Burma Related News, 24 March 2000

[TIN KYI <tinkyi@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Dailynews, 23 March 2000

City diary: Capturing the `Spirit of Asia'

THE spectacular photographs captured by R. Ian Lloyd for National Georgraphic and the publications were on exhibition at Suria KLCC in Kuala Lumpur last Saturday and Sunday.
The exhibition, Spirits of Asia, featured 80 prints by Lloyd, a Canadian, made from his 20 years covering more than 20 countries and territories in the Asian region including Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Philippines, Indonesia, Hong Kong, Taiwan, China, Japan, Myanmar, Brunei, Laos and India.

 

The series of exhibitions or roadshows kicked off in the Philippines last month.

 

In Kuala Lumpur, the exhibition was opened by the Canadian High Commissioner desiganate Jean McCloskey after which an exclusive cocktail was held for some 50 guests.

 

Also present at the opening was National Geographic Channel Asia vice- president Pauline Goh.

 

McCloskey, in her brief address, congratulated Lloyd for his vibrant and vivid works and said it was the first time that an eminent Canadian photographer had staged a solo exhibition in Malaysia.

 

Lloyd said he had worked for eight months to put up this roadshow and thanked sponsors Canon and Kodak for their support.

 

He also thanked the Canadian High Commission for its help in making the exhibition in Malaysia a success.

 

On his style, he said: "My goal has always been to reproduce my photographs as closely a possible to the original subject matter."

 

He added that when he was first approached for the exhibition, he was not too confident that his 35mm transparencies would do justice to the quality of the originals, but fortunately he found out about the new digital printing process that uses lasers to inscribe an image directly onto high quality photgraphic paper.

 

He added this had given him renewed hope.

 

Lloyd said by eliminating the traditional enlarger, he was able to achieve a degree of quality never heard of previously.

 

Lloyd was born and raised in Canada but since 1980 he has been based in Singapore, travelling widely throughout Asia, Australia and the South Pacific.

 

His award winning photographs have appeared in magazines such as National Geographic, Time, Newsweek, Fortune, Travel Holiday and Business Week.

 

He studied photography at Rochester Institute of Photography in New York and Brooks Institute in Santa Barbara before working in broadcast television.

 

 

Asia dailynews, 24 March 2000

Myanmar worker found poisoned in Putrajaya

A FOREIGN worker was found dead in Putrajaya on Monday and police have classified the case as murder,

Yesterday, a post-mortem revealed that 23-year-old construction worker from Myanmar, Khua Uk, died from poisoning.

"We are waiting the complete report to continue with our investigations," said Sepang OCPD Supt Shukri Dahlan.

Khua's body was found at Batu 14 Jalan Air Hitam near Gate 5 of Putrajaya about 8.45am on Monday following a tip-off.

He was found with bloodstains on the nose and face.

The victim was wearing a black T-shirt and camouflage pants. He had his work permit and passport number on him.

Shukri said a man claiming to be the victim's brother went to the Banting hospital to identify the body.

The man, Ban Luai, 28, said his brother left their Kuala Lumpur home last Saturday to find work in Putrajaya.

He identified the body and confirmed that it was his brother, said Shukri.

He said both siblings are legal workers in Malaysia.

"No arrests have been made, but due to the circumstances of the case, especially with the victim's bloodstains, we have classified it as murder."

He said initial findings of the post-mortem revealed the cause of death to be poisoning.

He urged those with any information to call Chief Inspector Suthakaran at 03-84712222.

 

ABC News, 24 March 2000

UNICEF calls for global action against TB epidemic

BANGKOK, March 24 (Reuters) - A tuberculosis epidemic is  raging across Asia and, together with HIV/AIDS, poses a serious  threat to the region's social and economic development, the  United Nations Children's Fund said on Friday.  
UNICEF said in a statement eight million new cases of TB  appeared every year and two million people died of the disease,  which attacks the lungs.  
Asia accounts for 70 percent of all TB cases and 10 Asian  countries -- Bangladesh, Cambodia, China, India, Indonesia,  Myanmar, Pakistan, the Philippines, Thailand and Vietnam -- are  among 22 countries with the highest number of cases.  
The director of UNICEF's East Asia and Pacific Regional  Office, Kul Gautam, said TB was the single biggest global killer  of young women, taking the lives of 750,000 women a year.  
"The deep stigma of TB often results in women being  ostracized by their families and communities, which in turn has  a devastating impact on the well being of their children,  families and society in general," he said in the statement.  
"The result is that many thousands of aspiring families are  driven back into poverty, while those families that were already  impoverished must struggle even harder just to survive."  
Children were especially vulnerable to the effects of TB,  which was often difficult to diagnose in young children and  therefore difficult to treat effectively.  
Children suffered serious social consequences when someone  in their family had TB. In India, for example, over 300,000  children were withdrawn from school each year either to go to  work to help their families bear the costs of TB care or due to  the stigmatising effects of the disease.  
"TB CAN BE PREVENTED AND CURED"  
"But TB can be prevented and cured," Gautam said.  "Several countries in Asia, including such low-income countries  as Cambodia and Vietnam, have developed model responses and are  well on their way to effectively controlling the disease.  
"The medical solutions are well within our reach and  include a six-month directly observed treatment short-course of  drugs.  
"The remaining challenge is to mobilise sufficient  political will to attack TB and to build a social partnership  that includes governments, the business and private sector,  concerned institutions, NGOs, and communities and families."  
UNICEF backed a call made in Amsterdam on Friday, World TB  Day, by ministers of health, finance and social welfare from  around the world for global action to combat the disease.  
UNICEF, working with other global health agencies, supports  a "Stop TB" initiative in the Asia-Pacific. The initiative  aims to reduce TB in the region by 50 percent in 10 years.  
Although some two billion people were infected with TB, only  a relatively small percentage ever develop the disease, it said.  
But TB was opportunistic, and people whose immune systems  had been weakened by HIV/AIDS faced a 30 times greater risk of  developing the disease. Approximately 40 percent of people with  HIV/AIDS also developed TB, and in many countries TB was also  the leading cause of death for HIV/AIDS-infected people.  
Gautam said urgent action was imperative to prevent the  spread of TB and contain treatment costs because the number of  multi-drug resistant forms of TB was on the rise.  
Treating a normal case of TB with a six-month course of  drugs costs as little as $11, but treating a multi-drug  resistant case increased costs at least 100-fold

 

Financial  Times, 24 March 2000
Myanmar says rallies want Suu Kyi party dissolved

YANGON, March 24 (Reuters) - Myanmar's government-controlled newspapers turned up the heat on Aung San Suu Kyi's National League for Democracy (NLD) on Friday, reporting mass rallies calling for her opposition party to be dissolved.

 

Official newspapers reported more than 111,000 people in a township in central Myanmar about 400 miles (640 km) north of Yangon rallied at separate sites to express their hostility to the pro-democracy NLD.

 

The newspapers said all those attending the rallies had signed a petition against the party. They said the township, Taungtha, had 118,205 eligible voters.

 

The people from the township had expressed no support for pessimist NLD and petitioned for dissolving it, they said.

 

Myanmar's military government has kept up a steady barrage of attacks on Nobel Peace Prize laureate Suu Kyi and her NLD since the party won Myanmar's last election in 1990 by a landslide.

 

The NLD has never been allowed to govern and the ruling generals have tried to silence the pro-democracy movement through a series of arrests and intimidation.

 

In 1998, hundreds of NLD members were detained and large numbers forced to resign from the party after it pushed for the convening of parliament.

 

Official newspapers have cited similar anti-NLD rallies in the past as evidence of popular hostility to the party.

 

Independent verification of such rallies is usually difficult to obtain. 

The Nation, 24 March 2000

EDITORIAL(2): Burma’s drug lords are winning the war

Thailand’s antinarcotics agencies are getting frustrated, increasingly frustrated. The country seems to be losing in its war against drugs – ya baa or methamphetamines, to be exact. And in the absence on Burma’s part of political will and intensified cooperation to suppress the production and flow of the illicit pills from the major sources in the Shan State, the situation in Thailand will continue to deteriorate.

Quietly, Thai authorities are acknowledging the country’s failure to stem the trafficking of methamphetamines from Burma – the key source of supplies for Thailand and other neighbouring states – and to keep track of the fastchanging pattern of trafficking routes into the Kingdom. Moreover, they are extremely worried about the surge in drug abuse, especially among young people for fun and enjoyment. Traditional users – truckdrivers and agricultural and factory workers – tend to take the drugs for performance enhancement.

Although the authorities have yet to explain how they came up with their estimates of methamphetamine production by ethnic insurgents in Burma – about 200 million pills in 1999 and 600 million this year – the increase in the number of drug seizures in Thailand since 1995 paints a gloomy picture of the ya baa epidemic in the country. According to Office of the Narcotics Control Board (ONCB), 541 kilograms of methamphetamines (about 6 million pills) were seized in 1995. The number increased to 4,250kg (about 48 million tablets) last year.

Although the seizure of 28.8 million tablets in Burma last year was a “notable increase” over the previous year’s record of 15 million, Thai and international antinarcotic officials believe that figure is just the tip of the iceberg. They concur that as long as the Burmese junta continues to tolerate the heavy engagement of armed ethnic groups, especially the Wa and the Kokang, in narcotic trafficking as their income source, Thailand and other regional countries will continue to suffer from drug problems originating in Burma.

To suppress the trafficking of methamphetamines into northern Thailand, antidrug agencies – ONCB, the Police Suppression Bureau, the Border Patrol Police, the Provincial Police and the Army – have for the past two years, strictly patrolled and virtually sealed off several border provinces bordering Burma: Chiang Rai, Chiang Mai, Mae Hong Son and Tak. Their efforts have paid off to a certain extent but still failed to deter smuggling groups, which since the middle of last year have been rerouting their traffic through northeastern Thailand. Since then the authorities have intensified their antinarcotic surveillance on the northeastern border with Laos.

Thailand’s strict control over its northern and northeastern border crossings with Burma and Laos have only forced the traffickers to look for new routes. Thus it came as a big shock on March 14 when the authorities seized a record haul of 4.35 million methamphetamine pills, with an estimated street value of Bt500 million, in Prachuap Khiri Khan province in the South. On Tuesday another two million tablets were seized in a house in a Bangkok suburb.

In interviews yesterday senior government officials expressed grave concern over the “worsening trafficking situation”.

“The more Thailand has intensified its antinarcotic operations, the more the traffickers have tried to outdo the Thai efforts,” said one official. “We are still trying to figure out what exactly is the cause of such a drastic surge in the production of ya baa in Burma, whether it’s purely a financial factor or a political factor.”

Thai agencies, said the officials, are keeping a close watch on the changing routes through central and southern provinces and the pattern of trafficking. The change, one official noted, took place about the time when the United Wa State Army began a major relocation of an estimated 200,000 Wa, Akha, Lahu and Chinese from their villages near the SinoBurmese border to a southern area of the Shan State on the ThaiBurmese border.

Thai authorities also detected the movement and limited presence of UWSA representatives in Myawaddy opposite Thailand’s Tak province in the northwest and in the Three Pagodas Pass area opposite Kanchanaburi province in the west.

Antidrug officials also discovered that trafficking groups were now employing “human couriers” to transport small amounts of methamphetamine tablets to certain meeting points where they were then collected into sizeable shipments to be smuggled into Thailand.

“Most of these couriers are just ordinary people who are familiar with the area,” said the official. “They travel by land or sea transport to the meeting point. Many groups are involved in this new pattern of trafficking, but we are quite certain that the Wa [UWSA] are involved in it.”

As it turns out, government agencies, the Army and the Navy are now forced to expand their antidrug operations to virtually the entire Thai frontier with Burma.

In addition to the North and the Northeast, authorities are now strengthening surveillance and intelligence in Kanchanaburi, Ratchaburi, Petchaburi, Prachuap Khiri Khan and Ranong provinces.

Discreetly, Thailand is observing the Burmese junta’s pledge to cooperate with Thailand and international drug agencies in suppressing the narcotics trade.

Although Thai authorities publicly praise their Burmese counterparts whenever they meet, they expect the Burmese to take action against or at least get tougher with key leaders of the drug groups instead of targeting petty traffickers.

But as long as the ruling Burmese generals insist on cohabiting with major Wa, Kokang and Shan drug warlords and tolerating their narcotics business in exchange for their pledge of allegiance to Rangoon, Thailand will continue to fight a losing war against drugs from Burma.