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Thailand to Send Refugees and Opposition Back to Burma? – The Irrawaddy

October 2nd, 2010

http://www.irrawaddy.org/article.php?art_id=19612

Thai Foreign Minister Kasit Piromya is working on a plan to repatriate Burmese refugees and intellectuals after the Nov. 7 election, saying that the Thai government will assist in their return to “half-democratic” Burma.

He told a US audience that upon his return to Bangkok, he will “launch a more comprehensive program for the Myanmar people in the camps, the displaced, the intellectuals who run around the streets of Bangkok and Chiang Mai province, to return to Myanmar after the elections.”

The remarks were made at a forum at the Asia Society in New York on September 28, when Kasit discussed the political situation in Thailand, as well as regional issues and US-China relations.

Kasit said he believes the elections will not be up to international standards, but will be “ a start,” and that non-Burmese should “believe the aspirations of the ordinary Burmese who are being given the first step back towards an open democratic society.”

Thein Oo, a Thailand-based member of the National League for Democracy (NLD), says that the Thai foreign minister’s remarks are out of sync with what the international community is saying about the poll. “These elections are for the generals, who have been committing crimes in our country for many years, and will continue to do,” he said. (more…)

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Businessman’s Son Takes Sanctions Case to Court of Justice – The Irrawaddy

September 30th, 2010

http://www.irrawaddy.org/article.php?art_id=19591&Submit=Submit

Pye Phyo Tay Za, the son of Tay Za, a businessman with close links to Burma’s military government, is appealing a decision taken earlier this year which maintains European Union (EU) financial sanctions and travel ban against him.

The case is now before the Court of Justice in Luxembourg, which is the highest court in the EU in terms of EU law, and pits Pye Phyo against the Council of the European Union, the European Commission and the United Kingdom.

On May 19, Pye Phyo Tay Za lost a legal bid at the General Court to have EU sanctions overturned. He was ordered to pay the court costs for the Council of the EU. He is seeking that the entire May 19 decision be overturned, that the sanctions regulations be rendered null and void in his case, and that the Council foot the bill for this appeal and for the previous case. (more…)

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Drug traffickers standing for election – The Irrawaddy

September 29th, 2010

http://www.irrawaddy.org/article.php?art_id=19582

Shan and Kachin researchers say that Burma’s ruling junta are backing candidates for the Nov. 7 election who are prominent in the drug trade along Burma’s borders with Thailand and China.

Myint Lwin and Kyaw Myint were cited today at a Bangkok press conference as well-known Shan State-based narcotics bosses who will stand for the junta’s proxy party—the Union Solidarity and Development Party—in the upcoming polls. Zah Kung Ting Ying, a former New Democratic Army-Kachin leader, will run for election as an independent, according to Kachin journalist Lahpai Nawdin.

“Most of the poppy-growing areas in Shan State are under the control of militia groups backed by the Tatmadaw [Burmese army],” said Shan researcher and journalist Kheunsai Jaiyen. (more…)

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Hong Kong, where democracy has stalled – Crikey

September 29th, 2010

http://www.crikey.com.au/2010/09/29/letter-from-hong-kong-where-democracy-has-stalled/

Simon Roughneen in Hong Kong

“We are a strategically-located gateway to China”, said Rita Lau, Hong Kong’s Secretary for Commerce and Economic Development, while addressing a gathering of Irish businesspeople and officials in the city last week.

Listed by the The Heritage Foundation and the Wall St Journal as the world’s freest economy, Hong Kong sells itself as the logical place for foreign corporations to start when it comes to looking at opportunities in China, which recently overtook Japan as the world’s second largest economy, and last year passed Germany to become the world’s biggest exporter. (more…)

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Standing out in the crowd – The Irrawaddy

September 22nd, 2010

http://www.irrawaddy.org/article.php?art_id=19519

BANGKOK—Somber, gloomy, provocative are probably overused words when it comes to talking about art, but these adjectives aptly describe the mood captured in Burmese painter Khin Zaw Latt’s “Going Home” series.

Done badly, the grays, blues and blacks depicting Burmese workers heading home from work in Rangoon could have come across as drab. The light-and-shadow effect, however, helps show the harshness and grinding effort of daily life for Burma’s millions of poor while maintaining the viewer’s focus on the art in and for itself.

“I was very affected by the sight of crowds of local people getting on the ferry to cross the river here in Yangon,” Khin Zaw Latt said. “I could feel the hardship and struggle of their everyday life, but also how they just got on with it.

“The more I watched, the more oppressive it was for me,” he said.

In the series, crowds of people are all portrayed walking away from the artist with their backs turned, making their way back to the countryside after a day’s work trying to make ends meet as vendors or porters .

Implicitly, perhaps, there is a critique of prevailing living and social conditions in what is southeast Asia’s poorest country measured on a real income per-capita basis, though perhaps the artist walks a fine line in a country where the Ministry of Information’s censorship board scrutinizes all art and anything that it perceives as critical of the government can land an artist in jail. (more…)

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4 years, 4 months, another redshirt rally – The Irrawaddy

September 20th, 2010

http://www.irrawaddy.org/article.php?art_id=19509

Redshirt protesters rally in Bangkok on the fourth anniversary of the military coup that removed former Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra from power.

BANGKOK – “I feel fear, we don’t know what is this!” Just arrived from Shenzhen, Zhao Fei and her two friends looked lost, wheeling their pink, silver and navy cases along the same intersection where four months ago to the day, the Thai Army launched a final assault on a mass anti-Government protest that occupied this luxury shopping district in Bangkok.

“We were scared coming through the crowd in the traffic”, she said, admitting that her group did not realise that a political rally was scheduled for the centre of Bangkok, where they hope to stay until Wednesday – “to do some shopping” – before flying south to the beach resort city Phuket.

An estimated seven thousand redshirts were flying red balloons and weaving a street-wide web of red ribbon, the end of a day-long commemoration of the September 19 2006 army coup that deposed then Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra. (more…)

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Thailand’s Vietnam cancellation a concern – The Irrawaddy

September 17th, 2010

http://www.irrawaddy.org/article.php?art_id=19493

Thailand’s decision to block a press conference criticizing Vietnam’s human rights record is a concern for human rights activists and freedom of speech advocates, including opponents of Burma’s ruling military junta.

The Foreign Correspondents’ Club of Thailand said on Sunday that it had been asked by Thailand’s Foreign Ministry not to allow its premises to be used for a news conference by the Paris-based Vietnam Committee on Human Rights (VCHR) and the International Federation for Human Rights (FIDH). The pair of speakers scheduled to travel to Bangkok for the event were told before departure that they would not be permitted entry to Thailand, where they hoped to launch a report titled, “From vision to facts: human rights in Vietnam under its chairmanship of ASEAN.”

Thailand is the current chair of the UN Human Rights Council, which is currently in session in Geneva. Vietnam is the 2010 chair of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (Asean), following on from Thailand’s chairmanship last year. Hanoi is currently preparing for the next Asean summit due to be held in late October, just before the Burmese election scheduled for Nov. 7.

The junta has long been something of an embarrassment and hindrance to Asean, slowing down the development of trade and political links with the US and EU in particular. Observers are waiting to see if the post-election period will see a push from some Asean members to have the Burmese government recognized as democratic, which may in turn have implications for Burmese opposition groups.

Thailand has long been a refuge for Burmese opposition leaders and political exiles, as well as hundreds of thousands of refugees and millions of migrant workers. Perhaps more vulnerable than most are groups who work on Burma-related issues inside Thailand. (more…)

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O Brother, there art thou – ISN

September 14th, 2010

http://www.isn.ethz.ch/isn/Current-Affairs/Security-Watch/Detail/?lng=en&id=121101

Junta leader comes back happy from China after getting backing for his November election and a pledge from Beijing to snub ethnic militias inside Burma

“May I propose a toast for the long-lasting Sino-Myanmar Pauk-phaw friendship”. So said Li Jinjun, China’s Ambassador to Myanmar, or Burma, speaking at an official reception in Rangoon five years ago.

Meaning ‘brother’ in Burmese, the wording is a hat-tip to the growing commercial and strategic ties between the two countries – links which Burmese opposition leaders and exiles have slammed for helping maintain an oppressive status quo in Burma, which is scheduled to hold elections on November 7. The real meaning of Pauk-phaw was underlined last week with the visit of Burma’s junta leader Sen. Gen. Than Shwe to China, marking the 60th anniversary of bilateral relations between the two countries, where once again both sides saluted their pauk-phaw relationship

More than oil and gas

China is Burma’s third-biggest trade partner after Thailand and Singapore. Going by official Chinese statistics, the two countries did business worth US$2.9 billion in 2009. However illicit or unreported commerce likely means that the given numbers underestimate the real scale of business across the 2,200 kilometer land border.

Chinese investment in Burma, focusing on the country’s lush natural resources, vastly outweighs bilateral trade. This year alone Chinese companies have sunk over US$8 billion in Burma, mainly in gas, oil and hydropower ventures. Beijing sees Burma as vital to securing energy supplies, as its economy overtakes Japan’s to become the second largest in the world.

However resource extraction is just part of the picture. (more…)

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Bringing Out the Stick – The Irrawaddy

September 9th, 2010

http://www.irrawaddy.org/article.php?art_id=19400&Submit=Submit

Having failed to induce change in Burma by dangling the carrot of reduced sanctions, the US is now calling for a

Sept 2010 edition of The Irrawaddy

war crimes investigation of the country’s military rulers.

Diplomatic eyebrows were raised in March when UN Special Rapporteur Tomás Ojea Quintana issued a report recommending that the UN form an international Commission of Inquiry (CoI) to investigate alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity in Burma. But other than the UK, Australia, the Czech Republic and Slovakia, no country rushed to support the proposal. The silence of the US was particularly deafening, but in August the Obama administration officially threw its support behind a CoI.

When the Quintana report was released in March, the US was enmeshed in an attempt to implement its new policy of “pragmatic engagement” with the Burmese military. Although sanctions remained in place under the new policy, the US held out the possibility they would be relaxed if the junta responded to calls to institute democratic and human rights reforms.

The regime, however, has arguably been even more obstinate since the engagement policy was introduced, and the announcement by the US that it supports the CoI may be the culmination of a recent series of setbacks for the Obama administration in which it was either rebuffed or ignored by Naypyidaw. (more…)

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Children at risk in flood-hit Pakistan – Foreign Policy/RTÉ World Report

September 8th, 2010

http://afpak.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2010/09/08/dispatch_from_sindh_children_at_risk_from_disease

http://www.rte.ie/news/2010/0905/worldreport.html

In the ad-hoc child malnutrition facility at the Railway Hospital in Sukkur, mothers cradle and nurse their toddlers, all emaciated and weakened. A row of beds runs either side of the ward in the brown and gray-painted Raj-era hospital.

Three year-old Zamina was malnourished before the floods hit, but the flight from the family farm in Thulla to this heaving city in northern Sindh worsened the tiny girl’s condition considerably, says Dr Sakina Jafri, pausing to speak as she moved from bed to bed.

“With the threat of disease all around, young children are most prone,” she said. “And when they are so young and are malnourished, it only adds to that level of vulnerability.”

UNICEF Director Anthony Lake says that almost 9 million children are at risk of disease, an alarm call rung out in tandem with World Food Program head Josette Sheeran’s warning of a second wave of disaster looming even as flood waters slowly recede.

Authorities have also struggled to cope with a growing number of cases of severe diarrhea and malaria caused by dirty water that offers a perfect breeding ground for insects and disease. (more…)

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