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Some monks are refusing alms from the military and their families - a religious boycott deeply embarrassing to the junta. In the Myanmar language, the term for "boycott" comes from the words for holding an alms bowl upside down.

The government appeared to be handling the situation gingerly, aware that any action seen as mistreating the monks could ignite public outrage. They are aware that restraining monks poses a dilemma, because monks are highly respected in predominant Buddhist Myanmar, and abusing them in any manner could cause public outrage.

A member of one of the junta's neighborhood councils said it had been given instructions by authorities not to interfere with the protesting monks.

The protests express long pent-up opposition to the repressive regime and have become the most sustained challenge to the junta since a wave of student demonstrations that were forcibly suppressed in December 1996.

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Unconfirmed reports said monks staged protests in several other cities Thursday, including Pakokku and Monywa in north central Myanmar.

Monks have historically been at the forefront of protests in the country, first against British colonialism and later against military dictatorship. They played a prominent part in a failed 1988 pro-democracy uprising that sought an end to military rule, imposed since 1962.

The junta's crackdown on the protesters has drawn increasing criticism from world leaders, including U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon and President Bush. They have called for the government to release opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi, a Nobel Peace Prize laureate who has been under house arrest for more than 11 of the past 18 years.

The U.N.'s envoy to Myanmar, Ibrahim Gambari, focused on the protests in a Security Council briefing Thursday.

"The developments over the last few weeks in Myanmar have raised serious concerns in the international community and once again underscore the urgency to step up our efforts to find solutions to the challenges facing the country," Gambari told the council, according to a U.N. account of the closed session.

Gambari said he was very concerned about protesters who have been detained and expressed hope for their release.

The demonstrations had been faltering, with about 200 protesters being detained, before the monks entered the fray.

Monks angered over being manhandled at a Sept. 5 demonstration in Pakokku in north central Myanmar had threatened to take to the streets unless the junta apologized. The regime remained silent, so they launched protests around the country on Tuesday that have been steadily growing.

Monks may now be assuming the vanguard because top pro-democracy activists were rounded up soon after the start of the demonstrations, said Debbie Stothard of Altsean-Burma, a Bangkok, Thailand-based coalition of non-governmental groups working for human rights and democracy in Myanmar, also known as Burma.

Despite apparent reluctance to send in soldiers now, history suggests the junta -- the latest face of 45 years of unbroken military rule -- will come down hard, as it did in 1988 when up to 3,000 people are thought to have been killed.
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Diplomats say Beijing -- the closest the junta has to a friend -- may also be playing a quiet role behind the scenes, building on public statements this month at an Asia-Pacific summit in Sydney urging "national reconciliation".

But any "pro-reform" elements within the junta's top leadership also face formidable impediments.

Not least of these is supremo Than Shwe's personal dislike of Suu Kyi, said to be so intense the 73-year-old "Senior General" refuses to allow her name to be mentioned in his presence.

Some analysts also said the lack of action may simply be because the junta has been caught off guard by the speed with which protests has mushroomed from sporadic marches against fuel prices in mid-August to massed ranks marches a month later.

It did not take more than a jump in the price of fuel to ignite a revolution in Burma, which goes a long way to show that anger and discontent with the country's military Government had been simmering under the surface for years, if not decades.

No international condemnation seems to move the generals; as was the case in 1988, they refuse to accept that the population has rejected their rule. In a speech on Monday, Burma's Religious Affairs Minister, Brigadier-General Thura Myint Maung, blamed the "disturbances" on "internal and external destructionists", including the Communist Party of Burma, which has been defunct for more than 18 years. It was a plot, the minister asserted, "systematically manipulated from abroad".

Burma is no ordinary military dictatorship, and it cannot be compared with Thailand, Indonesia, Bangladesh, Pakistan or other countries in the region which also have had spells of military rule.

When the army first seized power in 1962, it not only took control of the government, but assumed economic power. Branded the Under the "Burmese Way to Socialism" almost all private property was confiscated and handed to several military-run state corporations. The old mercantile elite, which to a large extent was of ethnic Indian and Chinese origin, left the country, and so did many of Burma's intellectuals. Before the 1962 coup, Burma had had one of the highest standards of living in South-East Asia, and a fairly well-educated population.

The generals are not interested in any "dialogue" with pro-democracy advocates, which they, and the international community, have been calling for since 1988. Nor are they interested in any "national reconciliation"; the military-controlled Burmese media instead constantly refers to the need for what it calls "national reconsolidation", or further strengthening of military rule.
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Western sanctions against Burma have not had much effect as its neighbours, which include China and India, and the ASEAN nations continue to trade and invest in the country, allowing the generals to use Burma's ample natural resources and strategic geographical position to survive.
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By late 1991 Chinese experts were helping in a series of infrastructure projects to spruce up poorly maintained roads and railways. Chinese military advisers arrived the same year, the first foreign military personnel to be stationed in Burma since Australia had a contingent there to train the Burmese army in the 1950s. The total value of Chinese arms deliveries to Burma is not known, but intelligence sources estimate it to be about $US1.4 billion ($1.58 billion).
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Burma's close relationship with China caused concern in India. To counter China's growing influence, at first India supported Burma's pro-democracy movement. But when it became clear that it was not going to come to power any time soon, India began to court the junta.
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But if change does come to Burma, it will be because of action taken by such younger army officers, not demonstrations led by monks. The protests can, at the most, perhaps influence sections of the army to realise there is no future in supporting the present regime. For, ultimately, there is no place in the modern world for an anachronistic and atavistic regime such as the warrior kingdom of Naypyidaw.

Bertil Lintner is a Bangkok-based journalist and an expect on Burmese affairs.

Cursed with a wealth of ironies

Edgar Koh

Fri, Oct 05, 2007
The Straits Times

George Orwell, a colonial police officer in Moulmein (now Mawlamyine) in the 1920s, would have recognised the irony in the brutality of the current crackdown in Yangon and other cities in Myanmar where troops killed, beat up, imprisoned and tortured monks and others marching against the junta.

To him, cruelty damaged the strong as well as the seemingly weak, in this case those in saffron robes chanting and offering 'loving kindness' as they took their licks.

'I was hated by large numbers of people - the only time in my life that I was important enough for this to happen to me,' he wrote later, after he had repudiated the evil of imperialism and 'chucked up my job'.

Another irony of the Myanmar crisis would not have escaped Orwellian comment, namely outsiders' insistence on 'democracy' for Myanmar. Foreigners presumably are clear in their own minds on what this entails, but what does the term mean - to the National League for Democracy that Aung San Suu Kyi leads, to ordinary Myanmarese trying to make ends meet, to the ethnic minorities aspiring to greater autonomy and to the junta reluctant to give up decades-long political and economic privileges and fearful of revenge?

United States President George W. Bush, obviously relieved he could make common cause for once with the left and right, Democrats and Republicans, film stars and evangelical Christians, and even his wife Laura, has moved quickly to impose sanctions on Myanmar.

He rides for democracy once again, looking for success in place of failure in Iraq. So buoyed by such non-partisan support, the White House could, however, over-reach and hurt the democracy movement's cause, observers warn.

Meanwhile, the US action has caught out America's Chevron corporation, with an embarrassing stake in a Myanmar gas pipeline project that funnels hard currency to the junta while contributing to human rights abuse, activists allege.

British Prime Minister Gordon Brown wants to see 'all the pressures of the world put on this regime now - sanctions, the pressure of the UN, pressure from China and all the countries in the region, India, pressure from the whole of the world'.

But despite official disapproval, companies from all over the world reportedly continue to plough money into Myanmar through subsidiaries based in British overseas dependent territories such as the Virgin Islands, although the largest European investor in Myanmar is Total Oil, France's biggest company.

No, Mr Brown, even representing the ex-colonial power, does not bear the sort of blame for Myanmar that some analysts apportion to former US secretary of state Henry Kissinger for creating the Khmer Rouge monster of the Kampuchean killing fields when he urged president Richard Nixon to expand the Vietnam War into Cambodia, trampling on its neutrality.

But in the stampede to react and without excusing the junta's conduct, it might be helpful to remember that the Myanmarese regarded their army, which conquered all of present-day Laos and Thailand in the 16th century, as a source of national pride until its defeat by Britain in the 1824-26 war.

Further humiliation resulted when the British made then Burma a minor Indian appendage of the Raj. The Burmese military's redemption came only in the 1940s when army officers, led by Aung San Suu Kyi's father General Aung San, wrested independence from Britain.

Strangely ironic, too, but not overly surprising, humiliation by foreign powers in the 19th century inhibits China from rushing at Western insistence to intervene in Myanmar's internal affairs in the 21st century.

The British also helped destroy another Burmese institution, the monarchy. The overthrow of the last dynasty in 1885 meant Burma, unlike the neighbouring Buddhist kingdom of Thailand, would never have a constitutional monarchy, with a king as the head of state, above politics, a symbol of unity and a steadying influence in time of crisis, perhaps a figurehead not unlike Mr Brown's Queen.

Yet another irony is that even the Chinese have used the 'd' word this time. The Xinhua news agency paraphrased a Chinese official last week admonishing a Myanmarese special envoy to 'push forward a democracy process appropriate for the country'. This is pushing the envelope.

Myanmar's strategic value as buffer territory, ready market for Chinese arms and abundant source of raw materials explain China's close ties with the regime. But China also wants to counter Western threats to brand the 2008 Beijing Olympics the 'genocide games' for conducting business as usual with the junta.

The Chinese reference is doubly ironic in that the Myanmar approach is an echo, a misbegotten echo but still an echo, of China's top-down system aimed at ensuring stability, necessitated and justified by harmony in the Confucianist sense, pre-empting human rights and political diversity.

While the Chinese Communist Party hangs on to legitimacy by spreading the fruits of economic modernisation and expansion, the Myanmar regime alienates itself from the people, mismanaging the economy on top of trying to maintain stability through repression and coercion.

The irony is more striking in that Myanmar is a country rich in vast natural resources. If the junta had the breadth of vision, intention and action to tap the land's mineral wealth, reweave and fill what used to be Asia's rice basket and educate its intelligent and hardworking citizens, the economy would have flourished, with or without the globalised economics now enveloping neighbouring nations.

Instead, the regime so reduced the nation's economic circumstances that it started the equivalent of rationing coal in Newcastle when it had to raise petrol prices fivefold in August, sparking the first of the recent demonstrations.

A booming economy and fair redistribution would at least have made it easier to deflect or to accommodate demands for political participation, rights for individuals and minorities and social justice.

The monks - numbering 400,000, similar in strength to the soldiers - would have been a willing ally, not a resolute adversary, given that Buddhism, like Confucianism, advocates harmony and eschews extremism. At the same time, a genuine constitutional process could have produced a viable political arrangement.

It is not too late for the junta to attempt national reconciliation by reopening dialogue with the opposition, notably Aung San Suu Kyi and the NLD. Whatever the 'democracy' that results from such reconciliation - the extent to which it requires opening up political space, formal recognition of human and minority rights, liberty, equality and other 'democratic' necessities - is for the Myanmarese to decide.

Hopefully, UN special envoy Ibrahim Gambari has managed to initiate such a dialogue in his minimal shuttle diplomacy in the past few days.

Meanwhile, outsiders unfamiliar with Myanmar's history, values and beliefs or vested with their own interests should certainly help to stop the violence, but beyond that remain only encouragingly watchful. They should refrain from fluttering politically correct 'democracy' banners in a patronising wind, sweet slogans that nevertheless may have difficulty passing the Orwellian test of linguistic accuracy, let alone moral truth.

http://news.asiaone.com/print/News/The% ... 28509.html

Snippets of the "detailed basic principles" of the charter appearing in state media point to little transfer of power to a civilian administration or autonomy for the former Burma's 100-plus ethnic minorities.

The commander-in-chief of the army will be the most powerful man in the country under the constitutional guidelines agreed at the national convention, with the power to appoint the ministers of defense, interior and border affairs. He will also be able to assume power "in times of emergency".

"ASEAN leaders know that if the situation in Myanmar continues to deteriorate, there must come a breaking point when much more brutal force will again be necessary to put their people down.

S'pore must distinguish itself by having better governance: MM Lee
By S Ramesh, Channel NewsAsia
04 October 2007 2131 hrs

Minister Mentor Lee Kuan Yew said Singapore has to continue to distinguish itself from its neighbours by having better standards of governance.

And key to achieving this is a corruption-free government. Otherwise, he said, Singapore will degrade and decline.

Speaking at a forum on "Singapore in the 21st century", attended by 1,800 Nanyang Technological University (NTU) students on Thursday, Mr Lee added that the situation in Myanmar looked "troublesome".

At the start of the forum, Mr Lee warned of the main setback for Singapore - unexpected turn of events.

He said because the prospects for the next 5-10 years are favourable to the country, Singaporeans tend to be complacent and ignore warning signs that things could go wrong suddenly.

"A first warning was the sudden drop in the Dow Jones Index of the New York stock market in August. The losses spread right across the world's stock markets. They recovered only when the US Federal Reserve Board reduced its discount rate by 50 basis points to boost confidence in the market and increase liquidity," said MM Lee.

"But the underlying problem has not gone away. The sub-prime mortgages problem is still not cleaned up. These were high risk loans to people who did not have the means to repay. Now there are nagging worries: commodity prices are rising - oil, gold, corn, wheat, iron, coal... Inflation is up.

"If the US consumer, suffering from reduced house values, loses his appetite for consumption, there will be a downturn in the US economy. That will affect the export-driven economies of China and the rest of East Asia."

While Asia looks promising, there are problems in the immediate region. Myanmar, he said, can be a destabilising factor.

Said Mr Lee: "ASEAN leaders realise that if we have volatile and unstable neighbours, they will destabilise the whole region. Hence the common reactions from ASEAN leaders, foreign ministers, presidents and prime ministers are that of sorrow and revulsion, that Myanmar's generals have again used armed forces against monks and civilians who are demonstrating peacefully because they are suffering from deprivation due to their poor economic conditions.

"ASEAN leaders know that if the situation in Myanmar continues to deteriorate, there must come a breaking point when much more brutal force will again be necessary to put their people down.

"We must try our best to help stabilise Myanmar. Singapore is at the very heart of Asean. An unstable Myanmar is a time bomb in the whole region."

Turning to the challenges that Singapore faces, Mr Lee said that when he and his colleagues started out, they did not know what branding meant.

All they knew was that Singapore had to be different from the way the neighbouring countries were being run, and that the country had to make up for the lack of resources to survive.

So Mr Lee said he and his team set out to build up a clean, corruption-free, secure and safe system, and a government which was effective and efficient, and one which welcomed investors and business.

"We had to get the big pieces right - national solidarity, not racial, religion or language strife. Hence the emphasis on racial and religious harmony, the mixing of all the races as we rebuild the city, with everybody sharing the same HDB blocks," said Mr Lee.

"We avoided clashes over languages. We would have brought troubles if we had chosen Chinese as our working language and thus disadvantaged the other races. We chose English - a neutral language with no special advantage to any race - as the working language, but we keep our mother tongues," he added.

As for the future, Mr Lee stressed that it depends on every Singaporean to realise that the country always has to be different.

Singapore has to have better governance compared to its neighbours. This will ensure that Singapore survives the competition against neighbours who have a wealth of natural resources, larger territories and bigger populations. - CNA /ls

But if change does come to Burma, it will be because of action taken by such younger army officers, not demonstrations led by monks. The protests can, at the most, perhaps influence sections of the army to realise there is no future in supporting the present regime. For, ultimately, there is no place in the modern world for an anachronistic and atavistic regime such as the warrior kingdom of Naypyidaw.

the army must be part of the solution to the problems facing their country, because if it is dissolved, all of Myanmar's administrative instruments will go with it and the country will have nothing with which to govern itself.

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Mr Lee said: 'These are rather dumb generals when it comes to the economy...

How they can so mismanage the economy and reach this stage when the country has so many natural resources?'

He noted that Singapore hoteliers, who had sunk millions of dollars in Myanmar on his advice, have now found their hotels empty.

Mr Lee disclosed that he has tried to advise the generals and take Myanmar out of its isolation, referring specifically to former junta member Khin Nyunt, who is now under house arrest.

MM Lee said: 'He's the most intelligent of the lot. I sold him the idea, or at least he bought the idea, that the way for them to go forward was to get out of uniform and do it like Suharto, form a party, Golkar and then take over as a civilian party.

'But halfway through, Suharto fell. So, it ended up as the wrong advice, they back-tracked. Then they chucked Khin Nyunt out.' [/b]

Myanmar military nears decisions on succession
Nirmal Ghosh
Fri, Oct 19, 2007

SENIOR General Than Shwe is firmly in charge of Myanmar's ruling junta, but change at the top level is imminent, and the job of the successor will not be as easy.

Gen Than Shwe, 70, the xenophobic head of the nation's State Peace and Development Council (SPDC), is known to be a shrewd and well-informed man, glued to the internet. His rise to the top level was a skilful manoeuvre by keeping peers and subordinates off balance by playing one against the other.

But, there are divisions between him and his deputy Gen Maung Aye, 70, over the use of Union Solidarity and Development Association (USDA) and Swan Arr Shin cadres - and then of soldiers - against monks and civilians.

The USDA, set up to eventually be a political party and form a puppet government - is Gen Than Shwe's baby, but Gen Maung Aye has kept away from it.

Hence, the successor will have to preside over a army with problems. Both the USDA and Swan Arr Shin comprise civilians, with the latter being mainly hired thugs and former convicts. The army has swelled to half a million men - but with deteriorating quality.

The gap between the army and the rest of the society is widening and experts believe that the recent shooting on the monks may have scarred the psyche of many junior officers.

But while the chances of an army collapse are thin, the need for change in Myanmar has to be come from young officers within the force.

Three Singapore-linked firms are among seven blacklisted by the United States under penalties imposed on Myanmar after its deadly suppression of pro-democracy protests.
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Singapore's Foreign Minister George Yeo told his hosts at a Myanmar Buddhist temple on Saturday evening that Asian countries could only do so much.

"While we in ASEAN have limited economic leverage, we do have a certain moral influence, because Myanmar is part of the ASEAN family," a transcript of his remarks, posted on the Ministry of Foreign Affairs website ...

"There could be some companies registered in Singapore and then it would be under certain restrictions from the US."

According to President George W. Bush's order, the companies which are either based in or linked to Singapore are: Pavo Trading Pte Ltd, Air Bagan Holdings Pte Ltd and Htoo Wood Products Pte Ltd, which is also listed as being from Myanmar's main city, Yangon.

Singapore is the current chair of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), and is to host the bloc's summit in November.
The city-state has led regional criticism of the junta's crackdown last month, which killed at least 13 people. More than 3,000 were detained.
Singapore strongly denies allegations that it allows banks based here to keep illicit funds on behalf of Myanmar's secretive generals.

http://news.sg.msn.com/article.aspx?cp- ... tid=452638