SCMP: EU seeks rights mission on he

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Subject: SCMP: EU seeks rights mission on heels of Amnesty torture report

South China Morning Post

Thursday, July 1, 1999

EU seeks rights mission on heels of Amnesty torture report

AGENCIES in Bangkok

The European Union is reportedly proposing to send a fact-finding mission
to Rangoon to discuss the
country's poor human rights record.

But Burma's junta had failed as yet to respond to the proposal, the Bangkok
Post said yesterday.

The EU hoped the mission would eventually lead to its mediating a meeting
between the ruling State
Peace and Development Council and National League for Democracy (NLD)
leader Aung San Suu
Kyi, the Post quoting unnamed Thai officials as saying.

The junta has refused to open a political dialogue with the NLD, which won
the 1990 general election
by a landslide, unless Ms Aung San Suu Kyi is excluded from the talks.

The Post's report coincided with the publication of an Amnesty
International report detailing the torture
and killing by the Burmese regime of members of the Karen, Shan and Karenni
ethnic minorities.

Amnesty said it based its findings on interviews with more than 100 refugees.

A government spokesman said yesterday the refugees interviewed were family
members and
sympathisers of "armed ethnic terrorist groups". He called Amnesty's report
part of a smear campaign,
and defended forced relocations of villagers as "temporary when necessary
and done to protect them
from being terrorised by the armed insurgent groups".

EU diplomats in Bangkok expressed annoyance that their proposal had been
leaked to the press, saying
the media attention might scuttle its efforts to persuade the junta to
accept its mission.

The decision to send a delegation to Rangoon, agreed upon in Brussels about
two weeks ago,
represented a shift in EU policy towards the military regime, diplomats said.

"Change in Burma is a political goal but it can only be achieved if we talk
to the people," one European
diplomat said.

The Association of Southeast Asian Nations has long maintained that
"constructive engagement" with
Burma, which joined the bloc in July 1997, is the best means of bringing
about political reform.