Burma Related News - Nov 27, 2000.

Monday, November 27 3:04 PM SGT
Aung San Suu Kyi's legal team launches defence in property suit

YANGON, Nov 27 (AFP) - Opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi's legal team Monday launched a defence against a property suit filed by her brother Aung San Oo who is claiming half ownership of her Yangon home.

Aung San Suu Kyi, who has been held under house arrest by the military government for the past two months, did not appear at the Yangon Divisional Court last Tuesday for the first hearing into the suit.

Judge U Soe Thein made a ruling then that as neither the opposition leader -- who had been given leave to appear by the junta -- nor her lawyers were present the case would proceed without their involvement.

However, four lawyers including the Nobel peace laureate's main representative U Tun Tin sought Monday to overturn the decision.

They objected to the decision to begin "ex parte" proceedings, saying the defence team was in the process of being prepared when the first hearing was held.

It is believed the lawyer handling the defence case for Aung San Suu Kyi, U Kyi Win, arrived at the court last Tuesday but missed the beginning of the session.

Aung San Oo's lawyers indicated Monday they would not fight the move to repeal the decision.

"We have no objections to removing the ex parte status if they want to go ahead and defend the case," U Han Toe, the legal representative in Myanmar for US-based businessman Aung San Oo, told AFP.

After a hearing which lasted less than 20 minutes, judge U Soe Thein said he would he hand down a decision on whether to scrap the ex parte status on December 4, when a date for the next hearing will also be set.

Journalists representing the foreign media were not allowed to enter the court room but were permitted to listen to the proceedings at the rear entrance.

Aung San Oo filed the suit over the property, which belonged to their late mother Khin Kyi, just before a deadline on registering property claims expired on the 12th anniversary of her death.

The Burma Lawyers' Council, a Thailand-based exile group, has said the case clears the way for the ruling State Peace and Development Council (SPDC) to evict Suu Kyi from the house and cripple her National League for Democracy (NLD).

As a US citizen, Aung San Oo would be forced to hand his half of the property over to Myanmar's military government if he won the suit.

"This would open the way for the SPDC to take over Khin Kyi's house ... where Suu Kyi is living and where the NLD's head office is based," it said in an opinion piece published in Bangkok's The Nation newspaper over the weekend.

"This would fulfil part of what many accept as the SPDC's plan to eliminate the NLD by the end of the year."

While not overtly political, Aung San Oo is much less critical of the regime than his sister, and the two are not close.

It is believed that before her death Khin Kyi expressed the wish that the house be equally shared between the two children, and that if it were sold the proceeds should be donated to charity.

U Han Toe has said his client wanted to stake his claim over the property so he could donate his half-share in line with his mother's wishes.

The timing of the lawsuit is a double blow for the opposition leader, coming soon after the owner of the NLD's Yangon headquarters gave notice to the high-profile tenants.

The order was temporarily withdrawn in late October because party officials were unable to pass the eviction letter on to their leaders due to the house arrest restrictions.

The Washington Post
Editorial - A Rebuke to Forced Labor
Sunday, November 26, 2000; Page B06

NOT IN 81 years had the International Labor Organization imposed such sanctions; but Burma is a special case. The ILO, a United Nations arm in which unions, businesses and governments participate, found that the Asian nation also known as Myanmar has so flagrantly violated international norms that sanctions had to be imposed. In particular, its ruling generals were found guilty of encouraging forced and slave labor in "a culture of fear."

Burma is a special case in part because its dictators cannot even pretend to reflect the will of their people. In 1990, they permitted a national election. A pro-democracy party headed by Aung San Suu Kyi, daughter of Burma's hero of independence, won four out of five parliamentary seats. But parliament never met; the generals refused to accept the results. Aung San Suu Kyi, who won the Nobel peace prize in 1991, is under house arrest; most of her party colleagues are in prison. The generals grow more corrupt while Burma grows ever poorer.

The ILO sanctions approved last week are, as AFL-CIO president John Sweeney said, "only a starting point." Nations are "urged to halt any aid, trade or relationship that helps Burmese leaders remain in power," he said. The United States already has imposed restrictions on investment, but that hasn't stopped companies such as Unocal from mounting major efforts in the country. Nor has it prevented trade, much of which enriches only the generals.

Companies that do business in Burma now more than ever will have to explain themselves. So will nations that sought to water down the ILO action, including fellow autocracies like Malaysia and China and, more surprisingly, democracies like India and Japan. Those nations, though, found themselves very much in the minority, just as Burma finds itself more isolated than ever.

WIRE:11/27/2000 02:56:00 ET
Suu Kyi's lawyers want Yangon house case scrapped

YANGON, Nov 23 (Reuters) - Lawyers for Myanmar opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi on Monday submitted an objection to the suit filed by her estranged brother over the ownership of her lakeside Yangon home.

The judge, presiding over the case, said he would adjourn proceedings until December 4 when he would present his decision on the validity of the objection.

Suu Kyi, 55, is being sued by her estranged elder brother Aung San Oo, a U.S. citizen, for half of the home in an elite residential area where she is under house arrest.

Myanmar"s government has said Suu Kyi would be allowed to leave her house to attend court proceedings, but she has given her three lawyers the power of attorney. Asked if he was optimistic the case could be blocked, lawyer Kyi Win told Reuters:

"Why not? The plaintiff"s side did not object to our application." Suu Kyi, the 1991 Nobel Peace Prize winner, has been confined to her residence with all diplomatic access barred and her telephone cut for more than two months.

Several senior members of her National League for Democracy (NLD) face similar restrictions. The NLD won the country"s last general election in 1990 by a landslide but has never been allowed to govern.

The ruling generals say Myanmar is not ready for democracy. The legal action filed by her brother is convenient for Myanmar"s military authorities which have been trying for several years without success to get Suu Kyi to leave the country and give up her political struggle.

Real estate agents in Yangon estimate the value of her estate, including the colonial style two-storey house where she has lived since 1988, at about $1 million.

Monday, November 27 12:28 PM SGT
Wahid preaches non-interference among ASEAN states

JAKARTA, Nov 27 (AFP) - Indonesian President Abdurrahman Wahid urged fellow ASEAN members to adhere to the organisation's policy of non-interference and vowed to stay out of the row over the jailing of Malaysian ex-deputy premier Anwar Ibrahim, a report said Monday.

Wahid told the inaugural People's Assembly of the Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN) on Indonesia's Batam island on Saturday that despite his friendship with Anwar he had promised Malaysian Prime Minister Mahatir Mohamad not to interfere in the country's affairs.

"So when Anwar Ibrahim's wife came to Jakarta and requested breakfast with me, I did that but afterwards I told the Malaysian ambassador that the breakfast was impossible for me to avoid but I would not take any action to interfere," he was quoted as saying in the Jakarta Post.

"Sometimes we can aid our friends, but sometimes we have to bear with the situation."

Anwar is in jail after being convicted of abuse of power and sodomy, charges which Mahathir's critics say were trumped up.

Wahid implored some 300 ASEAN representatives at the three-day gathering to remember that "progress, or let's say reconciliation, in one part of ASEAN cannot be executed in another part."

He said it was important for ASEAN members to know that the policy of non-interference should be followed "because we have to understand the position in other societies."

ASEAN groups Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam.

Wahid said that as a democratic man he had sympathy for human rights advocates, then added: "It's a long way to have a truly democratic society," citing a Chinese proverb, saying: "'A journey of a thousand paces begins with one step.'"

Wahid breakfasted with Malaysia's Mahatir on Saturday morning in Singapore during the two-day ASEAN leaders' summit, after which he said Mahatir had a "new friend" in confronting Singapore as he launched a scathing attack on the island state.

"Before only Prime Minister Mahatir was brave enough to confront Singapore, but now ... Mahatir has a new friend," the Post quoted him as saying.

During his speech on Saturday to the assembly, Wahid added that he held his own individual views on Malaysia, but would not publicise them because "it would only wreck the relations between Indonesia and Malaysia."

Wahid also said that he had informed the chief of military-ruled Myanmar, Than Shwe, that he would shun democratic leader Aung San Suu Kyi's call to boycott the country because it would do more direct damage than good, the Post reported.

ASEAN states have been under pressure in recent years to review the regional forum's non-inteference policy because of human rights abuses in some member states.

Monday November 27 9:53 AM ET
Carnival at Thai Bridge Criticized
By MICOOL BROOKE,

KANCHANABURI, Thailand (AP) - Hundreds of revelers whooped it up Monday at the Bridge on the River Kwai in a garish carnival that some veterans said commercializes a World War II atrocity - the Thai-Myanmar ``Death Railway.''

More than 100,000 Asians and 13,000 Allied prisoners of war from Australia, Britain, the United States, New Zealand and the Netherlands died building the bridge and the 260-mile railway under the yoke of the Japanese Army.

At the carnival, which commemorates the start of the Allied bombing campaign against the bridge in November 1944, Thais and foreign tourists enjoyed rides, discos and rock concerts.

``In Japan, the war is not even discussed, but here at the River Kwai it's a big party with dancing girls,'' said Yugo Saso, 27, a visiting Japanese actor.

The noisy two-week festival got under way Sunday after a somber memorial ceremony in the rain attended by Western diplomats, veterans and Thai officials at a nearby war cemetery in Kanchanaburi, 80 miles west of Bangkok.

Tim Moffat, 41, of Kansas, a school teacher in Kanchanaburi, said he was appalled by a replica bamboo hospital with 50 wooden crosses nearby, built to give festival-goers a feeling of wartime.

Kanchanaburi has built a prosperous tourism industry out of its war history, thanks largely to the success of the 1957 Academy Award winning film, ``The Bridge on the River Kwai.''

Pong-anan Sunpanich, the Tourism Authority of Thailand director in Kanchanaburi, defended a glitzy sound-and-light show depicting the U.S. air-raid that finally knocked out the bridge in June 1945. The show's plot includes a fictional love triangle, pitting a Japanese officer against an Allied POW for the affections of a Thai beauty queen.

The story helps express the ``pain and anguish'' of those who were forced to labor building the bridge, Pong-anan said.

But Japanese war veteran Takashi Nagase, 83, who has made more than 100 missions of atonement to the River Kwai after serving as a military police interpreter during the war, said he was ashamed.

``For the Thais it's just a carnival,'' he told The Associated Press. ``But we Japanese feel a deep sense of shame at how sensitive issues are so rudely portrayed in the light and sound show.''

The Independent-Bangladesh. - Nov 27, 2000.
Border trade with Myanmar: Govt to establish port, customs facilities on Teknaf frontier

An inter-ministerial meeting yesterday decided to establish port and customs facilities for border trade with Myanmar as the government realised that the country is being deprived of huge revenues in their absence, reports UNB.

It chose a spot, Keramtoli, in the reserve forest as a suitable site for a river port jetty and land customs station at the Teknaf frontier. The meeting decided to approach the Ministry of Environment and Forest for its permission to use the land.

The same site has been preferred for the port and LC station since 1989, but nothing except meetings took place so far to develop the site for integrated use for export-import trade and tourism, business representatives at the meeting regretted.

"There could be no better alternative to this site for serving both external trade and tourism, although there might be some impact on the environment," the meeting observed.

It decided to shortly hold a meeting of the ministries of Shipping, Environment and Forest and Land and National Board of Revenue to finalise the scheme.

Shipping Secretary Sohel Ahmed chaired the meeting held to select the site for Teknaf river port and LC station to facilitate trade and travels between Bangladesh and Myanmar.

The two-way trade has been on the rise since the two next-door neighbours entered into a border trade agreement in 1994.

"But the present trade flow is in no way in favour of the country's interest as there are no port and customs infrastructures at Teknaf," a revenue official told the meeting.

Bangladesh-Myanmar Business Promotion Council president Rashed Maksud Khan and vice-president Syed Mahmudul Haque, NBR member (customs) Abul Kashem, EPB director general Abu Zafar, Chittagong Customs Commissioner Kazi Shahidul Haque, BIWTA chief Engineer Mahbubur Rahman and Environment and Forest Ministry deputy secretary Anwarul Haque were present in the meeting.

Vancouver Sun

Last Updated: Monday 27 November 2000

OPINION - Burma's beauty masks brutal regime

Elin Sigurdson

It is a traveller's dream to discover virgin land unsullied by tourism: thus Bob Riche's astonishing article extolling the magnificence of a cruise on Burma's Ayeyarwady River (On the river from Mandalay, Travel, Nov. 18). But it was shocking to see that Mr. Riche took such an uncritical approach to supporting the tourist industry in Burma, a country notorious for having one of the worst human rights records in the world.

I was incensed at Mr. Riche's irresponsible journalism, particularly after having attended a screening of Inside Burma: Land of Fear at the recent Fifth Annual Amnesty International Film Festival. This documentary illustrated something unique to Burma -- it is the only country with an elected leader who urges foreigners not to support its tourist industry.

Nobel Peace Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi has said that tourism only serves to support the regime, one that made a bloodbath of the student democratic movement in 1988, and suppressed the elected government in 1990.

While the river from Mandalay might hold idyllic vistas of jungle and pagodas, until the people of Burma have attained the democracy and human rights standards that they have been fighting for, tourism serves as funding for the regime's armaments, human rights abuses and drug trade.

While there may be untold personal gratification in the discovery of such an untouched tourist destination, the fact remains that the tourist's footprint is not without significant impact.

The Daily Star - Nov 27, 2000.
Mine blast kills another Bangladeshi on Myanmar border
From Our Correspondent

COX'S BAZAR, Nov 26: One Bangladeshi woodcutter was killed in mine explosion near Myanmar border, Bangladesh Rifles (BDR) sources said here today.

The mine was planted by Myanmar Border Forces NASAKA near the 42nd pillar at Naikhangchhari on Bangladesh-Myanmar border. BDR 23rd battalion lodged a strong protest with their Myanmar counterpart and urged the local people not to go to the 'zero point.

BDR personnel recovered the body of the victim, Abdul Halim.

Bangkok Post - Nov 27, 2000.
BURMESE JAILBREAK
Transfers to ease overcrowding at prison
Samut Sakhon

Up to 500 inmates will be transferred out of overcrowded Samut Sakhon jail following last week's breakout by Burmese prisoners.

Siva Saengmanee, the Corrections Department director-general, said there were only 63 prison officials to look after 2,700 prisoners, of which 800-900 were Burmese.

Because there were so few warders, 400-500 prisoners would probably be transferred to Samut Songkhram prison.

The inquiry into the hostage-taking and the availability of weapons to the Burmese escapees would be concluded next week, he said.

The Nov 22 jailbreak, in which a prison teacher was killed, ended the next morning when nine Burmese escapees were gunned down.

Mr Siva confirmed one prisoner was still missing.

He said the break out was not a result of conflict between ethnic groups, even though they did not mix much.

The prison's chief warden, Somwong Siriwej, was considered a good man and was especially chosen to administer Samut Sakhon prison, which houses a large number of foreign prisoners.

Mr Somwong, who was badly wounded, is in a serious condition and remains unconscious, said Pol Gen Jirasak Panin of the Police hospital.

Mr Siva said a staff meeting would be held at the prison to increase awareness of the need for security.

Mr Siva said he could not rule out more jailbreaks, but reducing the number of inmates would be a step in the right direction.

San Francisco Chronicle
NEWS ANALYSIS
Burma's Insidiously Perfect Dictatorship
Opposition is surgically eliminated
Blaine Harden, New York Times Sunday, November 26, 2000

Rangoon, Burma -- Burma may not be a perfect dictatorship, but it's as close to perfection as is humanly (or perhaps inhumanly) possible at the beginning of the 21st century.The Southeast Asian nation is more insulated from outside pressure than North Korea because it can almost always feed its own people. It attracts far less international criticism than Iraq because it is not so anvil-headed as to invade its neighbors or go to war with a superpower. And it's much less likely than China to be destabilized from within by the growing pains of high-tech prosperity.

That's because it allows almost none of its citizens to prosper and the Internet is against the law.

There are a number of useful, if ugly, lessons to be learned by examining four decades of repression in Burma -- a reign of fear, poverty and isolation that, so far, shows no signs of coming to an end.

Outstanding achievement in the field of dictatorial misrule demands more than merely a willingness to commit murder to stay in power.

This isn't to suggest the generals who run Burma shy away from murder. Their troops killed at least several hundred pro-democracy demonstrators in 1988. According to the U.S. State Department, soldiers have since executed people unwilling or unable to work in forced labor gangs.

What separates the Burmese generals from lesser (and in many cases, former or dead) dictators is their thoroughness and creativity.

"They have effectively destroyed civil society," said Robert Helvey, a retired U.S. Army colonel who since 1992 has run training seminars in nonviolent resistance along the Thai-Burma border. "Burmese society has been atomized. People cannot come together for any purpose because all the organizations have been destroyed."

Whether it's being a Boy Scout or allowing a foreigner into your home, sending an unauthorized e-mail or gathering outdoors in groups larger than five, it is illegal in Burma and punishable by a long prison term.

Yet the generals are exceptionally flexible when it helps them hang onto power or attract foreign currency into the country's anemic economy. They have made a series of sovereignty-sharing deals with armed ethnic minority groups on the country's borders. These cease-fires have ended decades of war and freed the regime to focus its repressive talents -- and most of its 400,000 troops -- on the unarmed majority.

Since making all this carefully calculated peace, the generals have welcomed investment capital from ethnic minority groups that specialize in the sale of heroin and amphetamines. Many of the buildings erected in the country in recent years have been built with laundered drug money, according to the U. S. Embassy there.

The proven fragility of authoritarian leaders around the world -- most recently in Serbia, but going back to the henchmen of apartheid in South Africa and to Eastern Europe's communist bosses -- suggests that even the most repressive governments are vulnerable to mass democratic opposition.

"In general, the rule of thumb is the more brutal, the more brittle," said Peter Ackerman, an expert on nonviolent resistance and the principal content adviser to "A Force More Powerful," a recent PBS series on the triumphs of nonviolence in the 20th century.

But that rule of thumb doesn't seem to matter in Burma, at least for the moment.

"You have to distribute resistance to all strata of society, and the Burmese people have not yet figured out a way to do this," Ackerman said. "Nonviolent resistance is a strategy that doesn't always work. I think the Burmese dictatorship is doing a good job at doing a bad job."

For purposes of comparison, it's worth noting the failed regime of Slobodan Milosevic did a bad job at doing a bad job. In the run-up to the October election that Milosevic lost and then failed to steal, his regime seemed to fall asleep at the dictatorial switch. It allowed opposition groups to organize and distribute literature in the smallest towns and villages in Serbia.

In a display of half-hearted authoritarianism that would never pass muster in Burma, Milosevic ignored the power of the Internet to mobilize his opponents. He tolerated independent media outlets in the Serbian capital and in many other cities. He allowed foreign journalists to roam all over, sniffing out news that filtered back into Serbia via the Internet and independent news media.

Burmese generals know better. If they don't control it, they ban it. And the foreign press is kept out (unless they sneak in as tourists, as I did).

The generals in Burma have perfected a style of governance that limits information, sows distrust and prevents private misery from snowballing into mass political action.

"The individual who walks out of his house in Burma in the morning is confronted with the overpowering control of the state," said Helvey, who periodically trains Burmese to go back inside their country and try to organize nonviolent action against the government. "People do not have a place to go to talk to each other because they know that there are informers everywhere."

The country, of course, has an immensely popular, articulate and internationally acclaimed opposition leader. But that leader, Aung San Suu Kyi,

a winner of the Noble Peace Prize, is under house arrest, as she has been for more than six of the past 12 years. Nearly all the leaders of her opposition party are also locked up.

Locking up "the lady," as she is widely known in Burma, has all but paralyzed serious opposition to the generals, according to Helvey, who served as military attache in the 1980s at the U.S. Embassy in Burma. Some of his current pro-democracy work is funded by the Albert Einstein Foundation, a nonprofit group in Boston that supports nonviolent activism around the world.

"Politics in Burma have always been personalized and Aung San Suu Kyi is the symbol of the entire pro-democracy movement," said Helvey. "Without her, the movement has not demonstrated the ability to take on a strategic struggle."

The dictators in Burma also are geographically lucky. Positioned between China and India, two huge and antagonistic neighbors, the regime has been able to play on their mutual suspicions to acquire cheap arms and make favorable trade deals.

More than anything else, though, it seems to be single-mindedness that allows the generals to remain at the top of their game.

In the mid-1990s, they flirted with the Chinese model of combining openness to technology and foreign investment with continued political repression. That experiment, though, gave substantial economic power to people who had no loyalty to the regime.

"The generals decided, 'Uh-oh, we can't tolerate this,' " said Helvey. "They seem to be going back to isolation. They aren't trying to have it both ways."

In the past two years, the military has taken over scores of profitable foreign-owned companies and hundreds of businessmen have fled the country. In a perfect dictatorship, things are getting back to normal.

The New Nation - Nov 27, 2000.
Port, customs facilities with Myanmar planned

An inter-ministerial meeting on Sunday decided to establish port and customs facilities for border trade with Myanmar as the government realised that the country is being deprived of huge revenues in their absence, reports UNB.

"There could be no better alternative to this site for serving both external trade and tourism, although there might be some impact on the environment," the meeting observed.

It decided to shortly hold a meeting of the ministries of Shipping, Environment and Forest and Land and National Board of Revenue to finalise the scheme.

Shipping Secretary Sohel Ahmed chaired the meeting held to select the site for Teknaf river port and LC station to facilitate trade and travels between Bangladesh and Myanmar.

The two-way trade has been on the rise since the two next-door neighbours entered into a border trade agreement in 1994.

"But the present trade flow is in no way in favour of the country's interest as there are no port and customs infrastructures at Teknaf," a revenue official told the meeting.

Bangladesh-Myanmar Business Promotion Council president Rashed Maksud Khan and vice president Syed Mahmudul Haque, NBR member (customs) Abul Kashem, EPB Director General Abu Zafar, Chittagong Customs Commissioner Kazi Shahidul Haque, BIWTA Chief Engineer Mahbubur Rahman and Environment and Forest Ministry Deputy Secretary Anwarul Haque were present in the meeting.

Bangkok Post - Nov 27, 2000.
Postbag

This is not a life Burmese choose

Now that the hostage crisis has died down, the question that seems to arise is why did this happen? This is very complex.

Unfortunately this issue has been grossly simplified. There have been articles that simply blame Burmese illegal immigrants and refugees.

The vast majority of Burmese don't choose to live in Thailand. Few illegal workers would choose to take Thailand's worst jobs and be paid below minimum wages. Refugees don't choose to live in camps on the border, or spend time in the Immigration Detention Centre. The point is that there is no choice.

Thailand has shown a great deal of compassion to the estimated one million Burmese in the country. It is urgent now that this compassion be sustained.

Scapegoating Burmese immigrants will not solve any of the issues. For the majority of Burmese, deportation means imprisonment, torture or worse. The issue is dictatorship in Burma and a regime that commits mass crimes against its people.

The Thai media should never blame any nationality or marginalised group such as immigrants. This is just creating greater misunderstanding between Thai and Burmese, and inciting hatred. Readers deserve better journalism than this.

Maung Tint Tae
Melbourne

Escape makes sense given the conditions

In the wake of the recent killing of the Burmese fugitives who broke out of Samut Sakhon jail, I would like to draw your readers' attention to the underlying reasons for what happened. I understand that the jailbreakers expressly stated that they would rather die outside than endure the conditions inside the prison.

The sorry state of affairs that led to such desperation is not confined to that prison alone. Attempted jailbreaks occur with much higher frequency than the national press is able to report due to regular cover-ups by officials of the Corrections Department, often at a very local level, so that senior officials may remain unaware of events.

I myself have personally witnessed an attempted breakout and the savage beatings and torture handed out by wardens in the aftermath. Despite a number of prisoners escaping, nothing was mentioned in the press.

I also have had the opportunity to speak to the witnesses of other jailbreaks who relate such stories as wardens placing weapons by the bodies of escapees to make their deaths seem justifiable to the public.

Thai prisons are the property of the state and its people, and what goes on inside them is therefore part of the nation's conscience.

Populated in large part by penniless youths on drugs charges, these institutions often have a slow but brutalising effect on their inmates. Previously unacceptable acts of violence and sexual abuse become acceptable over time. The typical diet of old brown rice and left-over fish heads gradually erodes the body's ability to counter the various diseases circulating the cells, including widespread tuberculosis, and together with the near-total absence of any other medicines apart from aspirin, these and other factors can often combine to turn a sentence of a few years into a death warrant.

Meanwhile, UN-agency funds given to Thailand for the maintenance of prisons and their inmates are misappropriated while front-line wardens make money from inmates, selling calls on their mobile phones and, in some cases, drugs.

Prime Minister Chuan's assertion that weapons were smuggled into Samut Sakhon prison inside food rations is well based. A thorough examination of each morning's supply of "rice" would, I know, reveal all manner of illegal substances in many prisons nationwide.

Ladies and gentlemen, look at your watches. What time is it? You can be sure, whatever the time, that somewhere in a prison near you your countrymen and women are living as animals. They sleep on their sides because there's no room to lie on their backs. They drink foul water from dirty troughs. They are subject to sometimes arbitrary beatings from wardens or the inmates they sponsor. Those too weak to defend themselves are abused sexually in their infirmary beds.

I plead with you to remember that before they got into jail, before they committed their crimes, before they had the misfortune to live a life that made their crimes seem acceptable to them, before all of that, they were human, and that is what they still are.

The Corrections Department has a duty to the nation to create clearer lines of communication between its organisational levels to facilitate the monitoring and control of its prisons. A truly independent body of prison inspectors would also help, as would heightened public awareness which has been stifled in the past by the department's refusal of access to its jails by interested and legitimate third parties.

Can it be hoped that the state and its people will act in the interests of transparency to shed more light on these dark issues?

Otherwise the very people entrusted with this most fundamental part of the nation's conscience, and therefore identity, may risk turning into the same kind of morally-corrupt unfortunates that they are systematically creating on a daily basis.

A Voice for the Guilty Innocents
voicefortheguiltyinnocents@xxxxxxxxxxx
Scotland

South China Morning Post
Monday, November 27, 2000

BURMA - Junta beefs up officer corps
WILLIAM BARNES in Bangkok

The main officer training school, the equivalent of the United States' West Point, has tripled its intake this year to 1,500 officer cadets.
Official media have been silent on the expansion but military analysts believe it may be partly a response to a shortage of civil servants in a country devastated by frequent college closures and economic malaise.

"Burma is not a communist state but it is an army state. The regime thinks it must have its hands on all the chief levers of power so it wouldn't surprise me at all if it thinks it needs more officers," one observer said.

The Defence Services Academy at Pyin-Oo-Lwin - better known as the old British hill station of Maymyo - has trained most of the junta's leadership. It takes high school graduates and gives them a degree-equivalent education.

Its graduates are valued for their loyalty, the quality ruling generals value above all else in their recruits.

The military has swollen from 180,000 to more than 400,000 since nationwide pro-democracy protests in 1988 that led to the formation of the present junta from a military establishment that has ruled since a 1962 coup.

Although no one doubts that Burma's army is the largest it has ever been, many of its battalions are believed to be under strength. It may be that more officers are needed to stiffen the ranks, or that further expansion is contemplated.

Some figures within the regime have suggested in the past that it was aiming to enlarge its numbers to a half a million in uniform.

The Defence Services Academy has undergone dramatic expansion in both facilities and in courses offered over the past three years, according to Jane's Defence Weekly.

The country's colleges were closed for most of the 1990s for fear of political protests by students. The Government has had difficulty finding suitable candidates to work in senior technical and administrative positions in the administration, according to Jane's.

Military salaries were increased fivefold in April, compared with three-fold increases for civil servants. Raging inflation has severely punished state employees on fixed salaries.

The regime is loath to delegate even quite technical decisions to civilian experts.

On the other hand, outside observers have rarely given top marks for the quality of the regime's leadership.

The Burmese army has in the past appeared to want to try to emulate the military's dominant role in former president Suharto's Indonesia. But even under Mr Suharto's discredited rule, highly educated technocrats played a key role in developing the country.

"They are a pretty paranoid bunch. Even if they could stomach taking more advice from experts they would still want military officers to be there looking over their shoulder," a Burma watcher in Bangkok said.

The cash-strapped regime is taking in foreign currency from natural gas exports to Thailand, which may explain the recent pay rises. It also might help resurrect military projects that had been shelved earlier, Jane's said.