SCMP-Interpol drug talks furore

[tinkyi@xxxxxxx]

Wednesday  February 3  1999

Interpol drug talks furore

BURMA by WILLIAM BARNES
Interpol will hold its annual drug conference in Rangoon this month, to the
fury of pro-democracy groups who point out that wanted drug lords are free
to wander the capital.

Denmark is boycotting the meeting because it will send the wrong signal to
generals with a dire human rights record, according to the country's Justice
Minister, Frank Jensen.

Danish experts estimate that Burma produces about 2,560 tonnes of opium
annually - a figure unequalled by any other country.

The president of the Open Society Institute, a democracy lobby group,
demanded in a letter to the US Attorney-General, Janet Reno, that the United
States boycott the conference unless the venue was changed.

Aryeh Neier marvelled that this particularly inappropriate site should be
chosen given Washington's concern over the regime's role as a producer and
exporter of narcotics.

The Open Society president likened it to holding a conference on women's
rights in Kabul, a terrorism meeting in Tripoli or a weapons of mass
destruction convention in Baghdad.

The junta does not bother to disguise the fact that self-confessed
traffickers travel freely - as long as they steer clear of politics and
promise to stop trafficking sometime in the future.

Laundered drug profits prop up Burma's battered economy and only modest
seizures are made given the country's massive narcotics output.