Living Silence in Burma (48 page)

In the mid- to late 1990s, the regime also used various tactics to try to reduce the refugee population along the Thai–Burma border by encouraging the Democratic Karen Buddhist Army (DKBA) to burn down refugee camps in Thailand.
¹³
The camps were perceived as a support to the KNU because many KNU families lived there. In addition, their existence served
as evidence that Burma was not as peaceful as the regime claimed. The regime’s hope was that, by burning down the camps, the Thais might feel that the best way to eliminate the border incursions would be to repatriate the refugees, and that the refugees would feel they were no worse off at home. The policy worked to a certain degree. Some refugees went back and Thai military units repatriated a few groups of refugees. Other refugees were moved to camps farther away from the border, where they would be safer from attack.

Following the election of one of Thailand’s wealthiest businessmen, Thaksin Shinawatra, as prime minister in 2001, Thai policy focused far more on promoting economic interests in Burma. Shin Corp, founded by Thaksin, invested in telecommunications projects together with companies close to the regime, while the Thai and Burmese governments jointly developed plans to build hydroelectric dams on the Salween river which could produce electricity for Thailand. The Yadana and Yetagun pipelines, which were constructed in the late 1990s, were already bringing gas from Burma’s Gulf of Martaban, and were seen by the Thai government as critical in fuelling the country’s growing economy.

Successive Thai governments have continued to prioritize their energy interests in making policy on Burma. Nevertheless, relations between Thai and Burmese leaders have never been particularly warm. Thai history textbooks continue to emphasize past Burmese military conquests of Thailand, suggesting that Burma remains a threat to Thailand’s national integrity. As if to reinforce such perceptions, the Burmese authorities erected statues of one of Burma’s great empire-building kings, Bayinnaung, at two border points with Thailand. In the mid-1500s, King Bayinnaung invaded Thai territory (then known as Siam), conquering the capital and bringing back loot and war captives. The message of these statues appears to be ‘Don’t think we couldn’t do it again’.

Thailand has hedged its bets by allowing members of the democracy movement and ethnic resistance groups to maintain a low profile in the country, although they have generally not been permitted to become legal foreign residents or Thai citizens.

Bangladesh, like other neighbouring countries, has found relations with Burma challenging. The Bangladeshi government has been extremely frustrated by the Burmese regime’s refusal to take back all the Rohingya refugees and its continued harsh policies towards the Rohingya in Burma, which cause yet more Rohingya to flee to Bangladesh. Yet Bangladesh is desperate to improve its economy, so the Bangladeshi government has sought to expand trade with Burma. In November 2008, a dispute over
the maritime boundary between the two countries came to a head when Burmese warships accompanying a gas exploration ship were confronted by Bangladeshi warships.
¹⁴
Both retreated, but Burma vowed to continue the exploration work in the future.

Burma’s generals have insisted that no other countries have the right to interfere in Burma’s domestic affairs, but they have been unwilling to admit the extent to which their policy decisions have had serious implications for their neighbours. The refugee crisis is just one example. Although most of the funding for the refugees’ food and medicine is provided by outside sources, Burma’s neighbouring countries, especially impoverished Bangladesh, still suffer a heavy burden. Not only do they have to provide security, but the local population is also often resentful of the refugees’ presence and their use of local resources.

The failure or inability of the regime to eradicate drug production has had particularly profound consequences for Burma’s neighbours. In the mid-2000s, up to 900 million amphetamine pills produced in Burma were entering Thailand annually.
¹⁵
Meanwhile, addiction to Burmese heroin expanded rapidly in the Indian border state of Manipur, which developed one of the highest rates of HIV infection in India.

Diseases were not stopped by national borders either. As the report
The Gathering Storm
documents, diseases such as filariasis (also known as elephantiasis), malaria and tuberculosis have all been inadvertently reintroduced or spread by Burmese refugees and migrant workers.
¹⁶

South-East Asian and ASEAN relations with Burma

Singapore and Malaysia initially showed a great interest in working together with the SLORC. In the 1990s, Singapore supplied Burma’s military with weapons, ammunition, training and probably the communications equipment that enabled the regime to increase its monitoring capabilities over phone, fax and data transmissions.
¹⁷
Singapore also became one of Burma’s largest foreign investors, with most of its money channelled into the development of the tourism industry. Over the years, however, leaders in both Singapore and Malaysia have been frustrated by the regime’s unwillingness to make even small political concessions and its gross economic mismanagement, which has made it difficult for their companies to do business in Burma.

Before Suharto’s fall in 1998, Indonesia was also an important supporter of Burma’s generals. The SLORC and SPDC regimes looked to Indonesia as a model of how a military-backed government could maintain control at home while also developing good relations with international
financial institutions and foreign governments. Since the fall of Suharto, however, democratic politicians in Indonesia have called for the restoration of democracy in Burma.
¹⁸

Until the mid-1990s, Burmese leaders expressed no interest in joining ASEAN. But with membership promising to lead to increased investment and a degree of protection from Western condemnation over its refusal to democratize, the SLORC began to lobby for inclusion. Although some ASEAN nations expressed concern about Burma’s pariah status, they were eager to lessen China’s influence over Burma. Likewise, some members opposed the West’s confrontational stance towards Burma and believed they could persuade the regime to act more moderately through a policy of political and economic engagement.

Despite calls by Aung San Suu Kyi and some Western governments for ASEAN not to grant Burma full membership, Burma became a member in 1997. The Burmese regime had a song written to commemorate its inclusion in the association, and for a time the government-sponsored website, at
www.myanmar.com
, was called the Myanmar–ASEAN website.

Nevertheless, ASEAN suffered. The European Union (EU) refused to allow Burma to participate fully in annual EU–ASEAN meetings until the Burmese regime showed improvements in human rights and made political concessions.
¹⁹
In the late 1990s, this resulted in a number of joint meetings being postponed and much time spent on negotiations for how to include Burma in joint meetings without according it the same status as other participants. For a time, Burmese delegates were not able to participate in any joint meetings held in Europe because of the EU’s visa ban on regime officials. The visa ban on the Burmese foreign minister was lifted for the 2006 Asia–Europe (ASEM) meeting, however, so that EU officials could interact with the Burmese foreign minister.

In addition, the Burmese generals refused to improve their behaviour. Burma’s intransigence forced ASEAN to consider the merit of its founding principle of non-interference in other members’ domestic affairs. In 1998, Thai foreign minister Surin Pitsuwan proposed a new policy of ‘flexible engagement’, meaning that ASEAN should be able to have frank discussions about domestic issues that have implications for other countries in the association.
²⁰
The Philippines’ foreign minister, Domingo Siazon, publicly urged the junta and the opposition to begin a political dialogue without preconditions.
²¹
Nevertheless, other members of ASEAN did not support the proposed ‘flexible engagement’ policy, and for the next few years the Asian economic crisis led ASEAN member countries to focus more on their problems at home than on regional policy issues.

According to ASEAN’s system of rotating the chairmanship, Burma was supposed to take the position in 2006. In 2005, however, the USA and the EU threatened not to attend any ASEAN meetings hosted by Burma, including the ASEM meeting. The United States also said it might withhold funding to several development projects in the region if Burma took the chair. ASEAN was divided on the issue, however; some members made public their hopes that the Burmese regime would decide by itself to give up the chair. The regime at first remained defiant, but finally backed down.

After the brutal crackdown on the 2007 monks’ demonstrations, ASEAN issued a statement expressing its ‘revulsion’ at what had happened.
²²
This was the strongest statement ASEAN had ever issued on Burma. The possibility of punitive action against Burma, however, was not considered. When ASEAN drew up its charter in 2007, it decided to establish a human rights body, but in the end it was agreed that no mechanism would be created to punish member governments that violate human rights.

In 2004, interested MPs in various ASEAN countries joined together to establish the ASEAN Inter-Parliamentary Myanmar Caucus. The caucus has urged ASEAN leaders to push for genuine political reform in Burma. Given that many countries in ASEAN are not democracies, however, or are not fully democratized, the leaders of many ASEAN countries are more interested in seeing an easing of the political conflict in Burma than democracy per se.

Other Asian countries’ relations with Burma

Japan has tried to persuade the regime to change its ways by offering increased development assistance in return for the regime taking specific actions. The regime has sometimes responded positively to Japan’s offers, but only to the extent that it has suited them. Although Aung San Suu Kyi’s release in 1995 appears to have been related to Japanese diplomatic efforts, the generals did not hesitate to put her back under house arrest once she became a threat to them.

Recognizing the importance of Japanese support, Aung San Suu Kyi tried to reach out to the Japanese public through a weekly column for the
Mainichi
newspaper in 1995 and 1996. Entitled ‘Letters from Burma’, it described the leading members, activities and policies of the NLD and the kinds of repression her party and ordinary people face under military rule.
²³

While Aung San Suu Kyi has the sympathy of many Japanese, the
Japanese business community has continued to lobby hard for improved relations with Burma’s generals. Although the Japanese government would like to see democracy restored in Burma, Japanese officials are also worried that if they do not maintain good relations with the military regime, they will lose political and economic access to Burma. As a result, Japan has cancelled some of Burma’s debt and continued to offer overseas development assistance to Burma, reducing the amount only slightly after the Japanese journalist Kenji Nagai was killed by a Burma Army soldier during the September 2007 demonstrations.

Burma is one of the few countries in the world that currently has good relations with both North and South Korea. South Korea’s Daewoo International Corporation has teamed up with the regime’s Ministry of Gas and Energy to engage in gas exploration in the Bay of Bengal. Meanwhile, the SPDC has been quietly purchasing weapons from North Korea for several years and officially restored relations in 2007.
²⁴
Burma had cut off diplomatic relations with Pyongyang in 1983, after North Korean agents set off a bomb in Rangoon which killed eighteen visiting South Korean officials, including four cabinet members.

Burma has increasingly looked to Russia for weapons purchases in recent years. It has also sought to build a nuclear reactor with assistance from Russia and perhaps North Korea.
²⁵
Russia has also been helpful to the regime by consistently opposing any UN Security Council action on Burma.

Finally, the regime has developed closer relations with the Pakistani military and, since 1989, has purchased guns and ammunition from Pakistan on several occasions.
²⁶

Western countries’ relationships with Burma

In the 1990s and early 2000s, the United States government took the most hardline stance against Burma’s generals. In part, this has been because the USA has no direct strategic interests in Burma, nor have many American corporations invested there. After the SLORC’s crackdown in 1988, the United States expressed its disapproval by refusing to post an ambassador to Burma, and since then a lower-ranking chargé d’affaires has run the American embassy in Rangoon. Following Aung San Suu Kyi and the NLD’s call for foreign businesses to stay out of Burma until democracy was restored, in 1997 the US Congress passed a bill forbidding any new investment by American companies. After the Depayin Massacre in 2003, Congress passed a bill banning imports from Burma. The United States also imposed a visa ban on top regime officials and their family
members and, over time, expanded the list to include leading USDA officials and businessmen with close ties to the regime. In response to the 2007 crackdown, Congress passed a law blocking the import of all jewellery made from Burmese jade and rubies. This targeted sanction was aimed primarily at the regime and businesses close to the regime. The USA has also sought to rally other countries to take more coordinated action on Burma, and Canada has imposed many of the same economic sanctions that the USA has.

At the same time, the USA has provided funding for projects intended to build the capacity of democracy activists and Burmese journalists and has given financial support for education, health and humanitarian assistance inside Burma and along its borders.
²⁷
In 2008, the USA provided an additional $18 million in assistance for Cyclone Nargis survivors via UN programmes and international NGOs.