Myanmar to host controversial heroi

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Subject: Myanmar to host controversial heroin meeting 

Myanmar to host controversial heroin meeting

YANGON, Myanmar (Reuters) -- Myanmar aims to show it is serious about drug
suppression by hosting an international heroin conference organized by
Interpol starting on Tuesday, but critics have called the choice of venue a
bad joke.

The United States and most European Union nations have said they will not
attend the four-day meeting in Yangon, capital of a country that is one of
the world's leading sources of heroin.

Washington said it feared Myanmar's military government would use the
event -- Interpol's Fourth International Heroin Conference -- to give a
false impression of its drug suppression efforts.

Another critic, financier George Soros's Open Society Institute, likened the
choice of venue to holding conventions on women's rights in Afghanistan or
on terrorism in Libya.

Opponents of the Myanmar government have accused it of links to the drug
trade and pointed to the protection it has given to well-known heroin
traffickers like Khun Sa and Lo Hsing-han.

But more than 20 countries have said they will attend the conference,
including Australia, Austria, Brunei, China, Japan, Malaysia, the
Philippines, Singapore, South Africa. Switzerland and Thailand.

Myanmar's Foreign Minister Win Aung last week accused boycotting countries
of neglecting their role in battling drugs and defended Myanmar's drug
record.

"We are doing this not for the public relations, we are doing it with the
collaboration of Interpol to fight against the menace of the drug trade," he
told Reuters in an interview.

Australia called the conference an opportunity to put more pressure on
Yangon to combat drug production and smuggling.

Many overseas officials working to stem a flood of drugs from Myanmar's
refineries have expressed doubts about the government's commitment to wiping
out the narcotics industry.

But Win Aung said Myanmar was serious about eradicating drugs and would
destroy all poppy plantations by 2014.

"We have the political will to do that, we have strong determination to do
that. We are achieving this gradually," he said.

The Yangon conference will include sessions covering heroin production and
trafficking in Southeast and Southwest Asia as well as other world
production areas and trafficking routes.


The United States has criticised the agenda, saying it should concentrate on
issues more specific to Myanmar, including money laundering, corruption,
smuggling and crop destruction and substitution.

Myanmar said earlier this month that the United States and Britain, as two
of the largest markets for heroin in the world, had a special resposibility
to attend the conference.

(Reuters)