BURMA: Japan renews hopes for profi

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Subject: BURMA: Japan renews hopes for profitable    relations 

VIA LEXIS NEXIS
World News / Asia-Pacific
15/12/99

                  BURMA: Japan renews hopes for profitable
                  relations 
                  Tokyo may decide to revive links that go as far back as
                  the second world war. William Barnes reports

                                   A bruised Japanese soldier in the
                                   popular post-war novel, The Harp
                                   of Burma, argued that the
                                   Burmese "possess something
                                   marvellous that we can't even
                                   begin to understand".

                                   Burma has held a peculiar
                                   fascination for many Japanese
                  since the Greater East Asian war when its anti-colonial
                  heroes fought the British side-by-side with their
                  Japanese "liberators".

                  That sentimental undertow may help explain why Japan
                  is urging Burma's military regime to ease its iron grip on
                  the country sufficiently to permit Japan to start helping it.
                  Keizo Obuchi last month became the first Japanese
                  premier in 15 years to meet his Burmese counterpart
                  when he talked to General Than Shwe at the summit of
                  the Association of South-East Asian Nations in Manila.

                  Mr Obuchi told Gen Than Shwe that Japan was ready to
                  support the regime if it carried out "serious" economic
                  reforms. His senior foreign policy adviser, Ryutaro
                  Hashimoto, followed this up with a four-day tour of Burma
                  to "size up its economic needs". A 48-member
                  delegation from the powerful business organisation, the
                  Keidanren, has also just visited the country. Why should
                  Japan be quickening its engagement with a widely reviled
                  military regime when - according to a recent World Bank
                  report - "lacklustre economic performance. . . could have
                  devastating consequences for poverty, human
                  development and social cohesion in Myanmar [Burma]"?

                  One Japan-based analyst argues that Japan's niggling
                  worries over security should never be underestimated:
                  "Economic survivalism remains at the core of Japanese
                  perceptions of themselves and the outside world,
                  especially Asia," the analyst said. A feeling that Burma's
                  potential is too rich to ignore is reinforced by a concern
                  that if Japan or others do not move in, China will.

                  Japan has made Burmese friends under western noses
                  before. The vanguard of the anti-colonial movement
                  trained in wartime Japan. The "thirty comrades" included
                  Aung San, father of Aung San Suu Kyi, current
                  opposition leader, and also Ne Win, the future dictator

                  If the relationship turned sour before hostilities ended,
                  friendships created during the war helped ensure
                  Japanese aid provided a prop for an often isolated
                  economy from the mid-1950s to 1988.

                  Tokyo eventually rebelled against the Ne Win regime's
                  eccentric management with an unprecedented warning in
                  early 1988 that the bilateral relationship would be in
                  danger if fundamental economic reforms were not
                  introduced. The blunt threat encouraged a newly-formed
                  junta to announce the opening up of the economy in late
                  1988, though by then the massacre of anti-military
                  protesters had already caused aid to be cut off.

                  The big Japanese trading houses are eager to see a
                  resumption of large-scale overseas development
                  assistance to provide them with lucrative, risk-free
                  procurement contracts; they are too wary of political
                  instability, corruption and infrastructure problems to risk
                  doing much on their own.

                  The Keidanren, and a Japan-Myanmar Association of big
                  corporations, is strongly supported by pro-business
                  members of the ruling Liberal Democratic party who are
                  moving closer to Burma's powerful military intelligence
                  establishment.

                  One influential LDP leader, Kabun Muto, established a
                  "Parliamentarians' Group to Support the Myanmar
                  Government" in 1988.

                  Earlier this year another powerful LDP figure, Koichi
                  Kato, inspected, with intelligence chief Lt Gen Khin
                  Nyunt, a crop-substitution project (for growing buckwheat
                  rather than opium poppies) in Kokang State.

                  Aung San Suu Kyi, the Burmese opposition leader, has
                  her own links with Japan, especially through her father,
                  whose life she researched in Kyoto University in the
                  mid-1980s. However, Ms Suu Kyi's visibility in Japan has
                  declined sharply this year. This is important in a country
                  where personal relations count for more than abstract
                  ideas such as democracy, at least with the political and
                  business elite.

                  Japan lifted its 1988 freeze on humanitarian aid in 1995
                  after Ms Suu Kyi was released from house arrest. It
                  resurrected a pre-1988 aid project in March last year by
                  lending $22.1m (£13.6m) for the repair of the dangerously
                  rundown Rangoon airport.

                  Any moves to resume new aid lending must first
                  overcome the Ministry of Finance's own reservations
                  about extending more credit to a country that is not, in
                  effect, servicing its existing debt to Japan.

                  Trickier still is the row provoked by breaking ranks with
                  the west on sanctions. Japanese policymakers may
                  resent US and European moralising, but the potential
                  rewards in Burma are not worth risking a rupture with
                  trade partners.

                  Both Mr Obuchi and Mr Hashimoto made appeals for
                  more democracy and reconciliation, but critics of the
                  regime fear that in its eagerness Japan will encourage it
                  to make just token gestures.

                  "The leaders of Myanmar should retire from the military,
                  stop wearing uniforms and should form a political party,"
                  argued the president of The Nippon Foundation, Yohei
                  Sasakawa, who accompanied Mr Hashimoto to Burma.
                  "Every nation has its own pace in terms of democracy
                  and moves towards a market economy."