January 30, 2009
Forever at the Frontline
By SAW YAN NAING
January 31 marks the 60th anniversary of one of Asia’s oldest rebel movements—the Karen National Union (KNU). It is a day commemorated by Karen people all around the world.
Since it declared war on the central government in 1949—shortly after Burma declared independence from Great Britain—the KNU has faced a great many ups and downs during its six-decade fight for autonomy.
It is undergone rifts and splits, and breakaway Karen groups have emerged. It suffered defeat at the hands of the Burmese army and in 1995 was forced to abandon its jungle fortress at Manerplaw on the Thai- Burmese border. Its aging leadership is fading away while the number of Karen refugees continues to grow. Discontent is high among the Karen population and thousands of families are currently resettling in Western countries under the auspices of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugee (UNHCR).
However, unlike so many other armed insurgent groups, the KNU has steadfastly refused to sign a ceasefire agreement with the Rangoon government.
When the KNU’s founding father, Saw Ba U Gyi, established the rebel movement in 1949, he unveiled his “Four Principles” of resistance: “There shall be no surrender; The recognition of the Karen State must be completed; We shall retain our arms; and We shall decide our own political destiny.”
The KNU has locked itself to those principles through thick and thin for 60 years.
In 1995, the Democratic Karen Buddhist Army (DKBA) split from the KNU and joined forces with the Burmese army. Manerplaw fell soon after. The KNU, led by Gen Bo Mya, scattered while its civilian population joined the exodus into Thai border refugee camps. The KNU lost their only true sources of income: logging and taxation.
After fighting the Burmese army for 30 years, KNU commander Tha Mu He and hundreds of his followers surrendered to the regime in April 1997.
He told journalists and diplomats that he split from the KNU because of the failed peace talks between the Burmese junta and his mother organization in 1994 and the realization that the conflict would continue indefinitely.
One year later, Phado Aung San, a central executive member of the KNU, and hundreds of his followers also surrendered to the Rangoon government. He gave the same reasons for laying down his weapons as Tha Mu He had.
Then in early 2007, another splinter group reached a ceasefire agreement with the Burmese regime. Known as the KNU/ KNLA Peace Council and led by Maj-Gen Htein Maung, it included around 300 defecting KNU soldiers.
Brig-Gen Johnny, head of KNLA Brigade 7, said that Karen breakaway leaders who had reached ceasefire agreements with the Burmese regime had betrayed their people and their comrades who had died for the Karen revolution.
“We have to carry on the unfinished duty for our people. If we give up, it is as if we were betraying our comrades and our leaders who have died for us,” said Brig-Gen Johnny.
“Our enemy [the Burmese military regime] is trying to divide us every day. We have to be united and always be careful,” he said.
Meanwhile, the DKBA has boasted that its forces will overrun the KNU’s military wing, the KNLA, by 2010.
The target of its operation would appear to be Kawkareik Township in southern Karen State, which is rich in gold, teak forest, antimony, zinc and tin. Sources from both the KNU and the DKBA circles have said that the DKBA seeks to control the regions that do business with the Thai authorities.
However, the KNU leadership, as always, remains resolute. KNLA Battalion 201 Maj Bu Paw acknowledged recently that the DKBA would attack his battalion in Kawkareik and try to seize its military bases, but stated: “The DKBA can not defeat us.”
Assassinations among the KNU and the breakaways groups have increased since 2007.
On February 14 last year, KNU General-Secretary Mahn Shah was gunned down by two men at his home in Mae Sot, Thailand.
Mahn Sha had been widely respected, not only by ethnic Karen people, but by most democratic alliance groups and individuals who have participated in the pro-democracy movement for Burma.
Aung Thu Nyein, a Burmese political analyst and former senior leader of the All Burma Students’ Democratic Front, blogged: “It is necessary for the new KNU leadership to quickly stop the assassinations and divisions among Karen people.
“It is time for the KNU to reestablish unity among the Karen people,” he said.
The newly appointed joint secretary (1), Maj Hla Ngwe, admitted the divisions among KNU leaders and said that the Burmese regime had cleverly manipulated the KNU.
“We have had weaknesses and divisions in the past. That is natural. It can happen in any party or organization. But, we should learn from these events and ensure it doesn’t happen in the future,” he said.
Brig-Gen Johnny agreed, but was more cynical. “It is not because our enemy is clever, it is because we are not clever,” he said.
Breakaway groups have been quick to criticizing their former patrons, claiming that they now enjoy improved living conditions.
DKBA Chairman Tha Htoo Kyaw once said that the KNU had been poor since 1949. He said that his followers who had settled in Myaing Gyi Ngu village, on the bank of the Salween River, enjoyed peace, an improving economy, proper education and a healthcare system since splitting from the KNU.
“The path we chose has been beneficial to the Karen in the area,” he was quoted as saying.
Meanwhile, several voices from the overseas Karen community have been vocal in criticizing the KNU leadership for its inactivity in both the political and military arenas.
Some claim that the KNU’s policy of self-defense is not enough to protect the Karen civilians and the impact on Karen civilians who are internally displaced in Karen State.
As the conflict between the Karen rebels and the Burmese army goes on, observers say the problem of internally displaced people (IDPs) and refugees will continue unabated.
There are about 451,000 IDPs in Karen State, according to a 2008-released report by the Thailand Burma Border Consortium (TBBC). The report stated that since 1996 about 3,300 villages in Karen State have been destroyed by the Burmese army and its allies.
Meanwhile, hundreds of Karen refugees from the nine refugee camps on the Thai-Burmese border resettle every year in third countries. About 32,000 refugees went overseas in 2008, according to TBBC.
“We want to say to the world that we only want peace,” said Myat San, an IDP from Ei Tu Hta camp on the banks of the Salween River. “We want to live in peace. We want to urge the world to push for the fall of military rule in Burma and create peace for us.”
According to Brig-Gen Johnny, the KNU and all the pro-democracy forces inside and outside Burma, including Buddhists monks and students, should speed up the movement for democracy in 2009 and boycott the junta’s multi-party election in 2010.
“If the junta wins the election, we [the opposition] will continue to be under the boots of the Burmese army,” he said.
“But if every single person knows their role in the democracy movement, the goal of the revolution will not be far away.”
January 31 marks the 60th anniversary of one of Asia’s oldest rebel movements—the Karen National Union (KNU). It is a day commemorated by Karen people all around the world.
Since it declared war on the central government in 1949—shortly after Burma declared independence from Great Britain—the KNU has faced a great many ups and downs during its six-decade fight for autonomy.
It is undergone rifts and splits, and breakaway Karen groups have emerged. It suffered defeat at the hands of the Burmese army and in 1995 was forced to abandon its jungle fortress at Manerplaw on the Thai- Burmese border. Its aging leadership is fading away while the number of Karen refugees continues to grow. Discontent is high among the Karen population and thousands of families are currently resettling in Western countries under the auspices of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugee (UNHCR).
However, unlike so many other armed insurgent groups, the KNU has steadfastly refused to sign a ceasefire agreement with the Rangoon government.
When the KNU’s founding father, Saw Ba U Gyi, established the rebel movement in 1949, he unveiled his “Four Principles” of resistance: “There shall be no surrender; The recognition of the Karen State must be completed; We shall retain our arms; and We shall decide our own political destiny.”
The KNU has locked itself to those principles through thick and thin for 60 years.
In 1995, the Democratic Karen Buddhist Army (DKBA) split from the KNU and joined forces with the Burmese army. Manerplaw fell soon after. The KNU, led by Gen Bo Mya, scattered while its civilian population joined the exodus into Thai border refugee camps. The KNU lost their only true sources of income: logging and taxation.
After fighting the Burmese army for 30 years, KNU commander Tha Mu He and hundreds of his followers surrendered to the regime in April 1997.
He told journalists and diplomats that he split from the KNU because of the failed peace talks between the Burmese junta and his mother organization in 1994 and the realization that the conflict would continue indefinitely.
One year later, Phado Aung San, a central executive member of the KNU, and hundreds of his followers also surrendered to the Rangoon government. He gave the same reasons for laying down his weapons as Tha Mu He had.
Then in early 2007, another splinter group reached a ceasefire agreement with the Burmese regime. Known as the KNU/ KNLA Peace Council and led by Maj-Gen Htein Maung, it included around 300 defecting KNU soldiers.
Brig-Gen Johnny, head of KNLA Brigade 7, said that Karen breakaway leaders who had reached ceasefire agreements with the Burmese regime had betrayed their people and their comrades who had died for the Karen revolution.
“We have to carry on the unfinished duty for our people. If we give up, it is as if we were betraying our comrades and our leaders who have died for us,” said Brig-Gen Johnny.
“Our enemy [the Burmese military regime] is trying to divide us every day. We have to be united and always be careful,” he said.
Meanwhile, the DKBA has boasted that its forces will overrun the KNU’s military wing, the KNLA, by 2010.
The target of its operation would appear to be Kawkareik Township in southern Karen State, which is rich in gold, teak forest, antimony, zinc and tin. Sources from both the KNU and the DKBA circles have said that the DKBA seeks to control the regions that do business with the Thai authorities.
However, the KNU leadership, as always, remains resolute. KNLA Battalion 201 Maj Bu Paw acknowledged recently that the DKBA would attack his battalion in Kawkareik and try to seize its military bases, but stated: “The DKBA can not defeat us.”
Assassinations among the KNU and the breakaways groups have increased since 2007.
On February 14 last year, KNU General-Secretary Mahn Shah was gunned down by two men at his home in Mae Sot, Thailand.
Mahn Sha had been widely respected, not only by ethnic Karen people, but by most democratic alliance groups and individuals who have participated in the pro-democracy movement for Burma.
Aung Thu Nyein, a Burmese political analyst and former senior leader of the All Burma Students’ Democratic Front, blogged: “It is necessary for the new KNU leadership to quickly stop the assassinations and divisions among Karen people.
“It is time for the KNU to reestablish unity among the Karen people,” he said.
The newly appointed joint secretary (1), Maj Hla Ngwe, admitted the divisions among KNU leaders and said that the Burmese regime had cleverly manipulated the KNU.
“We have had weaknesses and divisions in the past. That is natural. It can happen in any party or organization. But, we should learn from these events and ensure it doesn’t happen in the future,” he said.
Brig-Gen Johnny agreed, but was more cynical. “It is not because our enemy is clever, it is because we are not clever,” he said.
Breakaway groups have been quick to criticizing their former patrons, claiming that they now enjoy improved living conditions.
DKBA Chairman Tha Htoo Kyaw once said that the KNU had been poor since 1949. He said that his followers who had settled in Myaing Gyi Ngu village, on the bank of the Salween River, enjoyed peace, an improving economy, proper education and a healthcare system since splitting from the KNU.
“The path we chose has been beneficial to the Karen in the area,” he was quoted as saying.
Meanwhile, several voices from the overseas Karen community have been vocal in criticizing the KNU leadership for its inactivity in both the political and military arenas.
Some claim that the KNU’s policy of self-defense is not enough to protect the Karen civilians and the impact on Karen civilians who are internally displaced in Karen State.
As the conflict between the Karen rebels and the Burmese army goes on, observers say the problem of internally displaced people (IDPs) and refugees will continue unabated.
There are about 451,000 IDPs in Karen State, according to a 2008-released report by the Thailand Burma Border Consortium (TBBC). The report stated that since 1996 about 3,300 villages in Karen State have been destroyed by the Burmese army and its allies.
Meanwhile, hundreds of Karen refugees from the nine refugee camps on the Thai-Burmese border resettle every year in third countries. About 32,000 refugees went overseas in 2008, according to TBBC.
“We want to say to the world that we only want peace,” said Myat San, an IDP from Ei Tu Hta camp on the banks of the Salween River. “We want to live in peace. We want to urge the world to push for the fall of military rule in Burma and create peace for us.”
According to Brig-Gen Johnny, the KNU and all the pro-democracy forces inside and outside Burma, including Buddhists monks and students, should speed up the movement for democracy in 2009 and boycott the junta’s multi-party election in 2010.
“If the junta wins the election, we [the opposition] will continue to be under the boots of the Burmese army,” he said.
“But if every single person knows their role in the democracy movement, the goal of the revolution will not be far away.”
Raids in Rangoon Yield More Heroin
By THE IRRAWADDY
Police and customs officers in Rangoon have confirmed that a special anti-narcotics task force has seized substantial quantities of heroin in a series of raids carried out in the former Burmese capital since late last week.
Police said at least 28 kilograms of heroin were found last Sunday in a container on the Singaporean-flagged ship Kota Tegap, which was docked at the Asia World Port Terminal, located in Rangoon’s Ahlone Township.
The port is owned by Tun Myint Naing, the son of former drug kingpin and militia leader Lo Hsing Han and one of those listed for sanctions by the US Treasury Department.
According to a report by Washington-based Radio Free Asia, the container, which was bound for Singapore, is owned by the Myanmar Timber Enterprise, a government-owned business that is also under US sanctions.
Police told The Irrawaddy on Friday that in a subsequent sting operation, the Central Committee for Drug Abuse Control (CCDAC) discovered another large cache of heroin in FMI City, an upscale residential area in Hlaing Tharyar Township. Further details were not available.
The CCDAC is a high-level task force chaired by Minister for Home Affairs Maj-Gen Maung Oo. Brig-Gen Khin Yi, the director general of the national police force, serves as secretary of the committee, which is based in the junta’s capital of Naypyidaw.
According to sources at the customs department, the police special intelligence department, known as the Special Branch, is now questioning port employees, high-ranking government officials and prominent businessmen in connection with the heroin seizure at the Asia World Port Terminal last weekend.
Observers say that drug traffickers are increasingly using maritime routes to smuggle drugs out of Burma due to a tough suppression campaign by neighboring countries such as Thailand and China.
On Tuesday, the Norway-based Democratic Voice of Burma reported that Kyaw Kyaw Min, a crab exporter in Bogalay Township, Irrawaddy Division, was arrested for attempting to smuggle 32 kilograms of heroin out of the country aboard a container ship.
Meanwhile, Singapore’s Central Narcotics Bureau seized 44.2 kilograms of heroin last year, up from 17.2 kilograms seized in 2007, the Straits Times reported Friday.
A shipment of 11 kilograms of high-grade heroin, bound for the European market, was seized in June, said the report, adding that it was the biggest seizure of its kind in the last 10 years. The report added that most of the heroin came from Thailand and Burma.
According to the 2008 World Drug Report, opium poppy cultivation in Southeast Asia increased by 22 percent last year, mainly driven by a 29 percent increase in opium cultivation in Burma.
The Burmese regime seized 103.8 kilograms of heroin and 1,690 kilograms of opium from January 2007 to June 2008, according to official figures.
Police and customs officers in Rangoon have confirmed that a special anti-narcotics task force has seized substantial quantities of heroin in a series of raids carried out in the former Burmese capital since late last week.
Police said at least 28 kilograms of heroin were found last Sunday in a container on the Singaporean-flagged ship Kota Tegap, which was docked at the Asia World Port Terminal, located in Rangoon’s Ahlone Township.
The port is owned by Tun Myint Naing, the son of former drug kingpin and militia leader Lo Hsing Han and one of those listed for sanctions by the US Treasury Department.
According to a report by Washington-based Radio Free Asia, the container, which was bound for Singapore, is owned by the Myanmar Timber Enterprise, a government-owned business that is also under US sanctions.
Police told The Irrawaddy on Friday that in a subsequent sting operation, the Central Committee for Drug Abuse Control (CCDAC) discovered another large cache of heroin in FMI City, an upscale residential area in Hlaing Tharyar Township. Further details were not available.
The CCDAC is a high-level task force chaired by Minister for Home Affairs Maj-Gen Maung Oo. Brig-Gen Khin Yi, the director general of the national police force, serves as secretary of the committee, which is based in the junta’s capital of Naypyidaw.
According to sources at the customs department, the police special intelligence department, known as the Special Branch, is now questioning port employees, high-ranking government officials and prominent businessmen in connection with the heroin seizure at the Asia World Port Terminal last weekend.
Observers say that drug traffickers are increasingly using maritime routes to smuggle drugs out of Burma due to a tough suppression campaign by neighboring countries such as Thailand and China.
On Tuesday, the Norway-based Democratic Voice of Burma reported that Kyaw Kyaw Min, a crab exporter in Bogalay Township, Irrawaddy Division, was arrested for attempting to smuggle 32 kilograms of heroin out of the country aboard a container ship.
Meanwhile, Singapore’s Central Narcotics Bureau seized 44.2 kilograms of heroin last year, up from 17.2 kilograms seized in 2007, the Straits Times reported Friday.
A shipment of 11 kilograms of high-grade heroin, bound for the European market, was seized in June, said the report, adding that it was the biggest seizure of its kind in the last 10 years. The report added that most of the heroin came from Thailand and Burma.
According to the 2008 World Drug Report, opium poppy cultivation in Southeast Asia increased by 22 percent last year, mainly driven by a 29 percent increase in opium cultivation in Burma.
The Burmese regime seized 103.8 kilograms of heroin and 1,690 kilograms of opium from January 2007 to June 2008, according to official figures.
AI Calls for Access to Rohingya
By LAWI WENG
A leading international rights group, Amnesty International, called on regional countries on Thursday to address the plight of Rohingya migrants and grant the UN immediate access to the detained boat people.
Amnesty International sent an open letter on Thursday to the governments of Bangladesh, India, Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand and Burma and expressed its concern on the issue of Rohingya migrants.
“We write to you to raise our serious concern about the plight of the Rohingyas,” the rights group said in the letter.
It also urged the six regional countries to grant the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) immediate access to detained Rohingya in order to determine whether they need international protection.
The group asked the Burmese military government to stop persecution of the Rohingya people who live in Arakan State in western Burma.
On Friday, a Burmese state-run newspaper, Myanmar Ahlin, carried a story that claimed the Rohingya are not among Burma's more than 100 ethnic minority groups.
“It will be complicated if Thai authorities repatriate the 66 Rohingya migrants to Burma,” the report said, referring to an earlier group of detainees.
However, Kitty McKinsey, who is the regional spokeswoman for UNHCR in Asia, told The Irrawaddy on Friday that the detained migrants were clearly Rohingya, and they departed from Burma.
The UNHCR was granted access to 12 Rohingya teenagers from a group of 78 Rohingya who were rescued by the Thai navy on Monday night. She said the teenagers are in good condition.
The health of the remaining Rohingya is unknown. The UNHCR is in discussions with the Thai government to obtain access to those in detention, she said.
Kasit Piromya, the Thai Foreign Minister, told reporters in Bangkok on Thursday that he has agreed “in principle” to grant UNHCR access to the detained Rohingya boat people after talks were held at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
Meanwhile, two leading US-based rights groups, Refugees International and Human Rights Watch, claim the Thai navy has mistreated hundreds of Rohingya boat people who left from Burma, forcing many of them back out to international water with limited food and water. The groups said as many as 300 Rohingya are missing.
Thailand has denied the charges, but in a statement released on a Web site on Wednesday, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs said that “should concrete evidence be presented, the Thai Government would seriously look into such cases.”
Last week, Foreign Ministry officials met with envoys from India, Indonesia, Bangladesh, Malaysia and Burma to discuss the exodus of the Rohingya from Burma.
Due to alleged discrimination against the Rohinya people, there has been a persistent exodus of Rohingya from Burma and Bangladesh since the early 1990s in an effort to reach Thailand and Malaysia.
Chris Lewa, an expert on Rohingya issues, said the number of boat people may increase this year due to the impact of the global economic downturn on one of the poorest regions of Asia.
A leading international rights group, Amnesty International, called on regional countries on Thursday to address the plight of Rohingya migrants and grant the UN immediate access to the detained boat people.
Amnesty International sent an open letter on Thursday to the governments of Bangladesh, India, Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand and Burma and expressed its concern on the issue of Rohingya migrants.
“We write to you to raise our serious concern about the plight of the Rohingyas,” the rights group said in the letter.
It also urged the six regional countries to grant the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) immediate access to detained Rohingya in order to determine whether they need international protection.
The group asked the Burmese military government to stop persecution of the Rohingya people who live in Arakan State in western Burma.
On Friday, a Burmese state-run newspaper, Myanmar Ahlin, carried a story that claimed the Rohingya are not among Burma's more than 100 ethnic minority groups.
“It will be complicated if Thai authorities repatriate the 66 Rohingya migrants to Burma,” the report said, referring to an earlier group of detainees.
However, Kitty McKinsey, who is the regional spokeswoman for UNHCR in Asia, told The Irrawaddy on Friday that the detained migrants were clearly Rohingya, and they departed from Burma.
The UNHCR was granted access to 12 Rohingya teenagers from a group of 78 Rohingya who were rescued by the Thai navy on Monday night. She said the teenagers are in good condition.
The health of the remaining Rohingya is unknown. The UNHCR is in discussions with the Thai government to obtain access to those in detention, she said.
Kasit Piromya, the Thai Foreign Minister, told reporters in Bangkok on Thursday that he has agreed “in principle” to grant UNHCR access to the detained Rohingya boat people after talks were held at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
Meanwhile, two leading US-based rights groups, Refugees International and Human Rights Watch, claim the Thai navy has mistreated hundreds of Rohingya boat people who left from Burma, forcing many of them back out to international water with limited food and water. The groups said as many as 300 Rohingya are missing.
Thailand has denied the charges, but in a statement released on a Web site on Wednesday, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs said that “should concrete evidence be presented, the Thai Government would seriously look into such cases.”
Last week, Foreign Ministry officials met with envoys from India, Indonesia, Bangladesh, Malaysia and Burma to discuss the exodus of the Rohingya from Burma.
Due to alleged discrimination against the Rohinya people, there has been a persistent exodus of Rohingya from Burma and Bangladesh since the early 1990s in an effort to reach Thailand and Malaysia.
Chris Lewa, an expert on Rohingya issues, said the number of boat people may increase this year due to the impact of the global economic downturn on one of the poorest regions of Asia.
Global Slump Hits Burmese Crop Growers, Traders
By MIN LWIN
Crop prices in Burma have fallen 50 percent over the past year because of declining demand by the country’s two major export markets, China and India, according to traders at the Mandalay Commodity Centre.
Prices of beans, sesame and nuts began falling with the onset of the global financial crisis in late October 2008. The price of beans dropped from 825,000 kyat ($753) per ton to about 374,000 kyat ($341), according to Mandalay business sources.
Apart from China and India, Burma experienced declining orders from Thailand, Singapore and Malaysia. The decline was attributed to the effects of the global slump.
Cross-border trading is at a standstill because prices are now lower than production costs, according to traders. Commodities are piling up on both sides of Burma’s borders, waiting for buyers.
“Bigger companies have been hit harder than smaller ones,” said one trader from Tamu Township, on the Burmese-Indian border, Investors in border trading were hit most, she said.
Some exporters of crops to India had gone into hiding because they were unable to pay back loans for growing and dealing in commodities that were no longer profitable, the trader said.
Burmese local authorities in Myawaddy Township have meanwhile restricted Thai-Burmese cross-border trading.
The chairman of the chamber of commerce in Thailand’s border province of Tak, Ampol Chatchaiyareuk, said exports of Burmese sea food and timber were affected by the restrictions. “The Burmese local authority wants to control illegal trading with Thailand,” he said.
Crop prices in Burma have fallen 50 percent over the past year because of declining demand by the country’s two major export markets, China and India, according to traders at the Mandalay Commodity Centre.
Prices of beans, sesame and nuts began falling with the onset of the global financial crisis in late October 2008. The price of beans dropped from 825,000 kyat ($753) per ton to about 374,000 kyat ($341), according to Mandalay business sources.
Apart from China and India, Burma experienced declining orders from Thailand, Singapore and Malaysia. The decline was attributed to the effects of the global slump.
Cross-border trading is at a standstill because prices are now lower than production costs, according to traders. Commodities are piling up on both sides of Burma’s borders, waiting for buyers.
“Bigger companies have been hit harder than smaller ones,” said one trader from Tamu Township, on the Burmese-Indian border, Investors in border trading were hit most, she said.
Some exporters of crops to India had gone into hiding because they were unable to pay back loans for growing and dealing in commodities that were no longer profitable, the trader said.
Burmese local authorities in Myawaddy Township have meanwhile restricted Thai-Burmese cross-border trading.
The chairman of the chamber of commerce in Thailand’s border province of Tak, Ampol Chatchaiyareuk, said exports of Burmese sea food and timber were affected by the restrictions. “The Burmese local authority wants to control illegal trading with Thailand,” he said.
Gambari Must be Firm this Time Around
By KYAW ZWA MOE
UN Special Envoy Ibrahim Gambari is expected to arrive in Burma this weekend on the seventh visit of a mission that has so far raised little hope of progress towards democratic government there.
Gambari’s boss, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, believes that this time the envoy will be able to meet one of the military government’s top men and detained opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi. If he does, let’s at least call that a success.
On his previous visit, last August, Gambari failed to meet junta leader Than Shwe or Suu Kyi. Her refusal to receive him at her Rangoon home was a real blow because she has never declined to meet any of his predecessors during the political deadlock of the past 20 years.
Senior leaders of Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy believe that her motive for snubbing Gambari was rooted in her frustration at the lack of progress achieved by the UN in 20 years of involvement in the Burma question. It was also seen as a form of appeal for results to finally emerge from Gambari’s mission.
On this visit—his seventh—Gambari will probably be luckier than last August. NLD spokesman Win Naing told The Irrawaddy that the party shared Ban’s expectation that Suu Ky will agree to meet the envoy.
One reason for a change of heart by Suu Kyi may be a realization that she hasn’t much time left to make her views known before the 2010 election and that Gambari represents her only official channel for her message to reach the outside world.
World leaders and the Burmese people, especially her party members, are anxiously waiting for words that could form the NLD policy position on the 2010 election. For that reason alone, she has to meet Gambari and send the world a clear message about the election through the UN intermediary.
As for the NLD, Win Naing said the party will also stick to the four issues that its leaders emphasized during their talks with Gambari last August:
1. The release of political prisoners, including Suu Kyi;
2. A meaningful dialogue between the military regime and opposition groups;
3. Formation of an economic development committee;
4. Opening of a liaison office in Burma for the UN secretary-general.
The NLD believes that resolution of these issues is essential for the national reconciliation process.
Gambari upset NLD leaders last August by focusing on the 2010 elections and the government’s schedule for meetings with its proxy civic and political groups. He was accused of failing to act as a real negotiator.
This time, it is believed that Gambari has prepared himself to avoid issues that could upset the NLD. On the other hand, he will have to know how to handle attempts by the military leaders to manipulate him and the UN.
The release of all political prisoners is a necessary starting point for dialogue. Gambari is well aware how the junta has used the political prisoners as pawns in dealing with the international community.
Last September, fewer than 10 political prisoners were among about 9,000 prisoners freed in an amnesty. The release of that small group, including prominent political detainee Win Tin, drew praise from some countries.
By year’s end, however, more than 200 political activists, including prominent dissidents, were sentenced to prison terms of up to 104 years. Currently, more than 2,000 political prisoners are still languishing in various notorious jails across the country.
Hopes that Gambari may be able to secure the release of even just some of them next week are slim. Even if he does score some success, the world must remain suspicious of the motives of a regime that has cheated so often in the past.
The release of political prisoners must nevertheless remain a fundamental demand, ranking with the necessity of talks between the regime and the opposition. On their fulfillment depends all hope of breaking the present deadlock. Gambari must make that clear to the generals.
UN Special Envoy Ibrahim Gambari is expected to arrive in Burma this weekend on the seventh visit of a mission that has so far raised little hope of progress towards democratic government there.
Gambari’s boss, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, believes that this time the envoy will be able to meet one of the military government’s top men and detained opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi. If he does, let’s at least call that a success.
On his previous visit, last August, Gambari failed to meet junta leader Than Shwe or Suu Kyi. Her refusal to receive him at her Rangoon home was a real blow because she has never declined to meet any of his predecessors during the political deadlock of the past 20 years.
Senior leaders of Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy believe that her motive for snubbing Gambari was rooted in her frustration at the lack of progress achieved by the UN in 20 years of involvement in the Burma question. It was also seen as a form of appeal for results to finally emerge from Gambari’s mission.
On this visit—his seventh—Gambari will probably be luckier than last August. NLD spokesman Win Naing told The Irrawaddy that the party shared Ban’s expectation that Suu Ky will agree to meet the envoy.
One reason for a change of heart by Suu Kyi may be a realization that she hasn’t much time left to make her views known before the 2010 election and that Gambari represents her only official channel for her message to reach the outside world.
World leaders and the Burmese people, especially her party members, are anxiously waiting for words that could form the NLD policy position on the 2010 election. For that reason alone, she has to meet Gambari and send the world a clear message about the election through the UN intermediary.
As for the NLD, Win Naing said the party will also stick to the four issues that its leaders emphasized during their talks with Gambari last August:
1. The release of political prisoners, including Suu Kyi;
2. A meaningful dialogue between the military regime and opposition groups;
3. Formation of an economic development committee;
4. Opening of a liaison office in Burma for the UN secretary-general.
The NLD believes that resolution of these issues is essential for the national reconciliation process.
Gambari upset NLD leaders last August by focusing on the 2010 elections and the government’s schedule for meetings with its proxy civic and political groups. He was accused of failing to act as a real negotiator.
This time, it is believed that Gambari has prepared himself to avoid issues that could upset the NLD. On the other hand, he will have to know how to handle attempts by the military leaders to manipulate him and the UN.
The release of all political prisoners is a necessary starting point for dialogue. Gambari is well aware how the junta has used the political prisoners as pawns in dealing with the international community.
Last September, fewer than 10 political prisoners were among about 9,000 prisoners freed in an amnesty. The release of that small group, including prominent political detainee Win Tin, drew praise from some countries.
By year’s end, however, more than 200 political activists, including prominent dissidents, were sentenced to prison terms of up to 104 years. Currently, more than 2,000 political prisoners are still languishing in various notorious jails across the country.
Hopes that Gambari may be able to secure the release of even just some of them next week are slim. Even if he does score some success, the world must remain suspicious of the motives of a regime that has cheated so often in the past.
The release of political prisoners must nevertheless remain a fundamental demand, ranking with the necessity of talks between the regime and the opposition. On their fulfillment depends all hope of breaking the present deadlock. Gambari must make that clear to the generals.
US Envoy to UN Signals Support for ‘R2P’
By JOHN HEILPRIN / AP WRITER
UNITED NATIONS — US Ambassador Susan Rice signaled on Thursday during her first appearance before the UN Security Council that President Barack Obama's administration feels a "responsibility" to sometimes take on nations that abuse their own citizens.
"As agreed to by member states in 2005 and by the Security Council in 2006, the international community has a responsibility to protect civilian populations from violations of international humanitarian law when states are unwilling or unable to do so," Rice told the council, without elaborating, during a closed-door session.
"But this commitment is only as effective as the willingness of all nations, large and small, to take concrete action. The United States takes this responsibility seriously," she said, according to a transcript of her remarks made available to reporters later.
During the past year the UN has debated whether it has a "responsibility to protect" civilians in such cases.
Last May, for example, the council discussed a proposal by France to authorize the UN to enter Burma and deliver aid without waiting for approval from the nation's ruling military junta. Several countries, citing issues of sovereignty, blocked the idea.
France had argued that the UN has the responsibility—and power—because of language adopted at a UN summit in 2005 saying the world body sometimes has a "responsibility to protect" people from genocide, war crimes and ethnic cleansing when nations fail to do it. A Security Council resolution adopted in 2006 reaffirmed that agreement.
Rice also emphasized, in keeping with the subject of Thursday's council meeting, that the U. would work to strengthen protections for civilians in conflict zones and support international prosecutions of war crimes.
"It is in this spirit of cooperation and determination that we will seek to use this body of international law to minimize human suffering and protect vulnerable populations," Rice said.
She said the International Criminal Court "looks to become an important and credible instrument for trying to hold accountable the senior leadership responsible for atrocities committed in the Congo, Uganda and Darfur."
The US opposed the court's creation and for the past decade refused to join it. The court is not part of the United Nations, but the 107 nations that ratified the 1998 treaty creating it, along with the UN, are responsible for responding to its requests for cooperation.
As former president George W. Bush's administration wound down, the United States became a strident supporter of bringing Sudan's president before the court on charges of orchestrating atrocities in Sudan's Darfur region.
Rice, who began work at the UN on Monday, defended Israel while pressuring it to account for its military actions. Much of Thursday's council discussions revolved around Israel's three-week offensive and January 18 cease-fire in Gaza, diplomats said.
"Violations of international humanitarian law have been perpetrated by Hamas through its rocket attacks against Israeli civilians in southern Israel and the use of civilian facilities to provide protection for its terrorist attacks. There have also been numerous allegations made against Israel, some of which are deliberately designed to inflame," Rice said.
"We expect Israel will meet its international obligations to investigate, and we also call upon all members of the international community to refrain from politicizing these important issues," she said.
UNITED NATIONS — US Ambassador Susan Rice signaled on Thursday during her first appearance before the UN Security Council that President Barack Obama's administration feels a "responsibility" to sometimes take on nations that abuse their own citizens.
"As agreed to by member states in 2005 and by the Security Council in 2006, the international community has a responsibility to protect civilian populations from violations of international humanitarian law when states are unwilling or unable to do so," Rice told the council, without elaborating, during a closed-door session.
"But this commitment is only as effective as the willingness of all nations, large and small, to take concrete action. The United States takes this responsibility seriously," she said, according to a transcript of her remarks made available to reporters later.
During the past year the UN has debated whether it has a "responsibility to protect" civilians in such cases.
Last May, for example, the council discussed a proposal by France to authorize the UN to enter Burma and deliver aid without waiting for approval from the nation's ruling military junta. Several countries, citing issues of sovereignty, blocked the idea.
France had argued that the UN has the responsibility—and power—because of language adopted at a UN summit in 2005 saying the world body sometimes has a "responsibility to protect" people from genocide, war crimes and ethnic cleansing when nations fail to do it. A Security Council resolution adopted in 2006 reaffirmed that agreement.
Rice also emphasized, in keeping with the subject of Thursday's council meeting, that the U. would work to strengthen protections for civilians in conflict zones and support international prosecutions of war crimes.
"It is in this spirit of cooperation and determination that we will seek to use this body of international law to minimize human suffering and protect vulnerable populations," Rice said.
She said the International Criminal Court "looks to become an important and credible instrument for trying to hold accountable the senior leadership responsible for atrocities committed in the Congo, Uganda and Darfur."
The US opposed the court's creation and for the past decade refused to join it. The court is not part of the United Nations, but the 107 nations that ratified the 1998 treaty creating it, along with the UN, are responsible for responding to its requests for cooperation.
As former president George W. Bush's administration wound down, the United States became a strident supporter of bringing Sudan's president before the court on charges of orchestrating atrocities in Sudan's Darfur region.
Rice, who began work at the UN on Monday, defended Israel while pressuring it to account for its military actions. Much of Thursday's council discussions revolved around Israel's three-week offensive and January 18 cease-fire in Gaza, diplomats said.
"Violations of international humanitarian law have been perpetrated by Hamas through its rocket attacks against Israeli civilians in southern Israel and the use of civilian facilities to provide protection for its terrorist attacks. There have also been numerous allegations made against Israel, some of which are deliberately designed to inflame," Rice said.
"We expect Israel will meet its international obligations to investigate, and we also call upon all members of the international community to refrain from politicizing these important issues," she said.
Makers and Shakers of the Post-crisis World in Davos
By GUSTAVO CAPDEVILA / IPS WRITER
GENEVA — Of all the questions raised by the global economic crisis, one that is by no means insignificant may be answered this week: How will the pressure groups that influenced the policies that led to the present chaos adapt to the new world situation?
Clues to their behavior will begin to be revealed from Wednesday, as the annual session of the World Economic Forum (WEF), a think-tank for the élite that looks to the interests of transnational companies and is regularly attended by executives, experts and government officials from rich countries, kicks off at the winter resort of Davos in Switzerland.
At first sight it would appear that nothing has changed, as the WEF founder and chairman Klaus Schwab has already forthrightly announced that the first goal of this Davos Forum will be "to assist the G20 process".
Schwab was referring to the group of more than 20 large and emerging economies which began examining ways of reforming the world's financial architecture and policies to revitalize the global economy in Washington in November 2008. Leaders of the G20 are due to meet again on Apr. 2 in London.
Even more unambiguously, Schwab said "what we want is to allow business leaders and 'stakeholders' such as trade unionists and non-governmental organizations to contribute to the G20's goals."
This is sheer arrogance, Swiss academic Jean Ziegler told IPS.
It demonstrates that the Davos Forum will once again "be simply an exercise in cynicism, arrogance and blindness," Ziegler said in an interview with IPS between sessions of the consultative committee of the United Nations Human Rights Council, meeting this week in Geneva.
Some 2,500 people are expected to attend the Davos Forum, over half of them representatives of the business community, but also members of governments, politicians, trade unionists, religious leaders and members of non-governmental organizations.
As happens every year, press accreditation is largely confined to journalists representing media that are in sympathy with the liberal (free market) ideology of the WEF.
The organizers of the Davos Forum have underscored the secrecy surrounding some sessions by prohibiting writers of press releases, who attend the closed meetings, from having any personal contact with journalists.
Schwab has recently been at pains to deny the idea that the WEF has an ideology, saying that the Davos Forum does not express opinions, it just provides a platform.
Neither did he accept that the Davos Forum has embraced certain economic dogmas, such as complete rejection of state intervention and regulations. It was individual participants at the meetings who promoted these ideas, he said.
Some programs developed by the WEF have always called for a coordinated system of global regulation, he said.
At a press conference, Schwab expressed the view that "a reform of capitalism" is necessary. He said there was a need to return to certain values that had been lost in the past 10 years because of too much greed and too little regulation.
The WEF chairman acknowledged that after 39 annual meetings of the Davos Forum, this year's session will be one of the most challenging and significant. Titled "Shaping the Post-Crisis World," the central topic for debate is what kind of world the forum wants to see emerging when the crisis is over, and how to design it.
Ziegler criticized the conspicuous spending by WEF participants. For example, the delegates of UBS (United Bank of Switzerland) are staying in luxury hotels in Davos.
UBS was one of the financial institutions hardest hit by the crisis, so much so that the Swiss government had to bail it out to the tune of 64 billion Swiss francs (56.3 million dollars) to save it from bankruptcy.
"The Swiss taxpayer is paying for these luxuries. It's disgusting," Ziegler told IPS.
"Half the bankers and industrialists at Davos should have been sent to prison a long time ago," he said. "All these years, the Davos Forum has provided the ideological basis for plundering the world."
Twenty years ago, the Davos Forum was celebrating deregulation, headlong liberalization of the markets, privatizations and the heyday of profit, Ziegler said.
Former president of the World Bank James Wolfensohn coined the phrase: "The end of history is a world government without a state," which was roundly applauded by participants at the WEF, Ziegler said.
Their unrestrained neoliberal ideology has landed the world in its worst economic crisis since 1929, and those responsible are the very same people who are here at Davos squandering money, he concluded.
GENEVA — Of all the questions raised by the global economic crisis, one that is by no means insignificant may be answered this week: How will the pressure groups that influenced the policies that led to the present chaos adapt to the new world situation?
Clues to their behavior will begin to be revealed from Wednesday, as the annual session of the World Economic Forum (WEF), a think-tank for the élite that looks to the interests of transnational companies and is regularly attended by executives, experts and government officials from rich countries, kicks off at the winter resort of Davos in Switzerland.
At first sight it would appear that nothing has changed, as the WEF founder and chairman Klaus Schwab has already forthrightly announced that the first goal of this Davos Forum will be "to assist the G20 process".
Schwab was referring to the group of more than 20 large and emerging economies which began examining ways of reforming the world's financial architecture and policies to revitalize the global economy in Washington in November 2008. Leaders of the G20 are due to meet again on Apr. 2 in London.
Even more unambiguously, Schwab said "what we want is to allow business leaders and 'stakeholders' such as trade unionists and non-governmental organizations to contribute to the G20's goals."
This is sheer arrogance, Swiss academic Jean Ziegler told IPS.
It demonstrates that the Davos Forum will once again "be simply an exercise in cynicism, arrogance and blindness," Ziegler said in an interview with IPS between sessions of the consultative committee of the United Nations Human Rights Council, meeting this week in Geneva.
Some 2,500 people are expected to attend the Davos Forum, over half of them representatives of the business community, but also members of governments, politicians, trade unionists, religious leaders and members of non-governmental organizations.
As happens every year, press accreditation is largely confined to journalists representing media that are in sympathy with the liberal (free market) ideology of the WEF.
The organizers of the Davos Forum have underscored the secrecy surrounding some sessions by prohibiting writers of press releases, who attend the closed meetings, from having any personal contact with journalists.
Schwab has recently been at pains to deny the idea that the WEF has an ideology, saying that the Davos Forum does not express opinions, it just provides a platform.
Neither did he accept that the Davos Forum has embraced certain economic dogmas, such as complete rejection of state intervention and regulations. It was individual participants at the meetings who promoted these ideas, he said.
Some programs developed by the WEF have always called for a coordinated system of global regulation, he said.
At a press conference, Schwab expressed the view that "a reform of capitalism" is necessary. He said there was a need to return to certain values that had been lost in the past 10 years because of too much greed and too little regulation.
The WEF chairman acknowledged that after 39 annual meetings of the Davos Forum, this year's session will be one of the most challenging and significant. Titled "Shaping the Post-Crisis World," the central topic for debate is what kind of world the forum wants to see emerging when the crisis is over, and how to design it.
Ziegler criticized the conspicuous spending by WEF participants. For example, the delegates of UBS (United Bank of Switzerland) are staying in luxury hotels in Davos.
UBS was one of the financial institutions hardest hit by the crisis, so much so that the Swiss government had to bail it out to the tune of 64 billion Swiss francs (56.3 million dollars) to save it from bankruptcy.
"The Swiss taxpayer is paying for these luxuries. It's disgusting," Ziegler told IPS.
"Half the bankers and industrialists at Davos should have been sent to prison a long time ago," he said. "All these years, the Davos Forum has provided the ideological basis for plundering the world."
Twenty years ago, the Davos Forum was celebrating deregulation, headlong liberalization of the markets, privatizations and the heyday of profit, Ziegler said.
Former president of the World Bank James Wolfensohn coined the phrase: "The end of history is a world government without a state," which was roundly applauded by participants at the WEF, Ziegler said.
Their unrestrained neoliberal ideology has landed the world in its worst economic crisis since 1929, and those responsible are the very same people who are here at Davos squandering money, he concluded.
January 29, 2009
Suu Kyi, Gambari Likely to Meet: NLD
By WAI MOE
Burma’s pro-democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi will probably meet with United Nations Special Envoy to Burma Ibrahim Gambari during his forthcoming visit to Burma, her party, the National League for Democracy (NLD), said on Thursday.
NLD spokesperson Win Naing told The Irrawaddy that the NLD expected its leader to meet with Gambari, and it hoped the Nigerian diplomat would discuss meaningful issues and perhaps achieve a tangible breakthrough of some type during his visit.
“UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said the UN envoy won’t visit unless there is a sign of progress in Burma,” he said. “And then the UN announced Mr Gambari’s trip—it seems there is something in hand for the envoy. In this situation, Daw Aung San Suu Kyi could meet Mr Gambari.”
The UN said on Monday that Gambari would visit Burma at the end of this month.
“What I can tell you about the reports you have been seeing is that I can confirm that the secretary-general has asked Mr. Gambari to return soon, and that the Myanmar [Burmese] Government has extended an invitation for him to visit the country,” UN spokesperson Marie Okabe said. “At this point, however, discussions are ongoing about the details of the visit.”
The visit will be the seventh trip to Burma for the special envoy since 2006. During his last visit, in August, he failed to meet with the Burmese junta leader, Snr-Gen Than Shwe, and Suu Kyi. He held two meetings with NLD leaders.
According to diplomatic sources, the first meeting between Gambari and the NLD was about 30 minutes. Gambari reportedly urged the NLD to join the 2010 elections. Gambari was criticized by the NLD for stepping out of a purely mediation role.
Win Naing said that during the second meeting, the NLD did not talk with Gambari about the 2010 election issue, but party leaders discussed four issues which were needed for Burma’s national reconciliation process.
The four issues were: release of political prisoners including Aung San Suu Kyi; holding a meaningful dialogue between the military regime and opposition groups; forming an economic development committee; and opening a liaison office in Burma for the UN secretary-general, Win Naing said.
Win Naing said the NLD was not optimistic about Gambari’s seventh trip.
“After the last six visits to Burma by the special envoy, we did not see any concrete results for political development in the country,” he said. “But we hope there may be a solution to start a genuine dialogue on this trip.”
In regard to Suu Kyi, Win Naing said her lawyer, Kyi Win, was denied permission to visit her by authorities, and a second lawyer, Hla Myo Myint, was recently harassed by authorities.
The NLD won a landslide victory in the 1990 elections, winning more than 80 percent of the constituencies. The military regime failed to honor the election results.
Burma’s pro-democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi will probably meet with United Nations Special Envoy to Burma Ibrahim Gambari during his forthcoming visit to Burma, her party, the National League for Democracy (NLD), said on Thursday.
NLD spokesperson Win Naing told The Irrawaddy that the NLD expected its leader to meet with Gambari, and it hoped the Nigerian diplomat would discuss meaningful issues and perhaps achieve a tangible breakthrough of some type during his visit.
“UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said the UN envoy won’t visit unless there is a sign of progress in Burma,” he said. “And then the UN announced Mr Gambari’s trip—it seems there is something in hand for the envoy. In this situation, Daw Aung San Suu Kyi could meet Mr Gambari.”
The UN said on Monday that Gambari would visit Burma at the end of this month.
“What I can tell you about the reports you have been seeing is that I can confirm that the secretary-general has asked Mr. Gambari to return soon, and that the Myanmar [Burmese] Government has extended an invitation for him to visit the country,” UN spokesperson Marie Okabe said. “At this point, however, discussions are ongoing about the details of the visit.”
The visit will be the seventh trip to Burma for the special envoy since 2006. During his last visit, in August, he failed to meet with the Burmese junta leader, Snr-Gen Than Shwe, and Suu Kyi. He held two meetings with NLD leaders.
According to diplomatic sources, the first meeting between Gambari and the NLD was about 30 minutes. Gambari reportedly urged the NLD to join the 2010 elections. Gambari was criticized by the NLD for stepping out of a purely mediation role.
Win Naing said that during the second meeting, the NLD did not talk with Gambari about the 2010 election issue, but party leaders discussed four issues which were needed for Burma’s national reconciliation process.
The four issues were: release of political prisoners including Aung San Suu Kyi; holding a meaningful dialogue between the military regime and opposition groups; forming an economic development committee; and opening a liaison office in Burma for the UN secretary-general, Win Naing said.
Win Naing said the NLD was not optimistic about Gambari’s seventh trip.
“After the last six visits to Burma by the special envoy, we did not see any concrete results for political development in the country,” he said. “But we hope there may be a solution to start a genuine dialogue on this trip.”
In regard to Suu Kyi, Win Naing said her lawyer, Kyi Win, was denied permission to visit her by authorities, and a second lawyer, Hla Myo Myint, was recently harassed by authorities.
The NLD won a landslide victory in the 1990 elections, winning more than 80 percent of the constituencies. The military regime failed to honor the election results.
Veteran Shan Leaders Plan New Political Party
By MIN LWIN
A group of veteran politicians, some of whom were active in Burmese politics in the late 1940s, has announced plans to found a new national party to contest the 2010 general election.
One of their leaders, Shwe Ohn, now in his late 80s, told The Irrawaddy on Thursday that the group was waiting for the enactment of the election law before announcing details of the new party’s mission. The new political force would be called the Union Democratic Alliance Party and membership would be open to all of Burma’s nationalities.
Shan ethnic leader Shwe Ohn said he hoped the party would be approved by Burma’s military council and its head, Snr-Gen Than Shwe.
Shwe Ohn is one of six founding members, who include author Kyaw Win Maung.
Some of them worked for the Anti-Fascist People's Freedom League, the main political party in Burma after World War II, and the League for Democracy and Peace led by former Prime Minister U Nu in the late 1980s.
Shwe Ohn, a contemporary of Burma’s post-war leader Aung San, was a journalist and observer at the 1947 Panglong conference that created the Union of Burma.
During the regime of dictator Ne Win, Shwe Ohn stayed out of politics, although he kept in touch with the veteran political community.
After the 1988 pro-democracy uprising, Shwe Ohn founded the Shan State People’s Freedom League for Democracy, which forged a political alliance with the National League for Democracy, led by Aung San Suu Kyi. The party was later deregistered by the junta.
Shwe Ohn was also a patron of the banned coalition of ethnic political parties known as the United Nationalities League for Democracy.
In 1993, Shwe Ohn was arrested and detained for one year after criticizing the military- sponsored National Convention.
In February 2005, he was arrested at a gathering of Shan leaders in Taunggyi, Shan State, where the formation of a “genuine federal union,” uniting all ethnic groups, was discussed.
Shwe Ohn was released, but several other Shan leaders at the meeting, including Hkun Htun Oo of the Shan National League for Democracy, the second most successful party in the 1990 election, were sentenced to prison terms of between 75 and 106 years. Hkun Htun Oo, 64, was given a 93-year sentence.
A group of veteran politicians, some of whom were active in Burmese politics in the late 1940s, has announced plans to found a new national party to contest the 2010 general election.
One of their leaders, Shwe Ohn, now in his late 80s, told The Irrawaddy on Thursday that the group was waiting for the enactment of the election law before announcing details of the new party’s mission. The new political force would be called the Union Democratic Alliance Party and membership would be open to all of Burma’s nationalities.
Shan ethnic leader Shwe Ohn said he hoped the party would be approved by Burma’s military council and its head, Snr-Gen Than Shwe.
Shwe Ohn is one of six founding members, who include author Kyaw Win Maung.
Some of them worked for the Anti-Fascist People's Freedom League, the main political party in Burma after World War II, and the League for Democracy and Peace led by former Prime Minister U Nu in the late 1980s.
Shwe Ohn, a contemporary of Burma’s post-war leader Aung San, was a journalist and observer at the 1947 Panglong conference that created the Union of Burma.
During the regime of dictator Ne Win, Shwe Ohn stayed out of politics, although he kept in touch with the veteran political community.
After the 1988 pro-democracy uprising, Shwe Ohn founded the Shan State People’s Freedom League for Democracy, which forged a political alliance with the National League for Democracy, led by Aung San Suu Kyi. The party was later deregistered by the junta.
Shwe Ohn was also a patron of the banned coalition of ethnic political parties known as the United Nationalities League for Democracy.
In 1993, Shwe Ohn was arrested and detained for one year after criticizing the military- sponsored National Convention.
In February 2005, he was arrested at a gathering of Shan leaders in Taunggyi, Shan State, where the formation of a “genuine federal union,” uniting all ethnic groups, was discussed.
Shwe Ohn was released, but several other Shan leaders at the meeting, including Hkun Htun Oo of the Shan National League for Democracy, the second most successful party in the 1990 election, were sentenced to prison terms of between 75 and 106 years. Hkun Htun Oo, 64, was given a 93-year sentence.
Thai FM Meets with UNHCR to Discuss Rohingya
By LAWI WENG
A spokesperson for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) said that there were “positive indications” that Thailand would respond soon to a request for access to detained Rohingya boat people following a meeting on Thursday between the Thai foreign minister and a representative of the UN agency.
Kitty McKinsey, a spokesperson for the UNHCR in Bangkok, told The Irrawaddy on Thursday that Thai Foreign Minister Kasit Piromya did not formally grant the request during his meeting with UNHCR representative Raymond Hall at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, but, “There was obviously a wish to cooperate with the UNHCR.”
“We have not had any formal permission yet from the Thai authorities, but we have had positive indications that we will have a formal response soon,” said McKinsey.
The UNHCR asked the Thai government to grant access to the boat people for interviews last week. The agency said it believes 126 Rohingya are in the custody of Thai authorities.
“We have asked for access to them to do a fact-finding mission to find out exactly who they are, where they came from, and what their protection needs are,” said McKinsey.
Speaking to reporters in Bangkok, Kasit said that he had agreed “in principle” to give the UNHCR access to the Rohingya. He added, however, that the Foreign Ministry would discuss the matter with Thai security bodies, “and when we reach an agreement with them we will give the answer to UNHCR so that they can send a representative to meet [the Rohingya].
The meeting came a day after a Thai court in the southern province of Ranong decided to deport 62 Rohingya boat people who had been arrested by the Thai navy and charged with illegally entering the country. They were also sentenced to five days in jail because they were unable to pay a fine of 1,000 baht (US $28) each for illegal entry.
The detained asylum seekers appealed to the court not to send them back to Burma, where they said they would face severe discrimination. Many of them had severe injuries that they said had been inflicted by the Burmese army.
On Thursday, a senior Burmese official speaking to Agence France-Presse denied that the Rohingya were from Burma. “These so-called Rohingya are Bangladeshi who left their state for a better life, trying to get sympathy from Western countries by claiming to be Rohingya from Myanmar [Burma],” the official said.
“It’s not our problem. It’s the problem of Bangladesh,” he added.
According to Thailand’s English-language daily, Bangkok Post, 4,880 Rohingya were arrested last year for illegally entering Thailand and 90 percent are still waiting to be repatriated.
Two major US-based rights groups, Refugees International and Human Rights Watch, claim that the Thai navy mistreated hundreds of Rohingya boat people from Burma, forcing many back out to sea with little food or water. The groups said as many as 300 Rohingya are missing.
Thailand has denied the charges, but in a statement released on its Web site on Wednesday, the Thai Ministry of Foreign Affairs said that “should concrete evidence be presented, the Thai Government would seriously look into such cases.”
The statement added that “the Minister of Foreign Affairs looks forward to discussing this issue, and Thailand’s long-standing humanitarian cooperation with the UNHCR, with High Commissioner for Refugees [Antonio] Guterres when they meet in Geneva on February 2, 2009.”
Thailand has also moved to increase cooperation among regional neighbors to address the Rohingya issue. Last week, Foreign Ministry officials met with envoys from India, Indonesia, Bangladesh, Malaysia and Burma to discuss the exodus of the Rohingya from Burma.
Since the early 1990s, a growing number of Rohingya refugees have taken to boats, many not sea worthy, and fled Burma and Bangladesh for political and economic reasons, trying to reach Thailand and Malaysia.
Experts say the number of boat people may increase this year due to the impact of the global economic downturn on one of the poorest regions of Asia.
A spokesperson for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) said that there were “positive indications” that Thailand would respond soon to a request for access to detained Rohingya boat people following a meeting on Thursday between the Thai foreign minister and a representative of the UN agency.
Kitty McKinsey, a spokesperson for the UNHCR in Bangkok, told The Irrawaddy on Thursday that Thai Foreign Minister Kasit Piromya did not formally grant the request during his meeting with UNHCR representative Raymond Hall at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, but, “There was obviously a wish to cooperate with the UNHCR.”
“We have not had any formal permission yet from the Thai authorities, but we have had positive indications that we will have a formal response soon,” said McKinsey.
The UNHCR asked the Thai government to grant access to the boat people for interviews last week. The agency said it believes 126 Rohingya are in the custody of Thai authorities.
“We have asked for access to them to do a fact-finding mission to find out exactly who they are, where they came from, and what their protection needs are,” said McKinsey.
Speaking to reporters in Bangkok, Kasit said that he had agreed “in principle” to give the UNHCR access to the Rohingya. He added, however, that the Foreign Ministry would discuss the matter with Thai security bodies, “and when we reach an agreement with them we will give the answer to UNHCR so that they can send a representative to meet [the Rohingya].
The meeting came a day after a Thai court in the southern province of Ranong decided to deport 62 Rohingya boat people who had been arrested by the Thai navy and charged with illegally entering the country. They were also sentenced to five days in jail because they were unable to pay a fine of 1,000 baht (US $28) each for illegal entry.
The detained asylum seekers appealed to the court not to send them back to Burma, where they said they would face severe discrimination. Many of them had severe injuries that they said had been inflicted by the Burmese army.
On Thursday, a senior Burmese official speaking to Agence France-Presse denied that the Rohingya were from Burma. “These so-called Rohingya are Bangladeshi who left their state for a better life, trying to get sympathy from Western countries by claiming to be Rohingya from Myanmar [Burma],” the official said.
“It’s not our problem. It’s the problem of Bangladesh,” he added.
According to Thailand’s English-language daily, Bangkok Post, 4,880 Rohingya were arrested last year for illegally entering Thailand and 90 percent are still waiting to be repatriated.
Two major US-based rights groups, Refugees International and Human Rights Watch, claim that the Thai navy mistreated hundreds of Rohingya boat people from Burma, forcing many back out to sea with little food or water. The groups said as many as 300 Rohingya are missing.
Thailand has denied the charges, but in a statement released on its Web site on Wednesday, the Thai Ministry of Foreign Affairs said that “should concrete evidence be presented, the Thai Government would seriously look into such cases.”
The statement added that “the Minister of Foreign Affairs looks forward to discussing this issue, and Thailand’s long-standing humanitarian cooperation with the UNHCR, with High Commissioner for Refugees [Antonio] Guterres when they meet in Geneva on February 2, 2009.”
Thailand has also moved to increase cooperation among regional neighbors to address the Rohingya issue. Last week, Foreign Ministry officials met with envoys from India, Indonesia, Bangladesh, Malaysia and Burma to discuss the exodus of the Rohingya from Burma.
Since the early 1990s, a growing number of Rohingya refugees have taken to boats, many not sea worthy, and fled Burma and Bangladesh for political and economic reasons, trying to reach Thailand and Malaysia.
Experts say the number of boat people may increase this year due to the impact of the global economic downturn on one of the poorest regions of Asia.
Beware of the Burmese Dream!
By SHWE YOE
“A skinhead?” said the barber with his eyebrow raised. He looked skeptically at his young customer.
"Yes, just like Obama!" replied the young man confidently, his innocent face looking back at the barber in the mirror.
The barber plugged in the shaver and began unwrapping No 4 clippers from a packet. This was the fourth time in a week that he had been asked to cut a youngster’s hair so short.
“So, you’re an Obama fan?” the barber smiled.
The boy in the barber's chair smiled back. "I'm not alone,” he said. “My grandfather is also impressed with him after watching his inauguration live on TV. We are now addicted to watching Obama on the news. Did you watch it?”
"Of course. It was a historic movement,” the barber said softly. "This was the day in Martin Luther King’s dream.”
The teenager looked puzzled. He obviously had no idea who Martin Luther King was.
The barber continued: “Many years ago, Dr King spoke about the day when a man would be judged by the content of his character and not the color of his skin. Obama's rise is the stuff of the Great American Dream."
"I would like to be like him!" the boy exclaimed.
"What?" the barber asked. "Do you want to be the president of the United States? You are not American, my boy."
"I know. I am Burmese. But if any poor American kid can grow up to be president, why can't we?" the boy asked.
"Slow down, my boy," said the barber. "The Burmese dream is much riskier than the American dream. Sometimes, young Burmese dreamers end up behind bars. Their dreams turn into nightmares.”
The young man was silent as the barber began shaving the back of his head. He looked troubled.
"I think you know about the 88 Generation Students group?” said the barber quietly. “They were handed down 65-year prison sentences. Then there was Bo Min Yu Ko. That young man was given 104 years in the can. See where his dreams took him?”
“My uncle wants to be president,” the boy muttered. “He’s planning to run in the 2010 election. He said it would be his first step toward becoming the Burmese Obama.”
“Ah!” nodded the barber. “Your uncle is indeed a dreamer too. As for me, I also have a dream. I just dream that the election takes place.”
They were both silent.
“But I wouldn’t bet on it,” the barber sighed.
The teenager watched the barber shaving his head. Now his ears were sticking out. It didn’t feel such a good idea any longer.
“So, you don’t really recommend that I follow this Obama dream, do you, sir?” he asked sullenly.
“Well," said the barber. "What I want you to know is that the reality of the Burmese dream is notoriously tough. But I do know that since Barack Obama has become president, more kids around the world will make up their minds about what they want to do with their lives and stop trying to be gangsters and thugs.
“What I suggest is that you keep the fire burning until the sun rises,” concluded the barber poetically as he whipped the white bib off the teenager’s shoulders, scattering his black locks of hair all over the floor.
The young man looked at himself in the mirror and smiled. The barber thought he looked more like a new recruit for the army than Barack Obama.
But the lad looked happy anyway. “So?” he asked the barber. “Do you think I look presidential?”
“Keep dreaming, my boy!” laughed the barber. “Keep dreaming.”
“A skinhead?” said the barber with his eyebrow raised. He looked skeptically at his young customer.
"Yes, just like Obama!" replied the young man confidently, his innocent face looking back at the barber in the mirror.
The barber plugged in the shaver and began unwrapping No 4 clippers from a packet. This was the fourth time in a week that he had been asked to cut a youngster’s hair so short.
“So, you’re an Obama fan?” the barber smiled.
The boy in the barber's chair smiled back. "I'm not alone,” he said. “My grandfather is also impressed with him after watching his inauguration live on TV. We are now addicted to watching Obama on the news. Did you watch it?”
"Of course. It was a historic movement,” the barber said softly. "This was the day in Martin Luther King’s dream.”
The teenager looked puzzled. He obviously had no idea who Martin Luther King was.
The barber continued: “Many years ago, Dr King spoke about the day when a man would be judged by the content of his character and not the color of his skin. Obama's rise is the stuff of the Great American Dream."
"I would like to be like him!" the boy exclaimed.
"What?" the barber asked. "Do you want to be the president of the United States? You are not American, my boy."
"I know. I am Burmese. But if any poor American kid can grow up to be president, why can't we?" the boy asked.
"Slow down, my boy," said the barber. "The Burmese dream is much riskier than the American dream. Sometimes, young Burmese dreamers end up behind bars. Their dreams turn into nightmares.”
The young man was silent as the barber began shaving the back of his head. He looked troubled.
"I think you know about the 88 Generation Students group?” said the barber quietly. “They were handed down 65-year prison sentences. Then there was Bo Min Yu Ko. That young man was given 104 years in the can. See where his dreams took him?”
“My uncle wants to be president,” the boy muttered. “He’s planning to run in the 2010 election. He said it would be his first step toward becoming the Burmese Obama.”
“Ah!” nodded the barber. “Your uncle is indeed a dreamer too. As for me, I also have a dream. I just dream that the election takes place.”
They were both silent.
“But I wouldn’t bet on it,” the barber sighed.
The teenager watched the barber shaving his head. Now his ears were sticking out. It didn’t feel such a good idea any longer.
“So, you don’t really recommend that I follow this Obama dream, do you, sir?” he asked sullenly.
“Well," said the barber. "What I want you to know is that the reality of the Burmese dream is notoriously tough. But I do know that since Barack Obama has become president, more kids around the world will make up their minds about what they want to do with their lives and stop trying to be gangsters and thugs.
“What I suggest is that you keep the fire burning until the sun rises,” concluded the barber poetically as he whipped the white bib off the teenager’s shoulders, scattering his black locks of hair all over the floor.
The young man looked at himself in the mirror and smiled. The barber thought he looked more like a new recruit for the army than Barack Obama.
But the lad looked happy anyway. “So?” he asked the barber. “Do you think I look presidential?”
“Keep dreaming, my boy!” laughed the barber. “Keep dreaming.”
‘Illegal Immigrants’? Who’s Threatening Whom
By SAI SOE WIN LATT
The issue of migrants has returned as a security concern in Thailand, where the government has responded to reports that Thai officials were responsible for the deaths of hundreds of Rohingya refugees by vowing to crack down on “illegal migrants.”
Not for the first time, Thailand’s treatment of migrants has become a focus of international attention. Last year, 54 Burmese workers suffocated to death while they were being transported in a sealed truck to the Thai resort island of Phuket. That incident was blamed on the driver, who failed to ensure that the vehicle was properly ventilated. This time, Thai authorities have been faulted for allegedly towing boatloads of Rohingya out to sea without adequate food or water.
While the exact circumstances surrounding this latest incident are still under investigation, it is clear that, despite the official rhetoric, Thailand’s security fears are far less serious than those of the migrants, whose very lives are at risk from the moment they enter the country.
This danger does not derive simply from accidents or even from abuses at the hands of officials, but rather from the juridical-political treatment of migrant workers, who fit into a category of disposable labor created by the state-business alliance. That is why millions of Burmese migrants are able to enter the Thai workforce through the back door, only to be declared a “threat” when they are not needed.
In response to the Rohingya incident, Thailand’s new prime minister, Abhisit Vejjajiva, reiterated the country’s standard position on the migrant issue: “We have to solve the illegal immigrant problem, otherwise it will affect our security, economy and the opportunities of Thai laborers.”
As an Oxford-trained economist, Abhisit belongs to the liberal economic tradition, which removes migrant workers entirely from statistical calculations of production and profits, seeing them only as a liability.
It is not that the economic elite are unaware of the positive role of migrant labor; they simply do not want to acknowledge it. If they did, their attempts to exploit migrant labor would be called into question, and that is a risk they consider too great to take.
Treating some migration as “illegal” is to deny an enormously important facet of human history. From pre-recorded times, human beings have been on the move. Modern Thais, for instance, are the descendants of ethnic Tai who migrated from southern China millennia ago. Chinese Thais whose ancestors were more recent migrants have also had a major impact on Thai society after decades of social, economic and political assimilation.
In pre-colonial times, people did not cross borders; but in more recent times, borders have crossed people. Before the creation of national borders, people frequently moved back and forth between the different tributary states that now constitute parts of modern Thailand. These states did not have fixed political and geographical boundaries. Nor were they the vassals of the same powerful kingdoms or empires; at times, there were independent. Thus, they were neither Siamese (Thai) nor Burmese.
Near the end of the nineteenth century, however, the rulers completed the bounding up of territories into nation-states with fixed political boundaries to create modern Burma and Thailand. Human migration goes on, but it is now restricted by these artificial political borders.
Thus, if anything is illegal, it is not the people who cross the borders, but the national borders themselves, which were drawn up undemocratically by those from the power centers. (This is not to reject political borders altogether, but rather to highlight the need for more humane borders.)
If we replace the artificial national borders with the regional border of the Greater Mekong Sub-region (GMS) Program, under which Thailand has been extracting resources, we can see the senselessness of regarding Burmese as “outsiders.” It is unfair to fix political geography at the nation-state level to exclude the Burmese and deny their rights, while scaling up the economic geography to the regional level to accumulate profits.
Despite Thailand’s hand in displacing people in dam and gas pipeline areas in Burma, some continue to claim that the political crisis in Burma is solely responsible for the migrant issue. In fact, Burmese rulers and domestic business partners, as well as their counterparts in Thailand, China, India, other investor countries and the Asian Development Bank (which provides the GMS cooperation framework) share responsibility.
Burma’s political crisis is not an isolated event; rather, it is part of the sick drama of the global market economy, in which the Burmese regime’s international business partners suck resources such as gas and electricity out of the country while displacing people from their homes.
Looking deep into the very nature of this global economic system, propagated and led by Europe and North America, we can see that the system itself is anti-people. That is, it forces all countries to compete on the world market. One way to survive in this market is to stay competitive by securing natural resources and labor as cheaply as possible.
The transnational alliance of elites, united under the GMS Program, hijacks resources in Burma and dispossesses its people in a process David Harvey of the City University of New York calls “accumulation by dispossession.” Among the alliance members, Thailand is the biggest winner, drawing both resources and labor from Burma. That is why Thai policymakers are deaf to the Burmese cry for democracy and migrant justice.
But the dispossessed people do not become fully exploitable until they have been made “illegal” and labeled a threat. Thailand’s migrant registration system is partly responsible for the creation of “illegal immigrants.” Nicholas de Genova of Columbia University calls this the “legal production of migrant illegality,” in the sense that the so-called “illegal immigrants” are produced by legal processes whose narrow definition of who could be included ends up excluding a majority of migrant workers.
Indeed, the issue of “illegal migrants” was not visible in Thailand until 1995, when the government decided to implement the regular registration of undocumented migrants, according to Yougyuth Chalamwong, research director of the Thailand Development Research Institute. This is not to disregard migrant registration completely, but simply to shed light on the calculated manipulations of the government.
A good example is the 1999 registration, which allowed migrant workers to work in 37 provinces, down from 54 in 1998. The revised regulation ended up generating new undocumented workers outside these 37 provinces who had registered one year earlier. Ten years have passed, but the story continues. The newly “illegalized” workers then became the subjects of deportation.
Yet, it is “deportability,” and not actual deportation per se, that matters, as rightly pointed out by de Genova. The government’s attempts to deport migrant workers merely serve to destabilize the situation of migrants (both registered and unregistered), so that they become vulnerable and therefore more ready to accept exploitative working conditions.
Police crackdowns are thus meant to secure the physical presence of migrant workers while excluding them from political and legal entitlements. The crackdown on migrant workers by calling them a threat, therefore, is indeed the elites’ dirty laundry of their anti-people transnational profit accumulations.
Therefore, the future challenges for humanitarian groups would include re-connecting the role of migrant workers to the Thai economy for a better distribution of profits. Moreover, since migrant issue is embedded in the broader global political economy, activists need to go beyond the enclave of locally celebrated communities towards engaging with the networks of national and global alliances for a more democratic global economic operation.
The most immediate task: practitioners, activists and journalists should themselves stop using the language of ‘illegal immigrants’ and ‘migrant problems’ uncritically.
Sai Soe Win Latt is a Ph.D. student of geography at Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, Canada.
The issue of migrants has returned as a security concern in Thailand, where the government has responded to reports that Thai officials were responsible for the deaths of hundreds of Rohingya refugees by vowing to crack down on “illegal migrants.”
Not for the first time, Thailand’s treatment of migrants has become a focus of international attention. Last year, 54 Burmese workers suffocated to death while they were being transported in a sealed truck to the Thai resort island of Phuket. That incident was blamed on the driver, who failed to ensure that the vehicle was properly ventilated. This time, Thai authorities have been faulted for allegedly towing boatloads of Rohingya out to sea without adequate food or water.
While the exact circumstances surrounding this latest incident are still under investigation, it is clear that, despite the official rhetoric, Thailand’s security fears are far less serious than those of the migrants, whose very lives are at risk from the moment they enter the country.
This danger does not derive simply from accidents or even from abuses at the hands of officials, but rather from the juridical-political treatment of migrant workers, who fit into a category of disposable labor created by the state-business alliance. That is why millions of Burmese migrants are able to enter the Thai workforce through the back door, only to be declared a “threat” when they are not needed.
In response to the Rohingya incident, Thailand’s new prime minister, Abhisit Vejjajiva, reiterated the country’s standard position on the migrant issue: “We have to solve the illegal immigrant problem, otherwise it will affect our security, economy and the opportunities of Thai laborers.”
As an Oxford-trained economist, Abhisit belongs to the liberal economic tradition, which removes migrant workers entirely from statistical calculations of production and profits, seeing them only as a liability.
It is not that the economic elite are unaware of the positive role of migrant labor; they simply do not want to acknowledge it. If they did, their attempts to exploit migrant labor would be called into question, and that is a risk they consider too great to take.
Treating some migration as “illegal” is to deny an enormously important facet of human history. From pre-recorded times, human beings have been on the move. Modern Thais, for instance, are the descendants of ethnic Tai who migrated from southern China millennia ago. Chinese Thais whose ancestors were more recent migrants have also had a major impact on Thai society after decades of social, economic and political assimilation.
In pre-colonial times, people did not cross borders; but in more recent times, borders have crossed people. Before the creation of national borders, people frequently moved back and forth between the different tributary states that now constitute parts of modern Thailand. These states did not have fixed political and geographical boundaries. Nor were they the vassals of the same powerful kingdoms or empires; at times, there were independent. Thus, they were neither Siamese (Thai) nor Burmese.
Near the end of the nineteenth century, however, the rulers completed the bounding up of territories into nation-states with fixed political boundaries to create modern Burma and Thailand. Human migration goes on, but it is now restricted by these artificial political borders.
Thus, if anything is illegal, it is not the people who cross the borders, but the national borders themselves, which were drawn up undemocratically by those from the power centers. (This is not to reject political borders altogether, but rather to highlight the need for more humane borders.)
If we replace the artificial national borders with the regional border of the Greater Mekong Sub-region (GMS) Program, under which Thailand has been extracting resources, we can see the senselessness of regarding Burmese as “outsiders.” It is unfair to fix political geography at the nation-state level to exclude the Burmese and deny their rights, while scaling up the economic geography to the regional level to accumulate profits.
Despite Thailand’s hand in displacing people in dam and gas pipeline areas in Burma, some continue to claim that the political crisis in Burma is solely responsible for the migrant issue. In fact, Burmese rulers and domestic business partners, as well as their counterparts in Thailand, China, India, other investor countries and the Asian Development Bank (which provides the GMS cooperation framework) share responsibility.
Burma’s political crisis is not an isolated event; rather, it is part of the sick drama of the global market economy, in which the Burmese regime’s international business partners suck resources such as gas and electricity out of the country while displacing people from their homes.
Looking deep into the very nature of this global economic system, propagated and led by Europe and North America, we can see that the system itself is anti-people. That is, it forces all countries to compete on the world market. One way to survive in this market is to stay competitive by securing natural resources and labor as cheaply as possible.
The transnational alliance of elites, united under the GMS Program, hijacks resources in Burma and dispossesses its people in a process David Harvey of the City University of New York calls “accumulation by dispossession.” Among the alliance members, Thailand is the biggest winner, drawing both resources and labor from Burma. That is why Thai policymakers are deaf to the Burmese cry for democracy and migrant justice.
But the dispossessed people do not become fully exploitable until they have been made “illegal” and labeled a threat. Thailand’s migrant registration system is partly responsible for the creation of “illegal immigrants.” Nicholas de Genova of Columbia University calls this the “legal production of migrant illegality,” in the sense that the so-called “illegal immigrants” are produced by legal processes whose narrow definition of who could be included ends up excluding a majority of migrant workers.
Indeed, the issue of “illegal migrants” was not visible in Thailand until 1995, when the government decided to implement the regular registration of undocumented migrants, according to Yougyuth Chalamwong, research director of the Thailand Development Research Institute. This is not to disregard migrant registration completely, but simply to shed light on the calculated manipulations of the government.
A good example is the 1999 registration, which allowed migrant workers to work in 37 provinces, down from 54 in 1998. The revised regulation ended up generating new undocumented workers outside these 37 provinces who had registered one year earlier. Ten years have passed, but the story continues. The newly “illegalized” workers then became the subjects of deportation.
Yet, it is “deportability,” and not actual deportation per se, that matters, as rightly pointed out by de Genova. The government’s attempts to deport migrant workers merely serve to destabilize the situation of migrants (both registered and unregistered), so that they become vulnerable and therefore more ready to accept exploitative working conditions.
Police crackdowns are thus meant to secure the physical presence of migrant workers while excluding them from political and legal entitlements. The crackdown on migrant workers by calling them a threat, therefore, is indeed the elites’ dirty laundry of their anti-people transnational profit accumulations.
Therefore, the future challenges for humanitarian groups would include re-connecting the role of migrant workers to the Thai economy for a better distribution of profits. Moreover, since migrant issue is embedded in the broader global political economy, activists need to go beyond the enclave of locally celebrated communities towards engaging with the networks of national and global alliances for a more democratic global economic operation.
The most immediate task: practitioners, activists and journalists should themselves stop using the language of ‘illegal immigrants’ and ‘migrant problems’ uncritically.
Sai Soe Win Latt is a Ph.D. student of geography at Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, Canada.
IMF Predicts 2009 Growth Lowest Since World War II
By JIM LOBE / IPS WRITER
WASHINGTON — Growth in the world economy will fall to its lowest annual rate since World War II in 2009, according to the latest estimates by the Washington-based International Monetary Fund (IMF) which released the latest edition of its 'World Economic Outlook' (WEO) here Wednesday.
Overall global growth will fall to 0.5 percent this year with the world's most advanced economies—in North America, Europe, and East Asia—leading the plunge. The Fund said world economic growth should bounce back to three percent in 2010, but warned that the possibility of a more severe decline of greater duration cannot be dismissed, according to the report.
"The uncertainty surrounding the outlook is unusually large," the report asserted. "Downside risks continue to dominate, as the scale and scope of the current financial crisis have taken the global economy into uncharted waters."
One measure of that uncertainty was the steep downward projections of the new estimate itself, compared to the previous WEO issued by the IMF nearly two months after the collapse of the investment firm Lehman Brothers, which sharply accelerated the crisis. The Nov. 6 WEO predicted that world output would grow by 2.2 percent in 2009. That estimate was down from the three percent the Fund had predicted in October.
Average growth rates for all advanced economies will fall well into negative territory at minus two percent on average, according to the WEO. Worst hit will be the newly industrialized Asian economies—South Korea, Singapore, Hong Kong, and Taiwan—whose combined growth rate will fall to minus 3.9 percent, but Britain and Japan, at minus 2.8 percent and minus 2.6 percent, respectively, will not be far behind.
As for the United States, where most of the so-called "toxic" assets responsible for the ongoing financial crisis originated, the IMF predicted a negative 1.6 percent growth rate this year before a revival to plus 1.6 percent in 2010.
Developing countries will also suffer due to the contraction of credit and demand brought on by the crisis, although their growth rates overall should remain in positive territory. Sub-Saharan Africa should grow at a 3.5 rate this year, down from 5.4 percent in 2008, while Latin America's growth in 2009 will be substantially more anemic, at just 1.1 percent, down from 4.6 percent last year. Mexico's growth rate, which is closely tied to the U.S. economy, will fall to minus 0.3 percent this year, it said.
The Russian economy is also expected to plunge this year—to minus 0.7 percent from 6.2 percent in 2008, while China, whose average annual growth rate over the past 30 years has been a torrid 10 percent, will fall short of a seven-percent increase, down from nine percent last year. As a region, developing economies in Asia, including India, will experience 5.5 percent growth, down from 7.8 percent in 2008.
The latest report comes as governments around the world are trying to stimulate their economies in ways that will overcome the credit crunch resulting from the insolvency of banks or their reluctance to lend money at such an uncertain time.
According to a second report released by the IMF, global bank losses from toxic U.S. assets may reach 2.2 trillion dollars, up from a 1.4 trillion-dollar estimate issued just three months ago.
US President Barack Obama has spent much of his first week in office—as he did again Wednesday—lobbying Congress for an 825-billion-dollar economic stimulus package that he hopes will restore the flow of credit and pull the economy out of what many have called the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression.
Even if, as seems likely, he succeeds in persuading Congress—the House of Representatives approved it Wednesday—to pass the measure, some experts say it is unlikely to be sufficient given the depth of the crisis and the rapid growth in unemployment, which could go as high as 10 percent by next year, according to recent estimates.
The IMF's latest report also coincides with the opening of the annual "World Economic Forum" in Davos, Switzerland, where much of the discussion the policy-makers, politicians, and economists gathered there is expected to focus on how to address the financial crisis and especially on what kinds of stimulation packages are likely to work best and how best to coordinate them.
The IMF, which is itself trying to carve out a bigger role as a source of quick lending to countries affected by the crisis, stressed in its report that efforts to date have only addressed the immediate threats to the financial system and "done little to resolve the uncertainty about the long-term solvency of financial institutions."
It called for countries to set up public agencies to dispose of bad debts held by financial institutions in a definitive manner. "...(Unless) stronger financial strains and uncertainties are forcefully addressed, the pernicious feedback loop between real activity and financial markets will intensify, leading to even more toxic effects on global growth," it said.
And it stressed that quick action, including interest-rate cuts, was essential. "In current circumstances, the timely implementation of fiscal stimulus across a broad range of advanced and emerging economies must provide a key support to world growth," it said. "Given that the current projects are predicated on strong and coordinated policy actions, any delays will likely worsen growth prospects."
It noted that the crisis has reversed the commodity price boom that began earlier in the decade and reached its height as recently as six months ago. Oil prices have declined 60 percent since then and are currently projected to average 50 dollars a barrel this year and 60 dollars a barrel next year.
Those declines have dampened inflationary pressures considerably, but they have also weakened economies, mostly those of poor countries, that are dependent on commodity exports. While developing countries have by and large weathered the crisis relatively well compared to previous global downturns, a prolonged crisis could have devastating consequences.
In appealing last week for a global "Vulnerability Fund" for poor countries to be included in the stimulus packages of wealthier nations, World Bank President Robert Zoellick noted that the economic crisis has "already pushed an estimated 100 million people back into poverty".
"It will be important to avoid cutbacks in foreign aid in response to tightening budget constraints, lest hard-won economic gains in developing countries are lost," the WEO warned.
WASHINGTON — Growth in the world economy will fall to its lowest annual rate since World War II in 2009, according to the latest estimates by the Washington-based International Monetary Fund (IMF) which released the latest edition of its 'World Economic Outlook' (WEO) here Wednesday.
Overall global growth will fall to 0.5 percent this year with the world's most advanced economies—in North America, Europe, and East Asia—leading the plunge. The Fund said world economic growth should bounce back to three percent in 2010, but warned that the possibility of a more severe decline of greater duration cannot be dismissed, according to the report.
"The uncertainty surrounding the outlook is unusually large," the report asserted. "Downside risks continue to dominate, as the scale and scope of the current financial crisis have taken the global economy into uncharted waters."
One measure of that uncertainty was the steep downward projections of the new estimate itself, compared to the previous WEO issued by the IMF nearly two months after the collapse of the investment firm Lehman Brothers, which sharply accelerated the crisis. The Nov. 6 WEO predicted that world output would grow by 2.2 percent in 2009. That estimate was down from the three percent the Fund had predicted in October.
Average growth rates for all advanced economies will fall well into negative territory at minus two percent on average, according to the WEO. Worst hit will be the newly industrialized Asian economies—South Korea, Singapore, Hong Kong, and Taiwan—whose combined growth rate will fall to minus 3.9 percent, but Britain and Japan, at minus 2.8 percent and minus 2.6 percent, respectively, will not be far behind.
As for the United States, where most of the so-called "toxic" assets responsible for the ongoing financial crisis originated, the IMF predicted a negative 1.6 percent growth rate this year before a revival to plus 1.6 percent in 2010.
Developing countries will also suffer due to the contraction of credit and demand brought on by the crisis, although their growth rates overall should remain in positive territory. Sub-Saharan Africa should grow at a 3.5 rate this year, down from 5.4 percent in 2008, while Latin America's growth in 2009 will be substantially more anemic, at just 1.1 percent, down from 4.6 percent last year. Mexico's growth rate, which is closely tied to the U.S. economy, will fall to minus 0.3 percent this year, it said.
The Russian economy is also expected to plunge this year—to minus 0.7 percent from 6.2 percent in 2008, while China, whose average annual growth rate over the past 30 years has been a torrid 10 percent, will fall short of a seven-percent increase, down from nine percent last year. As a region, developing economies in Asia, including India, will experience 5.5 percent growth, down from 7.8 percent in 2008.
The latest report comes as governments around the world are trying to stimulate their economies in ways that will overcome the credit crunch resulting from the insolvency of banks or their reluctance to lend money at such an uncertain time.
According to a second report released by the IMF, global bank losses from toxic U.S. assets may reach 2.2 trillion dollars, up from a 1.4 trillion-dollar estimate issued just three months ago.
US President Barack Obama has spent much of his first week in office—as he did again Wednesday—lobbying Congress for an 825-billion-dollar economic stimulus package that he hopes will restore the flow of credit and pull the economy out of what many have called the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression.
Even if, as seems likely, he succeeds in persuading Congress—the House of Representatives approved it Wednesday—to pass the measure, some experts say it is unlikely to be sufficient given the depth of the crisis and the rapid growth in unemployment, which could go as high as 10 percent by next year, according to recent estimates.
The IMF's latest report also coincides with the opening of the annual "World Economic Forum" in Davos, Switzerland, where much of the discussion the policy-makers, politicians, and economists gathered there is expected to focus on how to address the financial crisis and especially on what kinds of stimulation packages are likely to work best and how best to coordinate them.
The IMF, which is itself trying to carve out a bigger role as a source of quick lending to countries affected by the crisis, stressed in its report that efforts to date have only addressed the immediate threats to the financial system and "done little to resolve the uncertainty about the long-term solvency of financial institutions."
It called for countries to set up public agencies to dispose of bad debts held by financial institutions in a definitive manner. "...(Unless) stronger financial strains and uncertainties are forcefully addressed, the pernicious feedback loop between real activity and financial markets will intensify, leading to even more toxic effects on global growth," it said.
And it stressed that quick action, including interest-rate cuts, was essential. "In current circumstances, the timely implementation of fiscal stimulus across a broad range of advanced and emerging economies must provide a key support to world growth," it said. "Given that the current projects are predicated on strong and coordinated policy actions, any delays will likely worsen growth prospects."
It noted that the crisis has reversed the commodity price boom that began earlier in the decade and reached its height as recently as six months ago. Oil prices have declined 60 percent since then and are currently projected to average 50 dollars a barrel this year and 60 dollars a barrel next year.
Those declines have dampened inflationary pressures considerably, but they have also weakened economies, mostly those of poor countries, that are dependent on commodity exports. While developing countries have by and large weathered the crisis relatively well compared to previous global downturns, a prolonged crisis could have devastating consequences.
In appealing last week for a global "Vulnerability Fund" for poor countries to be included in the stimulus packages of wealthier nations, World Bank President Robert Zoellick noted that the economic crisis has "already pushed an estimated 100 million people back into poverty".
"It will be important to avoid cutbacks in foreign aid in response to tightening budget constraints, lest hard-won economic gains in developing countries are lost," the WEO warned.
Ordeal at Sea Described by Rohingya Survivors
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
SABANG, Indonesia (AP) —The bearded farmer wept in his hospital bed as he recounted a harrowing six-month journey that brought him from the isolated country of Burma to this remote island in the Indian Ocean.
Nur Mohammad, a member of the Rohingya Muslim minority group, said he was forced to work for the Burmese army, after being detained and tortured without charge. When he fled that country, he said he was exploited by Bangladeshi human traffickers, beaten by Thai officials and then forced out to sea in an overcrowded boat that nearly sank off Indonesia's coast.
And his ordeal is not over.
The 37-year-old Muslim, who is being treated for internal bleeding and trauma, faces possible deportation by the very people who plucked him from the water.
"I would rather die here," Mohammad told The Associated Press, describing the abuse in Burma against the Rohingya, who for generations have been denied citizenship and reportedly face torture, religious persecution and forced labor under the ruling junta.
"If I'm sent back, I am sure authorities will kill me."
The stateless Muslim ethnic group, which is not recognized by the military regime, numbers about 800,000 in Burma. Their plight gained international attention after several boats carrying around 1,000 migrants were intercepted last month by the Thai navy. Human rights groups allege Thai officers detained and beat them before forcing them back to sea in vessels with no engines and little food or water.
Survivors recounted how four migrants were tossed overboard before the rest were forced at gunpoint onto a makeshift barge in the middle of the ocean, said Chris Lewa, coordinator of the Bangkok-based advocacy group Arakan Project.
Hundreds are missing and feared drowned, according to human rights groups; others have landed on remote corners of Indonesia and India, where they are being kept well away from the media, making it difficult to corroborate their stories.
Authorities in both Thailand and Burma have denied wrongdoing.
In the meantime, the harrowing accounts of victims like Mohammad continue to trickle in from hospital beds and jail cells.
Mohammad said by the time his boat reached Thailand's southern coast on December 26—after working for months on fishing vessels in Bangladesh—he and other fellow Rohingya had been at sea for four days and nights.
They were dehydrated and hungry, he said, but given almost no food or water when they reached land.
Authorities took the men to a hillside prison overseeing the Thai city of Ranong, he said, where they were lined up and stripped down to the waist. One by one, they were pummeled and taunted, with some officers scoffing at them for being Muslim and threatening to burn their traditional beards, he said.
"They tied me and beat me with sticks and kicked me with their boots until I was vomiting blood. They only stopped because I was about to die," said Mohammad. A doctor who treated him at an Indonesian navy base on Sabang island told the AP the wounds appeared to have been caused by a blunt object.
Soon after, he said, the migrants were crammed back into their boats and sent adrift in stormy seas.
Brad Adams of the New York-based Human Rights Watch said the story of the Rohingya has been made all the more tragic by the consistent lack of compassion shown by some regional governments, which appear to have ignored the suffering of the ethnic minorities or played a direct part in it.
Thai authorities insist repeatedly that they do not forcibly evict migrants but only detain and repatriate people entering the country illegally.
Thai Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva, facing growing criticism from rights groups, said last week the government would investigate claims of abuse. The Foreign Ministry also said it would convene a meeting with its neighbors to find a solution to the growing illegal migrant problem.
On Wednesday, a Thai court convicted more than 60 migrants on the same charge, raising the prospect that they could be kicked out. The men alleged they were abused by Burmese navy officials.
A spokesman for Burma’s military government was not available for comment.
The ruling junta does not officially recognize the existence of a separate Rohingya group in the country's western areas and sometimes refers to them as "Bangladeshis."
Restrictive citizenship laws enacted in 1982 make many Muslims living in the area stateless; "'Rohingyas' do not exist in the Union of Burma and are not one of Burma's indigenous national races," the government told the UN Human Rights Council last year.
At the same time, it rejected as untrue "allegations of discrimination and harassment" toward Muslim refugees returned from Bangladesh—meaning the Rohingya.
In addition to the Rohingya, the military regime has brutally repressed a number of groups and millions have risked their lives fleeing the country.
The Rohingya, who are believed to descend from 7th century Arab settlers whose state was conquered by the Burmese in 1784, face religious persecution because they are Muslims in a Buddhist-majority country. Human Rights Watch said in its latest annual report they faced forced relocation, land seizures, and denial of citizenship and identity papers, among other things.
The State Department agreed, saying they "experienced severe legal, economic, and social discrimination."
Hundreds of thousands of Rohingya have ended up in neighboring Bangladesh—some getting illegal jobs and others living in crowded, squalid refugee camps—after borrowing huge sums of money from family and friends to pay smugglers.
Others have settled in impoverished communities in Malaysia and Thailand, which depend on migrant labor; even more have braved the sea to go as far as the Middle East.
"It is a horrible humanitarian crisis unfolding, the fairly large numbers of people leaving in these boats, either drowning at sea or finding themselves in exploitative, abuse situations on arrival," said Chris Lom, a spokesman for the International Organization for Migration.
Like other stateless people, the Rohingya are especially vulnerable to human trafficking because they provide cheap labor and are not protected by the law, he said.
"The issue of people in poor countries trying to reach richer ones is not going to stop," he said. "It's going to become more serious and it needs to be addressed, not just regionally, but globally."
In describing his persecution in Burma, Mohammad said his village was placed under a curfew and the Rohingya were unable to marry and often had their land confiscated.
He said he was forced to work as a laborer for the army after being detained and tortured without charge.
He decided to cross the border illegally into Bangladesh, where he worked as a fisherman until he was able to earn enough money to pay for a boat to Malaysia—around $430. He and others set off in their rickety wooden boats on Dec. 16 with a captain who seemed not to know the way.
The men were picked up and beaten by the Burmese navy who held them for two days, he said.
When they reached Thailand, they were again taken into custody and pummeled before being cast adrift in a boat that had been stripped of its engine and emptied of fuel, Mohammad said.
"The boat was leaking badly," he said. "The water started rising inside. Finally, it was a foot deep and we started to sink. We prayed to Allah, we asked him to save us."
A fishing boat spotted them off Indonesia's westernmost coast and alerted the navy, which brought 193 men, all but 17 of them Rohingya, to shore on Jan. 7 as it was on the verge of sinking.
Many were too weak to stand and were hospitalized.
Now the Indonesian government is threatening to send them back to where they came from.
SABANG, Indonesia (AP) —The bearded farmer wept in his hospital bed as he recounted a harrowing six-month journey that brought him from the isolated country of Burma to this remote island in the Indian Ocean.
Nur Mohammad, a member of the Rohingya Muslim minority group, said he was forced to work for the Burmese army, after being detained and tortured without charge. When he fled that country, he said he was exploited by Bangladeshi human traffickers, beaten by Thai officials and then forced out to sea in an overcrowded boat that nearly sank off Indonesia's coast.
And his ordeal is not over.
The 37-year-old Muslim, who is being treated for internal bleeding and trauma, faces possible deportation by the very people who plucked him from the water.
"I would rather die here," Mohammad told The Associated Press, describing the abuse in Burma against the Rohingya, who for generations have been denied citizenship and reportedly face torture, religious persecution and forced labor under the ruling junta.
"If I'm sent back, I am sure authorities will kill me."
The stateless Muslim ethnic group, which is not recognized by the military regime, numbers about 800,000 in Burma. Their plight gained international attention after several boats carrying around 1,000 migrants were intercepted last month by the Thai navy. Human rights groups allege Thai officers detained and beat them before forcing them back to sea in vessels with no engines and little food or water.
Survivors recounted how four migrants were tossed overboard before the rest were forced at gunpoint onto a makeshift barge in the middle of the ocean, said Chris Lewa, coordinator of the Bangkok-based advocacy group Arakan Project.
Hundreds are missing and feared drowned, according to human rights groups; others have landed on remote corners of Indonesia and India, where they are being kept well away from the media, making it difficult to corroborate their stories.
Authorities in both Thailand and Burma have denied wrongdoing.
In the meantime, the harrowing accounts of victims like Mohammad continue to trickle in from hospital beds and jail cells.
Mohammad said by the time his boat reached Thailand's southern coast on December 26—after working for months on fishing vessels in Bangladesh—he and other fellow Rohingya had been at sea for four days and nights.
They were dehydrated and hungry, he said, but given almost no food or water when they reached land.
Authorities took the men to a hillside prison overseeing the Thai city of Ranong, he said, where they were lined up and stripped down to the waist. One by one, they were pummeled and taunted, with some officers scoffing at them for being Muslim and threatening to burn their traditional beards, he said.
"They tied me and beat me with sticks and kicked me with their boots until I was vomiting blood. They only stopped because I was about to die," said Mohammad. A doctor who treated him at an Indonesian navy base on Sabang island told the AP the wounds appeared to have been caused by a blunt object.
Soon after, he said, the migrants were crammed back into their boats and sent adrift in stormy seas.
Brad Adams of the New York-based Human Rights Watch said the story of the Rohingya has been made all the more tragic by the consistent lack of compassion shown by some regional governments, which appear to have ignored the suffering of the ethnic minorities or played a direct part in it.
Thai authorities insist repeatedly that they do not forcibly evict migrants but only detain and repatriate people entering the country illegally.
Thai Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva, facing growing criticism from rights groups, said last week the government would investigate claims of abuse. The Foreign Ministry also said it would convene a meeting with its neighbors to find a solution to the growing illegal migrant problem.
On Wednesday, a Thai court convicted more than 60 migrants on the same charge, raising the prospect that they could be kicked out. The men alleged they were abused by Burmese navy officials.
A spokesman for Burma’s military government was not available for comment.
The ruling junta does not officially recognize the existence of a separate Rohingya group in the country's western areas and sometimes refers to them as "Bangladeshis."
Restrictive citizenship laws enacted in 1982 make many Muslims living in the area stateless; "'Rohingyas' do not exist in the Union of Burma and are not one of Burma's indigenous national races," the government told the UN Human Rights Council last year.
At the same time, it rejected as untrue "allegations of discrimination and harassment" toward Muslim refugees returned from Bangladesh—meaning the Rohingya.
In addition to the Rohingya, the military regime has brutally repressed a number of groups and millions have risked their lives fleeing the country.
The Rohingya, who are believed to descend from 7th century Arab settlers whose state was conquered by the Burmese in 1784, face religious persecution because they are Muslims in a Buddhist-majority country. Human Rights Watch said in its latest annual report they faced forced relocation, land seizures, and denial of citizenship and identity papers, among other things.
The State Department agreed, saying they "experienced severe legal, economic, and social discrimination."
Hundreds of thousands of Rohingya have ended up in neighboring Bangladesh—some getting illegal jobs and others living in crowded, squalid refugee camps—after borrowing huge sums of money from family and friends to pay smugglers.
Others have settled in impoverished communities in Malaysia and Thailand, which depend on migrant labor; even more have braved the sea to go as far as the Middle East.
"It is a horrible humanitarian crisis unfolding, the fairly large numbers of people leaving in these boats, either drowning at sea or finding themselves in exploitative, abuse situations on arrival," said Chris Lom, a spokesman for the International Organization for Migration.
Like other stateless people, the Rohingya are especially vulnerable to human trafficking because they provide cheap labor and are not protected by the law, he said.
"The issue of people in poor countries trying to reach richer ones is not going to stop," he said. "It's going to become more serious and it needs to be addressed, not just regionally, but globally."
In describing his persecution in Burma, Mohammad said his village was placed under a curfew and the Rohingya were unable to marry and often had their land confiscated.
He said he was forced to work as a laborer for the army after being detained and tortured without charge.
He decided to cross the border illegally into Bangladesh, where he worked as a fisherman until he was able to earn enough money to pay for a boat to Malaysia—around $430. He and others set off in their rickety wooden boats on Dec. 16 with a captain who seemed not to know the way.
The men were picked up and beaten by the Burmese navy who held them for two days, he said.
When they reached Thailand, they were again taken into custody and pummeled before being cast adrift in a boat that had been stripped of its engine and emptied of fuel, Mohammad said.
"The boat was leaking badly," he said. "The water started rising inside. Finally, it was a foot deep and we started to sink. We prayed to Allah, we asked him to save us."
A fishing boat spotted them off Indonesia's westernmost coast and alerted the navy, which brought 193 men, all but 17 of them Rohingya, to shore on Jan. 7 as it was on the verge of sinking.
Many were too weak to stand and were hospitalized.
Now the Indonesian government is threatening to send them back to where they came from.
January 28, 2009
Danish Minister Visits Burma
By WAI MOE
Danish Development Minister Ulla Toraes was in Burma last week—the highest ranking member of the European Union to visit military-ruled Burma in two decades.
Ulla Toraes and her delegation visited for two days, from January 21-22, accompanied by a Norwegian minister, Erik Solheim, the minister for environment and development.
Burma’s state-run-newspaper, The New Light of Myanmar, reported on January 22 that the two ministers held a meeting with the Myanmar Red Cross Society, led by its president Prof Thar Hla Shwe.
Officials from the International Committee of the Red Cross, International Federation of Red Cross and Denmark Red Cross Society also attended the meeting, the newspaper reported.
The New Light of Myanmar provided no further information about the two ministers’ discussions.
The two ministers flew in UN helicopters to the delta region where they inspected relief and reconstruction work in four villages in the delta, which was devastated by Cyclone Nargis in May 2008.
One of Denmark’s leading newspapers, Politiken, reported on the trip under the headline: “Tornaes: Burma Needs Assistance.”
The newspaper report said the Danish ministers visited Burma for two days and saw a need for continued humanitarian assistance in Burma, considered to be one of the poorest nations in the world.
“It is quite clear to me that Burma is one of the world's poorest countries, and that neither can we nor should we neglect it. We must make an effort, although we know it will happen step by step,” said Ulla Tornaes, as quoted in Politiken.
In a UN news release, Norwegian minister Erik Solheim said, “The humanitarian relief and early recovery efforts after Cyclone Nargis have been more successful than expected. Many schools and homes have been rebuilt but still there are areas with great need for support. What is important is the continued and increased access for humanitarian workers.”
Denmark contributed US $11.4 million and Norway donated US $7.7 million to the humanitarian fund for the cyclone through the Tripartite Core Group (TCG), made up of the United Nations, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (Asean) and the Burmese regime.
The TCG agreement will expire in June. Danish officials and many aid groups expressed concern on the looming deadline, according to Politiken.
“It is possible that the authorities, the UN and Asean will agree to allow the coordination group to continue,” Ulla Tornaes said. “We have a well-functioning mechanism which has proved that it is functioning correctly, so there is good reason to let it continue.”
An aid conference on Cyclone Nargis will be held in February in Bangkok, Thailand. The extension of TCG projects in Burma will likely be decided during the conference.
Jakob Simonsen, a UNDP director based in Copenhagen, wrote in Denmark’s Information newspaper that critics say that the minister-level visit to Burma as giving legitimacy to the repressive regime and breaching the EU common policy on Burma that bars high-level visits. The EU has imposed a visa ban on the regime.
But Simonsen noted: “Conversely, most of us probably agree that we can not turn a blind eye when hundreds of thousands of innocent people have been hit by a devastating disaster.”
Prior to visiting Burma, Ulla Tornaes also visited Thailand where she met with Burmese exile groups.
Danish Development Minister Ulla Toraes was in Burma last week—the highest ranking member of the European Union to visit military-ruled Burma in two decades.
Ulla Toraes and her delegation visited for two days, from January 21-22, accompanied by a Norwegian minister, Erik Solheim, the minister for environment and development.
Burma’s state-run-newspaper, The New Light of Myanmar, reported on January 22 that the two ministers held a meeting with the Myanmar Red Cross Society, led by its president Prof Thar Hla Shwe.
Officials from the International Committee of the Red Cross, International Federation of Red Cross and Denmark Red Cross Society also attended the meeting, the newspaper reported.
The New Light of Myanmar provided no further information about the two ministers’ discussions.
The two ministers flew in UN helicopters to the delta region where they inspected relief and reconstruction work in four villages in the delta, which was devastated by Cyclone Nargis in May 2008.
One of Denmark’s leading newspapers, Politiken, reported on the trip under the headline: “Tornaes: Burma Needs Assistance.”
The newspaper report said the Danish ministers visited Burma for two days and saw a need for continued humanitarian assistance in Burma, considered to be one of the poorest nations in the world.
“It is quite clear to me that Burma is one of the world's poorest countries, and that neither can we nor should we neglect it. We must make an effort, although we know it will happen step by step,” said Ulla Tornaes, as quoted in Politiken.
In a UN news release, Norwegian minister Erik Solheim said, “The humanitarian relief and early recovery efforts after Cyclone Nargis have been more successful than expected. Many schools and homes have been rebuilt but still there are areas with great need for support. What is important is the continued and increased access for humanitarian workers.”
Denmark contributed US $11.4 million and Norway donated US $7.7 million to the humanitarian fund for the cyclone through the Tripartite Core Group (TCG), made up of the United Nations, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (Asean) and the Burmese regime.
The TCG agreement will expire in June. Danish officials and many aid groups expressed concern on the looming deadline, according to Politiken.
“It is possible that the authorities, the UN and Asean will agree to allow the coordination group to continue,” Ulla Tornaes said. “We have a well-functioning mechanism which has proved that it is functioning correctly, so there is good reason to let it continue.”
An aid conference on Cyclone Nargis will be held in February in Bangkok, Thailand. The extension of TCG projects in Burma will likely be decided during the conference.
Jakob Simonsen, a UNDP director based in Copenhagen, wrote in Denmark’s Information newspaper that critics say that the minister-level visit to Burma as giving legitimacy to the repressive regime and breaching the EU common policy on Burma that bars high-level visits. The EU has imposed a visa ban on the regime.
But Simonsen noted: “Conversely, most of us probably agree that we can not turn a blind eye when hundreds of thousands of innocent people have been hit by a devastating disaster.”
Prior to visiting Burma, Ulla Tornaes also visited Thailand where she met with Burmese exile groups.
Tensions Between Wa, Junta Continue to Rise
By LAWI WENG
Tensions between the Burmese military and the United Wa State Army (UWSA) have been mounting since a 30-member Burmese delegation led by Lt-Gen Ye Myint, the chief of Military Affairs Security, was forced to disarm during a visit to Wa-held territory in Shan State on January 19, according to sources in the area.
Aung Kyaw Zaw, a Burmese analyst based on the Sino-Burmese border, said that the visiting Burmese military officials and accompanying soldiers were told to disarm as they entered Wa-controlled territory to attend a meeting with the UWSA at their headquarters of Panghsang.
According to Mai Aik Phone, who observes Wa affairs, the purpose of the visit was to allow Burmese military leaders to learn how to launch an effective election campaign in the area in 2010. However, sources said that discussions were limited to plans to develop the local economy.
Since last year’s referendum on a military-drafted constitution, the Burmese regime has been sending delegations to different parts of the country to drum up support for an election slated to be held in 2010. The regime claimed to have won overwhelming approval for its new charter, despite charges that the referendum was rigged.
As part of its plans for the future, the junta has stepped up its efforts to persuade ceasefire groups to disarm. However, the Wa have been particularly resistant to this idea, putting renewed pressure on a ceasefire agreement that was reached 20 years ago.
On December 5, Brig-Gen Kyaw Phyoe, the Burmese Army’s regional commander in the Golden Triangle area of Shan State, met with the commander of the UWSA’s 468th Brigade, Col Sai Hsarm, in Mongpawk, south of Panghsang, to pressure him to withdraw troops from the area and “exchange arms for peace.” The Wa leader rejected the demand.
Earlier this month, the UWSA proposed a plan to designate territory under its control as a special autonomous region. Although the Burmese military hasn’t responded to the proposal, the UWSA has already begun to refer to its territory as the “Wa State Government Special Region” in official documents.
The Wa area has been known by the Burmese military as “Shan State Special Region 2” since the UWSA entered into a ceasefire agreement with the regime in 1989.
In 2003, when the United Wa State Party, the political wing of the UWSA, attended a junta-sponsored national constitutional convention, it asked to be allowed to form a Wa State.
Wa political observers estimate that there are 20,000 UWSA soldiers currently deployed along Burma’s borders with Thailand and China, while an estimated 60,000 to 120,000 Wa villagers inhabit areas of lower Shan State.
Tensions between the Burmese military and the United Wa State Army (UWSA) have been mounting since a 30-member Burmese delegation led by Lt-Gen Ye Myint, the chief of Military Affairs Security, was forced to disarm during a visit to Wa-held territory in Shan State on January 19, according to sources in the area.
Aung Kyaw Zaw, a Burmese analyst based on the Sino-Burmese border, said that the visiting Burmese military officials and accompanying soldiers were told to disarm as they entered Wa-controlled territory to attend a meeting with the UWSA at their headquarters of Panghsang.
According to Mai Aik Phone, who observes Wa affairs, the purpose of the visit was to allow Burmese military leaders to learn how to launch an effective election campaign in the area in 2010. However, sources said that discussions were limited to plans to develop the local economy.
Since last year’s referendum on a military-drafted constitution, the Burmese regime has been sending delegations to different parts of the country to drum up support for an election slated to be held in 2010. The regime claimed to have won overwhelming approval for its new charter, despite charges that the referendum was rigged.
As part of its plans for the future, the junta has stepped up its efforts to persuade ceasefire groups to disarm. However, the Wa have been particularly resistant to this idea, putting renewed pressure on a ceasefire agreement that was reached 20 years ago.
On December 5, Brig-Gen Kyaw Phyoe, the Burmese Army’s regional commander in the Golden Triangle area of Shan State, met with the commander of the UWSA’s 468th Brigade, Col Sai Hsarm, in Mongpawk, south of Panghsang, to pressure him to withdraw troops from the area and “exchange arms for peace.” The Wa leader rejected the demand.
Earlier this month, the UWSA proposed a plan to designate territory under its control as a special autonomous region. Although the Burmese military hasn’t responded to the proposal, the UWSA has already begun to refer to its territory as the “Wa State Government Special Region” in official documents.
The Wa area has been known by the Burmese military as “Shan State Special Region 2” since the UWSA entered into a ceasefire agreement with the regime in 1989.
In 2003, when the United Wa State Party, the political wing of the UWSA, attended a junta-sponsored national constitutional convention, it asked to be allowed to form a Wa State.
Wa political observers estimate that there are 20,000 UWSA soldiers currently deployed along Burma’s borders with Thailand and China, while an estimated 60,000 to 120,000 Wa villagers inhabit areas of lower Shan State.
Chins Face Human Rights Abuses: HRW
By MIN LWIN
Human Rights Watch (HRW) on Wednesday released a report calling for the Burmese military government to end human rights abuses against ethnic Chin in western Burma.
The New York-based human rights monitors also urged the Indian government and the newly formed Mizoram State government in northeastern India to “extend protection to Chin who have fled to neighboring India to escape ongoing abuses and severe repression in Burma.”
In the 93-page report, HRW said that ethnic Chin experience a wide range of human rights abuses, including forced labor, arbitrary arrests and detention, torture and religious repression at the hands of the Burmese army and government officials.
The report also accused the ethnic Chin insurgent group, the Chin National Army (CNA), of committing abuses against Chin villagers, such as harassment, beatings and extortion.
HRW called on the Burmese army and ethnic armed groups to end abuses and for Burma’s ruling State Peace and Development Council (SPDC) to allow humanitarian agencies in Rangoon unfettered access to Chin State.
The HRW report included testimonies from about 140 ethnic Chin inside Burma or living in Mizoram interviewed between 2005 and 2008.
Speaking to The Irrawaddy on Wednesday, HRW Burma consultant David Mathieson said, “That was just from 140 interviews. There are almost half a million people in Chin State. Therefore, the true number of people who have been tortured is very difficult to calculate.
“Wherever there are soldiers of the Burmese army and non-state armed groups, such as the Chin National Front [the political wing of the CNA], civilians are vulnerable to abuses by armed groups,” he said. “Abuses sometimes happen in towns and cities in Chin state, but they happen most frequently in rural areas. Anywhere where there are Burmese army soldiers and any kind of low-intensity conflict, civilians are vulnerable to these types of abuses.”
HRW quoted one Chin Christian church leader now living in Mizoram as saying, “These underground groups, rather than being a help, make life even more difficult for us.”
However, Chin National Front Joint General Secretary (1) Shwe Khar denied the charges that CNA soldiers extort money, food and property from Chin villagers.
“Chin soldiers used to collect donations from the villagers, but did not extort money,” he said.
There are currently about 75,000 Chin people living in Mizoram and a few thousand in New Delhi. Thousands more have migrated to Malaysia and to other countries such as America and Canada.
Last year, at least 70,000 ethnic Chin were affected by a famine caused by a plague of rats, which ate rice stocks in many of the state’s villages, according to exiled Chin rights groups. More than 30 children died as a result of the famine.
Human Rights Watch (HRW) on Wednesday released a report calling for the Burmese military government to end human rights abuses against ethnic Chin in western Burma.
The New York-based human rights monitors also urged the Indian government and the newly formed Mizoram State government in northeastern India to “extend protection to Chin who have fled to neighboring India to escape ongoing abuses and severe repression in Burma.”
In the 93-page report, HRW said that ethnic Chin experience a wide range of human rights abuses, including forced labor, arbitrary arrests and detention, torture and religious repression at the hands of the Burmese army and government officials.
The report also accused the ethnic Chin insurgent group, the Chin National Army (CNA), of committing abuses against Chin villagers, such as harassment, beatings and extortion.
HRW called on the Burmese army and ethnic armed groups to end abuses and for Burma’s ruling State Peace and Development Council (SPDC) to allow humanitarian agencies in Rangoon unfettered access to Chin State.
The HRW report included testimonies from about 140 ethnic Chin inside Burma or living in Mizoram interviewed between 2005 and 2008.
Speaking to The Irrawaddy on Wednesday, HRW Burma consultant David Mathieson said, “That was just from 140 interviews. There are almost half a million people in Chin State. Therefore, the true number of people who have been tortured is very difficult to calculate.
“Wherever there are soldiers of the Burmese army and non-state armed groups, such as the Chin National Front [the political wing of the CNA], civilians are vulnerable to abuses by armed groups,” he said. “Abuses sometimes happen in towns and cities in Chin state, but they happen most frequently in rural areas. Anywhere where there are Burmese army soldiers and any kind of low-intensity conflict, civilians are vulnerable to these types of abuses.”
HRW quoted one Chin Christian church leader now living in Mizoram as saying, “These underground groups, rather than being a help, make life even more difficult for us.”
However, Chin National Front Joint General Secretary (1) Shwe Khar denied the charges that CNA soldiers extort money, food and property from Chin villagers.
“Chin soldiers used to collect donations from the villagers, but did not extort money,” he said.
There are currently about 75,000 Chin people living in Mizoram and a few thousand in New Delhi. Thousands more have migrated to Malaysia and to other countries such as America and Canada.
Last year, at least 70,000 ethnic Chin were affected by a famine caused by a plague of rats, which ate rice stocks in many of the state’s villages, according to exiled Chin rights groups. More than 30 children died as a result of the famine.
‘Second Chance City’ Welcomes another Leading Burmese Monk
By JIM ANDREWS
MAE SOT — Secretly, singly or in small groups, Burmese monks who led the September 2007 uprising and then escaped the regime crackdown are leaving their hideout in Thailand and making their way to new lives in the US.
The latest to take this route to freedom is U Agga, 26, who slipped away from a “safe house” near Mae Sot on the Thai-Burmese border on Tuesday and boarded a midnight flight from Bangkok’s Suvarnabhumi Airport, bound for Seoul, South Korea.
From Seoul, he flew to New York, to be met by another fugitive from Burmese oppression, Pyinnya Jota, former deputy abbot of Rangoon’s Maggin Monastery. They’ll be settling in the New York State university town of Utica, which offered a new home to several monks who escaped to Thailand in the nightmare months following the September 2007 uprising.
Twenty monks who sought refuge in Mae Sot have been resettled in New York State, Arizona, California and France.
Six monks who shared a simple room with U Agga in the safety of a friendly Thai monastery near Mae Sot are still waiting for their resettlement formalities to be completed.
“Please don’t name the monastery,” pleaded U Agga. “There are Burmese government agents everywhere. Don’t even mention my former Burmese monastery.”
The group of fugitive monks moved to their secret quarters outside Mae Sot from a monastery near the Friendship Bridge connecting Mae Sot with the Burmese border town of Myawaddy. “We were told our safety couldn’t be guaranteed there,” U Agga said.
The Assistance Association for Political Prisoners, based in Mae Sot, says 146 monks and seven nuns arrested during and after the September 2007 uprising have been sentenced to imprisonment or are still being detained.
Dozens escaped to Thailand and more than 100 fled to Bangla Desh, according to U Agga. For all, it was a hazardous journey to freedom.
U Agga escaped to the border area traveling in plain clothes and by bus and then laid low in a monastery for one month before crossing to Thailand.
“Most of us changed from our monks’ robes into civilian clothes,” U Agga said. “One donned a wig and posed as a bus conductor, riding that way to the border. A passenger complained when he took the bus out of its way, but the driver was a sympathizer and sorted it out.”
U Agga is determined that his new life in the US will allow him plenty of room to speak out for human rights in Burma.
“Wherever I live, I must continue to work for the freedom of the Burmese people, who are suffering under a brutal military dictatorship,” he said in a farewell message.
“The struggle continues. It didn’t end in September 2007. The regime didn’t defeat us, it just gave us new strength.”
U Agga’s new home, Utica, is a cultural melting pot, absorbing thousands of refugees from Bosnia, Somalia, Cambodia and Thailand. The publication Reader’s Digest has dubbed it “Second Chance City.”
Utica also has a reputation as a cultural and educational center, and U Agga hopes to devote himself to study.
In Burma, U Agga saw the monks’ engagement in the September 2007 uprising as a non-political demonstration of solidarity with an oppressed population.
“We didn’t make any politics, we acted just for the welfare of our country,” he said. “We did not demand a handover of power by the military to us or Aung San Suu Kyi. We just requested the military to treat people fairly and kindly.
“We still send our loving-kindness to the military leaders because they are hungry for it.”
Nevertheless, the events of September 2007 did leave their effect on U Agga’s thinking. At his monastery in Burma, he studied Buddhist scripture and meditation practices. In Utica, he said, “I want to study political science.”
MAE SOT — Secretly, singly or in small groups, Burmese monks who led the September 2007 uprising and then escaped the regime crackdown are leaving their hideout in Thailand and making their way to new lives in the US.
The latest to take this route to freedom is U Agga, 26, who slipped away from a “safe house” near Mae Sot on the Thai-Burmese border on Tuesday and boarded a midnight flight from Bangkok’s Suvarnabhumi Airport, bound for Seoul, South Korea.
From Seoul, he flew to New York, to be met by another fugitive from Burmese oppression, Pyinnya Jota, former deputy abbot of Rangoon’s Maggin Monastery. They’ll be settling in the New York State university town of Utica, which offered a new home to several monks who escaped to Thailand in the nightmare months following the September 2007 uprising.
Twenty monks who sought refuge in Mae Sot have been resettled in New York State, Arizona, California and France.
Six monks who shared a simple room with U Agga in the safety of a friendly Thai monastery near Mae Sot are still waiting for their resettlement formalities to be completed.
“Please don’t name the monastery,” pleaded U Agga. “There are Burmese government agents everywhere. Don’t even mention my former Burmese monastery.”
The group of fugitive monks moved to their secret quarters outside Mae Sot from a monastery near the Friendship Bridge connecting Mae Sot with the Burmese border town of Myawaddy. “We were told our safety couldn’t be guaranteed there,” U Agga said.
The Assistance Association for Political Prisoners, based in Mae Sot, says 146 monks and seven nuns arrested during and after the September 2007 uprising have been sentenced to imprisonment or are still being detained.
Dozens escaped to Thailand and more than 100 fled to Bangla Desh, according to U Agga. For all, it was a hazardous journey to freedom.
U Agga escaped to the border area traveling in plain clothes and by bus and then laid low in a monastery for one month before crossing to Thailand.
“Most of us changed from our monks’ robes into civilian clothes,” U Agga said. “One donned a wig and posed as a bus conductor, riding that way to the border. A passenger complained when he took the bus out of its way, but the driver was a sympathizer and sorted it out.”
U Agga is determined that his new life in the US will allow him plenty of room to speak out for human rights in Burma.
“Wherever I live, I must continue to work for the freedom of the Burmese people, who are suffering under a brutal military dictatorship,” he said in a farewell message.
“The struggle continues. It didn’t end in September 2007. The regime didn’t defeat us, it just gave us new strength.”
U Agga’s new home, Utica, is a cultural melting pot, absorbing thousands of refugees from Bosnia, Somalia, Cambodia and Thailand. The publication Reader’s Digest has dubbed it “Second Chance City.”
Utica also has a reputation as a cultural and educational center, and U Agga hopes to devote himself to study.
In Burma, U Agga saw the monks’ engagement in the September 2007 uprising as a non-political demonstration of solidarity with an oppressed population.
“We didn’t make any politics, we acted just for the welfare of our country,” he said. “We did not demand a handover of power by the military to us or Aung San Suu Kyi. We just requested the military to treat people fairly and kindly.
“We still send our loving-kindness to the military leaders because they are hungry for it.”
Nevertheless, the events of September 2007 did leave their effect on U Agga’s thinking. At his monastery in Burma, he studied Buddhist scripture and meditation practices. In Utica, he said, “I want to study political science.”
UN: Burma Faces Food Crisis
By MICHAEL CASEY / AP WRITER
BANGKOK — Burma faces food shortages in many parts of the country, largely due to last year's cyclone and a rat infestation that destroyed crops elsewhere in the impoverished country, according to a UN report released Wednesday.
The report by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization and the World Food Program forecasts that 85,000 tons of emergency food relief will be needed this year in the cyclone-affected Irrawaddy delta. Almost 100,000 more tons will be needed elsewhere: Food stocks in Chin State have been ravaged by rats while Arakan State in the north, historically among the country's poorest states, also needs assistance.
Blessed with abundant natural resources and fertile land, Burma was once the world's top rice producer.
But years of government mismanagement have placed it among the 20 poorest countries in the world, the United Nations estimates, with a per capita income of only $200—10 times less than its neighbor Thailand.
In the past four decades, it has seen its rice exports drop from nearly 4 million tons to only about 40,000 tons in 2007.
Cyclone Nargis, which left more than 130,000 people dead or missing in May last year, exacerbated the country's economic difficulties and raised the prospect of a humanitarian crisis.
In 2008, the WFP supplied 55,000 tons of food to families in the delta and 22,000 tons for the remainder of the country. None of that went to Chin state, which is expected to be second biggest recipient in 2009 after the delta.
"Access to food remains the critical challenge for the poorest people and for vulnerable populations in remote areas of Myanmar [Burma]," said Chris Kaye, WFP's representative for Burma. "For many of those affected by Cyclone Nargis, who are engaged in rebuilding their lives and livelihoods, the limited delta harvest means they will continue to rely on assistance to meet their food needs."
Agriculture Ministry officials in Burma were not available for comment Wednesday.
Cheng Feng, an economist for the FAO, told The Associated Press that rice production in the delta during the second half of 2008 fell 32.5 percent to 1.93 million tons from a year earlier because so many paddy fields were inundated with sea water. A shortage of labor, higher fertilizer prices and lower rice prices may also have dissuaded some delta farmers from planting, according to the UN report.
"For the delta, we recommend support through the provision of relatively simple inputs such as seeds, draught animals and other livestock, hand tractors, fishing equipment, boat building and net making," Cheng said separately in a statement.
BANGKOK — Burma faces food shortages in many parts of the country, largely due to last year's cyclone and a rat infestation that destroyed crops elsewhere in the impoverished country, according to a UN report released Wednesday.
The report by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization and the World Food Program forecasts that 85,000 tons of emergency food relief will be needed this year in the cyclone-affected Irrawaddy delta. Almost 100,000 more tons will be needed elsewhere: Food stocks in Chin State have been ravaged by rats while Arakan State in the north, historically among the country's poorest states, also needs assistance.
Blessed with abundant natural resources and fertile land, Burma was once the world's top rice producer.
But years of government mismanagement have placed it among the 20 poorest countries in the world, the United Nations estimates, with a per capita income of only $200—10 times less than its neighbor Thailand.
In the past four decades, it has seen its rice exports drop from nearly 4 million tons to only about 40,000 tons in 2007.
Cyclone Nargis, which left more than 130,000 people dead or missing in May last year, exacerbated the country's economic difficulties and raised the prospect of a humanitarian crisis.
In 2008, the WFP supplied 55,000 tons of food to families in the delta and 22,000 tons for the remainder of the country. None of that went to Chin state, which is expected to be second biggest recipient in 2009 after the delta.
"Access to food remains the critical challenge for the poorest people and for vulnerable populations in remote areas of Myanmar [Burma]," said Chris Kaye, WFP's representative for Burma. "For many of those affected by Cyclone Nargis, who are engaged in rebuilding their lives and livelihoods, the limited delta harvest means they will continue to rely on assistance to meet their food needs."
Agriculture Ministry officials in Burma were not available for comment Wednesday.
Cheng Feng, an economist for the FAO, told The Associated Press that rice production in the delta during the second half of 2008 fell 32.5 percent to 1.93 million tons from a year earlier because so many paddy fields were inundated with sea water. A shortage of labor, higher fertilizer prices and lower rice prices may also have dissuaded some delta farmers from planting, according to the UN report.
"For the delta, we recommend support through the provision of relatively simple inputs such as seeds, draught animals and other livestock, hand tractors, fishing equipment, boat building and net making," Cheng said separately in a statement.
Rohingya Refugees Appear in Thai Court, Face Extradition
By SAW YAN NAING
Sixty two Rohingya boat people from Burma appeared before a court in Thailand’s southern Ranong province on Wednesday. All of the men, who were arrested on Tuesday by the Thai Navy, face repatriation to Burma if convicted of entering Thailand illegally.
Twelve other Rohingya refugees were under the age of 18 and are being detained at a Thai police station. Four others were admitted to hospital with injuries they say they sustained after Burmese troops intercepted their boat and beat them. One refugee reportedly died during the journey.
The Rohingyas, refugees from Burma’s Arakan State, appealed to Thai authorities not to send them back to Burma, where they face severe discrimination.
A Ranong resident who offered his help to the refugees said they had clearly been beaten. “There were many injuries on their backs. They said they were beaten by Burmese army.”
The Rohingyas, members of a Muslim minority in overwhelmingly Buddhist Burma, said they had bought a boat with the intention of reaching Malaysia. They had left their wives and children behind while they set out to find refuge and work in a Muslim country.
A Ranong police officer, Col Weerasilp Kwanseng, told the Associated Press that the refugees would be expelled from Thailand if found guilty of entering the country illegally.
The Associated Press report said one refugee, Mamoud Hussain, pleaded: “Have pity on us. They [Burmese army] will kill me and my family if I go back.”
Chris Lewa, a researcher on Rohingya issues, said: “This is an issue of serious concern. We are concerned what will happen to them because we know that the Burmese government never accepts any Rohingya back.”
She urged the Thai government to allow officials of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) access to the Rohingya migrants to determine whether they needed protection.
Meanwhile, Surin Pitsuwan, Thai general-secretary of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, told the TV station Aljazeera: “This is not an issue for a particular country. It is a regional issue. It is also an issue for the international community.”
Last week, Thai Foreign Ministry officials met with envoys from India, Indonesia, Bangladesh, Malaysia and Burma to discuss the exodus of the Rohingya from Burma.
Sixty two Rohingya boat people from Burma appeared before a court in Thailand’s southern Ranong province on Wednesday. All of the men, who were arrested on Tuesday by the Thai Navy, face repatriation to Burma if convicted of entering Thailand illegally.
Twelve other Rohingya refugees were under the age of 18 and are being detained at a Thai police station. Four others were admitted to hospital with injuries they say they sustained after Burmese troops intercepted their boat and beat them. One refugee reportedly died during the journey.
The Rohingyas, refugees from Burma’s Arakan State, appealed to Thai authorities not to send them back to Burma, where they face severe discrimination.
A Ranong resident who offered his help to the refugees said they had clearly been beaten. “There were many injuries on their backs. They said they were beaten by Burmese army.”
The Rohingyas, members of a Muslim minority in overwhelmingly Buddhist Burma, said they had bought a boat with the intention of reaching Malaysia. They had left their wives and children behind while they set out to find refuge and work in a Muslim country.
A Ranong police officer, Col Weerasilp Kwanseng, told the Associated Press that the refugees would be expelled from Thailand if found guilty of entering the country illegally.
The Associated Press report said one refugee, Mamoud Hussain, pleaded: “Have pity on us. They [Burmese army] will kill me and my family if I go back.”
Chris Lewa, a researcher on Rohingya issues, said: “This is an issue of serious concern. We are concerned what will happen to them because we know that the Burmese government never accepts any Rohingya back.”
She urged the Thai government to allow officials of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) access to the Rohingya migrants to determine whether they needed protection.
Meanwhile, Surin Pitsuwan, Thai general-secretary of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, told the TV station Aljazeera: “This is not an issue for a particular country. It is a regional issue. It is also an issue for the international community.”
Last week, Thai Foreign Ministry officials met with envoys from India, Indonesia, Bangladesh, Malaysia and Burma to discuss the exodus of the Rohingya from Burma.
January 27, 2009
Burmese Opposition Views Gambari Visit with Skepticism
By LALIT K JHA and WAI MOE
Burmese opposition politicians and commentators view with skepticism the news that UN Special Envoy Ibrahim Gambari is to return to Burma at the end of this month.
It will be Gambari’s seventh visit to Burma on a long-running mission, begun in 2006, to break the deadlock between the regime and pro-democracy forces. He last visited Burma in August 2008, failing to meet either junta chief Snr-Gen Than Shwe or detained opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi.
Confirming on Monday that the Burmese government had invited Gambari back to Burma, UN Spokeswoman Marie Okabe said “discussions are ongoing about the details of the visit."
One leading opposition figure, Aye Thar Aung, an Arakan leader and secretary of the Committee Representing the People’s Parliament, told The Irrawaddy, he did not expect anything from Gambari’s visit.
“In the past, the UN could do nothing for the Burmese political process,” he said, charging that the military government had used Gambari as “their mouthpiece before the international community.”
Thakin Chan Tun, a veteran politician and former Burmese ambassador to China, was also skeptical about Gambari’s latest visit, saying it would be “just another UN envoy’s trip to Burma.” Gambari’s previous six visits had produced no political progress, he said.
One open issue is the refusal by Suu Kyi’s party, the National League for Democracy, to participate in the 2010 election unless there is first of all a review of the junta-sponsored constitution.
Gambari reportedly told the NLD and other opposition groups in August that if the NLD wanted to participate in the 2010 general election he would discuss the issue with the regime—prompting charges that he was favoring the regime and neglecting his role as mediator.
The NLD’s Win Tin said on Monday the party would not discuss the 2010 elections with Gambari, according the Norway based Democratic Voice of Burma.
“If the UN wants to give us their opinions and tell us their concerns about the 2008 constitution, we would at least like to listen to them. We would strongly encourage the UN if they will put in the effort for negotiations on this issue," Win Tin was quoted in a report by the Democratic Voice of Burma. "But if they are only here to talk about the elections, then we won't listen to them.”
Win Min, a Burmese political analyst based in Chiang Mai, Thailand, said he didn’t expect much to result from Gambari’s visit—although the resumption of his mission was better than doing nothing.
UN spokeswoman Okabe said Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon believes more progress is necessary on the issues that Gambari raised with the Burmese military junta during his last visit.
Prominent among these is the need for dialogue between the regime and Aung San Suu Kyi, she said.
"He [the Secretary General] has, therefore, asked Mr Gambari to return to continue his discussions and engagement with the Myanmar government, opposition and other stakeholders as an integral part of this process in the implementation of the Secretary-General's mandate," she said.
Burmese opposition politicians and commentators view with skepticism the news that UN Special Envoy Ibrahim Gambari is to return to Burma at the end of this month.
It will be Gambari’s seventh visit to Burma on a long-running mission, begun in 2006, to break the deadlock between the regime and pro-democracy forces. He last visited Burma in August 2008, failing to meet either junta chief Snr-Gen Than Shwe or detained opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi.
Confirming on Monday that the Burmese government had invited Gambari back to Burma, UN Spokeswoman Marie Okabe said “discussions are ongoing about the details of the visit."
One leading opposition figure, Aye Thar Aung, an Arakan leader and secretary of the Committee Representing the People’s Parliament, told The Irrawaddy, he did not expect anything from Gambari’s visit.
“In the past, the UN could do nothing for the Burmese political process,” he said, charging that the military government had used Gambari as “their mouthpiece before the international community.”
Thakin Chan Tun, a veteran politician and former Burmese ambassador to China, was also skeptical about Gambari’s latest visit, saying it would be “just another UN envoy’s trip to Burma.” Gambari’s previous six visits had produced no political progress, he said.
One open issue is the refusal by Suu Kyi’s party, the National League for Democracy, to participate in the 2010 election unless there is first of all a review of the junta-sponsored constitution.
Gambari reportedly told the NLD and other opposition groups in August that if the NLD wanted to participate in the 2010 general election he would discuss the issue with the regime—prompting charges that he was favoring the regime and neglecting his role as mediator.
The NLD’s Win Tin said on Monday the party would not discuss the 2010 elections with Gambari, according the Norway based Democratic Voice of Burma.
“If the UN wants to give us their opinions and tell us their concerns about the 2008 constitution, we would at least like to listen to them. We would strongly encourage the UN if they will put in the effort for negotiations on this issue," Win Tin was quoted in a report by the Democratic Voice of Burma. "But if they are only here to talk about the elections, then we won't listen to them.”
Win Min, a Burmese political analyst based in Chiang Mai, Thailand, said he didn’t expect much to result from Gambari’s visit—although the resumption of his mission was better than doing nothing.
UN spokeswoman Okabe said Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon believes more progress is necessary on the issues that Gambari raised with the Burmese military junta during his last visit.
Prominent among these is the need for dialogue between the regime and Aung San Suu Kyi, she said.
"He [the Secretary General] has, therefore, asked Mr Gambari to return to continue his discussions and engagement with the Myanmar government, opposition and other stakeholders as an integral part of this process in the implementation of the Secretary-General's mandate," she said.
Burmese Monk Talks about Compassion, Obama in Mahachai
By LAWI WENG
About 10,000 Burmese migrant workers living in Mahachai, in Thailand’s Samut Sakhon Province, attended a Buddhist sermon on compassion given by Dr Ashin Nyanissara, a famous Burmese monk, on Monday night, said one of the organizers of the talk.
Dr Ashin Nyanissara, who is better known as Sitagu Sayadaw, is the abbot of the Sitagu International Buddhist Missionary Center in Sagaing and one of Burma’s most respected monks. He has been active in raising funds for relief efforts in the Irrawaddy delta, where over 130,000 people were killed by Cyclone Nagris on May 2-3.
Monday’s talk raised about 400,000 baht (US $11,450) in donations, according to Ashin Wayama Sayadaw, a monk who helped organize the event.
This was the second time that Sitagu Sayadaw had come to Mahachai to speak. Last July, he gave a talk to around 5,000 people at the Thai Union Sports Stadium in Mahachai.
In his two-and-a-half-hour sermon, Sitagu Sayadaw discussed the common Buddhist themes of compassion and change. On the latter topic, he focused on the message of new US President Barack Obama, whose inaugural speech last Tuesday attracted worldwide attention.
“Most people who live here want to see change, so [Sitagu Sayadaw’s] talk really spoke to them,” said Ashin Wayama Sayadaw. “It gave them a way out of their feeling. I was also very impressed.”
Myo Thaw, a Burmese worker who attended the talk, said, “It is difficult for us to hear dhamma talks here. After I listened to him speak, my mind was cleansed and strengthened. This is what I desperately needed.”
“In Burma, it would be very difficult to see him. I could only see his picture in Burma,” he added.
Moe Thee, another Burmese worker, said, “When I heard him talk about how our donation would be used to provide clinics and schools in the delta, I felt very happy. I donated as much as I could. I want to donate more.”
Many Burmese migrants had the day off on Monday because it was the start of the Chinese New Year. According to sources, the event was held in part to give Mahachai’s large Burmese migrant population an opportunity to gather as a community.
It is estimated that more than 4 million migrants work in Thailand, of whom only about 500,000 are registered.
According to the Thai Labor Promotion Network, there are about 300,000 Burmese migrants, including those who have registered or are waiting for registration, in Mahachai.
A week after Cyclone Nargis hit the Irrawaddy delta, Sitagu Sayadaw set up emergency relief centers and clinics in Ka Don Ka Ni, Amar, Set San and Kunthi Chaung, which were among the worst-hit villages in the region.
About 10,000 Burmese migrant workers living in Mahachai, in Thailand’s Samut Sakhon Province, attended a Buddhist sermon on compassion given by Dr Ashin Nyanissara, a famous Burmese monk, on Monday night, said one of the organizers of the talk.
Dr Ashin Nyanissara, who is better known as Sitagu Sayadaw, is the abbot of the Sitagu International Buddhist Missionary Center in Sagaing and one of Burma’s most respected monks. He has been active in raising funds for relief efforts in the Irrawaddy delta, where over 130,000 people were killed by Cyclone Nagris on May 2-3.
Monday’s talk raised about 400,000 baht (US $11,450) in donations, according to Ashin Wayama Sayadaw, a monk who helped organize the event.
This was the second time that Sitagu Sayadaw had come to Mahachai to speak. Last July, he gave a talk to around 5,000 people at the Thai Union Sports Stadium in Mahachai.
In his two-and-a-half-hour sermon, Sitagu Sayadaw discussed the common Buddhist themes of compassion and change. On the latter topic, he focused on the message of new US President Barack Obama, whose inaugural speech last Tuesday attracted worldwide attention.
“Most people who live here want to see change, so [Sitagu Sayadaw’s] talk really spoke to them,” said Ashin Wayama Sayadaw. “It gave them a way out of their feeling. I was also very impressed.”
Myo Thaw, a Burmese worker who attended the talk, said, “It is difficult for us to hear dhamma talks here. After I listened to him speak, my mind was cleansed and strengthened. This is what I desperately needed.”
“In Burma, it would be very difficult to see him. I could only see his picture in Burma,” he added.
Moe Thee, another Burmese worker, said, “When I heard him talk about how our donation would be used to provide clinics and schools in the delta, I felt very happy. I donated as much as I could. I want to donate more.”
Many Burmese migrants had the day off on Monday because it was the start of the Chinese New Year. According to sources, the event was held in part to give Mahachai’s large Burmese migrant population an opportunity to gather as a community.
It is estimated that more than 4 million migrants work in Thailand, of whom only about 500,000 are registered.
According to the Thai Labor Promotion Network, there are about 300,000 Burmese migrants, including those who have registered or are waiting for registration, in Mahachai.
A week after Cyclone Nargis hit the Irrawaddy delta, Sitagu Sayadaw set up emergency relief centers and clinics in Ka Don Ka Ni, Amar, Set San and Kunthi Chaung, which were among the worst-hit villages in the region.
Global Crisis Hits Burmese Overseas Workers
By MIN LWIN
The global financial crisis is affecting overseas employment agencies in Rangoon, with many agencies likely to close and thousands of Burmese workers’ jobs in jeopardy, according to sources in the former capital.
Of the 132 overseas employment agencies in Rangoon registered with the Ministry of Labor, at least 50 will go out of business in the near future due to the fall in demand for Burmese workers abroad, said the director of an overseas employment agency who preferred to remain anonymous.
All the Rangoon agencies have seen their revenue decrease, with most losing contracts to provide Burmese workers to foreign countries such as Japan, South Korea, Malaysia, Singapore and the Middle East, according to sources within the agencies.
The demand for migrant laborers—such as construction workers, housemaids, agricultural workers and factory workers—has reduced drastically since the global financial crisis took effect in late 2008.
“We will not renew our company registration this year, because we have no idea when the crisis will end,” said an official from an overseas employment agency in Kyauktada Township in Rangoon.
The Burmese labor ministry doubled the annual fee for overseas employment agencies in February last year. Each agency now has to pay the government an annual fee of 5 million kyat (US $4,739.33).
In addition, each agency must account for no less than 300 workers’ contracts per year. If they are unable to do so, their licenses are revoked.
“We have not received any offers of workers’ contracts since November,” said a staff member at the Thu Kha Su San Service Company, a well-known overseas employment agency in Rangoon.
While most illegal migrants—some estimates run as high as 5 million—head to neighboring Thailand, most of the overseas agencies’ contracted workers are sent to Malaysia. Workers’ rights groups estimate that about 500,000 Burmese migrants work in Malaysia—mostly in restaurants, on construction sites, rubber plantations and in factories—about two-thirds of whom are registered with overseas employment agencies.
However, since the global meltdown began, hundreds of Burmese workers in Malaysia have lost their jobs and have been sent home.
Speaking to The Irrawaddy on Tuesday, Ye Min Tun from the Malaysia-based Burma Workers' Rights Protection Committee said that more than 700 Burmese migrants have been forced to return home since late November because of the fall in demand, while others have had their times or salaries cut.
He quoted the Human Resources Department in Malaysia as saying recently that more than 6,000 Burmese workers will be sent home after Chinese New Year (January 26) due to the turmoil in global financial markets.
Between 60 and 70 percent of young people (aged 18- 35) are jobless in Burma and many seek work abroad. Jobs in Japan or South Korea have been particularly sought after by young Burmese since the 1990s.
The global financial crisis is affecting overseas employment agencies in Rangoon, with many agencies likely to close and thousands of Burmese workers’ jobs in jeopardy, according to sources in the former capital.
Of the 132 overseas employment agencies in Rangoon registered with the Ministry of Labor, at least 50 will go out of business in the near future due to the fall in demand for Burmese workers abroad, said the director of an overseas employment agency who preferred to remain anonymous.
All the Rangoon agencies have seen their revenue decrease, with most losing contracts to provide Burmese workers to foreign countries such as Japan, South Korea, Malaysia, Singapore and the Middle East, according to sources within the agencies.
The demand for migrant laborers—such as construction workers, housemaids, agricultural workers and factory workers—has reduced drastically since the global financial crisis took effect in late 2008.
“We will not renew our company registration this year, because we have no idea when the crisis will end,” said an official from an overseas employment agency in Kyauktada Township in Rangoon.
The Burmese labor ministry doubled the annual fee for overseas employment agencies in February last year. Each agency now has to pay the government an annual fee of 5 million kyat (US $4,739.33).
In addition, each agency must account for no less than 300 workers’ contracts per year. If they are unable to do so, their licenses are revoked.
“We have not received any offers of workers’ contracts since November,” said a staff member at the Thu Kha Su San Service Company, a well-known overseas employment agency in Rangoon.
While most illegal migrants—some estimates run as high as 5 million—head to neighboring Thailand, most of the overseas agencies’ contracted workers are sent to Malaysia. Workers’ rights groups estimate that about 500,000 Burmese migrants work in Malaysia—mostly in restaurants, on construction sites, rubber plantations and in factories—about two-thirds of whom are registered with overseas employment agencies.
However, since the global meltdown began, hundreds of Burmese workers in Malaysia have lost their jobs and have been sent home.
Speaking to The Irrawaddy on Tuesday, Ye Min Tun from the Malaysia-based Burma Workers' Rights Protection Committee said that more than 700 Burmese migrants have been forced to return home since late November because of the fall in demand, while others have had their times or salaries cut.
He quoted the Human Resources Department in Malaysia as saying recently that more than 6,000 Burmese workers will be sent home after Chinese New Year (January 26) due to the turmoil in global financial markets.
Between 60 and 70 percent of young people (aged 18- 35) are jobless in Burma and many seek work abroad. Jobs in Japan or South Korea have been particularly sought after by young Burmese since the 1990s.
Junta Promises to Address Rohingya Exodus
By SAW YAN NAING
Burma’s No 2 leader, Vice Snr-Gen Maung Aye, has promised the Thai military supreme commander during an official visit to Burma that authorities will try to stem the flow of Rohingya refugees who try to reach neighboring countries illegally, according to the Thai News Agency (TNA).
A Thai delegation led by Supreme Commander Gen Songkitti Jaggabatara visited Naypyidaw, the Burmese capital, on Monday.
Gen Songkitti was quoted by TNA that Maung Aye agreed with Thailand’s request to address the issue of Rohingya Muslims who have sought refuge in Thailand, Malaysia and Indonesia, often risking dangerous journeys by sea in small boats.
Maung Aye said authorities will try to prevent the Rohingya from leaving Burma for other countries.
Burma’s state-run newspaper, The New Light of Myanmar, mentioned the visit by the Thai supreme commander, but disclosed no details about the meeting.
Meanwhile, Al-Jazeera television reported on Tuesday that a boat with 78 ethnic Rohingya migrants was detained in Thailand. Some Rohingya had lacerations, burns and other wounds.
According to the report, the migrants fled Burma about a month ago, and the Burmese military intercepted their vessel as it sailed south toward Thailand.
A Rohingya, speaking through a translator, said the Burmese military beat them with sticks. Others said the soldiers tried to set their boat on fire, and they showed severe body burns.
A senior Thai navy official told The Associated Press news agency that the migrants would be repatriated once their boat was fixed. "We will send them back through legal channels," he said.
On Monday, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) said that it is still awaiting a response from the Thai government one week after it requested access to Rohingya refugees in Thailand to examine whether they are in need of international protection.
NGOs have alleged that up to 300 Rohingya are missing after the Thai navy denied them refuge and turned them back out to sea.
According to the Thai Ministry of Foreign Affairs, it is estimated that up to 20,000 illegal Rohingya migrants have entered Thailand over recent years and remain in the country.
Last week, Thailand offered to host a regional conference to discuss the mass migration of Rohingya refugees.
Foreign Ministry officials met with envoys from India, Indonesia, Bangladesh, Malaysia and Burma to discuss the exodus of the Rohingya from Burma, where they say they are persecuted economically and denied basic rights of citizenship.
Burma’s No 2 leader, Vice Snr-Gen Maung Aye, has promised the Thai military supreme commander during an official visit to Burma that authorities will try to stem the flow of Rohingya refugees who try to reach neighboring countries illegally, according to the Thai News Agency (TNA).
A Thai delegation led by Supreme Commander Gen Songkitti Jaggabatara visited Naypyidaw, the Burmese capital, on Monday.
Gen Songkitti was quoted by TNA that Maung Aye agreed with Thailand’s request to address the issue of Rohingya Muslims who have sought refuge in Thailand, Malaysia and Indonesia, often risking dangerous journeys by sea in small boats.
Maung Aye said authorities will try to prevent the Rohingya from leaving Burma for other countries.
Burma’s state-run newspaper, The New Light of Myanmar, mentioned the visit by the Thai supreme commander, but disclosed no details about the meeting.
Meanwhile, Al-Jazeera television reported on Tuesday that a boat with 78 ethnic Rohingya migrants was detained in Thailand. Some Rohingya had lacerations, burns and other wounds.
According to the report, the migrants fled Burma about a month ago, and the Burmese military intercepted their vessel as it sailed south toward Thailand.
A Rohingya, speaking through a translator, said the Burmese military beat them with sticks. Others said the soldiers tried to set their boat on fire, and they showed severe body burns.
A senior Thai navy official told The Associated Press news agency that the migrants would be repatriated once their boat was fixed. "We will send them back through legal channels," he said.
On Monday, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) said that it is still awaiting a response from the Thai government one week after it requested access to Rohingya refugees in Thailand to examine whether they are in need of international protection.
NGOs have alleged that up to 300 Rohingya are missing after the Thai navy denied them refuge and turned them back out to sea.
According to the Thai Ministry of Foreign Affairs, it is estimated that up to 20,000 illegal Rohingya migrants have entered Thailand over recent years and remain in the country.
Last week, Thailand offered to host a regional conference to discuss the mass migration of Rohingya refugees.
Foreign Ministry officials met with envoys from India, Indonesia, Bangladesh, Malaysia and Burma to discuss the exodus of the Rohingya from Burma, where they say they are persecuted economically and denied basic rights of citizenship.
Are Malaysian Officials Trafficking Burmese Migrants?
By BARADAN KUPPUSAMY / IPS WRITER
KUALA LUMPUR — A scandalous trade in Burmese migrant labor involving Malaysian officials and international human traffickers is now coming to light, investigators say.
Like thousands of Burmese migrant workers, That Zin Myint travelled overland from Rangoon to Bangkok and reached the Thai border where local syndicates, for a hefty bribe, helped him cross into northern Malaysia and move overland to the capital where cheap, unskilled labor is in great demand.
‘'Don't take my photographs... they will come after me,'' Zin Myint said, referring to Malaysian authorities who now closely monitor local and overseas publications for anti-Malaysia sentiments expressed by migrant workers.
On arrival Zin Myint “celebrated” with others from his village and joined some three million—documented and undocumented—Asian migrant workers who live and work here in deplorable conditions.
An estimated 150,000 of these workers are Burmese migrant workers, many of them Kachins and Muslim Rohingyas from Burma's northern Rakhine region.
‘'We Burmese migrants are sold like fish and vegetables,'' Myint told IPS in an interview in Pudu market, a big wet market in the capital where Burmese migrant workers predominate.
Myint had been arrested, taken to the Thai border, and officially “deported” which actually means getting sold to human traffickers. “I was robbed of all my cash by both Malaysian and Thai officials and sold to traffickers,'' Myint told IPS.
“I was held in a jungle camp near the border for three weeks until my relatives bought me from the traffickers. I bribed my way back into Malaysia,'' he said, adding that while conditions are tough in Malaysia, they are better than Burma or Thailand. ‘'There is food, work and a roof over my head.''
Myint is one of the luckier ones to be arrested and “deported” only once. He is now considered a leader in the Pudu area and much sought after by other Burmese workers for “assistance” in avoiding arrest and deportation all over again.
Burmese migrant workers call the trade “bwan” (thrown away) or one of the worst forms of human trafficking.
“Malaysia does not recognize key international agreements on the protection of refugees and foreign nationals. Nor does it apply to foreign migrants the same rights and legal protections given to Malaysian citizens,'' said Irene Fernandez, executive director of Tenaganita, a rights NGO that protects migrant workers.
Human rights activists have long charged that immigration, police and other enforcement officials, including the unpopular voluntary force called RELA, have been “trading'' Burmese migrants, especially Rohingyas, to human traffickers in Thailand who then pass them on to deep sea fishing trawler operators in the South China Sea.
The women are generally sold into the sex industry.
“They are treated as a commodity and frequently bought and sold, and we have been condemning this practice for a long time,'' Fernandez said.
“Our demands have always fallen on deaf ears despite the accumulating evidence of the involvement of uniformed officials in the trade,'' Fernandez told IPS.
It has become commonplace for the authorities to use the vigilante RELA force to periodically arrest and “deport” Rohingyas, but since Burma does not recognize them as citizens, the practice is to take them to the Bukit Kayu Hitam area on the Thai-Malaysia border and force them to cross over into Thailand.
“They are arrested, jailed and deported, but since they are stateless they are taken to the Thai border and often sold to Thai traffickers,'' said Fernandez. Invariably, the “deported'' Rohingyas bribe Thai and Malaysian officials and return to Malaysia.
The accusation against corrupt Malaysian officials is long standing and made frequently by refugees, human rights activists, opposition lawmakers and is even the subject of one official probe.
Malaysian television channels have also investigated and exposed the “sale” of the Rohingya refugees on the Malaysia-Thai border, although they did not finger Malaysian officials for fear of reprisals.
A U.S. probe being conducted into trafficking by the powerful Senate foreign relations committee has stimulated interest in the plight of Rohingyas when its findings are relayed to key U.S. enforcement agencies and Interpol for possible action, Senate officials have said.
“U.S. Senate foreign relations committee staff are reviewing reports of extortion and human trafficking from Burmese and other migrants in Malaysia, allegedly at the hands of Malaysia government officials,'' a staff official told international news agencies in early January.
“The allegations include assertions that Burmese and other migrants—whether or not they have UNHCR documentation—are taken from Malaysian government detention facilities and transported to the Thailand-Malaysia border,'' the official had said.
At the border, they alleged, “money is demanded from them, or they are turned over to human traffickers in southern Thailand.”
“If they pay, they return to Malaysia. If not, they are sold to traffickers,'' the official said, adding that teams had visited Malaysia, Thailand and Burma to collect evidence on the human trade.
Some of the immigrants from Burma and other countries are refugees recognized by the office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) which has an office in Kuala Lumpur.
Since 1995, about 40,000 Rohingya refugees from Burma have been settled in the U.S., most of them after passing through Malaysia, while the emigration applications of thousands more have been rejected by third countries.
“They are left stranded, unable to return to Myanmar (official name for Burma) where they face certain persecution by the military regime and rejected from immigrating to third countries,” said opposition lawmaker Charles Santiago who has raised their plight in parliament.
“They need urgent help and understanding of their plight,” he told IPS, urging Malaysia to sign U.N. refugee conventions and accord refugees due recognition. ”We can no longer close our eyes to their plight.”
“We are trapped in a foreign country without papers and without recognition,'' said Habibur Rahman, general secretary of the Myanmar Ethnic Rohingya Human Rights Organization Malaysia, an organization that speaks for stateless Rohingyas in Malaysia.
“We have been looking for a way to escape this dilemma but without success,'' he told IPS.
“We are denied citizenship and made stateless by the Myanmar military junta and persecuted and forced to flee to neighboring countries like Thailand, Malaysia and Bangladesh,'' he said.
The involvement of the U.S. Senate in the issue has upset Malaysian officials who have warned the U.S. to ‘'take their hands off'' the country, saying such action violated Malaysian sovereignty.
However, Prime Minister Abdullah Badawi has asked the U.S. to pass on information pertaining to the allegations, saying the government does not tolerate extortion from migrants by officials.
“The U.S. authorities have evidence we would be very thankful for, if they can pass the information to us for investigation and appropriate action,'' he told Bernama, the official news agency, on Jan. 15.
An upset foreign minister, Rais Yatim, told local media on Jan. 19 that the allegations were “baseless, ridiculous and farfetched.”
“We are a civilized country. We are not living in barbaric times when people are sold off at the whims and fancies of people with power. It is certainly unfair of the U.S. Senate to accuse us of doing such outrageous things,'' Yatim said.
KUALA LUMPUR — A scandalous trade in Burmese migrant labor involving Malaysian officials and international human traffickers is now coming to light, investigators say.
Like thousands of Burmese migrant workers, That Zin Myint travelled overland from Rangoon to Bangkok and reached the Thai border where local syndicates, for a hefty bribe, helped him cross into northern Malaysia and move overland to the capital where cheap, unskilled labor is in great demand.
‘'Don't take my photographs... they will come after me,'' Zin Myint said, referring to Malaysian authorities who now closely monitor local and overseas publications for anti-Malaysia sentiments expressed by migrant workers.
On arrival Zin Myint “celebrated” with others from his village and joined some three million—documented and undocumented—Asian migrant workers who live and work here in deplorable conditions.
An estimated 150,000 of these workers are Burmese migrant workers, many of them Kachins and Muslim Rohingyas from Burma's northern Rakhine region.
‘'We Burmese migrants are sold like fish and vegetables,'' Myint told IPS in an interview in Pudu market, a big wet market in the capital where Burmese migrant workers predominate.
Myint had been arrested, taken to the Thai border, and officially “deported” which actually means getting sold to human traffickers. “I was robbed of all my cash by both Malaysian and Thai officials and sold to traffickers,'' Myint told IPS.
“I was held in a jungle camp near the border for three weeks until my relatives bought me from the traffickers. I bribed my way back into Malaysia,'' he said, adding that while conditions are tough in Malaysia, they are better than Burma or Thailand. ‘'There is food, work and a roof over my head.''
Myint is one of the luckier ones to be arrested and “deported” only once. He is now considered a leader in the Pudu area and much sought after by other Burmese workers for “assistance” in avoiding arrest and deportation all over again.
Burmese migrant workers call the trade “bwan” (thrown away) or one of the worst forms of human trafficking.
“Malaysia does not recognize key international agreements on the protection of refugees and foreign nationals. Nor does it apply to foreign migrants the same rights and legal protections given to Malaysian citizens,'' said Irene Fernandez, executive director of Tenaganita, a rights NGO that protects migrant workers.
Human rights activists have long charged that immigration, police and other enforcement officials, including the unpopular voluntary force called RELA, have been “trading'' Burmese migrants, especially Rohingyas, to human traffickers in Thailand who then pass them on to deep sea fishing trawler operators in the South China Sea.
The women are generally sold into the sex industry.
“They are treated as a commodity and frequently bought and sold, and we have been condemning this practice for a long time,'' Fernandez said.
“Our demands have always fallen on deaf ears despite the accumulating evidence of the involvement of uniformed officials in the trade,'' Fernandez told IPS.
It has become commonplace for the authorities to use the vigilante RELA force to periodically arrest and “deport” Rohingyas, but since Burma does not recognize them as citizens, the practice is to take them to the Bukit Kayu Hitam area on the Thai-Malaysia border and force them to cross over into Thailand.
“They are arrested, jailed and deported, but since they are stateless they are taken to the Thai border and often sold to Thai traffickers,'' said Fernandez. Invariably, the “deported'' Rohingyas bribe Thai and Malaysian officials and return to Malaysia.
The accusation against corrupt Malaysian officials is long standing and made frequently by refugees, human rights activists, opposition lawmakers and is even the subject of one official probe.
Malaysian television channels have also investigated and exposed the “sale” of the Rohingya refugees on the Malaysia-Thai border, although they did not finger Malaysian officials for fear of reprisals.
A U.S. probe being conducted into trafficking by the powerful Senate foreign relations committee has stimulated interest in the plight of Rohingyas when its findings are relayed to key U.S. enforcement agencies and Interpol for possible action, Senate officials have said.
“U.S. Senate foreign relations committee staff are reviewing reports of extortion and human trafficking from Burmese and other migrants in Malaysia, allegedly at the hands of Malaysia government officials,'' a staff official told international news agencies in early January.
“The allegations include assertions that Burmese and other migrants—whether or not they have UNHCR documentation—are taken from Malaysian government detention facilities and transported to the Thailand-Malaysia border,'' the official had said.
At the border, they alleged, “money is demanded from them, or they are turned over to human traffickers in southern Thailand.”
“If they pay, they return to Malaysia. If not, they are sold to traffickers,'' the official said, adding that teams had visited Malaysia, Thailand and Burma to collect evidence on the human trade.
Some of the immigrants from Burma and other countries are refugees recognized by the office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) which has an office in Kuala Lumpur.
Since 1995, about 40,000 Rohingya refugees from Burma have been settled in the U.S., most of them after passing through Malaysia, while the emigration applications of thousands more have been rejected by third countries.
“They are left stranded, unable to return to Myanmar (official name for Burma) where they face certain persecution by the military regime and rejected from immigrating to third countries,” said opposition lawmaker Charles Santiago who has raised their plight in parliament.
“They need urgent help and understanding of their plight,” he told IPS, urging Malaysia to sign U.N. refugee conventions and accord refugees due recognition. ”We can no longer close our eyes to their plight.”
“We are trapped in a foreign country without papers and without recognition,'' said Habibur Rahman, general secretary of the Myanmar Ethnic Rohingya Human Rights Organization Malaysia, an organization that speaks for stateless Rohingyas in Malaysia.
“We have been looking for a way to escape this dilemma but without success,'' he told IPS.
“We are denied citizenship and made stateless by the Myanmar military junta and persecuted and forced to flee to neighboring countries like Thailand, Malaysia and Bangladesh,'' he said.
The involvement of the U.S. Senate in the issue has upset Malaysian officials who have warned the U.S. to ‘'take their hands off'' the country, saying such action violated Malaysian sovereignty.
However, Prime Minister Abdullah Badawi has asked the U.S. to pass on information pertaining to the allegations, saying the government does not tolerate extortion from migrants by officials.
“The U.S. authorities have evidence we would be very thankful for, if they can pass the information to us for investigation and appropriate action,'' he told Bernama, the official news agency, on Jan. 15.
An upset foreign minister, Rais Yatim, told local media on Jan. 19 that the allegations were “baseless, ridiculous and farfetched.”
“We are a civilized country. We are not living in barbaric times when people are sold off at the whims and fancies of people with power. It is certainly unfair of the U.S. Senate to accuse us of doing such outrageous things,'' Yatim said.
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