THE NATION - November 8, 1999

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THE NATION - November 8, 1999

 Headlines

Wahid asks Chuan to back E Timor's Asean bid

INDONESIAN President Abdurrahman Wahid yesterday asked Prime Minister Chuan
Leekpai to support any bid by East Timor for membership of Asean, Thai
officials said.

Wahid met Chuan for talks after flying in from Burma on the latest stop of a
whirlwind inaugural tour of Association of Southeast Asian Nations members.

''He has asked Thailand to support East Timor if it wants to join Asean,''
said Thai government spokesman Akaphol Sorasuchart.

Wahid also praised Bangkok's contribution to restoring peace in ravaged East
Timor.

Thailand is deputy commander of the Australian-led International Force for
East Timor (Interfet), which will soon be replaced by the United Nations
peace-keeping operation.

Wahid said he would like to see Thailand continue to play a role when the UN
operation took over, Akaphol said.

The new president flew in from Burma for a brief visit as the fourth leg of
a whirlwind tour aimed at trying to resurrect much-needed foreign
investment.

He is accompanied by his wife, who is in a wheelchair, and scores of
government officials.

His mission is to inform neighbouring countries of the economic situation
and to look for ways to enhance bilateral cooperation, Indonesian Foreign
Minister Alwi Shihab told The Nation yesterday.

The nearly blind Muslim cleric, escorted by his daughter, was received by
Foreign Minister Surin Pitsuwan at the Air Force airport.

He will travel to the United States for eye treatment after his tour of
Asean countries.

Upon his arrival at the hotel, Wahid was greeted by a dozen Indonesian
school children waving miniature national flags. Scores of Indonesian
nationals living in Bangkok, along with a group of Chinese businessmen from
Jakarta who are touring the country seeking investment partners, were
waiting for him.

''There is a feeling that the situation for ethnic Chinese will improve
greatly under Wahid,'' said one Chinese businessman from Jakarta.

During his five-hour visit to Burma, Wahid met Gen Than Shwe, chairman of
the ruling State Peace Democratic Council (SPDC). However, he did not meet
the leader of the opposition party Aung San Suu Kyi as he wished.

Last week he expressed an interest in visiting the 1991 Nobel Peace Prize
winner. ''I personally sympathise with Aung San Suu Kyi,'' Wahid said. ''If
there is a chance, I would like to meet her,'' Wahid had said.

He would have been the first head of state in Asean to meet her.

Wahid and Chuan talked on several issues including Burma during their
meeting yesterday. Chuan, whose government's ties with Rangoon have been
soured, told Wahid that Thailand is sincere towards its neighbour.

''We have been opening the doors and windows for Burma all along, so that
outsiders can see developments in the country,'' Chuan said.

Shihab, a former Islamic scholar at Harvard University, said Wahid did not
go into great length on any subject during his talk with Than Shwe. Wahid
had merely expressed a desire to see that bilateral ties continued on the
existing path, he said.

According to Akaphol, Wahid had told Chuan during their 40-minute talk that
Burma would need some time before democracy could be achieved.

Wahid's desire to meet Suu Kyi presented a dilemma for the ruling junta who
viewed the military-dominated regime of former president Suharto as their
role model. Suharto was forced from power 18 months ago when the people took
to the streets and demanded an end to his three decade rule.

Wahid praised Thailand's openness and racial harmony and added that he would
like to study the Thai method of achieving economic recovery, Akaphol said.

With the establishment of the Maritime Exploration Ministry, Jakarta is
looking to the rich natural resources in its territorial water to help
strengthen the fisheries industry and attract foreign investors.

The issue of bilateral cooperation between the two countries was bought up
and will be discussed in more detail later this month when Maritime
Exploration Minister Sarwano Kusumaatmadja visits Thailand, Akaphol said.

Wahid on Saturday won assurances from Singapore Prime Minister Goh Chok Tong
that he can count on the city-state to help with Indonesia's economic
recovery.

Some Chinese Indonesians, who had moved an estimated US$15 billion to
Singapore, had indicated they would consider returning.

BY SA-NGUAN KHUMRUNGROJ

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THE NATION - November 8, 1999

Headlines

Burmese gunmen seek haven in Australia

MANEELOY, Ratchaburi -- Five Burmese gunmen who stormed Burma's embassy in
Bangkok will resume their negotiations with Thai authorities with the hope
of being granted permission to relocate to a third country, one of their
fellow exiles said yesterday.

Aung Soe, a Burmese refugee at the Maneeloy holding centre who was called in
by Thai police to help during the 25-hour standoff with the five dissidents,
told The Nation yesterday that they had indeed established contact with the
Thai authorities to negotiate their surrender in return for passage to a
third country.

They all wanted to go to Australia and expressed willingness to be tried by
an Australian court, Aung Soe said.

They did not say why they did not want to be tried by a Thai court, he said.

Aung Soe said he helped draft a letter, as requested by Kyaw Ni -- the ring
leader of the five -- and was told that Prime Minister Chuan Leekpai had
ordered Border Police Unit 137 at Ratchaburi's Suan Phung to handle the
surrender.

However, the five dissidents backed off after Thailand refused to cut a deal
with them.

Chuan has said the students had violated Thai laws and would be dealt with
accordingly. There will be no negotiations with them, he said.

He has also said they would not be deported to Burma. The two countries do
not have an extradition treaty.

Nevertheless, the five students will make another pitch to the Thai
government to consider their request. The group will be trying to get the
United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees to assist as well, Aung Soe
said.

Last Thursday, a team of police officers were waiting for them at Suan Phung
but were stood up by them.

Armed with AK-47 automatic rifles, grenades and shotguns, the five stormed
the Burmese embassy on Oct 1, taking 38 people hostage and preventing 51
others from leaving the compound.

The event ended peacefully after the Thai authorities agreed to give them
safe passage to Burma's southern Karen state across from Ratchaburi
province.

Interior Minister Sanan Kachornprasart, who headed the negotiations, had
irked Rangoon by referred to the five Burmese as ''students fighting for
democracy, not international terrorists''.

Rangoon responded by closing down its border with Thailand, cancelling all
fishing concessions with Thai fishermen and refusing to cooperate with Thai
authorities who are in the process of repatriating thousands of Burmese
nationals working illegally in the country.

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THE NATION - November 8, 1999

Editorial & Opinion

Burma's policy of denial hits home

Without a substantial political shift in Burma, the country will continue to
be an impediment to regional economic and social development, writes David
Arnott.

In October, Lt Gen Khin Nyunt told a meeting of Asian health ministers that
claims of an Aids epidemic in Burma were totally false. Nyunt, Burma's chief
of military intelligence, seen by many as the most powerful figure in the
junta, dismissed a Unaids estimate that there may be 440,000 HIV infections
in Burma, saying that only 25,000 people had tested positive, and that
Burmese ''cultural values and traditions prohibited sexual promiscuity''.

The general either fails to understand that a figure of 25,000 people
testing positive is not compatible with an estimate of 440,000 or more HIV
infections countrywide, and that the principal vector of HIV spread in Burma
is needles shared by intravenous drug users rather than sexual promiscuity,
or he understands perfectly well, but goes ahead and issues the denial
anyway.

In either case, we are reminded that in Burma, the military leaders make all
policy, whether they understand the specific issues or not. (We also find
generals lecturing farmers about rice cultivation, and ruling on a whole
range of other areas -- the economy, for instance -- which are outside their
field of competence.) This is completely logical, in spite of the economic
and humanitarian consequences, once we understand that the main function of
the policy is to keep the military in power rather than to serve the people.

Technically, the way forward on the HIV/Aids front is clear; follow
Thailand's lead in overcoming denial and adopting pro-active, open and
rights-oriented policies. The problems are political: the measures
required -- free flow of information, wide consultation and public
education, needle exchange, anonymous testing and treatment, free
distribution of condoms, etc.

Not denying would threaten the opaque, top-down regime in Rangoon. So, in
the interest of regime survival, the policy is denial (of HIV/Aids, and
similarly of economic failure, military complicity in the drug economy,
human rights violations, the right of the National League for Democracy to
govern and so on).

But Burma has neighbours. In 1997, Prof John Dwyer, founding president of
the Aids Society for Asia and the Pacific, described Burma as ''the
epicentre of the epidemic in Asia''. Since then, the Burmese HIV/Aids
epidemic has spread, along with the growing drug traffic, ever deeper into
India and China. Both are now in the grip of escalating drug and HIV
epidemics originating in Burma, and Thailand is flooded with Burmese
amphetamines. China has more than 600,000 registered drug addicts, with the
real figures estimated at several times that, and for several years the
country has been experiencing a crime wave related, in great part, to drug
trafficking from Burma.

Not that the neighbours are entirely innocent. Thailand's current problems
with her Western neighbour stem to a large extent from Gen Chavalit
Yongchaiyudh's early business deals with Slorc and the abandonment of the
policy of ethnic buffer zones in the early 90s. And China froze the regime
in place around the same time with a US$2 billion injection of arms that
allowed the military to expand and modernise and block social, economic or
political development in the cities and the ethnic minority areas.

In the civil war, the military expansion permitted by the Chinese arms deals
facilitated the shift from a strategy of seasonal combat to one of
occupation, leading to the military advances and human rights violations by
the occupying troops, especially when cash-strapped Rangoon cut the army's
food supplies, requiring it to live ''off the land'' (ie, off the backs of
the people). This in turn helped maintain Burma's exclusion from
international assistance which, added to the junta's inept dirigisme,
continued the country's economic decline. Legal exports being at half the
value of imports, the country depends on laundered drug money to stay more
or less afloat. The drug economy is therefore allowed to flourish and carry
addiction and the HIV virus across the borders. The Thai and Chinese
chickens are home to roost with a vengeance.

The economy will not recover without investment and infrastructure
development. This will only return with a process moving towards an
economically-competent and publicly-accepted administration able to carry
out the hard but necessary tasks like currency devaluation and tax reform.
The same applies to the ethnic insurgencies, which can only be settled by
political means, which are beyond the capacity of the military.

Without a substantial political shift in Burma, the country will continue to
be the epicentre of the HIV and drug epidemics and, on account of inept
economic policies and exclusion from international assistance, an impediment
to regional economic and social development.

What may help to break the logjam and open up political space in Burma is a
coordinated regional and international approach, in particular by Thailand
(acting for Asean), China and India. So far, however, apart from a smidgen
of Asean diplomacy, these countries have tended to act bilaterally. China is
a key player, and apparently scolds the junta behind closed doors, but is
still stuck in the view that only a strong military in Rangoon can provide
the stability needed to further China's economic, political and (say some,
particularly the members of the Expansionist China school) strategic
interests. But it's not happening. Chinese traders suffer the erratic swings
of the Burmese economy and the idiosyncratic fiscal policies of the
generals; the modern transport routes through Burma to South Asian markets
and beyond which Yunnan needs have not been built; and the economic impact
of the HIV/Aids and drug epidemics is only just starting to be felt.

These problems, which cross international borders and threaten the
comprehensive national security of the neighbours, cannot be regarded as
purely the ''internal affair'' of one country. Thailand is in a particularly
good position to take a lead, at least behind closed doors, to bring China
and India into a regional effort to ''encourage'' the Burmese military to
take the first steps beyond denial towards a political process.

David Arnott is a specialist on Burma and contributed this article to The
Nation. The views expressed here are his own.

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THE NATION - November 8, 1999

 Mailbag

Chuan chided for dog attacks and repatriation of aliens

THE recent ''tit for tat'' policy implemented by the Chuan administration by
rounding up illegal aliens, specifically Burmese, and attempting to
repatriate them across the border to Burma will likely complicate future
negotiations with Rangoon. It could certainly provoke retaliation from that
country.

The immediate consequences of the failed policy will cause the loss of
business for many ordinary Thais. It will also drive many illegal aliens to
the underground economy.

The Chuan administration is close to being a barbaric government by the
recent use of trained dogs to attack cassava farmers who demonstrated for
government price support for their products.

Wild beasts like dogs, regardless of their training, should never be used to
control crowds. They are too unpredictable and, worse yet, too excitable
when around loud noises or threatening gestures from humans. This resulted
in the indiscriminate attacks by the dogs even to the police trainers.

It is pathetic that police tried to protect government property at the
expense of the lives and flesh of their fellow citizens. They need to be
trained in negotiating tactics and better control of mass demonstrators. In
a democratic society like ours, public demonstrations will take place for
almost any issue and about anything, like it or not.

The rule of thumb before police decide to take any action against
demonstrators in the future: imagine if they are your parents or children.
Would you do the same to them or find some non-violent alternatives to deal
with them?

Those injured farmers should be given monetary compensation by the Chuan
administration for the police's negligence.

Aroon Suansilppongse

BANGKOK

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