21 July 2008 : Burma News Extra
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Freedom for Suu Kyi unlikely in 2008, Burma says
Another Burma promise
Burma aid effort 'requires $1bn'
Myanmar cyclone damage estimated at $4 billion
Myanmar appeals for more foreign aid to help victims of Cyclone Nargis, but gives no figure
Myanmar ratifies ASEAN charter
A New Generation of Activists Arises in Burma
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Freedom for Suu Kyi unlikely in 2008, Burma says
Bangkok Post / 21 July 2008
Singapore (dpa) - Burma has indicated that opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi could be freed in six months, or they will have to change current laws which limit her maximum detention period to six years, news reports said Monday.
Singapore Foreign Minister George Yeo said that his Burmese counterpart, Nyan Win, said that Suu Kyi has "about half a year's time left," according to The Straits Times.
When asked if this meant that the opposition leader and Nobel Prize winner would be released, Yeo said, "I think that is not an inaccurate inference."
Suu Kyi has spent 13 years in detention since 1989.
Association of Southeast Asian Nations foreign ministers called Sunday on the Burmese junta to release Suu Kyi and other political detainees.
On the eve of the formal start of the 41st Asean ministerial meetings in Singapore, the ministers of the 10-member regional bloc expressed disappointment over Suu Kyi's continued detention.
"The foreign ministers expressed their deep disappointment that Aung San Suu Kyi's detention under house arrest had been extended by the Myanmar (Burmese) government," Yeo told reporters after the officials met over dinner.
http://www.bangkokpost.com/breaking_news/breakingnews.php?id=128970
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Another Burma promise
Bangkok Post / 21 July 2008
Singapore - Burma ratified the charter of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations Monday and vowed to uphold its democratic ideals, but dashed hopes of releasing opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi within the next six months.
The country, vilified for its dictatorial government and human rights abuses, became the seventh of the 10-member regional grouping to ratify the document, which was signed by the leaders in November last year.
"Myanmar's ratification of the charter demonstrates our strong commitment to embrace the common values and aspirations of the peoples of Asean," Foreign Minister Nyan Win said, using the military dictators' new name for Burma.
"It is my honest hope that with the growing momentum of ratification, our common goal and commitment to complete ratification of the charter by all member states will be realized at the time of our leaders' summit in Bangkok" in December, he added.
While foreign ministers attending the 41st Asean Ministers Meeting watched, Nyan Win handed over the document to Asean Secretary General Surin Pitsuwan, to the applause of observers.
Burma was also among the Asean countries which unanimously set up a high-level panel on an Asean human rights body, and endorse its terms of reference.
"We urged Myanmar to take bolder steps towards a peaceful transition to democracy in the near future," and work towards the holding of free and fair general elections in 2010," said the minister's communique at the end of the meeting.
"We reiterated our calls for the release of all political detainees, including Suu Kyi, to pave the way for meaningful dialogue involving all parties concerned."
In a separate statement, Singapore Minister for Foreign Af`fairs George Yeo said Ngan Win had clarified that Suu Kyi would not be released in the next six months, but six months from May 2009, the expiry date of the existing one-year detention order.
Yeo, who is also Asean chairman, and other foreign ministers "misunderstood the point made by the Burmese foreign minister on the limit of the detention period," a statement said.
The "clarification" was made at the ministers' meeting Monday afternoon.
Suu Kyi has spent 13 years in detention since 1989. Her house arrest was recently extended.
Surin said he was sure the Philippines, Thailand and Indonesia would soon ratify the charter and that he expected the ratification process to be completed by December.
"The charter will help us building an Asean community we can all be proud of," he said.
The document, which will turn the 41-year-old regional grouping into a legal entity, was initially opposed by the ruling junta because of its inclusion of human rights.
Several Philippine senators said they would oppose the ratification of the charter until the military junta that has ruled Burma since 1962 institutes democratic reforms.
In opening the meeting, Singapore Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong said Asean had decided to press on with the charter's implementation without waiting for all 10 members to ratify it.
"The internal processes of member countries are different and some will be more difficult than others, Lee said.
The Burmese ratification occurred a day after Asean ministers expressed their "deep disappointment" over the continued detention of Suu Kyi and undetermined numbers of political prisoners.
Asean comprises Brunei, Burma, Cambodia, Laos, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam.
http://www.bangkokpost.com/topstories/topstories.php?id=128981
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Burma aid effort 'requires $1bn'
BBC News
21 July 2008
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READ THE ASEAN REPORT |
 Asean is normally reluctant to criticise member states |
Relief and reconstruction work in Burma after Cyclone Nargis will cost at least $1bn (£500m), according to the UN and the regional body Asean.
The figure is in a report released at Asean's annual meeting in Singapore.
It is the first comprehensive assessment of the damage caused by the cyclone on 3-4 May, which is believed to have killed 130,000 people.
Burma's ruling generals were criticised in the wake of the cyclone for being slow to accept international aid.
Asean has already played a key part in helping to facilitate exchanges between Burma's ruling junta and international donors.
Enormous task
Asean Secretary-General Surin Pitsuwan told a news conference that the three parties involved in the report - the UN, Asean and the Burmese government - needed at least $1bn to deal with "a tragedy of immense proportions".
The estimated figure covers the most urgent needs such as food, agriculture and housing for the next three years.
"The task ahead is clearly enormous and will take a lot of time, a lot of effort," Mr Surin said.
"While significant progress has been made to date, we are still in the relief phase for this aid operation," added the UN humanitarian chief John Holmes.
The report outlines the scale of the cyclone - Burma's worst ever disaster - and estimates that it destroyed 450,000 homes, damaged 350,000 others, flooded 600,000 hectares of agricultural land and destroyed 60% of farming implements.
About 75% of hospitals and clinics in the area were destroyed or badly damaged.
'Deep disappointment'
Burma's military rulers are under the spotlight as delegates convene at the Asean meeting.
On Sunday, delegates issued a rare statement criticising the isolated nation, urging it to release political prisoners.
They expressed "deep disappointment" over the junta's one-year extension of opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi's detention.
In the past, the bloc has been accused of being too reluctant to speak out about the internal affairs of its member states.
The other issue on the agenda at the Asean meeting on Monday was the escalating tension between two other member states - Thailand and Cambodia - over ownership of the area around the ancient temples of Preah Vihear.
"The situation has escalated dangerously, with troops from both sides faced off on disputed territory near the Preah Vihear temple," Singapore Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong told delegates in his opening speech.
He added that he had received assurances from both countries that they would exercise "utmost restraint" and abide by international laws to resolve the issue amicably.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/asia-pacific/7517655.stm
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Myanmar cyclone damage estimated at $4 billion
AP
21 July 2008
A new U.N.-led report says the damage from Myanmar's Cyclone Nargis in May is estimated to be $4 billion.
The report released Monday says this includes $1.7 billion in damage to assets and $2.3 billion from loss of income of the victims. Nargis devastated much of the region south of Yangon, leaving at least 85,000 people dead and about 50,000 missing.
The report, prepared by the U.N., the Association of Southeast Asian Nations and the Myanmar government, is the first comprehensive assessment of the damage caused by the cyclone in May.
ASEAN secretary-general Surin Pitsuwan said the survivors need at least $1 billion over the next three years so that "we can help them recover back on their feet as soon as possible."
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Myanmar appeals for more foreign aid to help victims of Cyclone Nargis, but gives no figure
AP
21 July 2008
Myanmar is appealing for more foreign aid to help victims of Cyclone Nargis.
Foreign Minister Nyan Win said more assistance would shorten his nation's recovery time, but didn't say how much money was needed.
Myanmar would push ahead with its own limited resources if additional help was not forthcoming, Nyan Win told reporters in Singapore on Monday following the release of a report assessing relief efforts compiled by the 10-member Association of Southeast Asian Nations.
ASEAN has helped facilitate exchanges between Myanmar's governing military junta and international donors, who have demanded full access to storm-hit areas and an independent assessment of aid to ensure it was not being wasted or stolen.
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Myanmar ratifies ASEAN charter
AP
By CHRISTOPHER BODEEN, Associated Press Writer
21 July 2008
Myanmar has ratified a proposed international charter that includes controversial human rights provisions, officials said Monday, a day after regional powers slammed the nation's ruling junta for extending opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi's detention.
Myanmar's ratification of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations charter is to be formalized at a ceremony later Monday.
But question marks remain about whether Myanmar's junta, which has jailed hundreds of political dissidents, including Nobel peace laureate Suu Kyi, is willing to adhere to the principles of human rights and respect for rule of law enshrined in the charter.
It was also unclear whether the proposed ASEAN human rights body, the details of which have yet to be hammered out, will have any substantive enforcement or monitoring power.
The charter, expected to come into force by next year, aims to strengthen the 10-member group of Asian nations, giving it power to sue and be sued, and establishing enforceable financial, trade and environmental rules.
The most controversial part of the charter is a proposed human rights body.
"It's high time that we concretize the human rights of the people of ASEAN," said Rosario Manalo, the Philippine representative to the panel.
Still, it is clear that the body will not have the power to sanction countries that violate the rights of its citizens.
The Philippines and possibly Thailand will push for the body to have the power to at least monitor human rights violations, said one Southeast Asian diplomat who spoke on condition of anonymity because she was not authorized to speak to the media.
Myanmar is the seventh member of ASEAN to ratify the charter. The Philippines, Thailand and Indonesia have balked at endorsing it, demanding that Myanmar first give firmer commitments to democracy.
The human rights panel, which will hold its first meeting Monday to determine the scope of the human rights body, is expected to submit a draft of its recommendations to the ASEAN leaders' summit in December.
Ignoring international criticism, Myanmar's junta on May 27 extended Suu Kyi's detention by another year, drawing an extraordinary rebuke Sunday from ASEAN members who usually shy from criticizing each other.
Myanmar officials have issued no public response to that criticism, although its representative at the meeting, Foreign Minister Nyan Win, suggested Sunday that Suu Kyi could be freed from house arrest in about six months.
Suu Kyi has now been detained for more than 12 of the last 18 years at her home in Myanmar, formerly known as Burma.
In a Monday address to ASEAN foreign ministers, Singapore's Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong said ASEAN had only implemented 30 percent of its agreements. The charter, he added, will help improve that "somewhat patchy" record as a bulwark against crises, such as the 1997 Asian financial storm.
"If another test comes, ASEAN must not be found wanting again," Lee said.
Associated Press reporter Jim Gomez contributed to this report.
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A New Generation of Activists Arises in Burma
Network Strengthened By Junta's Crackdown, Post-Cyclone Bungling
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, July 20, 2008; A12
RANGOON -- They operate in the shadows, slipping by moonlight from safe house to safe house, changing their cellphones to hide their tracks and meeting under cover of monasteries or clinics to plot changes that have eluded their country for 46 years.
If one gets arrested, another steps forward.
"I feel like the last man standing. All the responsibility is on my shoulders. . . . There is no turning back. If I turn back, I betray all my comrades," said a Burmese activist who heads a leading dissident group, the 88 Generation Students, named for a failed uprising in 1988. He took command after the arrest last August of its five most prominent leaders.
In a nearly deserted Rangoon coffee shop one recent morning, he spoke in an urgent whisper, often glancing over his shoulder to look for informers.
The security apparatus of Burma's military junta was thought to have largely shattered the opposition last August and September, in a crackdown that included soldiers firing on an alliance of monks and lay people who had taken to the streets by the thousands to protest a rise in fuel prices. More than 30 people died. At least 800 were detained and many more were forced into exile, according to the Thailand-based Assistance Association for Political Prisoners.
But a new generation of democracy activists fights on, its ranks strengthened both by revulsion over last year's bloodletting and the government's inept response after a cyclone that killed an estimated 130,000 people two months ago. Largely clandestine, these activists make up a diffuse network of students, militant Buddhist monks, social service workers and leaders of the 1988 uprising.
Some activists express impatience with what they call the largely passive policies of the National League for Democracy, the country's main opposition party and one of the few anti-government groups that operates legally. In 1990, the league won a national election by a landslide, but the military prevented it from taking office. Its emblem, a fighting peacock, endures as a symbol of resistance to the military for millions of Burmese.
From its closely watched headquarters in downtown Rangoon, a clutter of dusty wooden desks and chairs, the league is led by three octogenarians whom many people here call the "uncles." The men oversee the party while its leader, Nobel Peace Prize laureate Aung San Suu Kyi, languishes under house arrest.
"Their biggest goal in life is to return the party to the lady," the honorific that sympathizers here use for Suu Kyi, said the leader of the 88 Generation. "They won't do anything. They are just guardians. . . . Because of them, their party is divided."
One woman who is active in the new opposition said she thinks that "the NLD has lost the trust of the people. They have been issuing many announcements, that the government must do this. But the government has not, and anyone who gets involved with the NLD gets in trouble."
Because of what it sees as an absence of clear direction from the NLD's leaders, the 88 Generation has acted on its own, issuing statements with the All Burma Monks Alliance and the All Burma Federation of Student Unions. The most recent statements criticized the junta for holding a referendum on a new constitution while the bodies of cyclone victims still floated in the waterways of the Irrawaddy Delta.
Since its founding in late 2006 by newly freed political prisoners, including legendary student leader Min Ko Naing, the group has launched a series of creative civil disobedience campaigns. Last year, people were invited to dress in white as a symbol of openness; to head to monasteries, Hindu temples or mosques for prayer meetings; and to sign letters and petitions calling for the release of Suu Kyi and other political prisoners. That effort resonated with so many that the group had to extend its closing date.
The group was at the forefront of the protests in August and reached out to monks, the 88 leader said.
"The struggle is still on," said a young lawyer who was sentenced to seven years in jail for starting a student union at a university. Since his release, four years early, he said, he has resumed regular contact with several groups of politically active current and former students. "Students will fight if they think it's just," he said, continuing a tradition among young people here that dates to the era of British colonial rule.
One group of young people, whose members gathered as a book club, decided to organize votes against the proposed constitution, dismissing it as a sham that reinforces the military's control of the country. So they created hundreds of stickers and T-shirts bearing the word "no" and scattered them on buses, in university lecture halls and in the country's ubiquitous tea shops.
Another student said he and some of his peers acted as unofficial election monitors during the referendum, taking photos and interviewing voters who were given already marked ballots or coerced to vote yes.
The 88 leader said such efforts have given him a stock of evidence to show that the vote was neither free nor fair.
Despite the obstacles, the group has not ruled out trying to become a legal party to run for elections in 2010, he said. "People think that if you accept to run, that means you accept the constitution. No! I want to have a legal party to fight from within," he said.
Outside experts have compared the network to Poland's Solidarity movement in the early 1980s, a broad-based coalition of workers, intellectuals and students that emerged as a key political player during the country's transition to democracy.
Just as Solidarity organized picnics to keep people in touch, some new groups here meet as book clubs or medical volunteers but could easily turn at key moments to political activity, said Bertil Lintner, a journalist and author of several books on Burma.
Meanwhile, the devastation wrought by the cyclone has sometimes been a trigger for more overt political activities. A handful of members of an embattled activist group called Human Rights Defenders and Promoters headed to the delta after the storm to hand out relief supplies as well as copies of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, according to a lawyer. They were subsequently sentenced to four years in jail, he said.
Monks remain politically active, too, in spite of increased harassment from security forces since the protests.
Some have hidden pamphlets inside their alms bowls to distribute when they go out to collect food in the mornings, according to a Mandalay monk. They have smuggled glue and posters inside the bowls to stick on street walls.
Ten years ago, the monk said, he started a library that has since expanded to 14 branches across the country. Under cover of membership, patrons take classes in public speaking and pass around poems and pamphlets that are often scathing about their rulers, he said.
"I told people to read lots of books, so they can start to know, and then they can change the system," he said. "Because we want freedom. Because it is difficult to speak and write in this country."
The cyclone's aftermath has also spurred vast new stores of anger, sometimes among monks, who take vows of nonviolence.
"Now we want to get weapons," said a monk known to other dissidents by the nom de guerre "Zero" for his ability to organize and vanish without a trace. "The Buddhist way is lovingkindness. But we lost. So now we want to fight."
In the dormitory of a monastery one recent afternoon, he sat among piles of handwritten speeches and recent clandestine pamphlets stamped with names of groups such as Generation Wave and the All Burmese Monks Alliance. Two young monks listening from a tattered mattress nearby nodded excitedly, and a third pretended to wield a machine gun.
Because of his role as a chief galvanizer of the monks in the protests, the monk has been on the run since September, moving from one monastery to the next. But since the cyclone, he has managed nonetheless to make about 20 trips to the devastated areas, where he buried more than 200 bodies and coordinated with monks and lay people.
"In September, we lost because everywhere, every village did not follow, because of fear," he said. But in the post-cyclone period, "we can do more. Now I can grow and grow."
At a 1,500-strong ceremony commemorating the victims of the cyclone, 15 dissident monks and lay people pondered their options, he said. Should they organize a strike in September to mark the first anniversary of the protests? Hold one to coincide with the auspicious date of 8-8-08, twenty years since the 1988 uprising?
Asked about prospects for an armed struggle, the 88 leader demurred. "We are totally, from beginning to end, peaceful," he said. But the militant monk, he said, chuckling, was a force to be reckoned with.
From house to house, meanwhile, Burmese whisper a new slogan:
"Mandalay, pile of ashes" -- for a fire that the government was barely seen to help extinguish.
"Rangoon, pile of logs" -- for city trees felled by the cyclone and still cluttering the streets.
"Naypyidaw" -- the generals' new capital -- "pile of bones."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/story/2008/07/20/ST2008072000993.html
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