Thailand and Burma wrangle over migrant worker laws – The Irrawaddy
April 20th, 2012
Deputy Labour Minister U Myint Thein (centre) speaks to media in Bangkok on April 19 2012 (Photo: Simon Roughneen)
http://www.irrawaddy.org/archives/2801
BANGKOK―More than 200,000 workers from Burma could be flown into Bangkok to be employed in Thai factories under a direct state-to-state agreement, according to a Thai Labor Ministry spokesman.
The plan is designed to address a labor shortage in Thailand and would involved available workers being flown directly to the capital. Burma has an estimated three million unemployed and many millions more on extremely low incomes.
The announcement was made at a joint Bangkok press conference on Thursday featuring representatives of both the Thai and Burmese labor ministries. The move would have to be ratified at a bilateral meeting in Burma next month.
Proposals to safeguard workers rights include having contracts that could be revoked or ended after six months on mutual consent if Thai bosses abuse their Burmese workers physically, the employer dies or the business finishes, or the employer violates the Thai Labour Law.
Meanwhile, five new centers enabling Burmese migrant workers to better-formalize their status in Thailand open on Friday.
Brandishing a new sample purple-covered machine-readable passport, which he says will be issued at the five additional nationality verification centers, Burmese Deputy Minister for Labor Myint Thein told assembled media that the Thai government finally agreed to allow the centers to open after a four-month delay. (more…)
Change and no change in Timor-Leste – Asia Sentinel
April 19th, 2012
http://www.asiasentinel.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=4434&Itemid=172
Timorese troops at Falintil commemoration ceremony in Dili, August 2011 (Photo: Simon Roughneen)
Presidential elections out of the way, the next big test is July parliamentary polls to see who controls the country’s formidable oil and gas reserves
BANGKOK - When incumbent Jose Ramos-Horta lost the March first round of Timor-Leste’s largely peaceful presidential election, some saw it as the end of an era for Timorese politics that began with the country’s independence in 2002.
Ramos-Horta, along with Fretilin leader Mari Alkatiri and Prime Minister Xanana Gusmao, have dominated the politics of the country, also known as East Timor, since independence, with the top jobs of prime minister and president passing between the trio, who have been sometimes comrades, sometimes rivals.
The new President is former army chief Taur Matan Ruak – a man the from same resistance fighter leadership that fought in the jungles against Indonesia’s elemental 1975-99 occupation, which by some estimates killed a third of Timor-Leste’s people.
Although the new President doesn’t have Ramos-Horta’s international profile, his personal prestige as army head and ex-jungle fighter (Ramos-Horta spent much of the Indonesian occupation era overseas) – as well Fretilin’s party machine strength – meant that Ramos-Horta was knocked out of the race in the first round with 21 percent of the vote. (more…)
As rains start, Thailand faces drought or flood conundrum – Christian Science Monitor
April 13th, 2012
Flooding in Pathum Thani, northern Bangkok suburb, October 2011 (Photo: Simon Roughneen)
BANG LUANG DOD, AYUTTHAYA, THAILAND - Despite seeing his 60 acres of rice paddies covered in more than 10 feet of water for three months during late 2011, farmer Tawee Wongsan is sanguine about flooding this year. “I don’t think there will be flooding this year,” he says. “The water in the big dams is not so high like last year.”
Last year’s floods killed more than 800 people and caused an estimated $40 billion damage to the country’s $345 billion economy, the world’s 25th largest. Water covered several districts of capital Bangkok and swamped industrial zones home to Thailand’s vital automobile and electronics sectors, disrupting global supply chains. The floods were actually caused in part by reaction to a drought the previous year. To hedge against any water shortage, Thailand’s dams were allowed to stay almost full throughout 2011. But after months of heavy rainfall, the eventual spillover met an already sodden floodplain.
And this year Thailand could face a “drought or flood conundrum” again. (more…)
Malaysian rare-earth anger links up with poll reform calls – Asia Times
April 10th, 2012
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Southeast_Asia/ND11Ae01.html
BANGKOK – With Western countries and Japan seeking to get around China’s domination of the crucial but mis-named “rare earths” sector, a potentially game-changing processing site slated for Malaysia looks set to become a major election issue as that country gears up to vote.
Opposition politicians and local activists from Kuantan – where Australia’s Lynas Corp hopes to build a processing plant for rare earth minerals mined in Australia – are protesting against the project. The plant will provide “a crucial link in developing a non-Chinese supply of rare earth metals”, according to Yaron Voronas of the Technology and Rare Earths Center, an online forum for the industry.
The 17 materials, which are not in fact “rare”, but are difficult to mine in commercially viable amounts, are growing in economic and strategic importance because they are a key component in high-tech devices such as mobile phones and computers, as well as military hardware such as night-vision goggles and guided missiles. Despite having only around 35% of estimated global rare earth deposits, China currently supplies approximately 95% of the global market – as mining and processing in Western countries has been largely mothballed over environmental concerns.
Those same concerns have animated protests against the proposed Malaysian site, which awaits the granting of a Temporary Operating Licence from the Malaysian Atomic Energy Licensing Board, initially approved in February but postponed pending an appeal by locals and activists who have come out against the project.
The fracas looks set to be entwined in Malaysia’s fractious party politics as speculation grows that Malaysia’s Prime Minister Najib Razak will call national parliamentary elections soon, with whispers about an early June vote to coincide with school holidays. In the meantime, opposition-linked activists will stage renewed public demonstrations on April 28, after the findings of a parliamentary committee set up to assess electoral reform options were dismissed as “flawed” by opposition leader Anwar Ibrahim. (more…)
Constitution battle looms for Aung San Suu Kyi – RTÉ World Report
April 8th, 2012
audio here (realplayer) - http://www.rte.ie/news/av/2012/0408/worldreport.html#&autoplay=true
The idea that Aung San Suu Kyi would be elected as a MP in Burma seemed far-fetched not so long ago.
Famously, the 1991 Nobel peace laureate won a 1990 election, but then spent 15 of the next 20 years under house arrest, while Burma’s military junta ignored the election result.
But, last Sunday April 1, Suu Kyi and her National League for Democracy won 43 seats in by-elections. She will soon sit in a parliament set up after 2010 national elections, which were rigged to give the army-backed Union Solidarity and Development Party almost 80% of the seats available – a win on a scale befitting the Orwellian sounding party name.
And while there were understandable scenes of euphoria on the streets of Rangoon last week as results came thought – the reality is that Suu Kyi’s party has only around 5% of all seats going in Burma’s upper, lower and regional houses of parliament.
The country’s constitution ensures that one way or another, the army dominates government in Burma. It also means that Suu Kyi cannot become President, even if she wins the next national elections due in 2015. (more…)
Thai censors say out, damned spot, to Macbeth film adaptation- Christian Science Monitor
April 4th, 2012
BANGKOK – The banning of a Thai cinema adaptation of William Shakespeare’s ‘Macbeth’ is causing a stir in Thailand, after censors ruled that the movie “has content that causes divisiveness among the people of the nation”.
In a country where royalty is shielded by possibly the world’s strictest lese-majeste laws, a drama featuring regicide might be deemed taboo in some quarters, but Shakespeare Must Die seems also to have touched a raw nerve – with its angle on the playwright’s ambitious but guilt-ridden Scottish usurper blended in with scenes of protest and violence redolent of Thailand’s recent past.
The country has been beset by on-off street protests since 2005, and to some, the ‘Macbeth’ character in the movie is reminiscent of former Thai Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra, whose apparent vaulting ambition prompted royalist suspicions that he had a real-life anti-monarchy agenda. (more…)
Burma: after by-election win, hard yards ahead for NLD – RTÉ Morning Ireland/The Huffington Post
April 3rd, 2012
http://www.rte.ie/news/2012/0402/morningireland.html - Audio file, scroll down
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/simon-roughneen/burma-hard-yeards-ahead-f_b_1401803.html
BANGKOK – After winning a landslide victory in April 1 by-elections in Burma, Aung San Suu Kyi and the National League for Democracy (NLD) will face the hard yards of politicking in a parliament dominated by the same military and its allies that the NLD trounced in Sunday’s vote.
Late on Monday, the Burmese election commission announced that the NLD had swept 40 out of 45 seats available, with results pending in the remaining constituencies. The loss of face for the army and its Union Solidarity and Development Party (USDP) was compounded by the NLD taking all 4 seats in the former junta’s purpose-built capital in Naypyidaw.
Despite the understandable euphoria among party supporters in Rangoon and elsewhere in Burma as tallies came through suggesting that the NLD would win most, if not all, of the 45 seats on offer, some Burmese are less than sanguine. (more…)
Muslim militants in south Thailand growing stronger – Christian Science Monitor
April 1st, 2012
BANGKOK, THAILAND - Muslim insurgents announced a deadly new departure in their long-running terror campaign in southern Thailand, with four explosions killing 14 people and injuring more than 300 on Saturday.
Just before noon on Saturday, a truck bomb went off in the middle of a busy shopping and restaurant area of Yala, a town of 75,000 people in Thailand’s south. Around 20 minutes later, as rescue workers convened and members of the public looked on, a second blast went off in the same area. Elsewhere in southern Thailand, in Hat Yai, a popular hotel was targetted, with a Malaysian tourist among the dead from a blast there, while insurgents also set off a motorcycle explosion at a police checkpoint in Pattani province.
The attacks resulted in one of the worst death tolls in the history of the eight year insurgency in the region, which has claimed more than 5,000 lives since 2004. Ethnic Malay Muslim insurgents in Thailand’s southernmost provinces of Narathiwat, Pattani, and Yala are thought to be seeking greater autonomy for their region bordering Malaysia to the south, though they have not to date stated their precise political aims.
“It is a significant escalation in terms of the scale of the attacks, with three car bombs and one motorcycle bomb in one operation. That has never happened before. It is also an escalation in that both in Yala and Hat Yai it was a pretty ruthless targetting of civilians on a busy Saturday afternoon,” says Anthony Davis, a Bangkok-based security analyst with IHS-Janes. (more…)
Cautious hope for freedom of information in Burma – PBS Mediashift
March 29th, 2012
NLD leader Aung San Suu Kyi readies to speak at election rally in Myawngmya in mid -February (Photo: Simon Roughneen)
http://www.pbs.org/mediashift/2012/03/cautious-hope-for-freedom-of-information-in-burma089.html
BANGKOK — A week out from special elections that are likely to see opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi take a seat in the country’s parliament, Burma’s long-straitjacketed journalists sat with local and foreign officials to discuss a new press law that could see the country’s censorship regime abolished.
Thiha Saw, editor of Myanmar Dhana magazine and Open News (two Rangoon-based publications), told an audience in Bangkok earlier this week that, according to the Ministry of Information, the censorship department will be abolished and there will no longer be pre-publication checking of articles.
Right now in Burma, daily newspapers are banned and existing weeklies must run their content by the censorship board for approval before publishing.
But change is nigh, it seems, and a second draft of a new print media law will go before the country’s parliament later this year. By then, the parliament could include Aung San Suu Kyi, the famous dissident who was denied her win in 1990 elections and spent much of the intervening years under house arrest.
That possibility is heartening for journalists.
“Hopefully the Lady will be in parliament by the time the second draft comes around,” Thiha Saw said. (more…)
Kachin abuses undermine Burma’s reform claims – The Irrawaddy
March 20th, 2012
http://www.irrawaddy.org/article.php?art_id=23243
KIA soldier recovers from landmine injury at KIA military hospital near Laiza (Photo: Simon Roughneen)
BANGKOK—Since a 1994 ceasefire between the Burmese army and the Kachin Independence Army (KIA) broke down last June, Kachin civilians have suffered human rights abuses at the hands of the Burmese government forces, including extrajudicial killings, torture, rape, forced displacement and the denial of humanitarian aid, says New York-based Human Rights Watch (HRW).
More than 70,000 Kachin villagers have been driven from their homes by fighting in the resource-rich northern Burmese state, and on-off peace talks between the two sides have to date failed to yield a ceasefire. HRW says that both the Burmese army and the KIA are laying landmines and deploying child soldiers—sometimes as young as 14—to the front line.
“Both parties are using anti-personnel mines, both are using child soldiers,” says Matthew Smith, the lead researcher of the HRW report, Untold Miseries: Wartime Abuses and Forced Displacement in Kachin State, which documents over 100 interviews with those involved in and affected by the fighting. (more…)
