Cambodian Premier to visit India, Myanmar
PHNOM PENH, Feb 16 (AFP) -Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen will leave Phnom Penh later this week for a four day tour of India and Myanmar aimed at strengthening trade and political ties, the foreign ministry announced Wednesday.
The visit, beginning Friday, will be the first by a Cambodian premier to India in more than 20 years, and the first to military-ruled Myanmar since Cambodia's entry into the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) last year.
The foreign ministry said Hun Sen would be accompanied by a high-profile delegation including foreign minister Hor Namhong, commerce minister Cham Prasith and tourism minister Veng Sereyvuth.
In India, Hun Sen is scheduled to meet with Indian Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee and other senior government officials, and sign agreement in the fields of trade, economy, science and technology, tourism and agriculture.
In Myanmar, Hun Sen is scheduled to hold talks with the junta chairman Senior General Than Shwe.
Los Angeles Times-Wednesday, February 16, 2000
Lawyers for U.S. Seek End
to Myanmar Boycott Trade: Massachusetts case before Supreme Court could
affect laws in L.A., other cities.
WASHINGTON
The United States must speak with "a
single, national voice" in the global economy, the administration said, and it
urged the Supreme Court to rebuke Massachusetts for refusing to buy from firms
that do business with Myanmar, formerly known as Burma.
If the high court agrees, its decision
probably will strike down similar laws in at least a dozen cities, including Los
Angeles, San Francisco, Oakland and Portland.
The Massachusetts case, to be argued next
month, tests whether cities and states can consider moral standards when doing
business.
In 1996, it became the first state
to formally boycott firms that do business with the military regime in Myanmar.
During the 1980s, many American cities, states
and colleges announced that they would not do business with the apartheid regime
in South Africa or with companies that operated there. But those laws, while
unpopular with corporate leaders, went unchallenged in court.
Over the last decade, concerns over human
rights, the environment or forced labor have figured in boycotts announced by
cities and states. China, Cuba, Nigeria, Sudan and Switzerland have been
targeted by boycott laws.
States need not
"trade with dictators," lawyers for Massachusetts said in defending its Myanmar
law. "The states should be free to choose their trading partners . . . and to
apply a moral standard to their spending decisions," they argued.
The law posed a high-stakes dilemma for
businesses, since the state made purchases of more than $2 billion per year. As
a practical matter, they were forced to choose between doing business with the
state or Myanmar.
Two years ago, the National
Foreign Trade Council, a coalition of American and foreign firms, filed suit in
Boston and contended that the state was unfairly discriminating against them.
The European Union and Japan also protested the Massachusetts law.
Last year, the U.S. Court of Appeals struck it
down as unconstitutional, leading to a showdown March 22 in the Supreme Court,
when the case will be argued.
In siding with
the corporations, administration officials said they feared the specter of 50
foreign policies, one for each state, and perhaps many more if more cities
joined in.
"The ultimate authority to act on
behalf of the United States . . . in the international arena resides with the
president and Congress alone," U.S. Solicitor General Seth Waxman said in his
brief to the high court. Cities and states "impermissibly intrude into the
national government's exclusive authority over foreign affairs" if they use
their purchasing power to condemn human rights abuses abroad, he said.
Massachusetts Assistant Atty. Gen. Thomas
Barnico said he had not seen the administration's brief and refused to comment.
Lawyers for California and 21 other states
supported Massachusetts, as did a group of major cities, including Los Angeles
and San Francisco.
Georgetown law professor
Robert Stumberg, who filed a brief supporting the state, said he was
disappointed but not surprised by the administration's stand.
"Massachusetts is not regulating anybody or
saying you can't do business here," Stumberg said. "They are just saying: 'We
the people of Massachusetts don't want to do business with you under these
circumstances.' "
The Japan Times- Feb 16, 2000.
Visaless race the clock as new penalties approach
By TAKUYA ASAKURA
Staff writer
Undocumented foreigners are flooding immigration authorities' offices and travel agencies trying to get out of Japan before the revised Immigration Control Law takes effect Friday.
The sudden demand, however, has already congested several escape routes.
Under the revised law, overstayers ordered deported will be banned from entering Japan for five years. The current penalty is one year.
In a bid to dodge the law's invocation, hundreds of foreigners were forming long queues at the Tokyo Regional Immigration Bureau on Tuesday morning.
What is apparently not well understood, however, is that appearing before immigration authorities in no way protects undocumented foreigners from the law.
Many undocumented foreigners in the lines said they were unable to reserve flights departing before Friday.
A Chinese man at the immigration office said flight tickets for his hometown in southern China were sold out.
"Everybody wants to go home before the new law takes effect, but we just physically cannot," he said.
A group of people from the Philippines standing in line said they purchased tickets for a flight early next month because there were no earlier flights available.
"We are having difficulty handling all the customers coming all at once," said Reza Yousuf Bin, manager of A'cross Travellers Bureau, a travel agency near the immigration office offering discount flights.
It is especially difficult to book flights to Seoul and Bangkok this week, he said, adding that there are almost no discount tickets available for other Asian destinations either.
Reza said his shop started noticing the rush in mid-January.
From the beginning of this month, customers started coming directly from the immigration office to the agency and desperately asking for flights leaving before Friday, he said.
Despite the crushing demand, he said, "We can find a way for customers who really have to (leave before Friday)," citing taking alternate routes or purchasing business-class tickets.
Some voluntary deportees are going to immigration authorities under the mistaken belief that the revised law would not be applied to those who turn themselves in by the Friday deadline.
Authorities are advising overstayers to come back after obtaining a passport from their embassies and a flight ticket for any day within a month from the day they appear at the immigration office.
Although it is only a limited provisional release from immigration authorities, many foreigners are mistakenly believing they will not be subject to the revised law if they depart within the grace period.
But the revised law will impose the five-year ban on all undocumented foreigners staying in Japan beyond Friday, including those given the one-month grace period.
A Filipino woman who was in line with her friends expected the last-minute rush to increase. "I think more people will come tomorrow and the day after tomorrow," she said, "because everybody thinks it will be all right if they come by Friday."
Another woman at the end of a line explained to an immigration official that she was not able to book a flight for before the deadline.
"It is your own fault for not coming earlier," the official told the woman.
An immigration spokesman said the immigration authorities have done their best to publicize information on the law revision and deportation procedures.
He said that they also hosted meetings with concerned parties, such as travel agencies, to explain the revision.The Nation - Feb 16, 2000.
Maybe it's time to raid Rangoon
Now that Thailand's armed forces have shown the world what kind of stuff they're made of, perhaps they are ready to go the whole nine yards and "resolve" another hostage-taking crisis.
I am referring, of course, to the dozen-year-old siege of Burma by a group of terrorists known as the SPDC (State Pillage and Destroy Council). I understand that these desperados on Thailand's doorstep have infringed on the Kingdom's sovereignty on a number of occasions.
If I am not mistaken, Thai lives have actually been lost in a number of raids carried out by SPDC troops on Thai soil. How much more provocation does Thailand require? And what of the SPDC's well-publicised practice of harbouring known drug runners on Burmese soil, whence they flood Thailand with their weapons against the minds of the Kingdom's youth. Patriotic Thais should be furious.
If Thais are really in the mood for a bit of Burma-bashing, why not take their grievances straight to the source? Perhaps there is some vicarious satisfaction in harassing Karen refugees and a handful of Burmese dissidents unlucky enough to be stuck on Thai soil; but if the Thai army really wants to right some historical wrongs, perhaps a pre-dawn raid on Rangoon would be more effective.
Of course, there are risks involved: what if, for instance, the goons in Rangoon do not simply put their hands up and surrender? Are the Thai commandos prepared for such a contingency? But this is not the time for doubts and dawdling. If Thailand wants to heal the wounds of Ayutthaya (and, incidentally, liberate 50 million hostages) then it should be prepared for another display of heroism like the one the world witnessed in Ratchaburi.
Gustav Lerner
TOKYO
BBC-Wednesday, 16 February, 2000, 14:01 GMT
When states go to cyber-war
By BBC News Online's Joe Havely
Digital weapons could change the face of warfare
... London 2015: Welcome netizen! You are accessing this on Gatesweb, one of the few networks to have survived the First World Web War.
Planet Earth is still reeling from its experience of the ultimate in stealth warfare - no bombs, no bullets, no bangs; just chaos and the total breakdown of society.
In this war the battlefield was everywhere and nowhere; a conflict fought by invisible warriors moving silently to bringing about their digital Armageddon.
Public utilities have ground to a halt; the banking system has imploded; transportation systems are in terminal gridlock; telecoms are all but useless...
Futuristic fantasy? Not necessarily - cyber-warfare is fast becoming a fact of military life.The kind of disruption once possible only with a battery of intercontinental missiles now seems achievable at the click of a mouse.
Cyber-wars might not directly spill blood, but in the information age stemming the flow of data using so-called "weapons of mass disruption" can be as effective a way of bringing a country to its knees as bombing its oil refineries.
Sitting target
As our wired world becomes more reliant on technology for its prosperity and security, so it becomes increasingly vulnerable.
Thomas Siebel, chief executive of Siebel Systems, a provider of e-business software, says recent examples of prominent websites being shut down by young and relatively amateur hackers show how exposed the system is.
"If you want to shut down the free world", he says, "the way you would do it is not to send missiles over the Atlantic Ocean - you shut down their information systems and the free world will come to a screeching halt.
"If a college kid can do it, imagine what Libya and red China can do."
In geostrategic terms the US is still very much the uncontested superpower based on its arsenal of conventional weapons. But on the electronic front the field is much more fluid and the internet could prove to be the great leveller.
Arms cache
The latest lethal weapon?
Unsurprisingly the US is thought to hold one of the most sophisticated and top secret stores of so-called cyber-bombs.
But that by no means gives it a monopoly.
In capable hands a powerful computer hooked up to the web has the potential to be a relatively cheap, fast and effective tool of war.
During the Kosovo war US officials are reported to have decided against deploying their electronic arsenal because of fears that the impact on civilian life would have led to charges of war crimes under the Geneva Convention.
The revelation highlighted a growing debate over the impact of these weapons on the nature of warfare and legitimate targets.
Late last year Russian diplomats warned that the uncontrolled development of cyber-warfare applications "might lead to an escalation of the arms race."There is also the genie-in-the-bottle syndrome to think about.
Once a cyber attack has been unleashed, who's to say that in the interconnected world your carefully constructed virus won't spread to the networks of friendly or neutral nations?
The art of war
Intelligence analysts say one of the first concerted cyber-attacks occurred in Sri Lanka in 1997 in support of the Tamil Tiger separatists.
Sophisticated more in terms of organisation than technology the strike was intended to disrupt government communications by overloading - i.e. spamming - Sri Lankan embassies with millions of emails.
Burma's military government has built a sophisticated cyber-warfare division
A year later the Indian army's website on Kashmir was "hijacked" by supporters of Pakistan's claim to the disputed territory who plastered the site with their own political slogans.
In Burma, the military government is believed to have built up an advanced cyber-warfare department within its own secret police force.
Using monitoring equipment loaned by the government of Singapore, analysts say the junta has been able to track online critics of the regime. A growing number of exiled activists say they have received viruses attached to emails later found to have been sent by Burmese agents.
And during the East Timorese crisis last year, independence leader Jose Ramos Horta threatened to unleash a series of viruses against Indonesia's banking sector if the government tried to rig the territory's referendum.
But military officials say these are just tips of the electronic iceberg.
Hack attack
US forces held back from using electronic weapons during the Kosovo conflict
According to US Government reports at least 120 groups or countries are developing information-warfare systems, most of them using the net as their means of attack.
Already the US Defence Department is engaged in an ongoing war to protect its communications network.
Backed by a $1.4bn presidential budget, the Pentagon announced last October that it was consolidating offensive and defensive cyber-warfare programs under the authority of the US Space Command in Colorado Springs.
It says hackers try to penetrate its systems between 60 and 80 times a day, but analysts believe the real figures are likely to be much higher.
Most hackers gain access through so-called "back-doors" - a kind of electronic loophole which only tends to become apparent after the intruder has made their presence felt and left.
Once you've been infiltrated, you then have to trace who attacked you - a task complicated by the array of electronic "screens" available to hackers to mask their locations.
By then, of course, it could already be too late - a fact that is causing senior White House officials to contemplate the possibility of an "electronic Pearl Harbor".
Maybe the first shots of the global cyber-war have already been fired. Trouble is, if and when the war starts for real you won't see it until it's too late.