KIO Asks Junta to Stop Military Exercises

By Khun Sam
December 19, 2006 Irrawaddy.org

Kachin Independence Army

The Kachin Independence Organization, an ethnic ceasefire group, has called on the Burmese junta to halt military exercises near its headquarters on Laisin Mountain near the China-Burma border.

The request came during a meeting between the KIO and junta officers at Myitkyina, the Kachin State capital, last week. The Burmese army has been conducting exercises in Samar Region near Wai Maw Township of Kachin State, about 20 miles from the KIO's army wing of the Kachin Independence Army headquarters.

Lt-Col Nuk Gan, a KIO central committee member, told The Irrawaddy on Tuesday that the group’s general secretary Dr La Ja and Vice General-Secretary Sumlut Gun Maw met with the Burmese deputy northern commander, Brig-Gen San Tun.

“He told us that the case would be considered,” Nuk Gan said. “It was a big concern for us and the local people.”

The Kachin community in-country and abroad, including the London-based Kachin National Organization, have also raised their concerns, saying the exercises
threaten all Kachin ceasefire groups and peace in the region.

The KNO said the junta is toying with ethnic ceasefire groups instead of finding solutions through peaceful and political means. The Burmese military has dramatically increased its presence in Kachin State and often enters into Kachin ceasefire-group controlled areas, creating instability in the region, the KNO said.

KNO also said the junta often claims the military exercises are conducted “to prevent an invasion from abroad,” but their real mission is “to crush all ethnic
armed groups in the country.”

The junta has recently intensified military operations against ethnic insurgent groups in Karen, Mon and Shan States. Critics says the KIO became a target of the regime following the biggest Kachin ceasefire group’s refusal to join the regime-led condemnation of the inclusion of Burma on the UN Security Council agenda in September this year.

Sources close to the KIO said the recent military pressure increased after the KIO held secret security meetings with other ethnic armed groups in which they discussed solidarity issues, should the regime-led national convention not achieve ethnic-group goals.

We are irrepressible

_ by Raluca Enescu

Last month, in November, Burma Digest's main page has got 367346 pagehits; what do you think?
Reading the statistics, I can't help but wonder: who are all those people who take time to check upon our work, to read the articles that we're doing our best to write, why do they choose us? Actually, the more we progress in our work for the Burma Digest, the more I feel that we have a stronger responsibility towards our readers.
Some time ago, we have decided to publish a campaign journal that would be able to make a strong statement; for freedom, for justice, for democracy. As we have grown, ever since, as a public forum and as a voice to be heard, the most important thing we had in mind along the way was: we have to be IRREPRESSIBLE!
IRREPRESSIBLE = impossible to repress or control. Maybe you've seen before, on some websites, Amnesty International irrepressible logo. It is part of a global campaign concerning freedom of expression on the internet.
Chat rooms monitored. Blogs deleted. Websites blocked. Search engines restricted. People imprisoned for simply posting and sharing information; is this situation familiar to you? If you dare to speak up against it, then you are irrepressible, just like us. Amnesty International, with the support of The Observer UK newspaper, is launching a campaign to show that online or offline the human voice and human rights are impossible to repress. Also, they are working with the Open Net Initiative (ONI) to help raise awareness of internet censorship around the world.
Together with Amnesty's Irrepressible campaign, the ONI has published a detailed report concerning censorship of the internet in Burma; According to them, "Myanmar's Internet Service Providers (ISPs) block access to web sites of political opposition groups, human rights-oriented sites, and organizations working for democratic change in Myanmar. Until recently Myanmar used Dans Guardian, an open source filtering software, but has switched to a filtering product made by the U.S.-based vender Fortinet. The state also maintains the capability to conduct surveillance of e-mail as individual users are only allowed access to local email providers - free e-mail sites such as Hotmail and Yahoo! Mail are blocked. Myanmar filters Internet access using Fortinet's Fortiguard Web filtering software. Users receive block pages when attempting to access banned content. Earlier tests revealed that Internet access was filtered by Dans Guardian filtering software. Internet connectivity is prohibitively expensive so users are also largely limited to the country's intranet. In 2000 Myanmar imposed new Web Regulations:
* Any writings detrimental to the interests of the Union of Myanmar are not to be posted
* Any writings directly or indirectly detrimental to the current policies and secret security affairs of the government of the Union of Myanmar are not to be posted
* Writings related to politics are not to be posted
* Internet users are to inform MPT of any threat on the Internet
* Internet users are to obtain prior permission from the organization designated by the state to create Web pages
Violations of the 2000 regulations are punishable by revocation of access and "legal action".
In another words, anyone who accesses internet pages that would be in any way linked to the democracy movement can be arrested. Anyone who would try to post a political manifesto on the internet can be arrested. Anyone who would use the internet to criticize the current regime can be arrested. What impression does this make to you?
For all those people, who are denied the access to accurate information, which are living under a repression, who may risk their lives for freedom of speech, for all of them. We at the Burma Digest are and have the duty to remain IREPRESSIBLE.

Myanmar shakes Western noose

By Shawn W Crispin

BANGKOK - It wasn't that long ago that military-run Myanmar periodically wobbled on the brink of economic and financial collapse. The many detractors of the ruling State Peace and Development Council (SPDC) had long hoped that Western-led economic sanctions would eventually squeeze the rights-abusing regime out of power.

A massive inflow of Asian capital has recently wholly undermined the near-decade-old sanctions regime led by the United States and the European Union and greatly strengthened the once-isolated military junta's political staying power. Significantly, the failure of the US-led policy
is also symptomatic of China's and India's ever increasing economic clout across the region.

Foreign investment into Myanmar surged to a record high US$6 billion in the fiscal 2005-06 year that ended in March, up from the paltry $158.3 million recorded the previous year, according to recently released official statistics.
Myanmar's total trade also hit a record high of $5.5 billion over the same period, surging 27% year on year and handing the junta a rare trade surplus of $1.6 billion. Bilateral trade is on pace to expand even faster this year to more than $7 billion as the junta cashes in on high global energy prices.

Those rising figures will no doubt irk the administration of US President George W Bush, which has in recent years referred to the hardline regime as an "outpost of tyranny". China, India and to a lesser degree Thailand have all overlooked Myanmar's abysmal rights record to gain access to the country's largely underdeveloped energy resources, including big new capital outlays for
joint-venture hydropower dams, oil and gas exploration and production, and assorted mining activities. The three Asian countries are also among Myanmar's top five trading partners.

Myanmar's reclusive ruling generals have awoken belatedly to the notion that opening to select foreign investors is more likely to maintain their long-term hold on power than economic isolationism. The junta recently opened six previously off-limits terrestrial-based oil and gas blocks to foreign exploration and development, mainly from India and China, and has also promised to open the country's largest gold mine and other key mineral deposits to foreign investment.

SPDC leader General Than Shwe is reportedly reviewing a larger-scale privatization plan, which would involve the selling of private stakes across a wide array of state-owned enterprises, some of which were nationalized in the wake of the military first seizing power in 1962. If that plan were even partially implemented, the sales would substantially fill the junta's long-depleted national coffers and provide the financial cushion necessary to stabilize inflation and exchange-rate volatility - the key on-the-ground targets of any economic-sanctions regime.

Declining influence

When the US first imposed its economic sanctions in 1997, and the EU later followed suit, Myanmar's isolated economy was highly vulnerable to outside pressure. China had not yet fully emerged economically and Washington was able to keep enterprising Japanese investors from shoring up Myanmar's decrepit economy and depleted finances.

When the 1997-98 Asian financial crisis hit, the local currency, the kyat, went into free fall, and the country was only rescued by China's friendly extension of emergency short-term interest-free loans. A banking crisis in 2003 and the government's inept policy response threatened to undermine completely Myanmar's already precarious financial balance. Without China's behind-the-scenes financial assistance, on several occasions Myanmar's economy could have succumbed to the combination of Western sanctions and its own economic mismanagement.

The sanctions have long been cheered by the hardline regime's many detractors, including detained opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi, who has said from house arrest that foreigners should refrain from investing in Myanmar until democracy is restored. Yet when the US imposed sanctions against Myanmar in 1997, the punitive policy had achieved its objectives in fewer than 24% of cases since 1973, according to research compiled by the Heritage Foundation, a US-based conservative think-tank.

Meanwhile, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) member states were initially peeved when the US first imposed its sanctions, which ran counter to their 1997 initiative to engage rather than isolate the junta through membership in their regional grouping - which was at least partially initiated to counterbalance fears of China's growing economic and strategic influence in Myanmar.

Still, investment from financial-crisis-strapped ASEAN countries has only gradually trickled into Myanmar, and was further restrained by behind-the-scenes US and EU diplomatic pressure on certain regional countries. Yet China, India and Thailand have all willingly risked Western philippics to gain access to Myanmar's oil and gas sources, which some industry analysts estimate are second in volume only to Indonesia in the region.

Myanmar has significantly managed to bypass the Western-controlled multilateral lending agencies, including the World Bank, which has in the main observed the US and EU sanctions, and accessed capital investment directly from private-sector Asian sources. While various US and European companies closed down their Myanmar-based investments because of the sanctions, Chinese and Indian - mainly energy - companies have rapidly filled the gap.

India's Essar Oil Ltd, Focus Energy Ltd, MPRL Exploration and Production Private Ltd and Goldpetrol and China's CNOOC (China National Offshore Oil Corp), Sinopec (China Petrochemical Corp) and China National Petroleum subsidiary Chinerry Assets have all recently established substantial operations in the country. And there are reportedly many more joint-venture energy deals in Myanmar's pipeline.

Western sanctions' failure to achieve economic collapse and political change in Myanmar significantly underscores both the United States' and Europe's waning and China's and India's growing economic influence in the region. As Asia's economies become more integrated, particularly through greater Chinese- and Indian-inspired trade and investment links, Western-led economic threats clearly no longer strike fear into the region's roguish regimes.

If US and EU sanctions fail to have the desired effect against a country as backward, mismanaged and until now isolated as Myanmar, then the policy tool is unlikely to work anywhere else in Asia, including against nuclear North Korea. That's a potentially disturbing economic truth considering that current US administration's penchant for using preemptive force against regimes it considers "evil" or, in Myanmar's case, "tyrannous".

Some Western diplomats believe that fear of a possible US invasion was one big reason Myanmar's ruling junta last year abruptly moved the national capital from the coastal city of Yangon to the inland, mountainous redoubt of Naypyidaw. Ironically, perhaps, the junta is now pumping profits earned from China and India into building up a new military-industrial complex, where the ruling generals are living comfortably and hunkering down against a possible US military rather than economic threat. Meanwhile, the junta continues to round up and jail its political opponents, and crack down on even the mildest forms of dissent.


Shawn W Crispin is Asia Times Online's Southeast Asia editor.