The BurmaNet News: October 1, 1998

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------------------------ BurmaNet ------------------------
 "Appropriate Information Technologies, Practical Strategies"
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The BurmaNet News: October 1, 1998
Issue #1108

HEADLINES:
==========
THE NATION: LEADER ISSUES APPEAL FOR PATRIOTISM 
REUTERS: MYANMAR RALLY DEMANDS SUU KYI DEPORTATION 
REUTERS: MYANMAR TELLS UN TO KEEP OUT 
BKK POST: NO MORE AID TO BURMA, SAYS JAPAN 
THE ECOLOGIST: LETTER FORUM (RE: UNOCAL) 
ANNOUNCEMENT: HEROIN AND HIV/AIDS IN BURMA 
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THE NATION: BURMESE LEADER ISSUES APPEAL FOR PATRIOTISM 
30 September, 1998 

AP

RANGOON -As Burma's main opposition party reported that arrests of its
members were approaching 1,000, a senior member of the ruling junta has
aimed another barb at the group by calling for a renewal of patriotic spirit:

The state-owned press yesterday quoted Lt-Gen Khin Nyunt as saying Burma
had lived under servitude for more than 100 years owing to disunity among
citizens.

"The need to vitalise patriotism among the people is of utmost importance,
as there have been attempts by alien nations to subjugate the country for
the second time," Khin Nyunt said.

The military government accuses the opposition National League for
Democracy (NLD) of being in cahoots with Western powers to destabilise
Burma. Western nations have been critical of the junta for its poor human
rights record and failure to move toward democracy.

In recent months, the government has been in a sustained confrontation with
the opposition. It began mass arrests in May and intensified them in
September in an effort to block the NLD from carrying out a threat to
convene parliament on its own. The NLD won a landslide victory in 1990
elections, but the military never allowed parliament to meet.

On Monday, the NLD said 961 party members, including 202 elected
representatives from the 1990 election, have been detained so far. The
government claims that they have simply been invited for discussion of
political matters.

"The unlawful activities by the National League for Democracy harm the
stability and unity of the country and hamper economic progress," the state
press quoted Khin Nyunt saying. "The gentle handling of the government
towards the opposition was to avoid panic and danger among the public."

Khin Nyunt also said that an exhibition to vitalise patriotic spirit among
youths and students must be organised.

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REUTERS: MYANMAR RALLY DEMANDS SUU KYI DEPORTATION
30 September, 1998 

YANGON, Myanmar (Reuters) - Thousands of supporters of Myanmar's military
government rallied this week against the political opposition and demanded
the deportation of its leader Aung San Suu Kyi, state media reported
Wednesday.

The New Light of Myanmar said 28,000 ``people of various walks of life''
gathered at an open-air rally in Monywa in northern Myanmar Tuesday to
denounce the National League for Democracy's (NLD) confrontation with the
government.

``Daw Suu Kyi is a danger to the Union,'' the paper quoted businessman Aung
Hla as telling the rally. ``I demand that she be deported with a view to
warding off this danger.'' 

It was the third such rally since the NLD announced earlier this month that
a committee grouping its leaders would act for a parliament elected in 1990
that was never allowed to convene.

While the state press has presented the rallies as spontaneous, political
analysts say they could not take place without government support. 

Articles in state newspapers in recent months have called repeatedly for
Suu Kyi's deportation, but diplomats say the government would be
discouraged from such a step by practical difficulties and the
international outcry it would provoke.

The New Light of Myanmar said the rally showed people ``are now impatient,
unhappy with the government's magnanimity and want action taken against the
Bogadaw and her cronies.'' 

Bogadaw, literally ``wife of a lord'' was used in pre-independence days to
refer to wives of British colonialists. State newspapers have frequently
attacked Suu Kyi for her marriage to British academic Michael Aris.

The paper's editorial criticized Suu Kyi, the winner of the 1991 Nobel
Peace prize, for urging foreign governments to impose sanctions on Myanmar
and accused her of inciting unrest that had caused a rise in food prices.

``What the rallies are saying, most vocally and justifiably, is that it is
high time the government took concrete action, the kind of drastic move
that will bring a halt to the NLD's wily and wicked ways,'' it said.

``The voice of the rallies is that of the entire people of the Union,'' it
said.

Monday, Lt. Gen. Khin Nyunt, the military intelligence chief considered the
most powerful figure in the ruling military council, accused the NLD of
damaging peace and stability through ``unlawful'' acts.

However he said the government was dealing with the situation in a
``lenient'' way ``to save the people from facing unnecessary danger and
panic.'' 

[ ... ] 

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REUTERS: MYANMAR TELLS UN TO KEEP OUT, OPPOSITION WANTS HELP 
30 September, 1998 by Evelyn Leopold 

UNITED NATIONS, Sept 30 (Reuters) - Myanmar's foreign minister told the
United Nations on Wednesday that the world had no right to interfere in his
country's internal affairs when the military government had chosen the path
of democracy.

But as U Ohn Gyaw addressed the 53rd General Assembly, Denmark sponsored a
news conference of the country's democratic opposition which warned that
``time was running out'' for the junta and called on the United Nations to
combine global sanctions with diplomatic mediation.

``We will not be sitting down and taking it easy just because we are
calling for a dialogue,'' said Dr. Sein Win, prime minister of the
provisional government in prime minister in exile of Myanmar, formerly Burma.

``We will not wait. We will do what has to be done to convene the
Parliament in Burma,'' he said. ``The situation is very explosive and it
may happen that we cannot control it.

There may be an uprising.

Ohn Gyaw, in his address, spent little time defending Myanmar's polices,
which have been the subject of annual General Assembly resolutions on human
rights abuses. Instead he spoke mainly about regional and international
issues.

He said, however, that ``we are much distressed that there are those who
would like to use the United Nations to intervene in matters that are
essentially within our domestic jurisdiction.'' 

``We, in Myanmar, have chosen the path of democracy,'' he said, adding that
the government would not submit to political pressure to transplant a
foreign form of democracy.

The minister said the United Nations had too many responsibilities to
intervene in Myanmar, when its government had restored stability from a
``state of chaos and anarchy.'' 

The United States and European nations have been in the forefront of
international condemnation of Myanmar, whose military refused to give up
power after the National League for Democracy (NLD) won a May 1990 general
election.

Its leader, Aung San Suu Kyi, a Nobel Peace Prize winner, was put under six
years of house arrest, until mid-1995, and is still forbidden to play a
political role.

Sein Win charged that the country's economy was in a state of collapse
except for the heroin trade protected by the junta.

Universities remain closed because the generals feared intellectuals, AIDS
continued to spread because the regime did not even acknowledge the threat
and forced labour was exacted ``on a massive scale'' from the elderly,
women and children 

In recent days, he said, the military has arrested more than 900 students,
some as young as 14, to keep them from assembling in an NLD congress.

Dr. Thaung Htun, his colleague in charge of U.N. affairs, said
Secretary-General Kofi Annan should formulate a road map for a transition
to democracy, offering U.N. mediation services and setting a time frame.

If the government refused to cooperate, the U.N. Security Council should
impose global diplomatic and economic sanctions.

He said the General Assembly should impose a voluntary arms embargo and
U.N. relief agencies should make any assistance conditional on human rights
and military spending.

The United States has imposed sanctions on Myanmar, the European Union has
suspended aid and Japan has sharply curtailed its assistance although it
paid for some projects amounting to more than $1 million.

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THE BANGKOK POST: NO MORE AID TO BURMA, SAYS JAPAN 
30 September, 1998 

Washington-Japan's foreign minister, Masahiko Komura, has assured US
Secretary of State Madeleine Albright that Tokyo will not resume aid to
Burma any time soon, a senior US official said on Monday.

In New York on September 22, Mr Komura "made very clear ... there was
absolutely no more aid in the pipeline," Assistant Secretary of State for
Democracy, Human Rights, and Labour Gare Smith told a House panel.

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THE ECOLOGIST: LETTER FORUM 
July/August, 1998 

LETTER FROM DAVID GARCIA, UNOCAL CORPORATION

As one of four co-venturers in the Yadana natural gas development project
in Myanmar, we take serious exception to the manner in which the project
was presented in the article, "US Petroeleum giant to Stand Trial for Burma
Atrocities" (The Ecologist January/February 1998).

Your readers deserve an accurate report about the project, not a special
pleading on behalf of the plaintiffs represented in that article. Here are
the facts:

Fact: Contrary to repeated claims by a few misinformed activists, there has
been no finding in that litigation that Unocal has committed or is
responsible for any human right violations or that it has violated any law
in any fashion.

Fact: The Court rejected certain affidavits submitted by plaintiffs'
lawyers to support a preliminary injunction to prevent Unocal's
participation in the Yadana pipeline. The court sanctioned the plaintiffs'
lawyers for not having those declarations reviewed or signed by the named
affiants prior to their being submitted to the Court.

Fact: The Court denied the plaintiffs' request for a preliminary injunction
against Unocal. In the course of oral argument at the injunction hearing,
the Court told the plaintiffs' lawyers that after reviewing the extensive
record, he saw no evidence that any plaintiff had been forced to work on
the pipeline. Although they had conducted extensive discovery, taken
numerous depositions and had access to over 15,000 pages of documents, the
plaintiffs' lawyers were forced to admit that they had provided no such
evidence.

Fact: To support their argument, plaintiffs' lawyers rely on State
Department Annual Reports for Burma. Yet the only specific mention of the
Yadana pipeline (in the 1996 State Department Report) makes clear that
there was no forced labour on the pipeline:"During 1996 there were repeated
allegations that forced labour was used on a project to build a pipeline
across the Tenasserim Region. The preponderance of the evidence indicates
that the pipeline project has paid its workers at least a market wage." [US
State Department 1996 Human Rights Report on Burma]

In January 1998, two internationally respected human rights experts
traveled to Myanmar to inspect conditions at the pipeline. The letter
transmitting their report stated in part:

"We congratulate you and your colleagues on the socio-economic and
humanitarian work you are carrying out as part of the Yadana Project.
Everyone in each village has a better life because of your work. The
approach you have taken at Yadana should be a model for other international
companies."

We are proud of our human rights record and will vigorously challenge those
who describe it inaccurately.

David M Garcia, Senior Public Relations Representative, Unocal Corporation

JED GREER RESPONDS:

David Garcia's letter represents another effort in a campaign by the United
States-based petroleum company Unocal to defend the indefensible. Over the
past decade, Burma's military junta has received widespread condemnation
from the United Nations, governments, and non-governmental organizations
for brutally suppressing the civil and political liberties of its citizenry
and amassing a record of human rights abuses that is exceptional even by
today's standards. Burma is one of the few countries in the world for which
the UN Human Rights Commission has appointed a Special Rapporteur, whose
reports have documented these abuses. In April 1998, the Commission
extended the Special Rapporteur's mandate because of what it calls "the
continuing violations of human rights" in Burma, including extrajudicial,
summary or arbitrary executions and enforced disappearances, torture, abuse
of women and children by government agents, arbitrary seizures of land and
property, violations of freedom of movement of people and goods, and the
imposition of oppressive measures directed in particular at ethnic and
religious minorities, including systematic programmes of forced relocation,
and the widespread use of forced labour, including work on infrastructure
projects and as porters for the army[.]

And precisely because it rejects Unocal's self-serving rationale that
projects such as the Yadana gas pipeline can democratize Burma's regime,
the Clinton Administration in May 1998 renewed a ban it had imposed on new
US foreign investment in the country. The lawsuit I discussed in my article
was filed in US federal court by lawyers representing Burmese farmers. They
named Unocal and the French firm Total as defendants for alleged complicity
in human rights abuses, in particular forced labor, by Burma's dictatorship
in connection with the pipeline's construction.

Contrary to Garcia's assertion, no one has said there has yet been a
"finding" in this litigation that Unocal or Total violated the law. As I
explained, US corporations charged with causing harm outside the US
(especially in less-industrialized nations) typically try to prevent such
lawsuits from ever coming to trial. Often they succeed. In response to such
an attempt by Unocal, however, the presiding judge issued a landmark
opinion in March 1997 that effectively permitted the suit to proceed and
paved the way for the defendants eventually to face their accusers in court.

Garcia's discussion of the preliminary injunction is intended to divert
attention from that significant achievement. Certain affidavits were
prepared improperly and stricken. This spring, the judge denied plaintiffs'
request for a preliminary injunction against Unocal, which would have
prevented the company from funding the project even before the judge ruled
on the substantive merits of the case. But Unocal's lawyers surely realize
that denial of the preliminary injunction is irrelevant to the lawsuit's
merits, even if Garcia insinuates otherwise. The judge made the decision
about the preliminary injunction on the narrow technical ground that
Unocal's withdrawal alone would not end the alleged violations because
Total could pursue the project on its own, perhaps purchasing Unocal's
share in the venture. Unocal and Total continue to face the plaintiffs'
charges, and whether or not they'll be held liable on the merits of this
case still remains to be seen.

Plaintiffs' lawyers flatly reject Garcia's contention that the judge or
they made statements regarding lack of evidence of forced labor in
connection with work on the pipeline. Indeed, had there been such an
admission by plaintiffs' lawyers, the judge would have been required to
dismiss the suit.

Even more absurd is Garcia's suggestion that the plaintiffs' lawyers "rely"
on State Department Annual Reports "to support their argument." Were that
so, considering the quote he provides, this case would not be heading to
trial. Plaintiffs' lawyers have used reports about the horrific situation
in Burma from the aforementioned UN Special Rapporteur, the European Union,
the International Labor Organization, Amnesty International, and Human
Rights Watch. Most crucially, the lawyers have relied on depositions of the
plaintiffs themselves, made under oath and penalty of perjury, about the
abuses to which they were subjected, including forced labor. In testimony
before the US Department of Labor in January 1998, Katharine Redford of
EarthRights International, a Thailand-based group that has worked for years
to expose and combat injustices in Burma and is co-counsel in the lawsuit,
provided excerpts from several depositions taken by Unocal's lawyers. Those
documents offer brief but revealing commentary about the Burmese army's
conscription of workers in connection with the pipeline. Also telling are
remarks Unocal's President, John Imle, made in a deposition plaintiffs'
lawyers took in August 1997: 

"Surrounding the question of porters for the military and their payment was
the issue of whether they were conscripted or volunteer workers. The
consensus -- although very hard to verify this -- but the consensus was
that it was mixed. Some porters were conscripted." In her testimony,
Redford observed:

This is a far cry from Unocal's usual response to questions concerning
forced labor. They assert that nobody is forced to work on their project;
that the military providing security does not use porters; that any forced
labor or portering that does occur is not in any way connected to the
pipeline. But here we have John Imle, the president of Unocal, stating
under oath that not only are porters used by the military but that they are
often conscripted.

Redford went on to note -- a point the US State Department should heed --
that "the legal definition of forced labor has nothing to do with payment,
but the manner in which the labor is procured."

Regarding the January 1998 report that supposedly absolves Unocal and
Total, Garcia understandably does not disclose that Unocal paid the
expenses of the "experts," who spent a mere five days in Burma, two in the
pipeline area. Nor does he mention that Myanmar Oil & Gas Enterprise, a
partner in the consortium that is controlled by Burma's junta, provided the
translator. Given such supervision, the limited scope of inquiry, and the
atmosphere of fear that pervades Burma and curtails free speech, it is
unsurprising that this report has come under considerable discrediting
attack. So much so, in fact, that Unocal chose not to mention it in
response to critics at the company's most recent annual shareholders'
meeting in June.

In recent years, many corporations have pulled out of Burma in an effort to
dissociate themselves from the country's appalling regime. Unocal and Total
should do likewise.

Jed Greer

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ANNOUNCEMENT: NEW INFORMATION ON HEROIN AND HIV/AIDS IN BURMA 
1 October, 1998

NEW REPORT DETAILS ALARMING NEW INFORMATION ON HEROIN AND HIV/AIDS IN BURMA.

In a new report released today by the Southeast Asian Information Network
(SAIN), shocking details are given detailing the Burmese heroin epidemic as
one of the most severe ever documented.

The report, titled "Out Of Control 2", addresses both the HIV/AIDS epidemic
in Burma and its neighbors, and the increase of drug addiction and
trafficking of heroin. Out Of Control 2, shows that when the regime known
as the State Law and Order restoration Council (SLORC), seized state power
in 1988 a dramatic increase in heroin use began.  This has caused a public
health crisis not just for Burma, but also neighboring countries such as
China and India.

"Under this regime Burma is not only becoming a narco-state but its people
and those of its neighbors are facing two devastating epidemics: injecting
drug use and HIV/AIDS." Said Dr. Chris Beyrer.  Dr. Beyrer is the author of
"War In The Blood" Sex, Politics and Aids in Southeast Asia and co-author
of this report.

The report states that the last several years have produced a mounting body
of evidence indicating high-level involvement of some junta members in the
illicit narcotics industry.  Routes and methods of transportation and
export of Burmese narcotics are described in this report.

SAIN, working closely with several groups, has investigated the workings of
the heroin industry at the grass-roots level; through site visits in border
areas, interviews with addicts and traders, collecting testimony from
refugees, former prisoners of the regime, villagers in opium growing areas,
and activists in Burma, Northeast India, Thailand and Bangladesh.

Out Of Control 2 shows:

New evidence from China and India suggesting that Burmese heroin exports to
those countries now pose similar health risks to their peoples, and the
evidence suggests high- level junta involvement with the export of these
narcotics.

New information showing how heroin #4 from Burma is crossing through
China's western borders into Kazakhstan and onto Hungary and Poland.  The
report explains how the explosive use of heroin #4 and HIV infection are
linked to the dual epidemic in Burma and its neighbouring countries.

That the Indian and Chinese drug and HIV/AIDS epidemics are evidence that
Burma, in addition to being a net heroin exporter, is also an exporter of
HIV infection.

There has been a considerable rise in the amount of heroin crossing the
border since the signing of the Indo-Burma trade treaty in 1995.

Testimonies and maps detailing the heroin route which consistently point to
The Regimes army, the Tatmadaw, as playing a central role in the
distribution of heroin from opium producing areas to the international
market. In interviews by SAIN with dealers, carriers and activists from
both sides of the border, it was found that not only is #4 coming from the
cease-fire areas in Burma, but the involvement of the Burmese army is key
to the distribution of heroin from Burma to the domestic and international
markets.   Further, several heroin refineries which produce #4 are
reportedly placed well within the reach of the military regimes army
battalions.

The only way of transportation from an area that houses a heroin refinery
is by helicopter. The refinery is in the same place as an army base.

"This regime is involved in narcotics from the granting of security passes
for drug traffickers, allowing heroin refineries to be situated close to
their army bases, and joint ventures with drug barons," said Faith Doherty
co-author and director of SAIN.

"Their policies towards ethnic populations reliant on opium production do
not address political solutions but continue to sustain a military option
which simply does not assist either the health nor peace and security so
desperately needed in Burma for all of its citizens. "

"Without lasting political solutions, both for the democracy movement and
for the rights of ethnic nationalities, drug addiction and HIV/AIDS will
continue to devastate the populations of opium growing areas," said Doherty.

"The involvement of the junta in heroin trading is a tragedy for the people
of Burma, and is clearly inseparable from the widespread availability of
the drug in the country.  This reality makes it all the more difficult to
envision The Regimes effectiveness in HIV/AIDS control programs" concluded
Dr. Beyrer.

Out Of Control 2 is available through the www at:
http://www.sunsite.unc.edu/freeburma/drugs/ooc2   

This report is not being released as a hard copy and is only available
through the above address.

For More Information please contact either:

Dr. Chris Beyrer 1.410.614 5247
Faith Doherty:  report16@xxxxxxxxxxx

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