BurmaNet News Jan 1-3, 2005

[Editor]

January 1-3, 2005, Issue # 2627

Dear Readers,

We at BurmaNet wish to express our deep-felt sympathy with our readers and
offer condolences to those that may have been affected by the tsunami
tragedy in 2004.

In solidarity
The Editor, BurmaNet News


INSIDE BURMA
AFP: Myanmar to release 5,500 prisoners on eve of independence anniversary
Daily Telegraph: Seventeen villages swept away
The Guardian: We need just a little, not much
Sunday Telegraph: Our government in Burma is lying when it says just a few
people were killed
Narinjara: A small volcano erupts in Arakan

BUSINESS / MONEY
Xinhua: Tourist arrivals in Myanmar up in first 3 quarters of 2004-05
Xinhua: Myanmar encourages full foreign investment in restaurant business
Xinhua: Myanmar to build deep-sea port to facilitate transit trade

REGIONAL
AP: Thousands of Myanmar migrants are the forgotten tsunami victims

INTERNATIONAL
Washington Post: Experts Fear Burma Was Battered

OPINION / OTHER
Burma News International: India-Burma Relationship in Year 2004
Mizzima: Detained A New Website for Tsunami Information Launched

______________________________________
INSIDE BURMA

January 3, 2005, Agence France Presse
Myanmar to release 5,500 prisoners on eve of independence anniversary

Military-ruled Myanmar on Monday freed hundreds of prisoners on the eve of
independence day and an official said all 5,588 inmates involved in the
latest release would be out of jail by the end of the day.

Some 15 truckloads of prisoners, up to 750 people in all, were driven out
of the gates of notorious Insein prison, Myanmar's largest, and taken to a
nearby football field where they were to be released, an AFP correspondent
witnessed.

"We are going to release all of them today" from dozens of prisons and
labour camps across the country, a prisons department official said.

On Sunday state radio announced that the prisoners were being released on
humanitarian grounds and to coincide with independence day.

Myanmar, then known as Burma, declared independence from colonial British
rule on January 4, 1948.

The release brings to 19,906 the number of prisoners, mainly believed to
be petty criminals, whom authorities say they have set free since November
18.

About 50 dissidents are believed to have been freed by the junta in the
three previous releases, according to opposition parties including Aung
San Suu Kyi's National League for Democracy (NLD).

Political prisoners were not expected to be released in the latest batch,
analysts and opposition groups said.

"If she is released they will bring her to me. I'm not going there to wait
for her," one man in Yangon said, referring to his wife whom he describes
as a dissident.

This week's gesture differs from the previous three mass releases. They
were due to what the junta described as "irregularities" in arrests by a
military intelligence organisation.

>From the beginning of the releases in November the junta has acknowledged
that the inmates may have been wrongly imprisoned by the powerful National
Intelligence Bureau.

The bureau was disbanded in October in a purge that saw its former head,
premier General Khin Nyunt, sacked and placed under house arrest for
corruption.

Khin Nyunt was seen as a pragmatist who favoured limited talks with Aung
San Suu Kyi, a Nobel peace laureate currently under house arrest.

The military has ruled Myanmar since 1962 despite a landslide election
victory by the NLD in 1990 that was never recognised.

_____________________________________

January 3, 2005 The Daily Telegraph
Seventeen villages swept away - Peter Foster

Details of the destruction in Burma are only just beginning to emerge, a
full week after the tsunami struck the highly-secretive country.

If the devastation at the temporary fishing village of Kha Pyat Thaung,
220 miles south-west of the capital, Rangoon, is typical, then the
official death toll - 53 with 21 still missing and 1,000 people homeless -
fails to reveal the true loss. At least 17 villages were swept away. "Our
temporary fishing village took the brunt of a 10ft wave. It was swept
away. All huts were destroyed and 17 people were killed in our village,
mostly young children," said Ko Myo Tun, a 37-year-old fishing contractor.

Temporary fishing villages, built from bamboo staves and thatch, spring up
along the Burmese coastline at this time of year to cash in on the monsoon
fishing season.

When the wave struck the beach was full of children playing in the sunshine.

"As soon as we saw the unusual wave coming towards us we all rushed to
higher ground, grabbing the children," Myo Tun said. "But some off the
unattended ones - 14 in all - were swept away."

Most of the children were aged less than 12. The other three victims were
women.

Several of the fishermen were out to sea at the time of the disaster. "All
our boats overturned," said Maung Maung, 36, whose wife and two daughters
survived. "But we managed to hold on and keep afloat until rescue
arrived."

The United Nations Children's Agency said at least 90 people were killed
in Burma. More than 1,300 were in need of urgent aid.

____________________________________

January 3, 2005, The Guardian
'We need just a little, not much': Burma Secretive state appears to have
escaped worst
Jonathan Watts in Ballack Tang Tang, Burma

The first calls for outside help from the tsunami victims inside the
secretive, military-controlled state of Burma were so impeccably polite
that they were almost apologetic.

"Nobody, including our gov ernment, has given us any support, but
economically we've lost a lot. We'd be very grateful for any assistance.
We need just a little, not much," said Tin Thein, the secretary of Ballack
Tang Tang village.

Speaking to one of the first foreign journalists to arrive in Burma after
the giant waves struck, Tin Thein estimated that more than half of the 590
homes in this coastal community suffered damage or a loss of property.

That no one died is remarkable given that most of the homes are flimsy
shacks constructed on barnacle-covered stilts jutting out into the Andaman
Sea.

But the locals were saved by keen-eyed lookouts who warned them of the
tsunami crucial minutes before it hit at 11.05 (an hour after parts of
Phuket were destroyed 180 miles to the south) and the relative weakness of
the wave compared with the far more devastating impact it had in other
countries.

Several homes were completely lost. Locals say the water rose above their
chests as their belongings floated away. The town chief, Yu Sadad,
estimated the total damage at more than 3m kyat (about £250,000) - a
fortune for such an impoverished community.

"We need all the basics - food, water, blankets, cooking utensils," he
said. However, he said, he did not expect much given the urgent needs
elsewhere in south Asia.

Burma has been the great mystery of the tsunami disaster. Despite its long
coastline, the government says only 90 people have died and 17 villages
have been destroyed. Burmese living overseas, however, say they have heard
far higher casualty figures. Over seas support groups, critical of the
military junta, say the government may be covering up the true scale of
the disaster for political reasons.

The Guardian went to check a rumour of 500 dead in Kawthaung, close to the
southern border with Thailand. But the bustling port town itself appeared
to have escaped almost unscathed. Boatmen thronged the quayside, the
markets were full of women with white face paint, and young children
offered tourists valium and viagra.

Even 12 miles further along the coast near Victoria Point, locals said the
only death they had heard of was a 13-year-old girl who was swept away as
she attempted to cross the now ruined wooden bridge to Ballack Tang Tang.

There were, however, many tales of close escapes and economic damage. At
Sillah village, a cluster of low-lying fragile shacks in a mango swamp,
eight of the 250 houses had fallen to pieces. But all the children escaped
the high waters by climbing two tamarind trees.

"Those tamarind trees saved their lives," said Tua Zar, a local woman. "It
was terrify ing. The wave was as high as that telephone pole. We have
never had water flooding that high through our village."

Tua Zar and others said that their village was one of the worst affected,
which suggests that the worst fears about the disaster may be unfounded -
at least in this particular area.

But the Burmese coastline is long, the communications infrastructure poor
and government control of many communities almost non-existent. The
situation could yet be far worse elsewhere. Help is needed, but it is far
from clear how much.

____________________________________

January 2, 2005, Sunday Telegraph
Our government in Burma is lying when it says just a few people were killed
Damien McElroy, the only western journalist to enter the dictatorship
since the earthquake, reports on the true death toll in the hidden
disaster zone

With panic in his face, the fisherman beckoned me to lie down and hide at
the prow of his longboat. The Burmese navy was patrolling its territorial
waters and looking for interlopers as it sought to preserve the
dictatorship's fiction that only 90 people died in last weekend's
devastating tsunami.

The splintered remains of a wooden bridge just ahead, on the large island
of Palao Ton Ton, told a different story. The fisherman said he saw 50
people swept to their deaths from this bridge alone. The red-and-white
woodwork lay smashed in pieces and a large gap yawned in the middle of the
span. "All the people were just swept away," said the fisherman
hopelessly, his face shaded by a wide-brimmed, khaki hat. He was
sheltering at an inlet across the water when the tsunami struck with
deadly force. He went to help but there were no survivors. "They were on
foot, trying to cross over to the land side," he said. "Look, there are
bits of the bridge still floating in the water. That is all that is left."

In the aftermath of the tsunami the government in Rangoon sealed off parts
of its coastline, fuelling concerns that thousands more people died in the
disaster than it - to the disgust of many ordinary Burmese - has so far
been prepared to acknowledge.

Other fishermen spoke of the terrible loss of life farther up the coast at
Kra Buri, 50 miles north of the border with Thailand . "Many, many homes
were ripped away by the big wave," said one fisherman. "The government is
lying, lying very much, when it says just a few people were killed."

While aid workers believe that Burma escaped the carnage that was visited
on Indonesia, where about 100,000 people are feared to have lost their
lives, they say the death toll is certain to be higher than Burmese
officials have admitted. "It is in the thousands," estimated one foreign
diplomat.

Burma is a closed society and the regime is hostile to outside influences.
Journalists are banned and tight controls are placed on the movements of
aid workers and diplomats. The climate of fear instilled by almost four
decades of military dictatorship is such that any Burmese willing to help
in exposing suffering and loss of life faces a long jail sentence.

Since the tsunami the military's grip has become even tighter. Conscript
soldiers have been deployed on main roads leading out of the southern town
of Kawthaung. They have orders to prevent foreign nationals from
travelling more than two miles from the centre. The naval vessels are
looking for boats that they do not recognise in order to prevent
unauthorised missions landing along the ravaged coastline.

A government official intercepted our vehicle as we left Kawthaung with
the aim of catching a glimpse of the damage wreaked on one of the world's
last dictatorships. "Go back now," he told us. "I cannot give you
permission to leave town and the army checkpoints will stop you. There is
nothing to see. We are handling the situation in our own way."

Instead, and despite the navy patrols, we took to the sea and made a
hazardous boat trip across a mile-long stretch of estuary on the Andaman
Sea.

The fisherman who agreed to take us up the coast to Palao Ton Ton was too
scared for his name to be used. He did not want to stay more than a few
minutes in such a sensitive area with foreigners on board. He turned the
boat back towards Kawthaung and then indicated the lush hillsides where
hundreds of homes still clung precariously to the land at the water's
edge. "This is how we live, all the way up the coast," he said. "Not all
were so lucky to have escaped."

Kawthaung itself survived the worst of the waves because it is protected
by a ring of outlying islands. Even so, boats out in the bay were lifted
30ft on to the main road by the force of the water.

There are many remote islands that no one has yet reached. The fishermen
who ply these waters and know them well tell of widespread devastation on
the Coco Islands and the Mergui Archipelago. The vast island chains, which
belong to Burma, lie in a swathe across the Andaman Sea, north of
Thailand's Phuket peninsula and south of India's Nicobar island chain -
both of which suffered heavy loss of life.

Aid workers in Rangoon have repeatedly pressed the government for
permission to inspect the islands but have been rebuffed. Their population
has never been surveyed and the tribes who live there are renowned for
their amphibian way of life. Estimating the likely death toll would be
very difficult.

"The government says that it is possible to go but say the local fisherman
claim that the tides are particularly high, making sailing unsafe. But we
cannot see any difference," one aid worker said. "It is also impossible to
fly over the area because it is a designated military zone. "

Two days after the tsunami, when neighbouring governments were gratefully
accepting overseas assistance in the mass rescue operation, Rangoon
brushed aside most offers of help, accepting a token pounds 104,000 worth
of aid from communist China.

Brig-Gen Aung Thein, the government's spokesman, declared that only 36
people had died. By the end of the week diplomats were told that the total
had risen to just 90.

Further clues to the extent of the damage come, however, in reports of
foreigners who are missing in the area. Two South African backpackers and
a group of Christian charity workers have not been in contact with friends
and relatives for a week. A Florida-based missionary group has launched an
appeal to rebuild a Burmese village destroyed in the tsunami.

>From the government, however, there is no word

____________________________________

January 2, Narinjara
A small volcano erupts in Arakan

Akyab, January 2: A small volcano erupted in Arakan State just before the
Andaman Sea earthquake on 26 December, said an official living near the
incident.

The volcano is situated in the island of Chaduba, known as Manaung Island,
which is near the central Arakan coast.

The eruption of the volcano lasted only 2 minutes and the eructation went
as far as 1900 feet.

Because of the eructation, 3 islands that were emerged in the sea are now
up 5 feet on the ocean water level.

One local person told Narinjara last 3 days ago that the sizes of the new
islands are large and there were not previously any islands near Manaung
Island.

Government officials are currently inspecting the area of the volcano
eruption and the central government seeks further information regarding
the situation, said a local official.

A similar event happened in the sea 10 miles north of Rambree Island where
a large ball of fire emerged from the sea, which was immediately followed
by the heavy waves that broke out in the sea.

At least 12 people dead in Arakan state including 5 people from Sandoway,
or Thandwe, a town in the southern district of Arakan, due to the heavy
tidal waves. One victim was identified as Ko Ray Win (52) from the Sin
Kaung village, under Sandoway.

There were few extinct volcanoes in Manaung Island and it was the first
time of small volcano eruption in Arakan's recent history.

_____________________________________
BUSINESS / MONEY

January 3, 2005, Xinhua
Tourist arrivals in Myanmar up in first 3 quarters of 2004-05

Tourist arrivals in Myanmar rose by 8.7 percent to 620,000 in the first
three quarters (April-December) of the present fiscal year 2004-05
compared with the same period of the previous year, according to a latest
report of the local news journal "7-Day".

Of the tourists visiting the country during the nine-month period, the
majority went to Thais and normally other visitors came from Western
countries such as Germany, France and the United States.

The increase of the tourist arrivals was also attributed to the abnormal
rise in the number of visitors from Australia, Mexico, Bulgaria and
Beruit, the report said.

Meanwhile, the government has geared up the building of beach resort
hotels in Myanmar's coastal areas, adding 10 such tourism infrastructures
to the country's famous Ngapali beach with nearly 700 rooms available so
far.

Besides, the government has also planned to build 20 more hotels at
Ngwehsaung beach and other similar locations. Ngwehsaung beach resort,
along with Chaunghta, which was thronged with vacationers including
tourists recently, escaped from being smashed by a tsunami triggered by a
latest deadly Indonesian quake.

According to the figures of the Central Statistical Organization, tourist
arrivals in Myanmar stood 269,205 in 2003-04, of which 122,940 entered at
airports, while 145,071 at border points.

Meanwhile, Myanmar has also launched tourism promotional campaigns in some
Asian nations including Japan, Singapore, Malaysia and India to boost
tourist arrivals.

Myanmar so far has 570 hotels with more than 17,200 rooms involving an
investment of about 583 million US dollars plus 33 billion kyats (about
41.2 million dollars), according to official statistics.

Contracted foreign investment in the sector of hotels and tourism has so
far amounted to 1.06 billion dollars since Myanmar started to open to such
investment in late 1988. Of the investment, that in hotel projects
amounted to over 580 million dollars, figures indicate.

_____________________________________

January 2, 2005, Xinhua
Myanmar encourages full foreign investment in restaurant business

Myanmar is encouraging foreign entrepreneurs to make full investment in
restaurant business to help promote its hotels and tourism industry, a
local news journal reported in its latest issue.

Quoting the Ministry of Hotels and Tourism, the Flower News disclosed that
there are few foreign-invested restaurants in Myanmar.

However, there have been plenty of local restaurants with the availability
of foreign food emerging since 1996 when the country first introduced the
Visit Myanmar Year.

According to hotels and tourism statistics, there are restaurants in
Myanmar offering a variety of cuisine such as Chinese, Thai, European,
French, Italian, Indian, Korean, Japanese and Singaporean as well as
Myanmar traditional ones.

Other figures show that contracted foreign investment in the sector of
hotels and tourism has so far amounted to 1.06 billion US dollars since
Myanmar started to open to such investment in late 1988. Of the
investment, that in hotel projects amounted to over 580 million dollars.

The Central Statistical Organization's figures show that tourist arrivals
in Myanmar stood at 269,205 in 2003-04. The figures rose over 20 percent
to 315,823 in the first half (April- September) alone of the present
fiscal year 2004-05 compared with the same period of the previous year.

_____________________________________

January 2, Xinhua
Myanmar to build deep-sea port to facilitate transit trade

Myanmar is to build a deep-sea port in Kyaukphyu, western coastal Rakhine
state, to facilitate transit trade through the country, the Flower News
journal reported in its latest issue.

The Kyaukphyu seaport will serve as a transit trade center for goods
destined to port cities of Chittagong, Yangon and Calcutta.

Kyaukphyu also stands at a point on land route connecting southwestern
China's Kunming city with Myanmar's Sittwe.

The building of the seaport in conjunction with an overall road link of
the two countries, outlined as Kunming-Mandalay- Kyaukphyu- Sittwe, is
under feasibility study, the Ministry of Construction was quoted as
saying.

Kyaukphyu, which has a water depth of 20 meters and is capable of
accommodating 4,000 TEU container vessel, will also connect another road
link known as Taungkok-Maei-Kyaukphyu.

Once the 1,943-kilometer Kunming-Kyuakphu road is connected, Myanmar will
be benefited from transit trade in terms of revenue from goods exported to
China with availability of job opportunities in the region.

The Kunming-Sittwe development road plan was discussed at workshops held
in Mandalay and Kunming respectively in April 2002, also involving experts
of Germany and India.

According to other official sources, as part of the country's
infrastructural construction, the Kyaukphyu deep-sea port will also be
equipped with offshore and deep-sea fishing industry in addition to sea
lobster farming.

Kyaukphyu is an area where there exists oil and gas resource potential.

Meanwhile, under an economic cooperation strategy (ECS) of Cambodia, Laos,
Myanmar and Thailand, Myanmar and Thailand are also building a deep-sea
port at Dawei, southern Tanintharyi division.

The seaport project and a Dawei- Kachanburi road link are being carried
out in one package together with a 1,360-kilometer trilateral highway
project between India, Myanmar and Thailand.

Observers here said, on completion of the project within two years, it
will greatly push Myanmar's transit trade.

_____________________________________
REGIONAL

January 3, 2005, Associated Press
Thousands of Myanmar migrants are the forgotten tsunami victims -
Rungrawee C. Pinyorat

Thai survivors of Asia's tsunami disaster have complained they are
second-class victims, with foreign tourists getting the best care. Now aid
officials say a third class of victims in Thailand has emerged: migrant
workers from Myanmar.

Thousands of laborers from impoverished Myanmar, also known as Burma, were
living in the resort area of Phang Nga at the time of the catastrophe
after crossing the Thai border for better-paying jobs on construction
sites and fishing boats.

But aid workers say little is known about what happened to many of them.

"There has been no publicity at all about Burmese workers. They have been
totally forgotten," said Somyos Leetrakul of World Vision, a group that
works with migrants, as he traveled deep into forested hills to assist
surviving migrant workers.

More than 5,000 people were killed in Thailand in the catastrophe, and
officials say the death toll could reach 8,000. The brunt of the disaster
was suffered in Phang Nga and the resort island of Phuket, which is
popular with foreign tourists.

Myanmar migrants, many of them illegal, were particularly vulnerable, aid
officials say.

Many of the workers were living in flimsy, makeshift shelters near
construction sites, while fishing crews mostly lived in Ban Nam Khem, an
impoverished village of more than 5,000 people which was completely
destroyed by the tsunami.

Officials are unclear about how many Myanmar citizens were in the area or
how many have died. A total of 5,139 workers from Myanmar were registered
with the Labor Ministry, but many others, particularly those here
illegally, were not. So far there are no confirmed Myanmar citizens
counted among the dead.

Somyos said he and a colleague have found 500 migrant workers from Myanmar
living in the hills in deep, forest-like rubber plantations - with little
outside assistance - after fleeing the waves.

"When the water washed up the beach, they ran away. Some of them ran away
deeply into the forest," Somyos said.

"We have to help stitch their wounds because there are not enough
doctors," he said.

Somyos said he feared infectious diseases could spread among the migrants,
who are living without clean water or toilets.

"They urgently need food and water. We will bring 600 packages of
assistance to distribute to the workers today," he said Monday.

Dr. Pornlert Chanruang, director of the Takuapa Hospital, said that out of
1,500 people who have received treatment from the hospital, 65 are from
Myanmar.

Chuwong Saengkhong, an aid worker in the adjacent province of Ranong, said
some 600 workers from Myanmar had contacted immigration officials in the
province in a bid to return home.

"They are terrified and want to go home," he said.

The workers told him that many of their fellows died, including children.

Thailand, however, would face problems if all the survivors from Myanmar
left, he said. Almost all the laborers in the affected areas are from
Myanmar, and their departure would hobble reconstruction, he said.

_____________________________________
INTERNATIONAL

January 2, 2005 Washington Post
Experts Fear Burma Was Battered - Ellen Nakashima

The tsunami last week probably killed more people in the southernmost area
of Burma than were reported dead by the country's ruling military junta,
but the region has not been independently surveyed because of tightly
restricted access, experts say.

A team from Doctors Without Borders and the International Committee for
the Red Cross hopes this week to tour the islands off the country's
southern coast in the Andaman Sea, where damage is believed to be great. A
U.N. team also is trying to survey southern Burma.

"I think it's very reasonable to assume that there's been quite
significant death and destruction caused by the tsunami in Burma, just as
it has elsewhere," said Tony Banbury, the World Food Program's regional
director in Asia.

Burmese officials have reported that 53 people were killed across the
country, which has 1,650 miles of coast on the Indian Ocean. In
comparison, two of Burma's neighbors, Thailand and India, each lost
thousands. And in Indonesia, 94,081 are confirmed dead.

Steven N. Ward, a geophysicist at the University of California at Santa
Cruz, created a computer model of the earthquake that triggered the
tsunami. According to the model, southern Burma "should have been hit
equally" as hard as southern Thailand, he said.

"This earthquake was 1,000 kilometers long," Ward added. "The aftershocks
broke at least as far. I see no scientific reason why a tsunami wouldn't
hit equally strong a few hundred kilometers north" of southern Thailand.

Burma's government, run by a reclusive clique of military generals, is
notoriously reticent about reporting on natural disasters and has been
dismissive of foreign aid.

A government newspaper, the New Light of Myanmar, reported Saturday that
17 villages were destroyed. The same article said that officials toured
two beach resorts and noted that they were "thronged with vacationers
including tourists, and everything was going well."

In the first assessment of the damage in Burma, a team from the World Food
Program and UNICEF found that in the Irrawaddy Division, near the capital,
Rangoon, "only two of 26 townships suffered serious damages," and that
10,000 people were in need of immediate food aid. Twenty-nine people were
killed and 2,800 people displaced there, according to the survey,
completed Saturday.

The Irrawaddy Division was probably not hit as hard as southern Burma,
experts said.

Banbury, of the World Food Program, said the government turned down his
organization's initial offer to help assess damage and assist survivors.
The group eventually was granted permission to enter Irrawaddy.

The biggest problem in Irrawaddy is a lack of clean drinking water,
according to the World Food Program. The few tanks used to collect
rainwater have been destroyed, and villagers cannot afford to buy drinking
water, it said.

Staff researcher Meg Smith contributed to this report.

_____________________________________
OPINION / OTHER

January 3, 2005, Mizzima via Burma News International
India-Burma Relationship in Year 2004 - Surajit Khaund

It was an eventful year for India and Burma.

Both countries had come closer to further cementing their relations.  In 
the field of trade both countries agreed to increase the volume of trade
up to US$1 billion by 2006.  The new Congress-led Indian government
appeared more pro-active towards Burma as it initiated many steps
including extending a $7 million credit line to the crisis-hit Burma.
Though India had not been able
to get the Burmese market through the land routes, it opened a new trade
point (Rih) across the border.

The year also marked the visit of State Peace and Development Council
(SPDC)Chairman Than Shwe along with senior ministers of the Junta. Than
Shawe had a series of meetings with the heads of Indian companies and
sought their investment in the country. The year 2004 will probably be
remembered by Burma and other ASEAN countries for the famous India-ASEAN
car rally.

The rally, organized to strengthen relations among ASEAN countries,
received a positive response from the people. Late in the year, to gear up
more trade, the Indian Commerce Ministry relaxed norms on currency,
allowing Indian traders to accept all currency during export and import
with Burma.

After the U.S. economic sanctions the Junta had to use euros. This move
was widely appreciated by the trade bodies.

On the other hand, in the field of drug trafficking, which had been
creating a serious problem over the years between the countries, both
India and Burma had vowed to fight more vigorously by involving
enforcement agencies.

The two countries had signed an accord deciding to fight jointly. India
had also provided new equipment to Burma to take action against the drug
menace. Similarly, for tackling the insurgency problem,SPDC Chairman Than
Shwe assured full cooperation with the Indian government to root
out militants taking shelter in bordering areas of the country. His
assurance brought a sigh of relief to the Indian Home Ministry, which has
been fighting insurgency for the last several decades.

Though several Indian opposition parties had been mounting pressure on the
Congress-I to take pro-democracy steps, the present Indian government did
not pay any attention, rather it seemed busy appeasing the Junta, which
evoked sharp repurcussions among opposition parties.
India wanted to satisfy the Junta for two reasons; the growing Chinese
influence and the insurgency problem. To overcome these problem, the
Indian Government ignored the pro-democracy movement.

By and large, the complete year was smooth for both India and Burma.

_____________________________________

January 5, 2005 Mizzima
A New Website for Tsunami Information Launched

As a solidarity with Asia, a new website has just been launched to gather
all the information available about the Tsunami disaster in Asia.

The website is www.tsunami-asia.info

It is devoted to all those who feel concerned and mostly to the people who
look for news about a displaced person or who have information to give
about a victim.  The website is open to all witnesses.  A chapter is
available for proposals of actions to help local populations.

This is a non-commercial website, independent from any organisation or
state. It does not receive any financial contributions.  French version is
also available in the website.

The website is also looking for any information about Tsunami disaster in
Burma, where the media is tightly controlled by the ruling military
generals.

The NGOs and International relief agencies working in Burma are not freely
allowed by the regime to get access to the affected areas and for relief
work.

If you have any information about the Tsunami effects in Burma, please
contact: Valerie Bonneau (France), contact at tsunami-asia.info