BurmaNet News, July 6, 2006

[Editor]

July 6, 2006 Issue # 2998


INSIDE BURMA
Mizzima: Monks should advise Than Shwe: Amyotheryei Win Naing
Irrawaddy: Supreme Court to hear appeal of jailed Burmese lawyer

ON THE BORDER
Irrawaddy: Burmese child labor in Thailand could take 10 years to end

HEALTH / AIDS
Irrawaddy: AIDS: Burma’s shadowy mass export

BUSINESS / TRADE
International Herald Tribune: Trade turns Mekong into a river of plenty

REGIONAL
Xinhua: Singapore institute to conduct tourism diploma course in Myanmar

INTERNATIONAL
IPS: Japan: soft policy on Burma under fire
Irrawaddy: Stormy air waves at VOA

____________________________________
INSIDE BURMA

July 6, Mizzima News
Monks should advise Than Shwe: Amyotheryei Win Naing - Nga Ngai

The self-styled national politician Win Naing has called on Burma's
Buddhist monks to use their status to advise military leader senior
general Than Shwe against corruption and unfair taxation.

In a letter dated July 3, Amyotheryei Win Naing called on Burma's Buddhist
monks to ask Than Shwe to take action against corruption and mafia-style
governance.

"Today, Burma has been deteriorating politically, economically and
socially . . . To lighten the pain of the Burmese people, only your
holiness monks and senior general Than Shwe can do it now," the letter
said.

"Your holiness monks should give guidance and senior general Than Shwe can
implement it."

Buddhist monks played a key role in the 1988 popular uprising in Burma,
but after many were slaughtered by the military regime few remained
engaged in the struggle for democracy.

Win Naing also called on Burma's leading monks to advise the setting up of
a "Nation Building Welfare Organisation" comprising intellectuals and
scholars, which would work to solve the economic crisis in the country.

"I am not asking the generals to hand over the power to some one, I am
just asking to solve the current problems and troubles of the people
inside the country," Win Naing told Mizzima.

"If you go to some new towns such as Hlaing Thayar, Shwe Pyi Tha, you will
see people are feeling shortage of food and they are starving, they seemed
to be dead in one or two months, they are very poor."

Win Naing said that since Buddhist monks were so revered by the military's
top leaders, he thought Than Shwe was more likely to respond to their
advice than to international or regional pressure.

U Pyinyawara, head of New Delhi-based 8888 monastery, said he agreed with
Win Naing.

"I hope the monks should involve in the current Burma's political
situation because we are doing for the sake and the benefit of our people
and the country."

____________________________________

July 6, Irrawaddy
Supreme Court to hear appeal of jailed Burmese lawyer

Burma’s Supreme Court will hear the appeal of jailed lawyer Aye Myint on
July 22, his legal representative has said, the first time the case will
have been subject to a formal review. The appeal had previously been
scheduled for June 20 but was postponed without any official reason given.
Aye Myint—who recently had his bar license withdrawn by the Burmese
government—was arrested in October last year after he took a land
confiscation case in Pegu Division to the International Labour
Organization. He is serving a seven-year sentence in Pegu prison for
“spreading false information.” The ILO in its annual conference in Geneva
last month urged the junta to release Aye Myint before the end of July on
the threat of strong action, including the possible referral of Burma’s
case to the International Court of Justice in The Hague. Another Burmese
imprisoned after successfully prosecuting government officials for
instigating forced labor, Su Su Nway, was released on June 6 after the
junta came under pressure from the ILO prior to last month’s conference,
in which Burma’s failure to eradicate forced labor was one of the main
points of discussion.

____________________________________
ON THE BORDER

July 6, Irrawaddy
Burmese child labor in Thailand could take 10 years to end - Sai Silp

Up to half of all child laborers in Thailand are Burmese and many are
forced into work by their parents, studies have revealed.

Some are working with dangerous agricultural chemicals hazardous to
health. But a senior Thai government minister said it could be another ten
years before the problem is eradicated.

The high incidence of Burmese child laborers was unearthed in several
sample research projects covering six Thai provinces, from Chiang Rai in
the north down to Songkhla in the south.

The research was debated on Thursday at the start of a two-day conference
in Bangkok, organized by the International Labour Organization and
Thailand’s Ministry of Labour, aimed at creating strategies to deal with
the problem.

“In five provinces, except Udonthani, the study shown that child laborers
is migrant children from neighboring country, especially Burma. Mainly
they start with helping their parents to work because they don’t have
opportunity to go to school,” said the ILO’s Panadda Palapol.

In Samut Sakorn, Tak, Chiang Rai provinces there are more than 130,000
legal Burmese migrant workers. Panadda said she believes the solution lies
in providing education opportunities for immigrant children.  Related
authorities should help to protect them from the worst working
environments.

Penpisut Jaisanit, a Chiang Rai Rajabhat University researcher who
operated a study in the Chiang Rai province border with Shan State said
most child laborers were ethnic children from Burma.

“We found that the ethnic children are forced to beg by their parents,
especially in Mae Sai. If they cannot find enough money they are punished.
Some girls under 15 work in entertainment places and sexual harassment at
the age when they should be in school,” said Penpisut.

The results of a separate study in Tak province’s districts of Pob Phra
and Mae Sot border with Karen State revealed child laborers working with
dangerous pesticides and fertilizers. However, Thailand’s Minister of
Labor Somsak Thepsutin suggested it would be another ten years before the
worst forms of child labor are eradicated in Thailand. He expressed
concern that the relevant authorities often face difficulties in reaching
migrant children.

____________________________________
HEALTH / AIDS

July 2006, Irrawaddy
AIDS: Burma’s shadowy mass export - Andrew Marshall

Will ignorance, incompetence and international indifference allow a
treatable disease to decimate a Burmese generation and engulf eastern
Asia?

In an impoverished Rangoon suburb, at the frontline of Burma’s losing
battle against AIDS, is a shabby, one-room private clinic which serves
more than 500 HIV-positive patients. Its only doctor, who requests
anonymity for fear of arrest, does not dispense life-saving
anti-retroviral drugs (ARV). A month of these drugs costs the equivalent
of about $40, more than a month’s wages for an average patient. Instead,
the doctor has concocted her own treatment, a dark, pungent paste made
from local herbs and fruits which, for half the price of anti-retrovirals
and often free, she dispenses by the spoonful from an old jar. “Most
patients can’t afford Western medicines,” she explains. “I try to give
them cheap and effective traditional medicine. My drugs are very effective
and have no side-effects.”

Most of her male patients are truck drivers and migrant laborers; the
women are mostly sex workers returning from neighboring Thailand, or,
increasingly, from Burma’s own sex industry, which has thrived under the
military dictatorship which has ruled this nation since 1962. With scanty
scientific evidence, the doctor claims her treatment boosts her patients’
CD4 counts (a way of testing the immune system’s strength) and prolongs
their lives for “three or four years.” But she also admits that “eight or
nine” of her patients die every month—tuberculosis, malaria, typhoid, or
diarrhea usually provide the coup de grâce, she says—leaving behind
infected partners and parentless children. “We have so many orphans living
with grandparents or other relatives,” she says.

In 2005 an estimated 360,000 people in Burma were living with HIV,
according to the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS. These are
hardly African levels yet, but rates are increasing dramatically and
Burma’s generals are doing nothing to stop them. Among ethnic minorities
such as the Shan, an estimated 9 percent of men are HIV-positive; so, in
some areas, are a staggering 96 percent of injecting drug-users. These
rates are exacerbated by public ignorance, widespread poverty, burgeoning
prostitution and drug abuse, lack of medicines, and the collapse of a
once-respectable healthcare system under military misrule. “You
essentially have the perfect storm, the perfect set of conditions for an
explosive and sustained HIV epidemic,” says Chris Beyrer, director of the
Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School’s Center for Public Health and Human Rights
in the US, and co-author of a recent report on the spread of serious
infectious diseases in Burma.

This plague is not just a national tragedy, but also a grave and growing
regional threat—including to regional superpower China. Burma is the
world’s second-largest producer of opium after Afghanistan, and
four-fifths of China’s HIV/AIDS cases can be traced back to Burma along
heroin-trafficking routes, estimates the United Nations Office of Drugs
and Crime. Genetic fingerprinting has also proved that Burma’s
heroin-users and sex workers have spread the disease throughout Asia,
reported the New York-based Council of Foreign Relations (CFR) last July.
“With the exception of one serious outbreak in China, virtually all the
strains of HIV now circulating in Asia—from Manipur, India, all the way to
Vietnam, from mid-China all the way to down Indonesia—come from a single
country,” said CFR senior fellow Laurie Garrett, the report’s author.
“This evidence suggests that Myanmar may be the greatest contributor of
new types of HIV in the world.” This genetic evidence is a “smoking gun,
fingering Burma,” Garrett continued. “The Burmese HIV contribution to much
of Asia poses a clear security threat to the region.”

Perplexingly, however, the international community seems to have found
this health threat less than compelling. Indeed, last August the
Geneva-based Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria announced
it was withdrawing funding from Burma worth almost $100 million over five
years. The Fund blamed travel restrictions and other obstructions by the
junta which, despite harsh US sanctions and softly-softly Asian diplomacy,
remains firmly in power.

The Fund’s Burma program ends in about October, but a new European
Union-led disease-fighting scheme is now due to take over (see separate
panel, Europe Fills the Vacuum, Page 22).

But another potential epidemic could finally give Burma’s AIDS crisis the
attention it demands, and galvanize the world into new diplomatic efforts
to tackle a brutal regime: avian influenza. In early March the H5N1 virus
was detected among poultry near Mandalay, Burma’s second largest city.
Within a month, more than a 100 outbreaks of bird flu were reported across
the country, with an official of the UN’s Food and Agriculture
Organization saying the situation was “more serious than we imagined.”

The Bush Administration is worried. Post-Katrina, it is terrified of
botching the response to avian influenza, says Chris Beyrer. “They want to
get it right,” he says. The virus promises to put the health of
long-suffering Burmese on the US radar in a way AIDS never could. “Here’s
a country that now has more than a hundred outbreaks, doesn’t have a
laboratory infrastructure, has really closed down the public health
system, won’t allow open access to areas by international organizations,
and borders Bangladesh, India, China and Thailand,” says Beyrer. “Hello?
This is your worst nightmare.”

Burma’s secretive rulers did not publicly admit their country had an HIV
problem until 2001. “HIV/AIDS is a national cause,” declared intelligence
chief Gen Khin Nyunt, who has since been purged. “If we ignore it, it will
destroy entire races.” The following year the US State Department warned:
“Unless checked, the disease threatens to destroy a generation of young
Burmese, much as it is destroying several societies in Africa.” Yet by
2004—and while the regime spent millions of dollars annually on weapons
for its 400,000-strong military—its entire budget for combating HIV/AIDS
was just $22,000, reported the International Crisis Group. This in a
nation of over 50 million people. The ICG stressed that the epidemic
“could undermine the basis for economic development and health services in
the country for decades to come. This situation is urgent enough to
require immediate action by all who have the power to make a difference.”

Educational programs are few and far between in Burma, and largely funded
by the few foreign aid agencies allowed to operate in Burma. Popular
awareness of HIV/AIDS has been raised mainly by the increasingly
hard-to-ignore number of deaths: few neighborhoods, rural or urban, remain
untouched by the epidemic. People living with HIV/AIDS are socially
shunned. A magazine editor tells how his brother was evicted from his
apartment building when the landlord discovered he was infected. In rural
areas, villagers refuse to bathe or wash clothes in the same rivers which
HIV sufferers use. In the countryside, bodies are often burnt on pyres of
tires, in the belief that only the intense heat of burning rubber will
kill the virus and prevent the corpse from infecting others.

The junta has not only delayed tackling HIV/AIDS, but also obstructed
private attempts to do so. Last August, citing licensing irregularities,
the junta ordered the closure of a popular clinic called Golden Heart in
the northern town of Monywa. Funded by private businesses, the clinic
provided free medi cal treatment to hundreds of poor people, especially to
HIV patients. The authorities were jealous of the clinic’s success, a
Monywa resident told the Democratic Voice of Burma radio station. “They
can’t provide a single thing to the poor,” he said. He added that clinic
staff had been threatened with six-month prison sentences, and donors with
three-year sentences.

The xenophobic regime also places harsh restrictions on overseas aid
agencies. “The junta basically regards all foreign aid-workers as spies,”
says a European diplomat in Rangoon. To secure travel permits for
non-Burmese aid-workers to leave the capital Rangoon takes three weeks,
often much longer. “We joke that we’re all under city arrest,” says Willy
de Maere, the Rangoon chief of the Asian Harm Reduction Network, which
distributes free syringes to injecting drug users.

The Burmese are now doing what they can to help themselves.  Many sink
into debt buying anti-retroviral treatments. “Some people have sold their
houses and land to buy ARVs,” says a Mandalay doctor. “We have to do
something ourselves, whether or not the Global Fund is here,” adds a
Rangoon social worker. With her friends and colleagues, she is raising
funds to build a home for children orphaned (and, in some cases, infected)
by HIV/AIDS. “There are hundreds of children [affected by AIDS],” she
says. “We might be able to house 20 or 30. It depends how much money we
raise.” Without foreign backers, she is struggling to raise the $7,000
required, or pay for the children’s medical treatment; it is enough for
now to give them a roof over their heads, she says. Fearful of government
meddling, the social worker says the home will be built without revealing
its actual function to health or social welfare officials, for fears they
will halt the project. The key is to get the home up and running, she
explains. “Then we can tell officials, ‘Recognize and help us—or take the
children and treat them yourself.’ This they won’t do.”

HIV is not the only disease ravaging Burma and imperiling neighboring
China, India and Thailand. Burma also has one of the world’s worst
tuberculosis problems, with 97,000 new cases diagnosed each year and
multi-drug-resistant strains flourishing. About 40 percent of Burma’s
population is thought to be infected with TB. Equally staggering, over
half of all Asia’s malaria deaths in 2005 occurred in benighted Burma,
where the disease is the leading cause of death in children under five.
Poverty and malnutrition compound the problem: a quarter of Burmese live
on less than $1 a day, and a third of under-fives are malnourished.

Despite all this, Burma receives less humanitarian aid than almost every
other poor country. Even Cuba—which, like Burma, is the target of sweeping
US sanctions—gets double the per-capita aid. The Global Fund’s withdrawal
was another blow. Under the five-year program, some 5,000 patients were
due to receive ARVs, from an estimated 45,000 who need them; it would also
have funded HIV testing in a country where last year only 28,000 tests
were conducted. “People are going to die because of this decision,”
Charles Petrie, the UN Development Program chief in Burma, told the Los
Angeles Times in December. And not just people in Burma, as the Global
Fund itself acknowledged in a statement explaining the withdrawal.
“Together with the relatively porous borders with key neighbors,
especially Thailand, this means that, without resolute intervention, these
diseases”—AIDS, TB, malaria—“could soon reach catastrophic proportions,
affecting the entire region. This could endanger gains in controlling
these diseases in other countries as well.”

Chief among those countries is, of course, China. Its infection rate is
also rising. Last year there were 25,000 deaths and 70,000 new cases,
transmitted primarily through injecting drug use and sex, according to a
joint survey by China’s ministry of health, the World Health Organization
and UNAIDS. Yunnan, which borders Burma, is among the worst-hit provinces.
The so-called Burma Road, a trade lifeline which links the Yunnanese
capital of Kunming with the northern Burmese city of Mandalay, is a major
transmission route, an “AIDS highway” plied by thousands of truckers every
day. In short, Burma is fueling an epidemic in a country too huge and
populous for the world to safely ignore.

This is why analysts like Laurie Garrett at CFR argue that AIDS must be
addressed in national and regional security terms, not as only a health
problem. “Currently, HIV is talked about as only a health problem, and
that means that it’s relegated to the lowest tiers of priority in most
governments,” she said. “And it also means that the notion of obligations
of states to respond to an epidemic—not only domestically but
regionally—is somehow written off, somehow ignored.”

In a December 2004 editorial, The Washington Post, citing the regional
threat posed by Burma’s unchecked HIV epidemic, noted: “If ever the United
Nations faced a challenge to its relevance, this would be the moment.” A
year later, in a closed-door meeting described as “informal,” UN
Undersecretary-General for Political Affairs Ibrahim Gambari briefed the
15-member Security Council on Burma’s deteriorating record on human rights
and health, including its AIDS epidemic. But despite arguments by the US
and Britain that the junta poses a clear threat to international peace and
security, Burma has stayed off the Council’s official agenda due to two
other permanent members, China and Russia.

Still, says Laurie Garrett, this UN briefing was “significant,” although
its impact on Burma’s generals is hard to gauge. “Do they even care what
the UN says or thinks?” she wonders. “Now that they’ve moved the capital
it’s getting harder to have any idea of what’s going on in their minds.”
Last November Burma’s generals moved to a newly built seat of government
at Pyinmana, nearly 400 miles from Rangoon, apparently prompted partly by
the advice of soothsayers—junta chief Snr-Gen Than Shwe is deeply
superstitious—and partly by paranoid but long-standing fears of a US
military invasion.

In the 1990s, while still under military rule, Thailand launched a
much-emulated anti-AIDS campaign which included huge public-awareness
programs and the promotion of 100-percent condom use. “Thailand was pretty
close to being a police state,” notes Laurie Garrett, “but ironically
waged the most successful battle against HIV that we have ever seen by any
country.”

That battle was prompted by high infection rates among young Thai military
conscripts. Burma is not waging a similar campaign, despite plenty of
evidence that infection rates among its troops are the same or worse.
Orlando de Guzman, a journalist with US-based Public Radio International’s
“The World” program, interviewed a former Burmese army doctor whose job
was to discharge dozens of HIV-positive soldiers. They received “no
anti-retroviral drug, no care [or] support at all,” said the doctor, and
their bed in a large military HIV ward was immediately occupied by new
arrivals.

One partial success story in Burma is condoms. More than 40 million were
sold last year, compared to only 2.6 million in 1996. The most popular
brand—called Aphaw meaning “companion”—is imported and sold cheaply by
Population Services International, a non-profit group based in Washington.
PSI has also produced television series and films to raise awareness about
condom use. This would have been almost unthinkable a decade ago: Burma is
a conservative society, and condoms have long been associated with
prostitutes and promiscuity. But it is still a long way from Thailand’s
hugely successful “100-percent” condom campaign in the 1990s.

Complicating the global response to Burma’s health crises is a bitter and
unresolved debate over humanitarian aid to the country. Vocal
pro-democracy groups outside the country argue that the presence of
foreign aid groups only legitimizes an evil regime. Kentucky senator Mitch
McConnell campaigned for the Global Fund’s withdrawal—a withdrawal Brian
Williams, the head of UNAIDS in Burma, likened to withholding food from
refugee camps. Even Laurie Garrett, whose report dramatically underscored
the urgency of tackling the epidemic, compares the efforts of UN agencies
and foreign aid groups as “putting Band Aids on a terrible, gushing
wound.” Their presence might assuage international guilt, she says, but it
also removes the “burden of responsibility” from the junta. When it is
suggested these arguments will mean little to sick Burmese, Garrett
replies, “This is ugly stuff, there’s no doubt about it. My heart breaks
for anybody who is trying to deal with HIV/AIDS in Burma right now.”

Or, indeed, with bird flu. Like AIDS, H5N1 is “a transnational issue that
underscores why Burma not responding to the health of its people matters
for everybody else,” explains Chris Beyrer. Surprisingly, perhaps, the
junta cooperated with the Food and Agriculture Organization by, for
example, promptly sending specimens to Bangkok for testing. But it waited
nine days before telling its own people, and still fails to adequately
relay the information that could check an avian epidemic and prevent human
deaths. Reliable information about bird flu in Burma is still—as The
Bangkok Post put it, choosing its simile carefully—“as rare as hen’s
teeth.”

One Western government has sent 1,000 biohazard suits and other equipment
to Burma. That the junta should accept such an offer from a sworn enemy is
evidence that at least someone in the regime understands that Burma cannot
fight bird flu alone. For example, surveillance is hamstrung by a
laboratory infrastructure which is “dangerously decrepit,” notes Beyrer,
who finds it striking that bird flu was first detected in Mandalay—“just
about the only place where there’s a functioning laboratory.” He adds:
“Chillingly, Rangoon and Mandalay are also the only places where there
appears to be screening for blood donors.”

The bird flu outbreaks could conceivably persuade the junta to relax the
travel restrictions which have hampered all humanitarian work in Burma. It
would not be a moment too soon. The “great wave of AIDS illnesses and
deaths” has yet to strike countries such as Burma, notes Laurie Garrett. A
foreign aid official quoted in The Washington Post estimated that the
disease will kill a tenth of young Burmese in the next decade. In the
Rangoon suburb where the traditional doctor has her clinic, they are
already dying “like leaves falling from a tree,” says a former resident.
The doctor herself makes no mention of AIDS on death certificates, because
temples in this predominantly Buddhist country often refuse to cremate its
victims. “They’re uneducated,” she says of her dirt-poor clientele. “If
they get [HIV], they are ashamed to tell relatives or neighbors. They hide
it, and they die quickly. They die within months.”

Andrew Marshall is the author of a book on Burma called “The Trouser
People,” published by Counterpoint in 2003.

____________________________________
BUSINESS / TRADE

July 6, The International Herald Tribune
Trade turns Mekong into a river of plenty - Vaudine England

Bangkok: In a small village in the north of Thailand, about an hour's
drive outside Chiang Mai, the farmers are happily surprised at what
happened with the garlic they cultivated in the dry season, from November
to April.

The crop this year attracted prices of 30 baht to 40 baht, or about 75
cents to $1 , per kilogram, or 2.2 pounds, double the price of previous
years.

As is so often the case in this part of the world, the answer lay in
China, hundreds of kilometers to the north.

Thanks to expanded port facilities along the Mekong River, and a free
trade pact between Thailand and China, fruit and vegetables from China
often make Thai production uneconomic. This year, however, local Thai
officials say they think that floods destroyed a lot of garlic in China,
cutting the imports from there.

The expanded docks and offices at Chiang Saen in northern Thailand mean
that such changes in trade patterns affect lives more immediately than
ever before. Chinese garlic, onions, cabbages, fruit and much more now
dominate supermarkets across Southeast Asia, partly because of those
enlarged ports along the Mekong.

Five years ago, Chiang Saen was a sleepy town, its ancient city walls and
temples attracting the occasional tourist. Now the waterfront is heaving.
Chinese restaurants appear seemingly overnight, and shipping agency
offices are mushrooming, as are tree-shaded benches for laborers. They
need a break from the otherwise constant loading of ships plying the
Mekong to and from China.

The ships are distinctive, with portraits of Mao Zedong and Deng Xiao-ping
in some captains' cabins. Chinese wives and children are busy on the upper
deck, hanging out the washing, playing with water, oblivious to the
sweating crowds below. At ground level, Chinese bosses oversee gangs of
workers who are Thai, Burmese or hill-tribe men, shouting a cacophony of
languages and taking a quick nip from bottles hidden in cloth shoulder
bags when they can.

Loading is still carried out by human sweat and ingenuity, as boxes of
fruit slide down planks into ships' holds. Officials say that 200 million
baht of goods passes through Chiang Saen annually, but putting accurate
numbers on this trade is difficult.

New numbers recently produced by researchers in Chiang Mai, working under
the Indochina Media Memorial Foundation, showed that imports from China
through Chiang Saen more than doubled to 1.22 billion baht in 2005 from
592.4 million baht in 2003. Exports through Chiang Saen rose to 3.86
billion baht in 2005 from 3.31 billion baht in 2003.

Some of the changes are duplicated farther along the Mekong at Chiang
Khong, another historic town finding new life as a river port. Although
affected by the burgeoning China trade, Chiang Khong handles more of the
direct trade across the river to Laos.

Chiang Saen has reaped the benefits from China's blasting of rapids in the
Mekong. That has allowed ships of a deeper draft to make the one-day or
two-day journey upriver from Chiang Saen into Sipsong Panna, or
Xishuangbanna, in the southwestern Chinese province of Yunnan. China's
Mekong trade ports include Jinghong, Menghan and Guanlei.

''I was skeptical about the river route from China,'' said Andrew Walker,
author of ''The Legend of the Golden Boat,'' a 1999 examination of trade
patterns across the borders of Thailand, Laos, China and Myanmar. After
all, Dutch, French, Thai and Chinese have been trying for hundreds of
years to make the Mekong navigable.

''The key development since then is that the river traffic has become much
busier,'' said Walker, who is a fellow at the Research School of Pacific
and Asian Studies at Australian National University. ''China's blasting of
the rapids north of Chiang Saen has facilitated far more ship arrivals and
greater trade.''

Trade between Thailand and Laos, from Chiang Khong to Luang Prabang, has
intensified old trading links and continued longstanding patterns, Walker
said. But the ''large-scale river trade down from China is fundamentally
new,'' he said. ''This Thai-China shipping is an order of magnitude bigger
than anything before.''

____________________________________
REGIONAL

July 6, Xinhua General News Service
Singapore institute to conduct tourism diploma course in Myanmar

Yangon: The Nanyang Institute and Management (NIM) of Singapore will
conduct its first training course for diploma of tourism and hospitality
management in Myanmar, the local Voice journal reported in this week's
issue.

The Myanmar Accounting Academy (MAA), which is NIM's partnership institute
in Yangon, will conduct an eight-month course in Myanmar starting later
this month and the remaining course will be given in Singapore until the
end of the course, sources with the MAA was quoted as saying.

The course in Myanmar will cover introduction to tourism and hospitality,
basic airfare and ticketing, destinations and product studies and customer
service quality, while those in Singapore will include property management
system, global distribution system, restaurant services, beverage studies
and housekeeping operation.

Successful Myanmar students will be offered job opportunities at 30
international-level hotels in Singapore as well as those in the United
States and New Zealand which have inter-related relations with the
institute, the sources said.

The students who are entitled with diplomas may also continue to pursue
for advanced degree course studies in Singapore, the sources added.

Meanwhile, according to another local news report, the Nanyang Polytechnic
is also offering increased number of Myanmar students scholarships for
diplomas on nursing for the academic year of 2006- 07 after 35 students
won such scholarships in 2005-06.

Besides, businessmen of Myanmar and Singapore have agreed to specially
enhance the cooperation in the field of education, initiating a memorandum
of understanding, the first of its kind, between the Union of Myanmar
Federation of Chambers of Commerce and Industry (UMFCCI) and the Singapore
Business Federation to step up cooperation in the sector by opening
schools, earlier reports said.

Moreover, Singapore has also been helping Myanmar in the development of
human resources by setting up a training center in Yangon as part of its
program to assist the four less-developed members of the Association of
Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN).

____________________________________
INTERNATIONAL

July 5, Inter Press Service
Japan: soft policy on Burma under fire - Suvendrini Kakuchi

Tokyo: Japan's refusal to join the West in slapping sanctions against the
Burmese military junta, responsible for gross human rights violations, has
disappointed activists and development experts who say Tokyo's continued
foot-dragging on Burma is wrong.

The United States, Japan's close ally, has been leading moves to get the
United Nations Security Council to pressure a regime that Washington has
already placed under economic sanctions.

''Nobody disputes that Myanmar (as the regime calls Burma) needs tangible
reforms that will bring democracy and freedom to its people. This is why
Japan must pressure the rulers to change or be viewed as double faced when
it comes to promoting human rights in Asia,'' said Kyotaka Takahashi,
spokesman for Japan Volunteer Centre, a leading non-governmental
organization (NGO).

Experts point out that Japan is now a leading advocate of human rights
under the United National Human Rights Forum but its focus seems limited
to North Korea which has abducted several Japanese nationals.

‘'When it comes to Burma, the government views the situation there
differently to North Korea because there are no Japanese people
involved,'' Prof. Kei Nemoto, an expert on Burma at Tokyo Foreign Studies
University.

Government officials, however, defend their position and say Japan's
stance is for achieving democracy in Burma.

‘'Japan believes in promoting democracy in Myanmar through dialogue.
Sanctions have only led to deteriorating conditions for the ordinary
people living in that country rather than promote democracy,'' said
Yoshinori Yakabe, a foreign ministry official.

Japan is not alone in the soft policy of ‘engaging' Burma and refusing to
place the regime under sanctions. Burma's two most important neighbours,
China and India, also follow a similar policy.

Yakabe points out that Western sanctions against Burma, on since 1988 and
extended in May after the junta refused to release democratically elected
leader, Aung San Suu Kyi from house arrest, have been a failure.

He blamed economic sanctions for the high unemployment rates in
Burma-200,000 workers with no jobs and more than 200 factories closed due
to bankruptcies.

‘'Private sector factories have faced the brunt of the poor national
economy because of U.S. trade embargo that have, ironically, not hurt
government run institutions,'' he pointed out.

Japan has provided Burma with grants of around 78 million dollars up to
2004 for humanitarian and environmental projects.

Experts acknowledge that the effectiveness of sanctions in bringing
democracy to countries led by violent regimes remains a troubling issue
for Japanese foreign policy.

One example of drastic failure has been in Iraq where poverty and illness
only increased after the international community refused to trade with the
former Saddam Hussein regime hoping that it would collapse on its own.

In contrast, the collapse of apartheid in South Africa and regime change
is attributed to an effective trade embargo.

‘'The effectiveness of sanctions can be debated. But in a case like Burma,
Japan, as Asia's largest donor, must send a strong message that shows that
the junta will not be tolerated,'' said Nemoto.

Yakabe, however, ruled out a policy change in Japan even while
acknowledging that attempts at engagement by Tokyo have not brought about
the necessary reforms in Burma.

''Japan believes in quiet diplomacy. Our most important goal now is to
work together with ASEAN countries rather than support sanctions,'' he
said. Apart form Burma, the ten-nation ASEAN or Association of South-east
Asian Nations comprises Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam, Laos, Malaysia,
Singapore, Indonesia, the Philippines and Brunei.

Activists, though, are getting impatient. ‘'It is frustrating to wait for
the Japanese government to promote democracy in Burma. Our strategy is to
raise public awareness about the gross abuses by the junta against its own
people and minorities. We are determined to show that Japan's policy of
engagement is not helping the people,'' said Sayaka Miyazawa, of the Burma
Citizens Forum that represents Burmese democracy activists in Japan.

Referring to the large pro-democracy rally in April attended by more than
500 people who demonstrated in front of the Japanese Diet, Miyazawa said
the grassroots support for democracy in Burma is growing.

Activists say the lack of a clear human rights policy within Japan also
contributes to slow reaction by the government in bringing change in
Burma. For example, out of the 138 applications filed by Burmese nationals
for refugee status, Japan has only accepted 43 so far.

Nemoto says Japan's resistance to imposing sanctions does not stem from
its own narrow economic interests as suspected in the case of other
players such as China that has long been involved in the Burmese economy.

‘'The economic interests of the Burmese is not an immediate concern for
Japan that sees the difficulties of trade with a junta that does not
adhere to international rules. Rather, Japan's wavering stance can be
attributed to its own inward policies that does not put human rights high
on its diplomatic agenda -- that too in a country that does not pose an
immediate threat to its own nationals or security,'' explained Nemoto.

____________________________________

July 2006, Irrawaddy
Stormy air waves at VOA

The arrival of a new director of the Voice of America’s Burmese Service
radio and his attempts to rejuvenate the staff and brighten up programming
have done little so far to quell unhappiness at the Washington-based
station.

Former dissident-turned-journalist Than Lwin Htun took over at VOA last
year after more than 10 years with the BBC’s Burmese Service, and set
about revamping the Burmese programs and recruiting a younger generation
of broadcasters, most of them from dissident circles.

He took over a staff riven by intrigue and infighting. His two
predecessors resigned amid charges of complicity with the regime, and an
anonymous website is now accusing VOA of harboring a junta “mole.” The
site, cheekily flaunting the name voaburmese.org, carries reports and
anecdotes attacking VOA and describing Than Lwin Htun, who has a British
passport, as an “alien.”

The Burmese service under Than Lwin Htun is also the target of attacks by
the Washington-based Burmese government-in-exile, whose prime minister, Dr
Sein Win, accuses him of abusing his power and “undermining” VOA’s
mission. Sein Win reportedly wrote a letter of complaint to a prominent US
senator and vocal critic of the Burmese regime. VOA is said to have
refuted the complaint.

The recent hiring of a senior journalist and former activist comrade from
VOA’s sister station Radio Free Asia has done nothing to improve Than Lwin
Htun’s popularity. Radio Free Asia is unhappy about its staffer’s
departure for a better deal with government-funded VOA, which entices
talented journalists with a generous package of benefits.