BurmaNet News, July 8, 2004

[Editor]

July 8, 2004, Issue # 2512


INSIDE BURMA
Xinhua: Interview: Myanmar wishes friendly ties with all countries: FM

ON THE BORDER
Bangkok Post: Mae Sot: Life on the border

DRUGS
Mizzima: Burma’s Drug Flow Increase in Northeast

BUSINESS / MONEY
Xinhua: Myanmar to establish more factories in industrial zones

REGIONAL
AP: Police arrest woman for abetting murder of Myanmar maid
FEER: Front-line training

INTERNATIONAL
Mirror: Sorted and the City: Sergio Tacchini
AFP: Bush signs law renewing sanctions against Myanmar

OPINION / OTHER
Independent: Corridors of power: regional co-operation helps South-east
Asian peninsula prosper


INSIDE BURMA
______________________________________

July 8, Xinhua News Service
Interview: Myanmar wishes friendly ties with all countries: FM - Zhang Yunfei

Yangon: Myanmar Foreign Minister U Win Aung said his country wishes to
develop friendly ties with all countries in the world and development of
such ties with its five neighbors, including China, stands as Myanmar's
target of priority.

In an exclusive interview with Xinhua on the eve of an official goodwill
visit to China by Myanmar Prime Minister General Khin Nyunt, U Win Aung
said China and Myanmar share a common boundary of over 2,000 kilometers
and the two countries have been living on friendly terms with mutual
understanding, sympathy and assistance for a long time.

He stressed that Myanmar attaches much importance to the upcoming visit of
the prime minister, saying that the Myanmar side has stood ready to
discuss with the Chinese side on how to boost the two nations' friendly
and cooperative ties.

He emphasized that there are so many trade and economic sectors in which
China and Myanmar can cooperate and there exists huge potential.

U Win Aung said Myanmar adopts an independent and active foreign policy to
safeguard national interest.

"The emphasizing point of Myanmar's foreign policy refers to five
neighbors --Bangladesh, India, China, Laos and Thailand," he said, adding
that Myanmar has worked hard for the purpose.

He noted that Myanmar, being a member of the Association of Southeast
Asian Nations (ASEAN), has to actively safeguard ASEAN's interest as well
as to push forward actively the relations of ASEAN3 (China, Japan and
South Korea).

U Win Aung stressed particularly that Myanmar never designates anyone as
an enemy but wishes to develop friendly ties with all countries including
the western countries.


ON THE BORDER
______________________________________

July 4, Bangkok Post
Mae Sot: Life on the border - Myint Shwe

For more than half of his forty years, all of his adult life, Win Myint, a
Burmese from the Karen State of Burma, has been living in Mae Sot, Tak
province. Since he left in 1980 he has never returned to his native
village, about 320 kilometres across rivers and mountains to the
northwest.

Equipped with a Honda motorbike and a Nokia cell phone, symbols of his
status, he is a broker in Mae Sot's growing gem and jade market, which
flourishes on one of the town's two main streets. The gems are smuggled
from mines deep inside Burma.

Win speaks and reads Thai like a local. Even his name has been "Siamised"
_Winmit Yosalawin, as printed on his business card. His is a case of self
acculturation for better acceptance.

But there are tens of thousands of Burmese in Mae Sot who have not made
the transition so well as Win Myint. They came, and keep coming, to
Thailand for employment, picking up any job which is open to them. Despite
persecution over their immigration status and pay below the minimum wage
officially set in the Kingdom, they live on here for years, even decades.

Mae Sot is one of the six border towns that dot Thailand's western
boundaries which prosper through their economic interactions with Burma.
Three decades of trade with the resource rich and politically troubled
Burma have turned Mae Sot, formerly a small agricultural town, into a
growing urban commercial and industrial centre which is much bigger than
the provincial capital of Tak.

In 1997, as part of its grand economic integration strategy, Thailand
funded the Friendship Bridge over the Moei River to link the two nations
and further enhance trade. Through Mae Sot, Thailand exports processed
food stuffs, fabrics, plastics, electronics and medicines to Burma. It
imports from Burma livestock, lumber, marine products, jade and other gems
and Burmese antiques. The official two-way trade accounts for around three
billion baht annually. The unofficial trade may be even more lucrative.
Trafficking in yaa ba (methamphetamine) has been contained to a large
extent in the past couple of years, but it still continues.

The Burmese started coming to Thailand in large numbers in the seventies,
a time in which Burma's economy began to suffer under fundamentalist
socialism. The long ethnic civil war also spewed out members of minority
groups - Karens, Mons, Shans and Burmese Muslims - into Thailand. After
the nationwide democracy uprisings of 1988 and the following international
economic sanctions on Burma, Thailand was the recipient of a mass exodus
of ordinary Burmese that still continues.

The latest group of Burmese arriving in Mae Sot are political exiles
fleeing the oppression of the Burmese military government. Though
relatively tiny, this last category is by no means insignificant. They
base their activities in Mae Sot because it is the shortest distance to
Burma's power centre in Rangoon.

The political activities of these groups have cost Bangkok in terms of its
relationship with Rangoon, often resulting in a unilateral suspension of
the lucrative border trade. But suppressing the dissidents also causes
outcries from the democratic world community, and accusations of appeasing
Rangoon. Because of this dilemma, the situation in Mae Sot is becoming a
direct concern for the Thai government.

PARTIAL INTEGRATION

The early Burmese migrants worked in farms and in domestic environs. By
the eighties, Thai entrepreneurs began to use their cheap labour in
manufacturing. Garment, plastics, footwear, food processing and sawmill
operations rose up quickly. Lucky young women got jobs in factories,
restaurants and retail outlets, whereas unlucky ones ended up in the flesh
trade.

Mae Sot today is home to around a hundred thousand people of Burmese
origin, along with thirty thousand native Thais. According to Win Myint,
even a poor Burmese spends a thousand baht on room, food and other
essentials monthly. That means 100 million baht a month, or 1.2 billion
annually, a great contributing factor to Mae Sot's economy.

The above figures exclude the Mae-la refugee camp, a decade-old shantytown
of forty thousand Burmese refugees outside Mae Sot. Funded by
international donors and managed by non-governmental organisations, the
administrators of the refugee camp shop in Mae Sot for supplies. Win Myint
estimates this comes to around 500 baht for each refugee's monthly basic
needs, an additional 240 million baht yearly.

Despite the relative economic prosperity, a wild-west mentality
characteristic of a remote border town haunts the Burmese. They are easy
victims of local thugs. Since most of them are illegal, local law
enforcement is also relaxed in cases where the victims are Burmese. Two
months ago, a Burmese girl working at a factory was lured out by the
factory's Thai security guard, who is an ex-convict. He raped and killed
her. Her funeral procession was joined by a thousand fellow Burmese
workers in town.

Last year, six new Burmese arrivals were killed in a farmhouse outside Mae
Sot. This prompted a formal complaint by Rangoon, which usually ignores
the welfare of its citizens abroad.

However, Mae Sot's huge immigrant community has integrated to a large
extent with the town over the years, socially as well as culturally. This
correlation has had lasting impacts on the face of the town. Burmese has
gradually become the spoken language of commerce in Mae Sot today.
Business signs are in both Thai and Burmese, and Thai monasteries hire
less expensive Burmese decorative artists, who naturally paint or draw
Burmese style artistic creations in the edifices. On days of auspicious
Buddhist ceremonies, the participating Burmese bring in their own
traditional music and dance, with the acquiescence of the Thai organisers,
a delicate insertion of Burmese elements into the local Thai culture based
on the common religion. To some extent this has been possible due to the
assumption that through the promotion of common Buddhist values more
cooperation by the Burmese authorities can be won to enhance the already
lucrative trade.

The Thai-Myanmar Trade and Cultural Cooperation Association is jointly
patronised by Deputy Prime Minister Gen Chavalit Yongchaiyudh on the Thai
side and by Prime Minister Gen Khin Nyunt for the Burmese. But control of
the town's economy is safely in Thai hands. Business partnerships between
Thai and Burmese traders exist, but apparently are not yet common.
Generally the Burmese- and Thai-owned shops in the market are in separate
blocks.

Sonjit Runjamrussamee, 47, who was born and lived all his life in Mae Sot,
evaluated the Burmese factor in the life of the town:

"Cheap Burmese workers help Thai products to be very competitive in the
international market. They buy all they need in Mae Sot and that also
helps the local economy.

"But they live in crowded rooms to save their money. This makes the
environment degraded with their garbage and personal refuse. Many of them
have infectious diseases, such as tuberculosis, dysentery and malaria.
This concerns us a great deal. But anyway, we do not hate them. If we
hated them we would stage protests to expel them. We do not."


DRUGS
______________________________________

July 8, Mizzima News
Burma’s Drug Flow Increase in Northeast

Guwahati: There has been a large-scale increase in drug smuggling,
including psychotropic substances, across the Northeast of India.

While the region is the major transit route of drugs destined for
metropolitan cities like Delhi and Mumbai from Burma and Thailand, it also
serves as a major route to supply cheaper alternatives like Phensedyl
cough syrup to countries like Bangladesh and Burma.

A huge consignment of Phensedyl bound for Bangladesh was seized by the
Border Security Force in Tripura, a northeast state of India recently.

Officials involved in the monitoring of the drug trade in the region said
that the North East has become the ideal route for drug traffickers as
they can take advantage of the porous border and the protection given by
militant groups to run a thriving business. The militant groups are also
said to be getting a cut from the profits generated.

“The region is the shortest route for drugs from Southeast Asia to the
metros,” an official said.

What is even more worrisome is the regular seizure of marijuana intended
to be smuggled to from the region to mainland India. In a few cases, even
members of the Central police organizations have been caught with these
substances.

“It only proves how lucrative the trade in such substances have become,”
sources said, adding that changing lifestyles in metropolitan cities has
increased the demand for intoxicating drugs.

The officials said that there is an unusually large flow of substances
like Phensedyl in the region. The abuse and smuggling of this drug has
been going on for more than a decade. Other drugs like Proxyvone,
Ephedrine, Methaqualone and Mandrax are also available in plenty here.

With the region becoming a major transit zone, drug addiction is also on
the rise in the North East. The officials, however, had no solid figures
at hand but admitted that the problem is very much prevalent in Guwahati
too. Though high-value drugs have still not made much inroad here, there
are several cases of abuse of the synthetic stimulant, Proxyvone.


BUSINESS / MONEY
______________________________________

July 8, Xinhua News Service
Myanmar to establish more factories in industrial zones

Yangon: Myanmar is making preparations for the establishment of steel
plants and machinery equipment factories in three industrial zones to
produce equipment as import-substitutes, a local news journal reported
Thursday.

Situated in Mandalay, Monywa and Taunggyi, these establishments will be
supported by the state, which has injected 5 million US dollars for the
move, the 7Day quoted the Ministry of Industry-2 as saying.

The Mandalay factory will manufacture diesel engines, using imported
Chinese technology to produce small-sized 18-horse-power single piston
engines, while the Monywa factory will produce gear boxes and the Taunggyi
mainly other accessories.

According to the Central Statistical Organization, Myanmar imported over
500 million US dollars' worth of various machinery equipment annually in
recent years, accounting for 23 percent of the total imports.

Myanmar, an agro-based developing country with relatively weak
infrastructure, has to depend for the majority of its different machinery
equipment in demand on imports mostly from China, Japan, Germany and South
Korea.

Meanwhile, Myanmar has designated the current fiscal year of 2004-05 as
the country's Industrial Development Year (IDY), aimed at developing the
sector with high momentum. Out of the country's 19 industrial zones, the
three said zones are covered by the industrial upgradation program during
the IDY.

There are 6,830 private industries in the 19 industrial zones with 37,500
outside the zones, according to the sources.

Official statistics show that there are more than 100,000 private
industries in the whole of Myanmar with over 2 million workers being
employed and 90 percent of the industries are small and medium ones
categorized into 13 kinds.

The figures also reveal that Myanmar's industrial sector, which
contributes about 9.8 percent to the gross domestic product, grew by 22.6
percent in 2003-04 from 21.8 percent in 2001-02 when it started its third
five-year economic plan.


REGIONAL
______________________________________

July 8, Associated Press
Police arrest woman for abetting murder of Myanmar maid

Bangkok: Thai police have arrested a woman accused of helping her husband
torture their 18-year-old Myanmar maid, who was later set on fire and then
died at a hospital.

Yuwadee Akarawiboon, 41, the owner of a construction company in the
central Lopburi province, was arrested on Wednesday following a two-year
investigation, police Col. Sathit Thonsanguan said.

Her husband, an air force captain who is accused of dousing the maid with
gasoline before setting her ablaze, is still at large and faces a murder
charge, he said.

If convicted, Yuwadee faces up to 15 years in prison.

Sathit said other Myanmar workers who witnessed the torture will testify
that Yuwadee and her husband, Suchart Akarawiboon, beat the maid, Ba Suu,
and poured acid on her legs at the couple's house in July 2002.

Ba Suu also told police details of the attacks before her death at a
hospital.

She said Yuwadee and Suchart forced her to confess to stealing a gold
necklace. After the torture, she was driven to an unknown location by two
men, doused with gasoline and set on fire, she told police.

The men put out the fire, took her back home, applied some balm and later
dumped her in Uthai Thai province, 190 kilometers (120 miles) north of
Bangkok, she told police.

She was found badly burned and taken to the hospital, where died nine days
later.

The two men who set her on fire are believed to be Suchart and a Thai
aide, Kamron Polnikorn, Sathit said.

Officials estimate that about 1 million workers from other Asian
countries, mainly Myanmar, are employed as cheap labor in Thailand, often
underpaid, exploited and abused. More than half of them work in
agriculture, construction and fishing.

______________________________________

July 15, Far Eastern Economic Review
Front-line training - Michael Vatikiotis

Special Report: Aids: Drugs

Chris Beyrer started working with HIV/Aids in Thailand in the early 1990s
on one of the first trials of an Aids vaccine, among military recruits.
But he grew impatient: "I found the vaccine trials frustratingly slow
since we were obviously in the midst of an epidemic," he says. So he moved
out of applied medicine and helped to set up a programme at Johns Hopkins
University in Baltimore to train Asian health officials and doctors in
Aids prevention. Currently he is associate research professor and director
of the Johns Hopkins Fogarty Aids International Training and Research
Programme. "I thought that it was critical to empower people in the region
in the medical and scientific aspects of Aids," says Beyrer. "This way
they can focus on prevention. A big part of the programme is to train
people and build capacity."

One of his students is head of the drug-treatment programme in Burma.
Burma is a huge challenge because of its military-led junta. Undeterred by
the obstacles, Beyrer has worked along the Thai-Burma border to
disseminate information about Aids. "A huge problem in Aids prevention is
the lack of access to information," he says. People trust radio broadcasts
from outside the country, so he uses broadcasts in the languages of local
ethnic groups to offer information and advice. The task was never easy,
given the security situation along the border. "Harassment of
non-governmental organizations working on Burma on the Thai side has been
intense," he says.


INTERNATIONAL
______________________________________


July 8, The Mirror
Sorted and The City: Sergio Tacchini - Andrew Penman & Michael Greenwood

Italian sportswear brand Sergio Tacchini is to stop getting kit made in
Burma.

Most clothing retailers including Tesco and M&S refuse to trade in stock
from the troubled state because it boosts the coffers of the nasty
military regime.

Mark Farmaner, of the Burma Campaign UK, said: "This is really great news."

______________________________________

July 7, Agence France Presse
Bush signs law renewing sanctions against Myanmar

Raleigh: US President George W. Bush signed a law renewing a range of
sanctions against military-ruled Myanmar for a further period of 12
months, the White House announced.

Bush signed the law days after US Secretary of State Colin Powell voiced
concerned about the slow pace of democratic reform in Myanmar and the
ongoing detention of democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi.

The measure Bush signed into law "renews the import restrictions contained
in the Burmese Freedom and Democracy Act of 2003," the White House said in
a short statement.

Bush signed the law during a visit to the southern state of North Carolina
in a bid to pressure the Yangon junta to improve its human rights record,
promote democracy and clamp down on drug trafficking.

The law bans US investments in and imports from Myanmar, formerly Burma.
It includes a ban on all financial services and certain property dealings,
an arms embargo and the suspension of all bilateral aid.

The United States also maintains visa restrictions on Myanmar's senior
government officials, and opposes all new lending or grant programs by
international financial institutions.

The measure Bush signed Wednesday had broad bipartisan support and was
passed by a wide margin in both houses of Congress.

Since 1990, the United States has kept its diplomatic representation in
Myanmar at the charge d'affaires level.

Myanmar's military junta has ruled the country since 1962 and continues to
keep democracy leader and Nobel Peace laureate Aung San Suu Kyi under
house arrest.


OPINION / OTHER
______________________________________

July 8, The Independent - Hamish McRae
Corridors of power: regional co-operation helps South-east Asian peninsula
prosper

Phnom Penh: What do you do with a region where the economic rationale
points to a large measure of integration but political and historic
divisions keep the place apart?

Europe has found one answer to that and shown that up to a certain point
at least there are very large economic gains to be had by encouraging
ever-greater integration.

South-east Asia has been wrestling with a similar problem and just over a
decade ago came up with an intriguing solution. It is now rethinking how
to press further forward.

The history of the South-east Asian peninsular is about as tortured as you
could get: the Vietnam War, genocide in Cambodia, extreme poverty in
landlocked Laos and a continued military dictatorship in Burma, also known
as Myanmar. British attention has been focused on the success of the
former colonies of Singapore, Hong Kong and Malaysia but they are
physically on the fringe of the region. Of all the core countries in the
South-east Asian peninsular, only Thailand has achieved a real economic
take-off and even so, its progress has been uneven.

The idea of creating the Greater Mekong Subregion came together in 1992
under the wing of the Asian Development Bank. It comprised of those five
countries above, plus the Yunnan province of China, which is physically
the top end of the peninsular and whose trade routes would naturally head
north-south along the river systems rather than east-west across the
mountains to the rest of China. Self-evidently the region is always going
to be a loose economic association, far looser than even the early vision
of a European common market, let alone the present EU. But it is big - 250
million people - and it is fascinating to see what can be achieved by
well-judged economic co-operation without any political sub-text.

The growth in output since 1992 is shown in the graph. Now that is an
index, and it flatters the countries that started from a very low base.
The best performer is the Yunnan province, though it remains poor by
comparison with the booming coastal regions of China. The worst is
Thailand, but then it started as the richest country in the region and
remains so. Burma has done well, again from a very low base.

All this ranks as a reasonable achievement. But it has been driven
basically by the different countries doing what they had already been
doing rather better. Inter-regional trade has shot up but the real drivers
have been international trade and an end to destructive economic policies.
Thus Thailand has grown not by trading more with neighbouring Burma but by
attracting inward investment and exporting to the rest of the world.
Cambodia has grown by having a civil constitution and a market economy.
Vietnam has grown because, rather like China, it dumped the communist
central planning system while retaining the political system. To say this
is not to belittle the idea of the Greater Mekong Subregion. It is to
point out that simply ending destructive economic policies and letting
market signals show through can pull things along a great deal.

Yes, regional co-operation has helped but it would be wrong to attribute
all the growth in the graph to its benefits.

What happens next? Well, having got so far, I suspect that we are at the
stage where inter-regional co-operation could become a much more important
driver of progress. The Asian Development Bank has just started a new
plan, built around the idea of economic corridors that run across the
national boundaries, along new or at least radically improved
communications routes. They are sketched on the map.

Corridors are fascinating. Why should economic development so frequently
happen along strips between cities as well as in cities themselves? Why do
cities that are linked by such corridors seem to do better than ones that
are isolated? We have corridors in the UK, along the M4 for example; the
north-east of the US is an almost continuous corridor from Boston to
Washington.

The practical element of these corridors are good all-weather roads, power
transmission lines and high-capacity telecommunications backbones. There
will eventually be a road to Mandalay (in central Burma), or rather via
Mandalay, that will link the region to Bangladesh and India. But the two
that will probably have the most immediate impact will be the east-west
one from Hue in the middle of Vietnam to Moulmein on the Gulf of Martaban
in Burma, and the southern one from Bangkok to Ho Chi Minh City via Phnom
Penh.

The east-west one is interesting because there really isn't much trade
along this axis at the moment. There is economic activity but it is all
north/south. The southern one is interesting because it links two capital
cities - huge Bangkok and much smaller Phnom Penh - and one former one, Ho
Chi Minh City, the place we used to call Saigon. It also connects Cambodia
to the rest of what was once its own economic region, the Mekong delta.
All that is happening is that links that would naturally be there had
political history been different are being recreated. Obvious, but it
needs a concept such as an economic region to put it in place.

The other two elements of the plan - the electricity and telecom grids -
are important in a different way. Power matters because there is a great
regional shortage of it. Rapid growth inevitably eats up power. Rapid
growth on what is pretty much a western model - motor cars,
air-conditioning - is especially power-hungry.

But the timing of power demand varies from country to country and creating
a regional grid is a rational way of distributing what there is. As for
telecoms - it is not very difficult to set up a regional high-capacity
network. But it does need to be done and in practice in a region where
there are several different national entities, that needs an external
agent, in this case the Asian Development Bank, to push it along.

Looked at from the perspective of the countries in the region, the task is
to help make the laggards on this peninsular as competitive and prosperous
places as the rest of South-east Asia, and thereby tackle the obvious
problems of extreme poverty that continue to exist. There are considerable
road-blocks, of course.

I don't think much more can be expected of Burma until there is regime
change there. And sadly the usual problems of corruption and environmental
degradation are pretty widespread too. But equally it is very hard to see
too much downside from the development of these corridors of economic
activity, provided at least that the environmental concerns can be coped
with.

>From the outsider's point of view, though, this is more than a story about
the benefits of regional economic co-operation. It is an experiment about
what really matters in economic development: if you put in good road
communications, good power supplies and telecom links into five different
countries and the province of a sixth, you can begin to see which set of
economic policies within the region work best.

This is not a level playing field for they start from different positions.
Still, if for example Yunnan continues to outpace the rest of the region,
that will say something very important about Chinese policy. And if Burma
picks up, well, I'm not too sure what we think about that.