Written by PHILIPPINE DAILY INQUIRER

Thursday, 16 December 2004

Senate Minority Leader Aquilino Pimentel Jr. yesterday urged the government to block Burma’s (Myanmar) assumption of the chairmanship of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (Asean), a regional grouping to which the Philippines belongs, in 2006.

Pimentel made the call saying he wanted the government, as well as the other members of Asean, to pressure Burma’s military junta to free Nobel Laureate Daw Aung San Suu Kyi and other opposition political leaders from detention, as well as to institute democratic reforms in that country.

Pimentel issued the statement on his return from an Asean parliamentarian conference in Malaysia on Nov. 27-28 that discussed the “unjust restrictions on the freedom of movement of Burma’s opposition leaders by the military junta,” among other topics.

In a statement, the senator said Burma’s military leaders last week extended Suu Kyi’s detention for one more year, while some 100 leaders of her party, the National League of Democracy (NLD), remained in prison.

Suu Kyi has been under house arrest since May 2003 following the Burma military’s violent dispersal of a motorcade led by NLD members. Previously, the Nobel Prize winner had been placed under house arrest from 1989 to 1995 and again from 2000 to 2002.

“(The extension of Suu Kyi’s house arrest was) in blatant disregard of Burma’s commitment to respect the human rights of its people and to abide by democratic principles when it was admitted into Asean seven years ago,” Pimentel said.

He said he concurred with President Macapagal-Arroyo’s move last week asking Burma Prime Minister Lt. Gen. Soe Win in Laos to allow Suu Kyi and the other opposition leaders to participate in the country’s political processes.

Pimentel urged the Senate to ask Foreign Secretary Alberto Romulo to express the chamber’s sentiment that Burma’s recent moves “make it unworthy to chair the Asean in 2006.”

COUNCIL OF THE EUROPEAN UNION

(10 DEC 04)

DECLARATION BY THE PRESIDENCY

ON BEHALF OF THE EUROPEAN UNION

ON THE EXTENSION OF DETENTION OF AUNG SAN SUU KYI

The EU condemns the continued detention of Daw Aung San Suu Kyi and regrets that although a small number of political prisoners have been released, a large number remains in detention.

The EU recalls its earlier position in this matter that, in order to improve its relations with the EU, the government of Burma/Myanmar should take the following steps:

- the immediate release of Daw Aung San Suu Kyi and all political prisoners; – the participation of the NLD and other democratic parties and all ethnic groups in the National Convention, which is announced to resume in February 2005; – the resumption of the National Convention with genuine and open debate for all participants.

The EU continues to urge the government of Burma/Myanmar to grant without further delay to the UN Secretary General’s Special Envoy for Burma/Myanmar, Tan Sri Razali Ismail, and to the UN Special Rapporteur, Paulo Sergio Pinheiro, complete, free, unrestricted access to Burma/Myanmar.

The EU welcomes the findings of the ASEAN Parliamentarians on Burma/Myanmar in Kuala Lumpur on 28 November 2004 and encourages the governments and Parliamentarians in the ASEAN countries to keep monitoring the situation in Burma and to continue to work with the regime to promote democracy.

The Candidate Countries Bulgaria, Romania, Turkey and Croatia*, the Countries of the Stabilization and Association Process and potential candidates Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, Serbia and Montenegro, and the EFTA countries Iceland, Liechtenstein and Norway, members of the European Economic Area, align themselves with this declaration.

* Croatia continues to be part of the Stabilization and Association Process

Written by PHILIPPINE DAILY INQUIRER

Thursday, 09 December 2004

“He’s mad is he? Then, I wish he’d bite some other of my generals,” George II reportedly snapped when told that Gen. James Wolfe had gone daft.

That’s also the reaction surging among members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations toward Myanmar’s junta for stalling, yet again, on restoring freedoms.

Myanmar’s caudillos dance an “incorrigible one-step forward, two-steps backwards foxtrot,” Malaysian Member of Parliament Lim Kit Siang told legislators from seven Asean countries in Kuala Lumpur. The shuffle blocks the release of Nobel Peace Prize laureate Aung San Suu Kyi, journalists and other detainees.

Some Parliamentarians are now pressing their governments to object when Yangon assumes the rotating chairmanship of Asean in 2006. The generals’ “seven-step road map” to democracy is fake.

Myanmar today is “the largest prison for journalists in Asia,” the Paris-based Reporters Without Borders says in a new report documenting the plight of 18 detained journalists.

Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy won a landslide victory in the 1990 general election. But the military never allowed parliament to convene, and unleashed waves of arrests. Yet, Suu Kyi continues to draw widespread support at home and abroad.

The stakes for the press are high. Offending the regime means prison. The 72-year-old journalist Win Tin has been detained for 14 years now.

“Torture is commonplace and some journalists suffer from serious mental disorders resulting from long isolation,” Reporters Without Borders says. Newsmen have received long sentences for articles deemed “hostile to the state,” talking with foreign journalists, even “owning undeclared video cameras”-an eerie clone of the Marcos regime’s order to register mimeograph machines.

Yangon’s daily newspapers are government-run outlets for turgid propaganda. The military and their families control most publications. As in our “New Society,” censorship is clamped on. Censors blue-pencil words such as “democracy,” “corruption” or “education.”

To beat the censors, “the trick is in the presentation,” Thint Bawa (Your Life) editor U Tin Maung Than told The New York Times’ Seth Mydans. The 47-year-old doctor-turned-writer “played the game hard, bobbing and weaving, winking and nudging, honing his metaphors, comparisons and historical references until it all became too much and he fled from Myanmar for safety.”

It’s a game played by all independent-minded writers in dictatorships from the Philippines of Marcos to Ayatollah Khomeini’s Iran and today’s Myanmar: writer versus censor, says Mydan’s analytical feature titled, “Burmese Editor’s Code: Winks And Little Hints.”

In repressive states, writing under censorship is an art form. Many of their rules are universal. Write only upbeat articles or “sunshine news.” Thus, many confine themselves to gossip, sports and lifestyle features. Praise the regime. That guarantees publication. It’s also safer.

Direct criticism is taboo. Even factual reports on drought or poor crop yields are forbidden. These could arouse fears of price increases. You cannot knock those in power. Imelda and the First Family, for example, could only be accorded fulsome hosannas.

A few in Myanmar, as in martial law Philippines, push against the boundaries of what’s acceptable. “You cannot blame,” Tin said. “You have to give hints that you are being critical, that you are talking about the current system. The hints are in your choice of words, your tones, your composition. You use words with double meaning. The challenge is to get through to those keen readers without tipping off the censors.”

He wrote about flag burning in the United States, ostensibly to criticize it but, between the lines, to give a glimpse of freedom.

Still the government remains paranoid about Suu Kyi’s drawing power. Favorable references in the press to the opposition leader are “clearly forbidden.” It’s verboten to write about female heads of state. Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo, Corazon Aquino, Megawati Sukarnoputri, Indira Gandhi or Margaret Thatcher would be blacked out.

Given the muzzled press, the pressure for reform is coming from outside. UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, for example, said that Suu Kyi and other political prisoners must be included in the current spate of releases involving more than 9,000 prisoners. Asean foreign ministers, meeting in Phnom Penh last July also pressed for the release.

President Arroyo and Thai Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra were reported to have reminded Myanmar Prime Minister Soe Win at the Laos Asean summit of still unfulfilled pledges. Now, the Parliamentarians are weighing in.

Whether these pressures will cause the hard-line generals, like Soe Win, to unbend, remains to be seen. Less than 40 political detainees, or one percent, were among those freed to impress Asean heads of state meeting in Vientiane.

Then President Fidel V. Ramos argued for Myanmar’s acceptance by Asean. He insisted that Asean credentials would restrain the junta from taking even more repressive measures. Both national and regional interests, he claimed, were served by having Myanmar in instead of “peeing from the outside.” The track record says otherwise.

“As for being a general, well, at the age of four, with paper hats and wooden swords, we’re all generals,” the actor Peter Ustinov once said, adding: “Only some of us never grow out of it.”

As Yangon shows, generals who never mature can go daft. They can impoverish a once-rich nation and crucify a gentle people, as our own “Rolex 12″ did.

Written by IRRAWADDY

Thursday, 02 December 2004

Southeast Asian leaders ended a two-day summit in the Laotian capital Vientiane with a calculated political stab in the back from a fellow member of their regional group, Burma.

That Rangoon’s military rulers had the sense of occasion to humiliate the Association of South-east Asian Nations or Asean was evident by the timing of their move to further oppress Burma’s pro-democracy leader, Aung San Suu Kyi.

On Monday, a senior member of the National League for Democracy (NLD), the opposition party that Suu Kyi heads, confirmed to the media that the junta had sent officials to extend Suu Kyi’s term of house arrest by another year.

“This is clearly a slap in the face of Asean,” Debbie Stothard of the Alternative Asean Network on Burma (ALTSEAN), a regional human rights lobby, told IPS. “It just shows how confident the military regime is about ASEAN – that it will not pressure Burma to free Suu Kyi nor push it towards democratic reform.

On the eve of the summit meeting in Laos, analysts speculated that Rangoon’s rulers would have to explain the lack of progress on political reform in Burma, the recent reshuffle of its appointed prime minister and the fate of Suu Kyi to the other leaders of the economic grouping.

This meeting of Asean – which includes Brunei, Burma, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam – was also expected to bring global attention to this regional body for signing an ambitious agreement with China to create the world’s largest free trade area by 2010.

However the popping of champagne bottles over that trade deal, signed late Monday, were spoiled by Burma’s decision to detain Suu Kyi further – a development that magnifies the hardline stance of the military strongmen at the helm, led by Senior Gen. Than Shwe.

The State Peace and Development Council or SPDC appears to have no qualms about an Asean backlash, said Aung Naing Oo, research associate at the Burma Fund – a Washington D.C.-based think-tank of Burmese academics in exile.

“They are prepared to go ahead with their own agenda even if it is plainly stupid as this week’s decision to detain Suu Kyi further while the ASEAN summit was on,” he told IPS.

Rangoon has made it a habit of flaunting its oppressive stripes in the face of Asean since it was invited to become a member in 1997. Such a healthy disregard for this regional body prevails despite Asean’s leading members, like the prime minister of Thailand, protecting Burma from critical barbs fired by the British or U.S. government.

The unflinching assault on Suu Kyi and her party have been a consistent indicator. The generals in Burma, also called Myanmar, have denied the NLD from staking a claim in the country’s political life despite its landslide victory at a parliamentary election in 1990. Suu Kyi was under house arrest then, only to be released in 1995.

She was detained again for two years by the junta between 2000 to 2002. Her current detention followed an attack on her and her party members by thugs linked to the military regime in late May.

In addition to Suu Kyi, the junta has filled close to 39 jails across the country with 1,400 political prisoners, among who include Parliamentarians, writers, pro-democracy activists and Buddhist monks.

Burma’s ability to expose Asean for its lack of courage to stand up for democracy and human rights is due to the group’s much vaunted principle of non-interference on domestic issues of its member countries.

The region’s founders, who ruled during a time when Asean was better known for its dictators and authoritarian leaders, conceived this see-hear-and-speak-no-evil principle. Those who benefited from the non-interference principle were former strongmen Suharto, the president of Indonesia, and Ferdinand Marcos, the president of the Philippines, and authoritarian leaders like Mahathir Mohamed, prime minister of Malaysia, and Lee Kuan Yew, Singapore’s premier.

But now the very principle that the region’s leaders hold sacred and have benefited from has come to haunt ASEAN, since Burma is due to assume the leadership of the regional body in 2006.

“Asean will be committing suicide in terms of its international credibility and its achievements as a region will suffer a huge blow if the Burmese generals take over,” says Stothard. “The next six months will reveal by just how much Asean wants to hurt itself by letting Burma get away.”

The prospect of Burma further lowering Asean’s significance on the global stage comes at a time when this regional group is desperately trying to reinvent itself after it was shaken to its roots – and relegated to a marginal entity after years of economic glory-following the 1997 financial crisis.

The consequence of such a dire scenario has not been lost on some of the Parliamentarians in the region, resulting in an unprecedented political development led by Malaysian legislators.

A bi-partisan group of Malaysian Parliamentarians, with support from legislators in Thailand, Philippines, Indonesia, Cambodia, and Singapore, have mounted a campaign to deny Burma the chairmanship of Asean.

“The chairmanship of Asean cannot be awarded to Myanmar in 2006, without undergoing systemic and irreversible change in its governance,” declared a statement released by the Asean Parliamentarians at the end of their four-day meeting on Sunday.

The legislators even hinted that the region would be better off if Burma was stripped of its Asean membership. “We call for the immediate review of Myanmar’s membership of Asean.”

For members of Burma’s opposition, the meeting in Kuala Lumpur was a revelation. It suggested the panic that has set in within South-east Asia’s capitals of the burden Asean will have to bear if Burma becomes the chairman.

“The military is seeking the chairmanship of Asean to enhance its legitimacy,” said Aung Naing Oo, the researcher. “But will Asean grant the military its wishes after this week’s summit?”

Written by AFP

Wednesday, 01 December 2004

Kuala Lumpur: A group of ASEAN lawmakers on Wednesday condemned the decision by Myanmar’s military junta to extend the house arrest of democracy leader and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Aung San Suu Kyi.

“We condemn the action of the ruling junta. We want her to be released immediately,” said Malaysian MP Zaid Ibrahim, who is interim president of the newly formed ASEAN Inter-Parliamentary Caucus on Myanmar.

Zaid described Aung San Suu Kyi’s continued detention as “cruel and totally unjustified.”

“Unless there is pressure from the international community and in particular ASEAN, she is doomed to be detained for a long time,” he added.

Last week the caucus, which includes lawmakers from Cambodia, Indonesia, Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Malaysia, said Myanmar should be suspended from the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) unless it makes progress towards democratic reforms.

Aung San Suu Kyi’s first period of house arrest started in 1989, and although she led the National League for Democracy to a landslide election victory in 1990 from her confinement, the military rulers refused to accept the result.

Aung Sang Suu Kyi was released in July 1995, but detained again in 2000. She was released in May 2002 but growing tensions saw her back under house arrest only a year later.

Opposition Malaysian lawmaker Lim Kit Siang, a member of the grouping, said the Myanmar military had been let off easily at the Vientiane ASEAN summit this week without having to account for its failure to show progress in political reforms.

“What is even more galling is the cocky stance of the junta to administer a public slap-in-the face of the other ASEAN leaders by timing the release of information on the extension of Aung Sang Suu Kyi’s house arrest” which coincided with the summit, he said in a statement.

Written by IRRAWADDY

Wednesday, 01 December 2004

The Asean summit in Vientiane has ended, without doing anything to make Burma’s leaders more accountable and their policies transparent. Disappointingly, Asean leaders failed to make any formal resolution on Burma.

One encouraging sign, however, is that Asean leaders are reluctant to defend the unpredictable generals in Rangoon.

Philippine President Gloria Arroyo said in a statement she had urged Burmese Prime Minister Soe Win, during talks she had with him, to include Aung San Suu Kyi and her opposition party in the political reform process.

“Having welcomed Myanmar to Asean, we want to ensure that the Asean vision of a vibrant and democratic community will be realized,” Arroyo said.

“I reiterated that we have to answer to our own Asean community and to the international community.”

Defending the generals can, in effect, be like digging your own grave. During the summit, Burmese authorities extended Suu Kyi’s house arrest. She has been confined to her home under tight security regulations for more than one year, and now she faces at least another year of the same treatment.

The news of the house arrest extension puzzled Asean leaders. On the eve of the summit, Burma had released 9,000 prisoners (though few political prisoners) and won praise from some Asean officials.

Thai prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra raised the issue of Suu Kyi when he met his Burmese counterpart prime minister Lt Gen Soe Win during the summit.

According to Thaksin, Burma’s Prime Minister Soe Win would not confirm the reports that opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi’s house arrest had been extended for one year.

“The Myanmar prime minister did not confirm the news report yesterday that the period of house arrest for Aung San Suu Kyi would be extended for one year, but (he said) that he would check and keep Thailand informed,” Thaksin said.

It’s perhaps understandable that the man accused dissidents of being behind the ambush attack that resulted in Suu Kyi’s detention is reluctant to tell the truth.

While Asean leaders held their summit, a three day workshop was in Kuala Lumpur also considered the Burma situation.

The workshop was organized by pro-democracy groups in Asia and within the Malaysian Parliament.

They were joined by Parliamentarians from Thailand, Indonesia, the Philippines, Cambodia and Singapore, officials from some Asean countries and Burmese Parliamentarians in exile.

Participants agreed that Asean governments had been “too soft for too long” with Burma.

Interim president Datuk Zaid Ibrahim said continuing the soft approach towards Burma would not solve the situation there.

Burma has certainly exploited Asean’s political legitimacy to hide its crimes and human rights abuses. Since its accession to Asean in 1997, Burma has contributed little to the regional grouping. In two years’ time, when it is due to take the Asean chair, it can create even more problems for Asean.

Asean leaders are hoping Burma will embark on the path towards democracy before then and forestall any trouble.

“I think one year from now on, some things must be improved,” said Thaksin.

Critics and pundits alike warn that Asean’s credibility is at stake.

If Asean continues to put its credibility into question by remaining soft on Burma, the organization could well be digging its own grave.