BurmaNet News, May 25, 2004

[Editor]

May 25, 2004, Issue # 2482

“The wars against terrorism and Saddam Hussein which, whether one likes it
or not, has an inevitable anti-Islamic aspect, has allowed the Burmese
junta to tighten the screws on the Muslim Rohingya with few people willing
to raise their voices in protest.”
- “Collateral damage,” Jonathan Manthorpe, The Vancouver Sun, May 25, 2004


INSIDE BURMA
Irrawaddy:  NLD Plans to Call Meeting for Representatives of People’s
Parliament
Xinhua: Myanmar to launch new malaria treatment program
Vancouver Sun: Collateral damage

DRUGS
UPI: Thailand to share anti-AIDS drugs

REGIONAL
New Straits Times (Malaysia): Panel on Myanmar dispute
Xinhua: Thailand to register immigrant workers with reinforced border patrol

INTERNATIONAL
Atlanta Journal-Constitution: Refugees live in limbo for years, advocates
find
Reuters via LA Times: Unocal Shareholders Reject Bid for Dissidents'
Access to Board
SF Chronicle: Junta's blows scatter Burmese families to Bay Area

OPINION/OTHER
Irrawaddy: Poisoning the Future


INSIDE BURMA
______________________________________

May 25, Irrawaddy
NLD Plans to Call Meeting for Representatives of People’s Parliament - Naw
Seng

Burma’s main opposition National League for Democracy, or NLD, plans to
hold a meeting of the Committee Representing the People's Parliament, or
CRPP, said a party spokesperson.

U Lwin, Secretary of the NLD, said that the party will call on members of
the CRPP to meet, but he was not sure when the event would be held.
However, U Lwin explained that the CRPP meeting doesn’t imply the calling
of a People’s Parliament. “We don’t plan to call a People’s Parliament,”
he said today by telephone from Rangoon.

The CRPP was formed on September 16, 1998 after the ruling military
government failed to respond to renewed calls to recognize the result of
the May 27, 1990 election, in which the NLD won 80 percent of the seats.

The committee is chaired by Aung Shwe, who also acts as NLD chairman, and
supported by 251 parliament members from the NLD and other political
parties. The committee president Dr Saw Mra Aung, chairman of the Arakan
League for Democracy, or ALD, was arrested in September 1998 along with
110 NLD members of parliament.

By the end of 1998, after the junta had shut down 43 NLD offices, it then
insisted on the dissolution of the CRPP as a pre-condition for the
resumption of talks with the opposition. On October 23, 2002 the CRPP
expanded the size of its committee to 13 members from the original 10,
with new places representing three ethnic parliamentary political parties.

Meanwhile, NLD members from across the country have been summoned to a
14th anniversary commemoration of the May 1990 election, the results of
which, the military government refused to honor.

The NLD and the United Nationalities Alliance, a group of ethnically-based
parliamentary political parties, boycotted the National Convention tasked
with drafting a new constitution for Burma, which opened on May 17.

_____________________________________

May 25, Xinhua News Service
Myanmar to launch new malaria treatment program

Yangon: Myanmar will launch a new malaria treatment program in July in the
country's three central divisions after the former treatment method was
found ineffective, a local journal reported in this week's issue.

The new treatment program, which covers 20 townships in Mandalay, Magway
and Sagaing divisions, will use a combination of medicine similar to the
way tuberculosis and leprosy are treated when the malaria strain became
immune to the previous treatment, a malaria specialist was quoted by the
Myanmar Times as saying.

The new treatment targets the Plasmodium strain, which takes up about 80
percent of the malaria cases in Myanmar, the specialist said.

With the cooperation of the World Health Organization and donation of such
new medicine by Germany, the program is to last for two years.

Myanmar has been fighting the disease with increased efforts, providing
tens of thousands of insecticide-treated mosquito nets for people in
high-risk areas in the country, mostly in the border areas.

Official figures reveal that there has been significant decline in the
mortality rate out of malaria in Myanmar since 1996. Three years ago, it
registered that 1.2 percent of its population   contracted malaria and the
disease accounted for about six deaths in every 100,000 people.

_____________________________________

May 25, The Vancouver Sun
Collateral damage - Jonathan Manthorpe

The campaigns to oust Saddam Hussein and crush al-Qaida have been a great
boon to the Burmese military regime

The collateral damage of war is, by the very nature of the chaos of
conflict, unpredictable. No one could have predicted that the battle
against the Taliban and al-Qaida in Afghanistan and the campaign to oust
Saddam Hussein in Iraq would also engulf the approximately three million
Arakanese.

Readers can be forgiven if they have never heard of the Arakanese, don't
know who they are or where they live. Few people do.

Arakan is the most northwestern state of Burma in Southeast Asia. It is a
stunningly beautiful region of wild, forested mountains that tumble down
to the Bay of Bengal to the west and slope into neighbouring Bangladesh to
the north.

Like many border territories, Arakan has been constantly washed by the
tidal ebbs and flows of history. Countless armies and immigrations have
come this way, changing the patterns of population in their paths.

The people of Arakan now are fairly evenly divided between Rakhine
Buddhists, closely related to the Burmans of Burma, and the Rohingya
Muslims, ethnically and religiously linked to the people of the Chittagong
Hills in southern Bangladesh.

It is primarily the 1.4 million Rohingya, though not exclusively, who have
been caught in the fall-out from wars elsewhere. All Burmese live under
the brutal rule of the Rangoon military junta whose most vicious
attentions are devoted to the country's many ethnic minority groups.

The Rohingya have been singled out for special persecution by the generals
in Rangoon.

The wars against terrorism and Saddam Hussein which, whether one likes it
or not, has an inevitable anti-Islamic aspect, has allowed the Burmese
junta to tighten the screws on the Muslim Rohingya with few people willing
to raise their voices in protest. No one wants to be accused of coddling
people who might be terrorists.

This has been a great boon for the Burmese military regime, which in
recent months has been able to step up with impunity its long-term policy
of locking up, drafting for slave labour or killing as many Rohingya as
possible.

The lives of all ordinary Burmese are fearful. For the Rohingya it is
worse. A 1982 law excluded them from Burmese citizenship. They are
stateless within their own country and subject to draconian restrictions.

Just last month a 16-year-old girl, Aiasha Haque, was sentenced to five
years in prison for trying to go to Rangoon to see relatives without the
internal passport all Rohingya need to acquire in order to travel outside
Arakan.

Many have escaped persecution. There are an estimated 100,000 Rohingya
living illegally in Bangladesh. Tens of thousands more have sought peace
and work in other, mostly Muslim, countries like Pakistan, Saudi Arabia,
Malaysia and Indonesia. Some have been welcomed in Canada and Australia.

The Rohingya may be victims, but they are not choirboys.

The firebombing of the Burmese embassy in the Malaysian capital Kuala
Lumpur last month has been blamed on Arakanese. For many years there have
been low level separatist insurgencies by both Rohingya and Rakhine
Arakanese, but that is true in almost all of Burma's ethnic minority
states.

There is also a criminal trade in drugs and guns across the
Arakan-Bangladesh border. But that is the case on Burma's borders with
China, Thailand, Laos and Cambodia, too. It is a function of the Rangoon
junta's involvement in drug production and trafficking from the Golden
Triangle of northeastern Burma and the general lawlessness and illegality
of the regime.

The question is whether the elements among the Rohingya have become part
of the Southeast Asian terrorist networks inspired by al-Qaida and Osama
bin Laden.

On that matter, bin Laden himself has had a say. When the cable news
network CNN obtained about 60 videotapes from the al-Qaida files in
Afghanistan, one was labeled "Burma."

The tape purported to show al-Qaida allies of the Rohingya Solidarity
Organization (RSO) training with Chinese-made infantry weapons inside
Burma. It is more likely the video was shot at a RSO camp at Ukhia near
Cox's Bazaar in Bangladesh -- around which clustered many Rohingya refugee
camps at the time -- than in Burma.

The tape probably dates from the early 1990s and perhaps even earlier when
bin Laden and the Taliban were clients of the American Central
Intelligence Agency battling the occupation of Afghanistan by the Soviet
Union.

That war was a magnet for young men from all over the Islamic world and
there is evidence some Rohingya fought there.

Since then the RSO has become virtually defunct and there was never any
substantial evidence that it had morphed from being an Arakanese
separatist force into a militant Islamic jihadi organization.

The Rohingya, however, have been caught in a web of racial profiling that
the terror and Iraqi wars has spawned. Even our own Canadian Security
Intelligence Service has fingered them in a high-strung report criticizing
the Bangladeshi government for not doing enough to prevent that country
becoming a "haven for Islamic terrorists."

But the only people getting comfort and protection from this are the
vicious generals of the Burmese junta.


DRUGS
_____________________________________

May 25, United Press International
Thailand to share anti-AIDS drugs

Bangkok: Thailand plans to give Burma, Cambodia and Laos anti-retroviral
drugs to treat 30,000 AIDS patients, plus three million condoms to help
prevent the disease.

Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra will make the offer at an International
Aids Conference to be held in Bangkok from July 11-16, the Bangkok Post
reported.

The drug, known as GPOVIR, is an inexpensive cocktail of anti-Aids drugs.
Public Health Minister Sudarat Keyuraphan said Thailand had an oversupply
of the pills, as domestic demand was being met for its 70,000 patients.
Thailand plans to increase its production capacity to treat around 200,000
patients next year, she said.

About 140,000 Thais were HIV-positive in 1991, but the number of new AIDS
cases has dropped, as have deaths from the disease and mother-child
transmissions. The ministry attributed the decline in to its continuous
efforts to give access to anti-retroviral treatment.

Around three million condoms will be distributed free at the conference
and condom vending machines will be installed in restrooms, factories and
department stores.


REGIONAL
_____________________________________

May 25, New Straits Times (Malaysia)
Panel on Myanmar dispute

A parliamentary committee will be formed to help resolve the dispute in
Myanmar and to seek freedom for pro-democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi.

Minister in the Prime Minister's Department Datuk Seri Nazri Aziz said the
committee would also include Opposition MPs. It is expected to meet on
June 8.

"We see the problem in Myanmar as a regional problem and we want to assist.

"We also want to assist Malaysia's permanent representative to the United
Nations, Tan Sri Razali Ismail, resolve the political conflict in the
country," he said in the Parliament lobby yesterday.

Oposition Leader Lim Kit Siang and Parti Keadilan Nasional president Datin
Seri Dr Wan Azizah Wan Ismail were also present at the Press conference.

_____________________________________

May 25, Xinhua News Service
Thailand to register immigrant workers with reinforced border patrol

Bangkok: Thailand would register immigrant workers in next month while
strengthening border control to prevent illegal influx, local press
reported on Tuesday.

The registration of alien workers would be started on June 15, the
national police spokesman Pongsapat Pongcharoen was quoted by Bangkok Post
as saying.

Meanwhile, the authority would improve border patrols in 128 districts of
30 border provinces, which were popular transit routes of illegal alien
workers.

The 30 provinces included those neighbored Myanmar, Laos, Cambodia and
Malaysia.

Pongsapat also said that illegal alien workers would be caught and
deported while those who took them into the country or those who provided
them with shelter would face legal action.

In the registration organized by the Labor Ministry in last September,
288,000 alien workers turned out to register.

An estimated 1 million to 2 million migrant workers from neighboring
countries now stay in Thailand illegally, according to local press report.

Last year, 106,597 illegal workers, mostly from Myanmar, Cambodia and
Laos, were caught.  A total of 287 employers of illegal workers, 179
people providing shelter for illegal workers and 125 people who smuggled
them in were arrested.


INTERNATIONAL
_____________________________________

May 25, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Refugees live in limbo for years, advocates find - Mark Bixler

Survey: Many stuck in camps, unable to work

More than 7 million refugees worldwide have been stuck for 10 years
without the right to work legally, own property or travel despite an
international law giving them such rights, an advocacy organization said
Monday.

The U.S. Committee for Refugees, in releasing an annual survey of global
refugee conditions, called attention to the problem of "warehousing,"
where people who have fled persecution in their native countries are stuck
in camps or other settlements for prolonged periods, often in dangerous
conditions.

"Warehousing is immoral, degrading, an affront to the principle that
refugees deserve protection," said Gregory Chen, director of policy
analysis and research for the committee.

The Washington-based nonprofit said countries that house refugees should
comply with the terms of the United Nations Refugee Convention of 1951. It
says countries that receive refugees should let them work for wages, but
many nations do not allow that.

Chen cited as an example the case of about 140,000 refugees who fled
atrocities in Myanmar, formerly Burma, more than 10 years ago. He said
they have lived since then in refugee camps in Thailand and that some have
been beaten, raped and killed. They are not allowed to earn money legally
in the camp or leave, conditions that he said foster a culture of forced
dependency and idleness.

By contrast, Zambia allowed Angolan refugees to farm in that country. The
refugees increased agricultural productivity and were less reliant on
donated food.

Merrill Smith, editor of "World Refugee Survey 2004," acknowledged that
addressing the problem is complicated because it involves various
countries and nongovernmental organizations.

He and Chen said Monday's release of the annual survey also begins a
campaign to call attention to refugees languishing for years, mainly in
Africa, the Middle East and South Asia.

Figures from the committee count Afghans in Iran and Pakistan as the most
populous "warehoused refugee" group, with 2.1 million refugees in those
countries.

Also high on the list are 1.6 million Palestinians in the West Bank and
Gaza, 475,000 Sudanese in various countries, 330,000 Liberians in Guinea,
Sierra Leone, Ghana and the Ivory Coast and 330,000 Burundians in
Tanzania, Congo and Rwanda.

The survey said there are 11.9 million refugees and an additional 23.6
million people who have been displaced within their own countries by the
threat of persecution.

_____________________________________

May 25, Reuters via Los Angeles Times
Unocal Shareholders Reject Bid for Dissidents' Access to Board

The proposal stems from discontent over the energy firm's stake in a gas
pipeline in Myanmar.

Shareholders in Unocal Corp. rejected a proposal Monday intended to force
the U.S. energy company to confront discontent over its stake in a Myanmar
natural gas pipeline by giving dissident shareholders direct access to
board members.

A coalition of institutional investors led by labor-affiliated Amalgamated
Bank had put forth the proposal to establish an office of communications
to help shareholders directly contact board members.

The proposal, which was opposed by the board, won support from nearly 21%
of voting shareholders at Monday's annual meeting in Los Angeles.

Meanwhile, protesters rallied outside the Unocal meeting as they have in
recent years to denounce the company's partnership with the military
government of Myanmar, branded by human-rights activists as one of the
world's most repressive.

The failed resolution follows a September meeting between officials
representing some pension funds and Unocal.

The funds had asked the company to consider withdrawing from the
$1.2-billion Yadana natural gas pipeline, which runs from the Andaman Sea
to Thailand, or to produce an analysis justifying its continued
investment.

The coalition of dissident public pension funds, which includes five New
York City pension funds, and state pensions from New York and Connecticut,
holds 2.6 million Unocal shares.

President Bush last week labeled the government of Myanmar, formerly known
as Burma, an "extraordinary threat" to U.S. interests, and renewed an
import ban.

But Unocal Chairman and Chief Executive Charles Williamson defended the
company's continuing presence in Myanmar to shareholders, saying it was
"good for stockholders ... and the country."

El Segundo-based Unocal faces lawsuits in state and federal courts by
villagers who said they or family members were raped, murdered or forced
to work on the pipeline by the Myanmar military, which guarded the project
from 1993 until its completion in 1998.

Unocal officials have consistently defended the project and its
partnership with Myanmar's state-owned oil company, Thailand's PTT
Exploration & Production and France's Total.

In other action, shareholders rejected proposals to award executives
restricted stock in lieu of options.

_____________________________________

May 23, San Francisco Chronicle
Junta's blows scatter Burmese families to Bay Area - Vanessa Hua

Loved ones still under thumb of military regime

Rangoon: Political prisoner Khin Maung Kyi is serving a 10-year sentence
in a jail far from his home in Burma's capital.

His 24-year-old son Koko Maung, in a world apart, lives with his aunt in
Sunnyvale. Before leaving Burma, he scanned stacks of family photos onto
floppy disks to remember the homeland that he can't return to for many
years.

One of the father's political allies, Myint Tun, was released in August
after seven years in prison. These days, he confers with opposition
leaders in Rangoon on strategies for bringing democracy back to
military-run Burma.

Myint Tun's twin brother works two jobs as a copy clerk in San Francisco
to support himself and his family in Burma. When homesick, the Richmond
District resident watches home videos, prays and meditates. He does not
want his name used for fear of being barred from ever returning to his
native land.

Burma's military junta has ripped apart these two families, whose
experiences reflect the anguish of many who speak out against the regime.
More than 1,300 political prisoners languish in Burmese jails, according
to Amnesty International.

Many of the prisoners' sons, daughters, brothers, sisters, husbands and
wives have left the country. Their lives apart from loved ones tell the
story of present-day Burma.

Democracy had only a brief run in this nation of 42 million people, which
was granted independence by Britain in 1948. Twelve years later, the first
in a succession of military governments took power in a coup d'etat led by
Gen. Ne Win.

In 1990, the junta refused to recognize its defeat at the polls after 80
percent of parliamentary seats were won by the National League for
Democracy (NLD), led by Aung San Suu Kyi.

>From 1989 to 1995, the junta kept Suu Kyi, who won the Nobel Peace Prize
in 1991, under house arrest. She was again detained in 2000 for two years.
Last May, government-backed thugs attacked hundreds of opposition
supporters, and Suu Kyi was placed under house arrest once more.

Two months later, the United States imposed economic sanctions on Burma,
banning imports, freezing Burmese assets in this country and forbidding
U.S. companies to offer financial services there. President Bush's
executive order said the steps were necessary because of the junta's
"continued repression of the democratic opposition."

On Monday, Bush extended the sanctions for another year. The move came as
the junta began a national convention billed as a first step toward
democracy -- but declined to lift Suu Kyi's house arrest.

Over the past four decades, the country's political turmoil and stagnant
economy have prompted between 10,000 and 50,000 Burmese to immigrate to
the Bay Area, according to estimates from academics and community
activists. Attracted by Northern California's progressive politics,
diversity and economic opportunities, they settled in San Francisco,
Oakland, Daly City, Fremont and San Jose.

The first time Khin Maung Kyi was jailed in 1989, Koko Maung, just 9 years
old, learned of his father's arrest while watching the evening news.
Police had nabbed him as he walked home from a meeting with Suu Kyi and
other pro-democracy leaders.
Koko Maung remembers bursting into tears. From a child's perspective, only
bad people are taken to jail. His father was held for three months.

In following years, Koko Maung and his sister begged their father to
withdraw from politics for the family's sake, but Khin Maung Kyi refused,
saying he could not shirk his duty to try to solve the country's problems.

In 1998, he was sentenced to 10 years' imprisonment, along with 11 other
NLD members, for "spreading false information." Amnesty International
named him a "prisoner of conscience" -- someone imprisoned solely for the
peaceful expression of beliefs.

"Some neighbors sympathized, but others were afraid to even ask how he
was," Koko Maung said of his 53-year-old father.

Myint Tun, 40, another NLD leader, was arrested in 1996 while shopping at
a bazaar. Elected to parliament in 1990, he was not allowed to take his
seat.
Sitting barefoot and cross-legged in a Rangoon living room, Myint Tun
recalled his years in solitary confinement and the several hunger strikes
he mounted to protest the arrest of political prisoners and a law that
protects the state from "destructive elements."

Meditation helped him overcome the ordeal. "I learned how to oppose the
government in a different way," he said. Burma is 90 percent Buddhist, and
has a highly developed system of monastery-trained meditation.

But the political consciousness that burns in Myint Tun never ignited in
his twin brother in San Francisco, who once dreamed of becoming a soldier.

"They want a democratic country, but how can they do it?" the twin said.
"Their leader, Aung San Suu Kyi, is under house arrest. What can she do?"

When his brother Myint Tun was arrested, the twin told his family that
imprisonment was the price his brother paid for getting involved in
politics.

"I told them, 'Don't be sad. He hasn't died. One day he will come back.
And even if he dies, we can't do anything. We can only go to the pagoda
and pray for him.' "

The imprisonment of Khin Maung Kyi drew his family closer together.
But Koko Maung knew his father's political past would prevent him from
landing a decent job. He also wanted a better education. In the last
decade, the junta shortened academic semesters and periodically closed
universities to prevent student uprisings.

He decided to leave Burma for the Bay Area, finally receiving permission
in 2000, on his third try.

A year later, after settling in the South Bay, he was granted political
asylum from the Immigration and Naturalization Service, now called
Citizenship and Immigration Services.

Today, Koko Maung studies computer science at Foothill College in Los
Altos and works part time as a busboy and cashier at a sushi restaurant in
Campbell.

Before leaving Burma, he received a short note of support from his father
written on the back of an instant soup label and smuggled out of prison.
Inmates are not allowed to write letters.

Koko Maung keeps the note in his wallet.

He also keeps a more recent letter that his father dictated to his mother
during her visit to Tha-Yet prison, about 200 miles northwest of the
capital.

"Try to survive," Khin Maung Kyi wrote. "Someday you'll see your family
again and have a better life."

Koko Maung now joins his father's sister, Htay Htay Kyi, and her husband
in protests and campaigns against the Burmese military junta. In 1996,
Htay Htay Kyi's family moved to Silicon Valley -- her husband is an
electrical engineer -- after they were granted political asylum.

"Here, I can speak freely of my father's situation," said Koko Maung. "In
Burma, people don't talk or look at each other on the bus. They don't
smile at each other.

"But it is still home. If we can run our own life, we would like to go
back. My life belongs there."

Back in Rangoon, Koko Maung's mother, Hnin Hnin Yu, told a reporter that
authorities monitor visitors to her home. She wants her son to stay in the
United States where people are free, she said.

"Good will come eventually," the 50-year-old mother of three said of her
country's future. "We can't go on like this."

Following his release from jail, Myint Tun entered a monastery for three
months at the request of his late father. Now, he is back working as an
NLD activist.
His twin brother, born five minutes after Myint Tun, seems his opposite in
many ways.

In 1999, he arrived in San Francisco after winning the "diversity
immigration lottery" -- a computer-generated drawing by the State
Department that grants 50,000 permanent resident visas annually to persons
from countries with low rates of immigration to the United States. A man
who speaks animatedly about his dreams, he says he wants to return to
Burma as a U.S. citizen and begin the process of bringing family members,
who live in a small village 175 miles from Rangoon, to San Francisco,
where he feels his future lies.

"You have to make happiness for yourself," he said.


OPINION/OTHER
_____________________________________

May 25, Irrawaddy
Poisoning the Future - Aung Naing Oo

There is little doubt that Burma’s National Convention will be a
success—at least in the eyes of the regime. But the very success the State
Peace and Development Council, or SPDC, will savor on completing the
convention and the rest of the road map will cause the poisoning of future
generations of Burmese—soldiers and citizens alike.

It is widely speculated that the Convention in progress at Nyaing Hnapin
will conclude quickly. The constitution-drafting process started in 1993
and has taken 11 years so far—probably the longest process in the world.
Actually, the proposed constitutional blueprint has long been finished.
All that junta needs is endorsement—preferably with a facade of public
support and participation to be provided by delegates.

Following the junta-orchestrated Depayin Massacre on May 30 last year, the
delaying tactics of the ruling generals became unviable. The military
elite then made up their collective mind: the constitution must be
completed. They now consider the National Convention the first step in
insuring their continued dominance and will not back down or backtrack.

Indeed, nothing—even the possible walkout of ceasefire groups in protest
at convention proceedings—will change their mind. The host of the assembly
(the incumbent military government) followed a well-thought out plan.
Also, Rangoon will be steadfast in overcoming any obstacles blocking the
road map.

The journey has just begun. But it was widely opposed even at its
embryonic stage. Opposition has grown louder even as the first step, the
National Convention, is completed. And it will remain so throughout the
road map and certainly in its aftermath.

This is because the SPDC is seeking a solution all for itself. The problem
in Burma is one of all citizens and so must be a genuine resolution.

In a normal transition that would follow negotiations, the successful
completion of a road map would be considered the “post-conflict” period.
However, Burma in the post-road map period cannot be considered
post-conflict because few, if any, of the outstanding problems will have
been solved.

Here are the key reasons: For a start, the SPDC refused to negotiate with
national and political stakeholders. It has excluded them from the
process. Additionally, the wars against various minority ethnic groups
will continue. Most importantly, the road map is not a mechanism to end
the repression in the country. The SPDC leaders who have carried out
repressive policies will remain in power.

According to the constitution under consideration, the people are given
very little in terms of freedom, democracy or protection of rights. The
human tendency is to ask for more when one is not given enough. As the
SPDC insists on retaining all prerogatives, the demand for more rights,
more freedom and greater personal safety will grow louder.

The junta will resist. But the struggle for greater rights will fuel
continued conflict. The implementation of the road map is taking place in
an atmosphere of antagonism, distrust, non-cooperation and even open
hostility from the people. The junta will maintain its sour relationship
with the Burmese population.

In short, all of these potential conflicts will burden the future of the
country. Progress, if there is any at all, will be excruciatingly slow.
Political instability will persist and that will hamper the economy
(compounded by sanctions and government incompetence).

Corruption will grow steadily worse as the country gradually becomes a
more comprehensively criminalized state. Burma’s natural resources will be
squandered on arms purchases (as resources are similarly squandered in
other criminalized, authoritarian states).

Rangoon either has yet to realize, or doesn’t care about the negative
effects that the proposed constitution will have on the country. This is
not surprising! The generals are short-sighted and bent on securing
short-terms gains for themselves. They seem oblivious to the possible
impact of their actions. As mentioned above, they will succeed in their
blind single-mindedness. They will, however, eventually reap what they
have sown. Let’s hope there’s something of the country worth recovering in
the aftermath.

Aung Naing Oo is a research associate with The Burma Fund, based in
Washington, DC.