BurmaNet News, April 15, 2010

[Editor]

April 15, 2010, Issue #3941


INSIDE BURMA
Reuters: Myanmar festival bombings kill eight, wound 94
Mizzima News: Township Chairman among injured in bomb blasts

REGIONAL
The Jakarta Post: World activists demand release of Suu Kyi

INTERNATIONAL
AFP: US warns Myanmar junta it can review dialogue

OPINION / OTHER
Daily Nation (Kenya): When soldiers make big law; Burma vs Kenya – Charles
Onyango-Obbo

STATEMENT
Asian Human Rights Commission: BURMA: Elections without rights





____________________________________
INSIDE BURMA

April 15, Reuters
Myanmar festival bombings kill eight, wound 94 – Aung Hla Tun

YANGON (Reuters) - Three bombs exploded at a water festival in the former
Myanmar capital Yangon on Thursday, killing eight people and wounding 94,
state TV said, blaming "destructive elements" for the attacks.

The junta has in the past blamed bombings on anti-government dissident
groups and separate ethnic rebels seeking autonomy in the former Burma,
which has been under military rule since 1962.

There were no immediate claims of responsibility. State TV said five men
and three women were killed. Hospital sources had put the toll at nine.

Witnesses said they heard three loud explosions at a pavilion alongside
Kandawgyi Lake.

Revelers in Myanmar, as well as neighboring Thailand and Laos, celebrate
New Year by dousing friends and strangers with scented water and white
powder.

Most of the pavilions on U Htaungbo Road, along the scenic lakeside, are
run by companies close to the authorities.

In May 2005, three bombs exploded at a convention center and supermarkets,
killing 23 people and wounding more than 160. There have been a few
sporadic bombings since.

ETHNIC REBEL GROUPS

At the time, the authorities blamed ethnic rebel groups, including the
Karen National Union, the Shan State Army-South, and the Karenni National
Progressive Party, as well as a government in exile known as the National
Coalition Government of the Union of Burma, which opposes the junta's
rule.

In 1990, Nobel Peace Prize laureate Aung San Suu Kyi's party won a general
election but was not allowed to take power by the military, which
continues to maintain a tight grip on the country.

An election is expected to be held later in the year but no timeframe has
been specified. The upcoming poll has been widely derided in advance as a
sham to make the country appear democratic, with the military retaining
control over key institutions.

Suu Kyi, currently under house arrest, has been in detention without trial
for more than 15 of the past 21 years.

Tension with armed ethnic groups has been rising in Myanmar in recent
weeks following attempts by the regime to forcibly recruit rebel fighters
for an army-run border patrol force.

Critics say Myanmar's army is seeking to neutralize ethnic minorities
ahead of the elections.

Many of the ethnic groups do not trust the military and its ethnic Burman
leaders, whom they have long resented, and feel they have nothing to gain
by taking part in the electoral process.

If they disarm and surrender hard-won autonomy, they could lose control
over lucrative trade in natural resources and, in some cases, in opium and
methamphetamines.

(Additional reporting by Jason Szep and Ambika Ahuja in Bangkok, Writing
by Nick Macfie; Editing by Ron Popeski)

____________________________________

April 15, Mizzima News
Township Chairman among injured in bomb blasts – Min Thet

Rangoon – Three bombs exploded in quick succession at the X2O water
festival pavilion in Rangoon at about 3 p.m. today near the Theinbyu
driving track, Kandawgyi Lake, Mingala Taungnyunt Township.

The blasts killed five men and three women, including Township Municipal
Officer of Mingala Taungnyunt, an official of the Yangon (Rangoon) City
Development Committee (YCDC) said. bombs-explosion1

However, some unconfirmed sources said nine people had died.

The number of injured may touch 90 but according to the Rangoon Division
Police Force Chief’s office, 63 people had been admitted to the Rangoon
General Hospital (RGH) as in-patients, it is learnt.

“A lot of people were injured in the blasts including Sub-Inspector of
Police Maung Maung Han and Mingala Taugnyung Township Peace and
Development Council (TPDC) Chairman Kyaw Nyein. Around 63 persons were
admitted to RGH,” a duty officer at the Rangoon Police Force Chief’s
office said.

“When I heard three loud explosions at about 3 p.m., I was near Yuzana
Plaza. First I thought it was car tyres, which had burst, but later
realized that it was something else. I called my friends at the water
festival at the Theinbyu ground and they said bombs had exploded. When I
reached there, the area was cordoned off by the police. There was chaos
everywhere with people running and wailing. Parents of revellers at the
pavilion were crying,” a person who reached the bomb blast site within 15
minutes said.

The state-run media reported at 6 p.m. local time that three men and three
women were killed in the blasts which left 75 injured. But it later
reported that total eight died and 84 injured.

“It is strange and unprecedented. The government has never before
announced such news so fast,” a local resident from Tamwe Township said.

The perpetrators of the bomb blasts have not yet been identified but the
police said time bombs were planted at the pavilion.

The police started making arbitrary arrests of people near the blast site.
A 20-year old youth from Mingala Taungnyunt Township, who fled from the
spot to evade arrest said.

“We ran from the spot. They seized my camera,” he said.

____________________________________
REGIONAL

April 15, The Jakarta Post
World activists demand release of Suu Kyi – Lilian Budianto

Jakarta – Hundreds of participants in the World Movement for Democracy
(WMD) symposium in Jakarta have signed a petition calling for the release
of Myanmar’s Aung San Suu Kyi and  a fair trial for Malaysia’s Anwar
Ibrahim.

Kim Campbell, a member of the steering committee of the WMD and former
prime minister of Canada said, the issue of progress towards democracy in
Malaysia and Myanmar had loomed over the symposium that brought together
600 activists from around 110 countries.

Former deputy prime minister of Malaysia Anwar Ibrahim, who also addressed
the WMD in Jakarta, has been facing a trial over accusations of sexual
harassment against an aide. Meanwhile, Myanmar is likely to see no change
in its upcoming elections as the opposition leader Suu Kyi has been barred
from running from office under new poll regulations.

“We call for the release of Aung San Suu Kyi and a fair trial for Anwar
Ibrahim. The petition will be presented to the ASEAN Secretary-General
Surin Pitsuwan,” said Campbell.

Democracy in Southeast Asia has hogged the spotlight in the WMD 6th
symposium as human rights activists have been sharing information on the
latest situations in their home countries. Besides Malaysia and Myanmar,
recent bloody uprising in Thailand has also grabbed  attention with much
sympathy for the embattled Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva. Protests in
Thailand have claimed the lives of over 20 people, including a journalist
and soldiers.

Carl Gershman, president of the National Endowment for Democracy, said the
Thai government had a reputation for non-violence and the recent death
toll had hinted at the scale of the urgency forcing the government to take
action.

Khin Maung Win, deputy director for the Democratic Voice of Burma, said
the Thai crisis was the fault of ousted prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra,
who has financed protests.

The WMD also presented honors to four worldwide democracy activists on
Wednesday for their efforts to advance freedom and democracy amid
government crack-downs.

Iran’s Mahnaz Afkhami, Russia’s Dokka Itslaev, Venezuela’s Roberto Patino
and Syria’s Radwan Ziadeh will receive the John Boyce Hurford honor.
Hurford was a philanthropist who helped form WMD.

Mahnaz was a lecturer in literature before becoming involved in the
women’s movement, which has put her life under constant threat. Mahnaz has
been involved in the “One Million Signatures Campaign” to end gender
inequality in Iran.

Mahnaz said, “the campaign aimed at collecting one million signatures in
support of granting women equal legal status as men”. At present, men have
the sole right to divorce and except in special cases, the right to
custody of children. “

Dokka Itslaev from Russia’s Memorial Chechnya has been working on
promoting human rights in the North Caucasus, which has been under close
government control over a local insurgency. “The government has continued
to clamp down on journalists and freedom movement activists,” said Dokka.
Dokka pointed to the death of one Memorial Chechnya activist, Natalia
Estermirova, last year.

Roberto Patino from Venezuela is a student movement leader in the
Caracas’s Student Federation of Simon Bolivar University. The 21 year old
student of manufacturing engineering has been involved in the student
freedom movement since he was 17 and the peace movement.

Radwan Ziadeh from Syria has been living in exile in the US for years
since the government blacklisted him for his vocal opposition to
injustice.

____________________________________
INTERNATIONAL

April 15, Agence France Presse
US warns Myanmar junta it can review dialogue

Washington – The United States on Wednesday warned Myanmar's generals that
it could review a dialogue with them in the absence of democratic reforms.

Washington has also conveyed concerns directly to the military junta over
its decision to hold elections that effectively barred key opposition
leaders, an official said.

"I think it will be fair to say in terms of the election law and our
desire to see an internal dialogue between the various stakeholders about
the upcoming election that we are disappointed in the steps that had been
taken," said US Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific
affairs Kurt Campbell.

"We have conveyed (this) directly to the regime and also to the countries
that encouraged us to begin a dialogue with the country," he said in reply
to a question at a forum on US-Malaysia relations held at the Center for
Strategic and International Studies in Washington.

"We do think we have been able to pass some consequential messages but
overall, I would say that we are going to need to see some steps on the
part of the leadership in (Myanmar) to sustain this process going
forward."

Campbell's remarks came ahead of the visit to Myanmar by Chinese Premier
Wen Jiabao as part of an April 22-25 swing through Southeast Asia.

China is the isolated state's sole major ally and trade partner and the
energy-hungry Asian giant is an eager buyer of Myanmar's sizeable natural
gas reserves. Beijing has in the past tried to shield the junta from
international sanctions imposed over its poor human rights record.

In announcing Wen's visit, Beijing said this week it hoped Myanmar's
elections would lead to national reconciliation of the various parties in
the country "to ensure national stability and development."

The elections have been criticized as lacking credibility because of laws
that effectively bar opposition leader and democracy icon Aung San Suu Kyi
from taking part.

They will be the country's first polls in two decades, but Suu Kyi's
political party has called a boycott over rules that would have forced it
to expel her as leader if it wanted to participate.

The Barack Obama administration, which has made a signature policy of
engaging US adversaries, last year initiated a dialogue with the junta,
judging that a previous approach of isolating the regime had not borne
fruit.

Following the junta's election decision, US lawmakers pushed the Obama
administration to review its policy of dialogue and tighten sanctions.

Nine US senators across the political spectrum in a recent letter to Obama
urged the Treasury Department to act on a law that would crack down on US
bank accounts linked to Myanmar's leaders and target foreign banks that do
business with the junta.

Asked to comment on the possibility of tightening sanctions, Campbell
said, "I would say we have obviously not eased sanctions."

The United States "always retain the right and the ability" to make any
decision on the sanctions issue, he said.

____________________________________
OPINION / OTHER

April 14, Daily Nation (Kenya)
When soldiers make big law; Burma vs Kenya – Charles Onyango-Obbo

With the passage of the draft constitution in Parliament, and most of the
political class seemingly agreed to campaign for it in the referendum,
Kenya has come very close to finally putting this matter to bed.

A section of church leaders are opposed to the draft, mainly because it
retains the kadhi courts, and also because they believe it’s cleverly
trying to legalise abortion. They have sworn to campaign against it.

That will be something, with priests and bishops on one side holding
rallies to urge a “No” vote, and the politicians on the other pushing for
a “Yes” vote. It is a high stakes game for the churches.

Because they have not recovered from the alleged complicity of some of the
church leaders in the 2008 post-election killings, if they go openly for a
“No” vote, they cannot afford to lose.

If they do, they will be disgraced like the Catholic Church in Rwanda,
which opposed the Rwanda Patriotic Army rebels, and whose leaders actively
participated in the 1994 genocide.

In the end, the RPA won and is now the government. And it never allows the
Catholic Church to forget that it fomented genocide. It will be decades
before the Catholic Church recovers its moral authority in Rwanda.

However Kenyan politicians, like their colleagues elsewhere, can afford to
lose. That is the currency of their trade. They just pick themselves up,
dust themselves off, and wait for the next political fight.

Kenyan commentators and politicians also like to speak about how the
nearly 20 years it has taken to get this far in the constitution making
process is one of the longest in the world.

We checked, and it is not just “one of the longest”, but the longest.
Until 2008, the record was held by Burma (Myanmar), which took 17 years to
get its constitution.

The common explanations for why Kenya’s constitution review has taken so
long are, first, lack of political will and, second, because it has a
querulous multiparty system that no single group has been able to totally
dominate in recent years.

However, Burma doesn’t have such “problems”. First, Senior General Than
Shwe and his fellow officers are running one of the most repressive
regimes in the world.

In 1990 when the military realised that the popular opposition was going
to win the 1991 elections, they placed her under house arrest — where she
remains 20 years later.

DESPITE THE DETENTION AND THE fact that she was not able to campaign for
her party, it still won 82 per cent of the parliamentary. There are no
prizes for guessing what happened next — the military refused to recognise
the results, end of story.

At about the same time, the military junta established the National
Convention to write a new constitution. While Kenya and quite a few other
countries in Africa had a highly consultative process, there was no such
thing in Burma.

According to online news journal The Irrawady, the Burmese public was
largely excluded from the constitutional drafting process. The National
Convention’s proceedings were not open. Delegates who opposed the military
junta’s views were expelled or silenced.

____________________________________
STATEMENT

April 15, Asian Human Rights Commission
BURMA: Elections without rights

The government of Burma has set down conditions for the forming of
political parties that would have people associate in order to participate
in anticipated elections, but nowhere is the right to associate
guaranteed. While parties are required to have at least a thousand members
to enlist for the national election--500 for regional assemblies--a host
of extant security laws circumscribe how, when and in what numbers persons
can associate.

The allowance of association without the right to associate is manifest in
the Political Parties Registration Law 2010, which contains references to
some preexisting laws that prohibit free association. According to section
12, as translated by the Asian Human Rights Commission,

"A party that infringes any of the following will cease to have
authorization to be a political party: ... (3) Direct or indirect
communication with, or support for, armed insurgent organisations and
individuals opposing the state; or organisations and individuals that the
state has designated as having committed terrorist acts; or associations
that have been declared unlawful; or these organisations' members."

As in present-day Burma--or Myanmar as it is now officially known--anybody
can be found guilty of having supported insurgents, of having been
involved in terrorist acts, and above all, of having contacted unlawful
associations, the law effectively allows the authorities to de-register
any political party at any time.

The case of U Myint Aye is indicative. For founding a local group of human
rights defenders and speaking on overseas radio broadcasts about what he
saw after Cyclone Nargis, Myint Aye was arrested and accused of a
fabricated bombing plot. The military tried and convicted him and two
other accused in a press conference during September 2008; in November a
court followed suit, handing down a sentence of life imprisonment
(AHRC-UAU-018-2009).

More recently, the AHRC has issued appeals on evidence-free cases in which
people have been tried and convicted to long terms of imprisonment for
having allegedly had contact with unlawful groups outside the country.
These include the case of Dr. Wint Thu and eight others in Mandalay
(AHRC-UAC-011-2010), and the case of Myint Myint San and two others in
Rangoon who were convicted for allegedly receiving money from abroad that
was for the welfare of families with imprisoned relatives
(AHRC-UAC-137-2009).

The new party registration law is hostile to democratic government because
it envisages the arbitrary use of draconian provisions to prevent people
from associating freely. It is a law to ensure that only persons and
parties palatable to the military regime will be able to run for and
obtain office.

But it also points to a far deeper problem. The very concept of a right,
in terms of international standards, is neither recognized nor understood
by the government of Burma. That the right to associate does not exist is
not merely a consequence of a law designed to deny it. It is a consequence
of a political and legal regime that does not contain rights within its
conceptual framework at all.

This was not always the case. In 1950s Burma, rights were a central part
of how national leaders sought to shape government and society. The courts
also strongly supported citizens' rights against the state through a
robust constitutional framework. But after the military took full power in
a second coup, during 1962, rights became "socialist".

According to this notion of rights, the interests of the people and the
state were aligned against the capitalists. Under "socialist rights" the
very idea that a citizen might have a right to claim against the state was
absurd. Individual agents of the state could violate citizens' rights, but
the state itself could never do wrong. The right to associate in this time
was therefore always a "right" to associate with and through the organs of
the state, not apart from them.

After 1988 the socialist concept of rights also ceased to exist, but it
was not replaced with anything else. The new state in Burma was
right-less, constitution-less, and also law-less in the sense that all
laws in the last two decades have been issued as executive decrees rather
than through any legislative process. Anything described as a right in
this time has in the official view been no more than an entitlement
bestowed upon all or part of the population, even if it may be described
otherwise.

The 2008 Constitution has confirmed the absence of rights from the
normative frame of the new state. At every point it negates and qualifies
so-called statements of rights, including the right to associate. Under
section 354, citizens have a "right" to form associations that do not
contravene statutory law on national security and public morality: which
as shown above can be construed to mean literally anything.

The military regime in Burma evidently expects the new constitution and
new elections together to be taken as indicators of social and political
change. But the passing of a constitution does not signify that rights
exist, and nor does the holding of elections signify democratic renewal.

After 52 years of almost unbroken army rule, Burma is today not only
without a judiciary, but also without the conceptual frame of rights that
are requisite for a fair electoral process. Lacking these, what remains
can only be characterized as the politics of despair.

[This is the second in a series of statements by the AHRC on the planned
general elections in Burma. The first was, “Elections without a judiciary”
(AHRC-STM-059-2010). Next: “Elections without speech”.]

# # #

About AHRC: The Asian Human Rights Commission is a regional
non-governmental organisation monitoring and lobbying human rights issues
in Asia. The Hong Kong-based group was founded in 1984.

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