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Reuter: First Croatia, now Burma co



Subject: Reuter: First Croatia, now Burma convince UN to ban films   

First Croatia, now Burma convince UN to ban films   

   UNITED NATIONS (Reuter) - Burma Wednesday succeeded in
getting the United Nations to cancel a film on an American
tourist caught in Rangoon's 1988 chaos and violence.

     U.N. spokesman Juan Carlos Brandt said that Burma, now
called Myanmar, had objected to the showing at the end of a
session on human rights. The  United Nations had no choice but
to comply with a request by a member state, he added.

    U.N. sources said such a decision was made when the event
was not organized by a member state but other groups using U.N.
premises, in this case the U.N. Staff Union.

    The film, ``Beyond Rangoon'' by British director John
Boorman is a fictionalized story of an American tourist caught
in Burma in 1988 when the military cracked down on Aung San Suu
Kyi and her democracy movement and declared martial law.

    Aung San Suy Kyi, a Nobel peace prize winner, was released
last summer from house arrest but the military has not
relinquished power to her party which won elections in 1990.

   The U.N. General Assembly for the last few years has deplored
human rights abuses in Burma.

   Burma's action follows a similar one from Croatia on December
5, which managed to have a Yugoslav anti-war film called
''Vukovar'' banned on grounds that Serb soldiers were not shown
to be responsible for ethnic cleansing in a Danube tourist town
that was reduced to rubble in 1991.

    ``Vukovar,'' produced with funds from Cyprus, Italy and
Yugoslavia and which condemns war in general, was to have been
shown at a conference in a U.N. auditorium sponsored by the New
York-based International Immigrants Foundation.

    Reuter/Variety


19:59 12-13-95