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Junta Allows Suu Kyi Seminar on Democracy
The Asian Age
19 March 1998
 
Yangon, March 18: Burma's military junta has allowed Opposition figurehead
and Nobel laureate Aung San Suu Kyi to host a seminar focussing on
democracy and human rights, sources said on Wednesday.
 
The Nobel laureate is taking the role of moderator at the one-week meeting
at her Yangon home which is being attended by 77 members of the inner
circle of her National League for Democracy party.
 
Subjects being covered over the seven-day period include discussions on
democracy, human rights and on the country's delayed constitution which is
currently being drafted.
 
The military authorities, who keep the Opposition leader and her close
supporters under surveillance, documented the arrivals of the delegates as
the conference started on Monday but did not interfere, a source here
said.
 
"The authorities appear unconcerned as long as the numbers are small and
the gathering takes place inside Aung San Suu Kyi's compound," one said.
 
Party personalities are taking turns at presenting topics to the
gathering, while Ms Aung San Suu Kyi, who spent six years under house
arrest until 1995, presides over the proceedings.
 
The next major gathering at her now famous lakeside home will take place
on March 27 when Burma celebrates Armed Forces Day, a holiday which the
National League for Democracy Party will match with a Resistance Day
commemoration.
 
Ms Aung San Suu Kyi and her party won Burma's last general elections in
1990 with a landslide, but the results were ignored by the military junta
which clung to power.
 
Scores of her supporters have been detained or jailed over recent years,
frequently for attending public meetings which the authorities deem to be
a threat to peace and security. (AFP)
 
Karen Refugees in Thailand Face New Burmese Attacks
By Matthew Pennington
The Asian Age
19 March 1998
 
Mae Sot (Thailand), March 18: Histry if repeating itself in deadly fashin
for Karen refugees in Thailand facing a wave of cross-border raids from
Burma that have left thousands homeless and four dead.
 
Incursions into Thailand by Burma-baked forces, who have attacked two
camps close to the frontier in the past week, ahs left many of an
estimated 1,000 shelters torched last week.
 
"We can not sleep here at night. They (the intruders) threatened us they
would come back again if we did not leave the camp," he said, sitting in a
tiny bamboo and thatch lean-to close to the charred remnants of his former
home.
 
The raid, in which four people were killed and more than 30 injured, was
the second time he had lost his few possessions. The camp, which houses
8,300 refugees, was razed in a similar raid in January last year.
 
The refugees sheltering in Thailand are loyal to the Karen National Union,
the only major ethnic insurgency yet to reach a ceasefire with Yangon. The
attacks appear designed to sever contact between the camps and the KNU
military units.
 
Last Wednesday, Burma government troops and soldiers from a Karen splinter
group, the Democratic Karen Buddhist Army, ventured unopposed into Huay
Kalok camp, which lies 3 km from the Burmese border.
 
While the Thai military have said they had no prior warning of the attack,
sources at the border were sceptical amid reports that a small convoy of
vehicles with unidentified men in camouflage uniforms drove through the
camp 30 minutes before the shooting started.
 
The intruders from Burma attacked from two directions, raining mortars and
grenades on the camp before busting in from the Thai side and setting fire
to it.
 
"They were shooting at us like it was a big battle, but we had nothing to
protect us. Children were crying for their parents," said Stephen Freddie,
a teacher at the camp. He said the intruders robbed valuables from people
as they fled. (AFP)
 
Do Sanctions Really Work?
Debate Is On In Burma
By Thomas Crampton
International Herald Tribune
 
RANGOON- Burma's economy, squeezed for years by Western sanctions and
weaken by economic crises affecting much of Asia, is in tatters.
 
Now, the ills afflicting Burma have in the last few months led the clique
of generals who rule the country to acknowledge, uncharacteristically,
that there are problems: the Burmese currency, the Kyat, has plunged;
inflation is rising; and investment has declined.
 
This new openness in turn, has led some supporters of sanctions to
question their continued usefulness.
 
"The economy is getting worse but the government is not shaky and it won't
topple," said Ma Thanegi, a former member of the opposition National
League for Democracy who was once an aide to the opposition leader and
Nobel laureate Daw Aung San Suu Kyi. "Boycotts and sanctions will not
work."
 
Since the military regime took over in 1988 and ignored the result of a
1990 election won by Daw Aung San Suu Kyi's National League for Democracy,
Western governments have introduced a ranged of sanctions to pressure
Rangoon into suppressing drug trafficking and making democratic reforms.
 
The country has lost access to most foreign aid. The European Union and
the United States cancelled the preferential tariffs often accorded
developing nations. And last year, U.S. ban on American countries making
new investment in Burma went into effect.
 
Ma Thanegi, who like many league members in 1989 was sent to prison for a
time, argues that such sanctions may end up impending change. "If there
were no sanctions, responsible companies could come in with their
financial clout and knowledge to change things," she said in an interview.
"You have to be realistic. With the government now looking for ways out of
this crisis, it is exactly the time they need good advice and expertise."
 
But the Executive Committee of the National League for Democracy still
supports sanctions unanimously, said U Tin Oo, the Party's deputy
chairman.
 
"If investment comes in, all the wealth will go to the generals," said U
Tin Oo. "The majority of Burmese people are farmers, so they are not
affected by sanctions."
 
Because of her change of heart, Ma Thanegi has been called a turncoat to
the party she still supports, but among activists in Burma she is not
alone.
 
"Sanctions are keeping out opportunity," said a former student activist in
Rangoon who now works for an international corporation and spoke on
condition of anonymity. 
 
"Foreign investment bring contacts with the outside world, ideas and it
can also be quite subversive," she said.
 
"The office of every Western business uses a fax machine and e-mail," she
said. These can be "powerful tools" in a country where the state strictly
controls communications.
 
Ronald Morris, general manager of Britain's Premier Oil PLC, a major share
holder in Burma's Yetagun gas pipeline project, echoed that, saying,
"International corporations bring the technology and value systems of
their home countries."
 
More than just building pipeline, Mr Morris said, "we import into
developing countries state-of-the-art communication technology along with
the microculture of the democratic and free society we come from."
 
To hear the Burmese government tell it, the U.S. ban on investment has
backfired.
 
"The adverse effects are being felt more by the United States, because we
have lots of raw materials and are rich with natural resources," a cabinet
minister, Brigadier General Maung Maung, said in an interview.
 
Unlike South Africa, which lost precious foreign investment to sanctions,
Burma had only just begun to emerged from decades of when sanctions began
to imposed.
 
For more than two decades until 1988, the dictatorship of General Ne Win
led the country along the Burmese path to Socialism, a xenophobic
nationalism that served most ties to the outside world.
 
Once the world's largest rice exporter, Burma had enough fertile land to
feed itself without any trade and the government had made it clear that
foreign ideas were unwelcome.
 
Since the 1990 election, the politics of Burma have frozen: The National
League for Democracy insists it should rule Burma, while the military
government continues to consolidate its control over the country.
 
Political change will come, the generals insist, once economic growth
takes place. The National League for Democracy, in contrast, says growth
should occur only after political change.
 
"Unless we resolve the problems of the 1990 elections nobody should invest
the money here and nobody should come as a tourists," said U Tin Oo.
"Sanctions should stay in place and there should be no economic
development until the political issues are solved."
 
It is hard to measure the economic impact of the U.S. investment ban.
Apart from some natural gas ventures and a few high profile manufacturers,
the country had not attracted many U.S. businesses. For one thing, Burma
consumers earn on average less than $300 per year and pay with a currency
that is not easily convertible.
 
More damaging to the economy than the actual sanctions, analysts say, are
parallel efforts, such as laws that several American cities and
Massachusetts have passed baring purchases from companies doing business
in Burma.
 
Massachusetts, for instance, recently sent letters warning companies in
Rangoon that they can not bid for state contracts.
 
Fears that such letters are a precursor to protests has prompted European
and American companies to withdraw or conceal their presence here.
 
In the months before the United States passed its investment ban,
investment in Burma originating from offshore corporate havens like the
British Virgin islands soared, and obscure appellations replaced familiar
company names.
 
Many businesses operating in Burma have scaled back operations to minimize
publicity.
 
"There used to be a ritual photograph with ministers and businessmen in
the New Light of Myanmar newspaper whenever a deal was struck," one
diplomat in Rangoon said. "Now fear of retribution from activists has
forced people to hide what they are doing here. It makes it much harder to
figure out what is really going on here."
 
For all the anxiety the activists create, the strongest brakes now being
applied to Burma's economy come from the economic crisis in East Asia.
 
About half of Burma's investment and trade come from its Southeast Asian
neighbors, which have seen the value of their currency against the U.S.
dollar plummet since July. The plunges have meant that Southeast Asian
companies that had opened branches here have had to pull out.


Burma Info (CCN)
New Delhi