the plants'
locations.

"We must not allow our country to be invaded anymore. We have been talking
for a long time about this issue," the premier said.

Thaksin said he had asked the Foreign Ministry to send a letter to the
Burmese government demanding that they put a lid on the illicit activities
of the Wa militia or "the Thai government would deal with the issue
itself."

The prime minister dismissed suggestions that military action against the
Wa militia would strain ties with Burma.

Relations took a nosedive following an all out offensive against the Wa in
May last year when former army chief General Surayudh Chulanont gave
troops the green light to take out Wa positions along the border.

Thaksin said then that the troops had "overreacted" and transferred
Surayudh in the annual re-shuffle.

The prime minister yesterday lashed out at the Wa and said Thai troops
"would shoot to kill".

"Their drugs have gradually killed our children, so we won't spare them,"
Thaksin said.

Nine Wa militiamen were killed in yesterday's clash and 500,000
methamphetamine pills confiscated after the 30-minute gunfight near Huay
Sala Village, in Chiang Mai's Mae Ai district.

No Thai officials were injured.

The clash took place at 5:30am after undercover police struck a deal with
smugglers to deliver 1 million pills in exchange for Bt16 million.

Pol Lt Col Anurak Sutsom, of Border Patrol Police Region 3, said Thai
police were waiting for the Wa troops to deliver their drugs but the
troops appeared to sense the trap and opened fire at the Thais.
____________________

Agence France Presse   August 20, 2003
Thai forces kill nine drug smugglers in Myanmar border clash

BANGKOK: Thai forces killed nine alleged drug smugglers and injured 11
others in a clash on the Myanmar border Wednesday that netted a million
methamphetamine pills, Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra said.

Thaksin said Thai anti-narcotics police had mounted a sting operation in
the northern province of Chiang Mai to buy methamphetamines from
traffickers belonging to the United Wa State Army, an ethnic militia known
as the "Red Wa".

The two sides clashed when the Wa traffickers turned up to deliver the
drugs, but no Thai police were injured and they successfully seized the
huge haul of pills, he said.

Thaksin said the government would contact Myanmar's military junta, which
is allied with the Red Wa, over the clash.

"I have asked the foreign ministry to contact Myanmar to tell them that
the Wa are still producing and selling amphetamines," he told reporters.

Thailand is the world's largest per-capita consumer of methamphetamines,
with five percent of Thailand's 63 million people thought to be users of
the drug which has largely supplanted heroin here.

The army said last year that it expected a record one billion pills to be
brought in from Myanmar this year, up from an estimated 700 million in
2002.

Thaksin said Myanmar had been cooperating well with Thailand over the
drugs issue but that it may be grappling with other problems at the
moment, in an apparent reference to the detention of democracy campaigner
Aung San Suu Kyi.

The ruling generals are resisting intense international pressure to
release the opposition leader who was taken into custody on May 30 after a
pro-junta gang attacked her convoy during a political tour of northern
Myanmar.

"We have told Myanmar that drugs is a policy priority for us and they have
provided good cooperation," he said.

"But they have often said the Wa are present at the border and that they
are a strong group. We understand this and we are ready to help."

The drugs issue has been the cause of frequent spats between the
neighbours, who have an historically troubled relationship.

However, Thailand has been at pains to smooth relations while it promotes
a "road map" proposal aimed at securing Aung San Suu Kyi's freedom and
introducing democratic reforms in Myanmar.

Thailand is concerned that tightened sanctions against Myanmar prompted by
the Suu Kyi crisis will result in an exodus of unemployed illegal migrants
over their common border.


MONEY

The Independent (London)   August 20, 2003
‘Dirty List’ Firms to Pull Out of Burma; PWC Re-evaluates Links W WPP’s
Office Likely to Close W Government
By Rachel Stevenson


THE ADVERTISING giant WPP, PricewaterhouseCoopers and the cruise company
Carnival were yesterday considering withdrawing from Burma after the
Government and human rights campaigners stepped up action against
companies that support the country's military dictatorship.

P&O Cruises, through its parent, Carnival, the global auditing company
Ernst & Young and WPP were all yesterday added to the "dirty list" of
companies that operate in the country by the Burma Campaign UK, as were 3
Mobile and Superdrug through their parent, Hutchison Whampoa.

PwC was already on the list but yesterday wrote to the Burma Campaign UK
to confirm that its interest in Burma is being "re-evaluated".

WPP said it was reviewing the future of its office "as a matter of
urgency" and it is understood that is it very close to closure. The
company only acquired an office in Burma through its recent and protracted
acquisition of Cordiant. P&O Cruises has been put on the list because
Carnival operates holidays in the region. Carnival said it too was
unlikely to continue operating there.

"Seabourn Cruises, which is part of Carnival, occasionally visited Myanmar
in the past. Given recent political activities in Burma, we feel we must
responsibly reconsider the impact of any additional visits to Myanmar," a
spokesman for Carnival yesterday said.

While PwC in the UK said it had "no presence or associations with any
organisations in Burma", one member company of the global PwC network does
have "an ownership interest in an entity operating in Burma" that is now
under review.

Superdrug and 3 Mobile yesterday sought to distance themselves from
Hutchison Whampoa. Hutchison operates a port in Burma. Superdrug and 3
Mobile said they had no interests there. No one from Hutchison, which is
headquartered in Hong Kong, was yesterday available for comment.

The high-profile withdrawals will pile on the pressure on British American
Tobacco, already under siege from the Government to withdraw.

The Government is against any British company investing or operating in
Burma and has said that it will not provide support to any company doing
so. It has increased pressure on British companies to withdraw after Aung
San Suu Kyi, the elected leader of Burma who has been denied power by the
military dictatorship, was arrested by the regime in May.

This led the Government to tell British American Tobacco, chaired by
Kenneth Clarke, to end to its operations there. BAT runs a joint venture
in the country of which the Burmese dictatorship and its generals are the
direct beneficiaries. In light of the request, BAT has said it will review
its position, but has yet to reach a decision.

The Government yesterday said it was encouraged by news that more British
companies were reviewing their position.

"No British company should be investing in Burma. There are compelling
moral reasons not to do so," a spokesman from the Foreign & Commonwealth
Office said yesterday.

Burma Campaign UK has been naming companies that operate in or have links
to Burma since December, and its list totals 79 companies. Premier Oil was
one of the most recent major investors to withdraw, followed by tour
operators Kuoni and Abercrombie & Kent. Since their listing by Burma
Campaign UK both said they will cease to operate there, as have
Travelsphere, Scott Dunn and Silk Steps.

Ernst & Young said yesterday it does not operate directly in Burma. "Ernst
& Young firms in countries that do not have a trade embargo against
Myanmar refer those clients who need business assistance to a technical
assistance' firm, U Tin Win. Neither Ernst & Young Global, nor any of its
firms, has any interest whatsoever in the technical assistance firm," said
a statement.
________________________

Asia Pulse   August 20, 2003
China’s Fujian Province to Increase Investment in ASEAN

WUYISHAN, Fujian: East China's coastal Fujian Province will speed up
investment in the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) countries
to accelerate its economic growth, said an official of the Fujian
provincial government here.

"We encourage local enterprises, especially the booming non-state-owned
enterprises, to invest in and cooperate with the ASEAN countries in the
fields of manufacturing and resource exploitation," said Wang Meixiang,
vice-governor of Fujian.

The ninth China-ASEAN Senior Officials' Consultation started on August 18
in the Fujian scenic spot, Wuyishan City, and Wang didn't miss the chance
to advertise her province to the delegates.

"Fujian Province and the ASEAN countries are highly mutually complementary
in many aspects, including natural resources, industrial structure and
agricultural products, so the potential for cooperation is great," she
said.

She said Fujian enjoys many advantages in cooperating with the ASEAN nations.

"Fujian is the ancestral home of a large number of overseas Chinese, and
it is close to the ASEAN countries geographically," she said.

China and ASEAN have agreed to construct in 10 years the world's largest
free trade area, the China-ASEAN free trade area, which will also bring
opportunities for Fujian, she said.

"We've laid down a development program to accelerate capital and
commercial exchanges as well as other economic and technological
cooperation between Fujian and the ASEAN nations so as to boost our local
companies and increase their market shares in the southeast Asian
countries," said Wang.

By the end of 2002, enterprises from Fujian had invested in 26 projects in
the ASEAN countries with a contract value of US$12.78 million. Fujian's
imports from ASEAN increased 36 per cent year-on-year in 2002 to US$1.34
billion.

So far Fujian Province has begun building manufacturing and trade zones in
Indonesia, Myanmar and Vietnam.

"We'll speed up the construction of those manufacturing and trade zones
and encourage the export of relevant equipment, technology and workforce,"
Wang said.

Statistics showed that the trade volume between Fujian Province and the
ASEAN countries reached US$1.36 billion in the first half year of 2003, up
19.05 per cent year-on-year.


REGIONAL

Kaladan News   August 19, 2003
Account Trade With Burma Hangs in The Balance

Chittagong, August 19:Account trade between Bangladesh and Burma hangs in
the balance as the US has imposed economic restrictions on
Yangon,according to Star report.

Dollar crisis worsened in Yangon following the economic restrictions. Due
to restriction on opening Lcs in Burma, Dhaka and Yangon had decided to
introduce account trade, which has now become uncertain due to the US
sanction, said a senior official at the Ministry of Commerce.

According to a memorandum of understanding (MoU) signed in March 2003,
account trade will be settled in every six months. But Burma may face a
big problem for settling the accounts due to dollar crisis, he added.

There was a proposal to open LCs in euro but there are also apprehensions
that adequate euro may not be available with Burma, said the official.

According to the MoU, Bangladesh and Burma will have to sign another
agreement for banking arrangement and send indicative list of products for
account trade.

Sonali Bank has already been authorised for banking arrangement and the
draft was sent to Burma.

Yangon has approved the draft and authorised a bank namely Burma
Investment and Commercial Bank (BICB) for settling the account.

The managing director of BICB was scheduled to visit Bangladesh in May
this year and all preparations were made but Burma authorities had
cancelled the visit at the eleventh hour.

Bangladesh has sent an indicative list of 45 products for export under
account trade. But Burma is yet to send its list to Bangladesh.

Account trade between Bangladesh and Rangon will begin shortly," Commerce
Minister told reporters after an inter-ministerial meeting held at the
Ministry of Commerce conference room yesterday.


EDITORIALS

The Vancouver Sun (British Columbia, Canada)   August 20, 2003
Boycott of Burma punishes the workers
By Richard Evin

Re: Firefighters to shed Burma jackets, July 29

We, Evin Industries, manufactured the jackets in question. We wouldn't
participate in any abusive enterprise. Our staff, working in a bright,
clean factory (seven to 10 Koreans assisted by more than 20 Burmese women
supervisors), proudly wear Evin Maple Leafs on their tunics.

No world organization "certifies" labour conditions. However, U.S.
Ambassador Gordon Giffin confirmed our factory was visited (and cited in a
U.S. report on Burmese labour) and nothing in the report implied that our
factory was a "sweatshop" or abusive.

Workers anywhere who strive to improve their lives should be allowed to do
so. Canadian should not assume that all factories in an oppressive country
are oppressive. Factories that abide by accepted standards should not be
tarred by the reputation of their repressive country. As factories close,
these skilled intelligent workers return home, to wait. So the innocents
are punished. The guilty continue to live a good life.

I have developed close friendships with these factory workers and others,
which often resulted in sharing views about their hopes and dreams. What
will happen to these people and their dreams? Clearly, if the world
"engages Burma" by doing business in a supportive way, these kind, gentle
people will eventually have prosperity and gain democracy.

The B.C. Ethics Group suggests that buying from Burma represents "a total
abandonment of any morals and ethics Canadians stand for." In truth, it is
the abandonment of the Burmese people that is contrary to the morals and
ethics that Canadians stand for.

Finally, as a businessman who can't change history, I state with great
sadness that by the end of August, because of the U.S. embargo, I will
terminate my relationship with Burma where more than half my business is
generated.

Richard Evin
President, Evin Industries Ltd.
Montreal


INSIDE BURMA

Time Asia   August 18-25, 2003
The Outsider
By Wendy Law-Yone
When Wendy Law-Yone returned to Burma after 33 years, she discovered that
exile was a deliverance from her homeland's living hell

A vision of hell that induces homesickness is something of a curiosity,
especially when that vision is encountered in the John Ritblat Gallery of
London's British Library. Some of the library's greatest treasures are on
display there: the Magna Carta, ancient Bibles and Korans, medieval mappa
mundi. Among these priceless objects, taking up an entire wall of the
gallery, is a series of watercolors by an unknown Burmese artist. Probably
commissioned in the mid-1800s, at the beginning of a century of British
rule over Burma, the paintings are meant to illustrate aspects of Buddhist
cosmology: hell, heaven, the world, a pantheon of spirits and deities, a
fortune-telling manual. Whimsy and insouciance are at the heart of these
illustrations. The world is egg shaped. Heaven is a diagram, abstract and
dull, of seven concentric circles. And hell? Hell is a field of open
fires, encircled by a ring of flames, on which stick figures are busily
kicking and punching, beating and beheading one another with long sticks
and long swords while others are being impaled, hung upside down over
spits, boiled in cauldrons, dismembered and devoured by wild beasts.

As I lean forward for a closer look, it occurs to me, as it must to anyone
familiar with Burma's recent history of oppression and violence, that here
in fact is an eerily prophetic hell.

Along with this message in the paintings, I see a metaphor in the very
glass enclosing them. Exiles are beings with their noses forever pressed
to the windows of the past, fogging up the panes with sighs of inchoate
nostalgia and guilt. Yet the sigh I breathe as I step back from the glass
is mostly one of relief. Exile, I am reminded, can be an escape from hell,
a form of salvation, and not necessarily the state of privation and
alienation it is often cracked up to be. With half the world in a state of
dislocation, with not just intellectuals and revolutionaries but whole
populations in search of such salvation, exile nowadays suggests quite
other states of being. Freedom, for instance. Or privilege. Or even
prestige.

Never was this paradox brought home to me more forcefully than on my
return to Burma some three years ago, after half a lifetime of so-called
exile in the U.S. Everywhere, my status as a Burmese-born visitor free to
come and go about the world was greeted with a kind of wistful awe.
Relatives I hadn't seen or heard from in three decades, old friends whose
names or faces I had almost forgotten, office workers, taxi drivers,
boatmen, Buddhist monks in remote monasteries—almost all of them made me
feel that exile was more a badge of honor than a state of banishment.

My freedom from Burma had come in 1967, in the xenophobic days when few
foreigners were let into the country and fewer nationals let out. An
earlier attempt to escape to Thailand through backdoor routes had landed
me in jail, where military-intelligence officials subjected me to a 10-day
marathon of interrogation before releasing me as arbitrarily, it seemed,
as they had arrested me.

The military junta had recently declared martial law in Rangoon, a
citywide curfew was in effect, and I drove to Mingaladon Airport in the
spooky atmosphere of a wartime blackout. Spookier still was the discovery
that I was the sole passenger on Thai Airways International Flight 304 to
Bangkok. I held my breath, from a combination of elation, fear and
disbelief, throughout the one-hour flight. Now, 33 years later, I was
returning on another Thai flight, this one filled nearly to capacity. As
the plane sank lower and lower toward Rangoon, I looked through scudding
clouds at the cultivated fields below and once again found myself
struggling to breathe.

Inside the airport terminal, the atmosphere—still sinister to me after so
many years away—proved similarly breathtaking, reminding me that nothing
can be taken for granted in a police state, not even the simple act of
breathing. "Things are different now," a family friend from the old days
kept insisting as we drove around the city in a quest to track down every
house I had ever lived in. She pointed to the high-rise buildings in a
downtown sector that lent an air of dubious prosperity to that otherwise
bankrupt capital. "So many changes, do you see?" But I didn't see. Just
around the corner, on 40th Street, were the old offices of The Nation, the
English-language daily my late father had founded in the 1940s and
published until his arrest in the 1960s. Nothing seemed to have changed in
the least: not the shop houses with their ragged laundry lines, not the
flooding ditches, not the stray dogs snuffling in the gutters, not the
rubbish heaps on the streets. Everything seemed shockingly true to my
childhood memories—including the doorway to No. 290, behind which, for all
I knew, still lay our old printing presses, shut down by government order
three decades ago.

And when we drove past the entrance to Insein Prison, where my father had
spent five years, locked up, along with thousands of others, without
charges or trial—all the trappings of that infamous facility seemed grimly
familiar as well. The entrance was manned by half a dozen guards who
lounged in the shade of an old banyan tree, smug in their power over a
cowed populace. The banyan tree housed its obligatory shrine, decorated
with scraps of colored paper and withered blossoms left by the prisoners'
families. The small watchtower looming above was almost hidden from view
by greenery. All along the street were market stalls and crowds and
lottery-ticket vendors. Repression had reached the level of domestic
routine, as in all seasoned dictatorships.

"A different time now, isn't it?" my friend kept asking, perhaps sensing
my observations to the contrary. "Time to forgive and forget, isn't it?"
Here, it struck me, was a fundamental difference between those who stayed
behind, like my friend, for whom the decision to forget is both a survival
mechanism and a political act, and exiles like myself, for whom the same
could be said about the decision not to forget.

Nostalgia distorts memory, it is true, but a past that leaves a bitter
taste in the mouth tends to curb nostalgia and to cut one's recall down to
size. Thus it surprised me to see that the houses I knew, the churches,
schools, markets and streets I once frequented, instead of being smaller
than I remembered (as often happens with childhood memories) were in fact
considerably bigger than my grudging imagination had allowed them to be.
Yet even with the past restored to size, when I left a month later to
return to the U.S., I knew what I had known upon leaving more than 30
years ago: home—if I could still call this home—was the last place I
wanted to live.

Buddhism is the official religion of Burma, and Buddhism, with its
teachings on impermanence and the universality of human suffering, is
thought to explain in large part the extraordinary tolerance of the
Burmese. They have tolerated, above all, four decades of a government
renowned for lying, cheating, stealing, torturing and murdering. Do the
tenets of Buddhism explain too, I wonder, this particular version of hell
before me in the British Library? Because a closer look at these old
paintings brings yet another revelation: the fires of hell seem to me now
like a picnic of bonfires. And although the stick figures are indeed busy
kicking, punching and stabbing one another, their kicks look like dance,
their punches like calisthenics, their stabs like harmless swordplay. The
whole business of damnation appears to be make-believe.

Displayed against another wall of the same gallery is that rarest of
manuscripts: the scroll of the Diamond Sutra, the oldest book in print.
Published in 868, this Chinese translation of early Indian Buddhist texts
derives from the Mahayana tradition and not from the Theravada Buddhism of
the Burmese. Still, in describing the world as unreal—in telling us that
there are no objects, no people, no other living beings—it seems to me a
guiding spirit behind my Burmese artist's hell. For if all is unreal,
suffering too is unreal. Thus, any representation of suffering can only be
a parody of suffering.

Parody or not, the images draw me to the glass for one last look. This
time I strain to read the blocks of handwritten script accompanying the
images—letters in ancient Mon, modern Burmese and scriptural Pali. But the
glass is too thick and the lighting too dim for me to decipher more than a
dozen disjointed words. The exile's privilege of standing outside the
glass looking in has its advantages, but the price of admission is a
certain loss of vision. Exiles can press their noses to windows all they
want, but they are never fully able to read the fine print.