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Intruder scares Myanmar's foreign minister
Mar 05 5:36 AM ET
DHAKA, Bangladesh
(AP) - Police questioned employees
at a Bangladeshi state guest house after the visiting Myanmar foreign minister
was woken at night by an intruder, news reports said Wednesday.
Guards arrived at Minister Win Aung's room at the Padma guesthouse
in Dhaka after he screamed for help Sunday night, and they found him trembling
inside the toilet of his room, media reported.
He spent the rest
of the night at the Myanmar Embassy, the Jugantar and Janakantha daily
newspapers reported.
Win Aung returned to Myanmar on Monday after
a two-day visit to prepare for Bangladesh Prime Minister Khaleda Zia's official
visit to Myanmar on March 19-20.
Officials of the two countries
declined to comment on the reported intrusion, which local media learned about
only after police detained all the 39 staff members at the guest house for
questioning.
Win Aung reportedly told the guards who came to his
aid that he had woken to see the shadow of a man approaching him.
He had gone to bed leaving one of the two bedroom doors unlocked.
Nothing was missing from the room.
Twenty-six employees were
released after questioning, while 13 others, including security guards, were
still being detained, Jugantar newspaper reported.
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OneWorld.net
BURMA: Tobacco Giant
under Pressure for Joint Venture with Rangoon
Tue Mar 4, 5:20 PM
ET Add World - OneWorld.net to My Yahoo!
Bob
Burton,Inter Press Service
CANBERRA, Mar 4 (IPS) - Ahead
of its mid-April annual general meeting, British American Tobacco (BAT) is
facing increasing pressure from human rights groups in Asia and elsewhere to
withdraw from a joint-venture partnership with the Burmese military regime.
The Australian labor movement aid organization - Union Aid
Abroad/Apheda - is organizing protests urging BAT, the world's second biggest
tobacco firm, to withdraw from its joint venture.
''We are calling
for a withdrawal of trade investment in Burma following on from International
Labour Organization (ILO) reports and the International Confederation of Free
Trade Unions' (ICFTU) own investigation which found that forced labor in Burma
is actually increasing,'' said Marj O'Callaghan, national program manager with
Union Aid Abroad.
In June 2000, the annual ILO Conference backed a
resolution urging governments unions and trade unions ''cease any relations that
might aid its military junta to abet forced labor''.
In October
last year, the ICFTU released a 350-page report that concluded that ''trade
union groups are becoming the focus of violent attacks and foreign multinational
investment is helping keep the junta afloat as the world's governments look
on.''
While BAT proclaims it plans on staying in its joint venture
partnership with Rangoon, the director of the London-based Burma Campaign UK,
John Jackson, predicts that BAT will buckle under the glare of public attention.
''We have no doubt that they will eventually withdraw. We will
find every point of pressure that we possibly can, and we will continue to push
until we succeed,'' he said.
BAT openly acknowledges that Rothmans
of Pall Mall Myanmar is 40 percent owned by the Union of Myanmar Economic
Holdings (UMEH), a government-owned company.
While the company
commenced operations in 1995, it only became part of the BAT stable of companies
when it merged with Rothmans in 1999. Last week, BAT announced that it made 3.3
billion dollars in profits last year.
Zin Linn, spokesman for the
National Coalition Government of the Union of Burma, the Burmese
government-in-exile, says it welcomes the ''pressure on the tobacco company, or
any foreign investments''.
''People know that the income from the
tobacco multination helps the generals. That is always the case,'' he said.
''Many people say even if they are suffering from sanctions, they welcome the
pressure on the military regime because of the suppression they have to live
with.''
Activists hope that by yearend, campaign groups in 20
countries will be publicizing BAT's Burma project.
''They could
pull out tomorrow without affecting the company's overall financial position,
and they could do this honorably by providing a generous redundancy package that
would more than meet the needs of their workers for at least a one-year
period,'' Jackson told IPS.
To deflect the controversy over its
joint venture project, in early January BAT contributed some 50,000 U.S. dollars
to a four-day human rights awareness workshop on ''capacity building that may
help the country to move closer to international conventions on women's human
rights''.
But this ''allows the regime to present a facade of
concern about these issues, when they could simply order their commanders to
stop (abuses),'' Jackson said.
According to the Burma Campaign UK,
BAT's joint venture factory is in the military-owned Pyinmapin Industrial Zone
in the Rangoon division of the Mingaladon township.
''This
industrial zone was upgraded in 1996 by construction crews made up of child
laborers. UMEH contributed the land and the factory building to the venture'',
Burma Campaign charged in a November report on BAT's operations.
BAT does not challenge the accuracy of the allegation. ''We are
disturbed to learn of this allegation, of which we have no knowledge,'' BAT
wrote in a background paper on its Burma operations late last year.
Asked if it had subsequently undertaken investigations into the
claim, BAT did not respond.
The company defends its operations in
Burma by saying that contributing to the economy makes improvements in human
rights possible. ''We believe that economic prosperity is an important catalyst
for other forms of social advance,'' BAT argues.
But Burmese
exiles in Thailand disagree. Soe Aung, external affairs director of the Network
for Development and Democracy, said: ''Any kind of investment in Burma will in
one way or another support the income of the military regime.''
''The military regime is known to launder money it gets through
the drug trade to keep its foreign reserves from falling,'' he said. ''Investing
in Burma has no guarantees at all.''
Jackson estimates that 16
million dollars in taxes paid by BAT's joint venture have gone directly into the
coffers of the regime.
''BAT are pumping millions of dollars into
a regime that is impoverishing 41 million people. A few projects by BAT do not
compensate for the damage done by a regime that BAT is helping to sustain,''
Jackson said.
The campaign has already embarrassed the deputy
chairman of BAT, Kenneth Clarke, who chairs the board's corporate social
responsibility committee.
In November 2002, Burma Campaign
released a copy of a letter that Clarke - who is also a Conservative member of
Parliament - wrote to a constituent, ''I must admit that I do sometimes feel
uncomfortable about investment in that country.''
''The problem in
Burma arises when companies start collaborating with an extremely unpleasant
regime which is totally contrary to our notions of civil liberties and
democracy,'' he wrote. Clarke later told the British Broadcasting Corp, ''I
don't think companies can have a rule about not doing business with
dictatorships.''
BAT's sponsorship of the human rights workshops
mimics the funding by Britain's Premier Oil of similar workshops. In September
2002, Premier Oil finally from its involvement in the Yetagun gas project after
a seven-year campaign by the Burma Campaign UK and other groups.
BAT points to community projects, from support for health
projects, food support and orphanages as evidence of the benefits that locals
would miss out on if the company withdrew.
But Jackson said:
''Fund a brutal military dictatorship, have little regard to the impact of your
investment, and then in order to allay public criticism, throw a little bit of
money to a few villages to illustrate how positive your presence in the country
is. It's a bit like having dinner with the jailers while throwing crumbs to the
prisoners.''
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Bangkok Post - Wednesday 05 March
2003
Army forces Shan State troops off mountains to appease Burma
The Third Army has expelled Shan State Army troops
from border mountains to prevent them attacking Burmese soldiers from Thai soil
as relations with Burma improve.
Third Army commander Lt-Gen
Udomchai Ongkhasing said yesterday SSA troops on mountains in Chiang Mai, Chiang
Rai and Mae Hong Son provinces were forced to lower ground.
Defence
Minister Gen Thammarak Isarangkura na Ayudhaya had ordered the action, with
relations improving after Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra visited Rangoon on
Feb 9-10.
To reciprocate, Burma was forcing Wa people to stop
producing drugs by 2005, Lt-Gen Udomchai said.
He had also sent
staff to convince SSA leader Chao Yodsuek to negotiate with the Burmese
government, in line with Mr Thaksin's recent promise to mediate between Rangoon
and its ethnic groups.
Maj-Gen Saprang Kalayanamit, Lt-Gen
Udomchai's deputy, heads the team negotiating with Chao Yodsuek.
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Rediff.com
Engagement with Myanmar to
go on: Fernandes
Basharat Peer in New Delhi | March 05, 2003 08:50
IST
Defence Minister George Fernandes is known to keep an
open house, despite it having brought infamy upon him in the recent
past.
Among those who have benefited from his generosity are some
Burmese pro-democracy activists, who he refuses to throw out despite they being
an embarrassment to the Indian government, which is trying to maintain cordial
relations with the junta in Myanmar.
However, on Tuesday, he killed
two birds with the one stone when he said that India would continue its
engagement with the government in Myanmar as it needs the latter's help in
fighting insurgents in Northeast.
"These insurgents, who operate
from Burmese soil, target our soldiers. We are duty-bound to talk to Myanmar's
government to protect our borders," he said.
Interestingly, he
expressed these views at a function in Delhi to release Burma File -- A Question
of Democracy, a book by Soe Myint, a pro-democracy Burmese
journalist.
Myint is the editor of Mizzima News, an online news
service established by him, his wife and other pro-democracy Burmese journalists
living in exile in India.
Referring to the question of democracy in
Myanmar and the problems of Burmese refugees in India, Fernandes said, "While
government are bound by certain constraints which come along with the powers
invested in them, people are not bound by such restrictions."
"Some
Burmese refugees once came to my house saying they were being thrown out of
India. I asked them to move into my house," he told the
audience.
The defence minister has vacated a few rooms in his house
to provide shelter to the refugees. "Whenever and wherever anyone has a similar
problem, my doors are open to them."
Myint was one of the refugees
who found shelter in Fernandes' place.
Having left his country
after the military took over the government in 1988, Myint, then a student at
the Rangoon University, moved to Thailand and joined the Burmese students'
struggle against the junta.
In the 1990s, when the world's
attention was focused on the Gulf war, he and another student, Htin Kyaw,
hijacked a Thai Airways plane from Bangkok to Rangoon and diverted it to
Kolkata.
The hijackers, then in their early twenties, were unarmed
but claimed to possess a 'bomb' -- a soap case with a wire attached to
it.
At the Kolkata airport, their only demand was to hold a press
conference to focus world attention to their country's
plight.
Myint went on to establish himself as a
journalist.
But with the recent warmth in Indo-Burmese relations,
the ghosts of the hijacking incident have come back to haunt
him.
He will face trial in April and can be sentenced to 10 years
in prison. "I was shocked to find out that India will try me," Myint
said.
Fernandes, on his part said, "I have consistently strived to
save Myint. My efforts will continue till he is free of the
problem."
On his book, the minister said, "It is a must reading for
all who share the concern for democratic values and human rights."
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WEDNESDAY, MARCH 5, 2003
THE TIMES OF INDIA
George
Fernandes fetes Burmese hijacker
TIMES NEWS NETWORK[ WEDNESDAY,
MARCH 05, 2003 04:29:55 AM ]
NEW DELHI: In what was probably
a first, a hijacker being brought to trial by the Indian government shared the
dias with the country's defence minister who promised him full support and help
in getting him out of his problems at a book release function here on
Tuesday.
The occasion was the release of "Burma File: A Question of
Democracy", a collection from the pro-democracy Myanmarese news agency, Mizzima.
The hijacker, Soe Myint, was the editor of Mizzima and the chief guest releasing
the book, George Fernandes.
Though Fernandes was clearly on the
back foot ^ defending both his own politics as also the Indian government's
policy of engagement with the Myanmarese military junta ^ he also took the
opportunity, a panel discussion on media and democracy, to hit out at the
tehelka expose.
Fernandes argued that the government was bound to
engage with the government of Myanmar since it had to deal with the activities
of insurgents in the North East who were using that country as a staging post to
attack Indian soldiers.
Saying that he would not call that immoral
by any standard of morality Fernandes asserted that "this engagement will
remain, must remain."
Fernandes however also stated that it was
necessary to make efforts to let the military leadership of Burma know that
democracy is not going to hurt the people of Burma. The military had its role
and democratic polity was not going to have adverse impact on military's task,
he stated. This had to be articulated so that the message was sent to those to
whom it needed to be sent.
Fernandes asserted that from the day Ne
Win came to power, India had stood by the people of Burma and would continue to
stand by the people of Burma.
Striking a personal note, Fernandes
mentioned how his own house hosted many Burmese activists. It was his open door
policy which had allowed a ``gang'' to take advantage and misuse it to declare
that the house was being used for defence deals and take bribes.
On
Soe Myint, against whom the Indian government had initiated a trial for the
hijacking of a Thai airways flight to Kolkata 12 years ago, Fernandes said he
would continue to make efforts till Myint was out of the problems he was
facing.
If there were those who were less than convinced by
Fernandes' explanation, the final word was perhaps said by Soe Myint in his vote
of thanks.
"In which country will we find a publisher publishing a
book by a hijacker and a minister releasing the hijackers book. This is India.
This is why I love India." Myint said.
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Asian Tribune
Date : 2003-03-05
Bank closure hits Indo-Myanmarese
trade
New Delhi, (IANS), March 04:: The closure of
a bank in Myanmar has dealt a severe blow to the country's trade with
India.
The closing down of the Burma Economic Bank in Tamu,
Myanmar, last week has already led to large losses in trade, according to the
India-based Mizzima news agency.
Indo-Myanmar Traders Union vice
president W.N. Singh said the closing down of the bank strongly affected traders
on both sides. "According to reports, the Burmese (Myanmarese) traders are also
worried over the developments but they are prevented from protesting," he said.
The union facilitates export and import under a trade agreement
between India and Myanmar. Singh called for "immediate steps from both
countries" to undo the damage to bilateral trade from the bank's
closure.
According to Singh, Myanmarese traders had yet to clear
dues to Indian businessmen because of the bank's closure. Furthermore, revenue
losses to both India and Myanmar could be anticipated.
The
Indo-Myanmar trade agreement was signed in 1994. In its wake, the volume of
trade between the two countries has increased significantly.
Two
other trade groups -- the Indo-Myanmar Friendship Organization and the
Associated Chambers of Commerce -- have also expressed concern over the Burma
Economic Bank's closure and appealed to Myanmar's ruling junta to take steps to
reopen it.
"Trade is the lifeline of the people living along the
international border and hence the junta should take immediate step in this
regard," said an Indian trader.
- Siliconindia.com
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