Burma’s Elections in Name Only

The last time Burma’s junta tried rigging an election in hopes of putting a civilian face on its military rule, in 1990, it was routed at the polls. The junta responded by annulling the results. Now, with the country’s first vote in 20 years set for Nov. 7, the generals have apparently learned their lesson: this time, the process will be even more tightly controlled.

In 2008 the junta pushed through a Constitution that guarantees it a quarter of parliamentary seats and a continued stranglehold on state power. In the upcoming elections, meanwhile, opposition candidates need permission to campaign and are barred from shouting slogans, waving flags, criticizing the junta, or “harming security.” Civil servants and monks are barred from running, as is anyone convicted of a crime—which means a good portion of the politically inclined. And parties must submit a list of at least 1,000 members in order to register, a scary proposition for voters who live in constant fear of the military and its spies. (One party chair has complained that security forces are already intimidating members on his list.)

None of this lends the appearance of legitimacy to the elections, and candidates are starting to quit in protest and threatening to boycott the polls. Unfortunately, this will likely matter very little to countries such as the other ASEAN nations and China, which have already been willing to do business with the junta and turn a blind eye to human rights. Worse, it may even give political cover to those like India that hope to ramp up trade with Burma. Twenty years later, it’s likely that the junta will finally get its desired results at the polls—but from an election free in name only.

Sex and the Capital City In Burma

It didn't take long for Burma's new capital, Naypyidaw, to develop a red light district, where sex can be bought at brothels masquerading as beauty salons, massage parlors, karaoke lounges and even restaurants.

The seamy district, Paung Laung, is on the main road leading into the city. Nearly 100 establishments where girls can be bought by the hour or the night line the road. But sex comes at a high price—between 100,000 kyat (US $100) and 200,000 kyat ($200).
Such prices can only be afforded by well-heeled businessmen and members of Naypyidaw's top brass, who not only patronize the brothels but are said to have invested in many of them.

Business is brisk, spawning the development of a cheaper red light zone along the 30 mile stretch of highway between Naypyidaw and the next town. Before Burma's new capital moved to Naypyidaw, less than half a dozen brothels were in business along the roadside—today there are more than 70.

Most are just makeshift tents and bamboo huts, where 20 minutes with a sex worker costs 6,000 kyat ($6). Young boys working on commission tout for trade from passing motorists and motorcyclists.

One sex worker, from Lewe, near Naypyidaw, told me she resorted to prostitution because her family's land was expropriated by the authorities when the new capital was built. Her mother contributed to the household budget by selling rice at a local market.

The girl said her meager earnings have to cover a daily “fee” of 7,000 kyat ($7) demanded by police, who are at the bottom end of a systematic racket.

One sergeant serving at Naypyidaw's military headquarters accused the capital's commander, Maj-Gen Wai Lwin of encouraging the spread of prostitution in and around the city.

“He told his men to avoid brothels but then allowed them to get involved in the beauty parlor business,” the sergeant told me on condition of anonymity.
“All understood what he meant and that he was giving a green light to running massage businesses.”

Senior military officers and high-ranking officials reportedly own buildings in which massage parlors and beauty salons operate and where sex is also sold.

One top officer close to junta head Snr-Gen Than Shwe was granted ownership of a share in a hotel, the Myint-Moe-Nan Motel, which was built on Naypydaw's main street despite a ban on hotels within the city. Brig-Gen Soe Shein's involvement in the hotel project was regarded as a way for the consortium of owners to get official protection.
By ZIN MIN MAUNG /NAYPYIDAW

ၾကားေနရမယ့္အခ်ိန္ ေရာက္ပလား?

ၾကားေနရမယ့္အခ်ိန္ ေရာက္ပလား?



မီဒီယာသမားေတြကို ရဲေဘာ္ေက်ာ္သန္း ေဝဖန္လိုက္လုိ႔ မီဒီယာသမားျဖစ္တဲ့ ကိုေမာင္ေမာင္ ျမင့္က တုံ႔ျပန္ေဝဖန္တာေတြ ဖတ္လိုက္ရပါတယ္။ ကြ်န္ေတာ္ကေတာ့ ဟိုလူေတာ္ ဒီလူေတာ္ေျပာၿပီး ၾကားက မဂၤလာယူတတ္သူမဟုတ္တဲ့အတြက္ ကြ်န္ေတာ့အေတြ႕အႀကဳံကို တင္ျပမယ္၊ ကြ်န္ေတာ္ ကေတာ့ လူမိုက္လုိ႔ဘဲ ေျပာရမလား ကိုယ့္ကမွားေနတယ္ထင္တာကို အားမနာတမ္း ေျပာတတ္လုိ႔ သူငယ္ခ်င္းေတြက ေက်ာင္းေနစဥ္က “တေစာက္ကမ္း” ဆိုတဲ့ ဘြဲ႔ကို ေပးခဲ့ၾကပါတယ္။ အဓိကေတာ့ ကိုယ္တင္ျပခ်က္ေတြဟာ ကိုယ္က်ဳိးမဖက္ဘုိ႔ လိုပါတယ္။ ဒီမီဒီယာဆိုတာ သုံးတတ္ရင္ေဆး၊ မသုံးတတ္ရင္ေဘးလို႔ ႏုိင္ငံေရးသမားေတြက ယုံၾကည္ၾကပါတယ္။ မီဒီယာကို သုံးတတ္ရင္ မီဒီယာရဲ႕ပံ့ပုိးမႈနဲ႔ ေရြးေကာက္ပြဲေတြမွာ ၿပိဳင္ဘက္ကို အႏိုင္ရတတ္သလို မီဒီယာကို မသုံးတတ္ရင္ ခ်ီးေသးကအစ မေကာင္းတာမွန္သမွ် အညႈိးနဲ႔ ပုပ္ခ်တာကို ခံရၿပီး ကိုယ္က်ဳိးနဲတတ္ပါတယ္။



ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံလုိ စစ္အာဏာရွင္စံနစ္ေအာက္မွာ ႏွစ္ေပါင္းမ်ားစြာေရာက္ေနတဲ့ ျပည္သူေတြဟာ မဆလ၊ နဝတ၊ နအဖအစဥ္အဆက္ ျပည္သူပိုင္ (၎တုိ႔ပိုင္) လုပ္ထားတယ္ဆိုတဲ့ မီဒီယာရဲ႕ နားမုဒိမ္း က်င့္ေနတာကို ေန႔စဥ္နဲ႔အမွ်ခံေနၾကရပါတယ္။ ငါတုိ႔အစိုးရလုပ္တာ အကုန္မွန္တယ္၊ ဒါတို႔ ေခါင္းေဆာင္ႀကီးမ်ား တိုင္းျပည္ကို စည္းကမ္းရွိစြာ ျပဳျပင္ေနတယ္။ တံတားေတြ ေဆာက္ေနတယ္၊ လမ္ေတြခင္းေနတယ္၊ အႏွစ္သာရရွိေသာ ေခါင္းေဆာင္ႀကီး၏ မိန္႔ခြန္း၊ အတိုက္အခံ ျပည္ပပုဆိန္ ႐ိုးမ်ား က်ဆုံးရမည္ စသည္ျဖင့္ တြင္တြင္ႀကီး မ်က္စိမုဒိမ္း၊ နားမုဒိမ္း ေန႔စဥ္က်င့္ေနသည့္ အသုံး ေတာ္ခံ မီဒီယာမ်ားကို တန္ျပန္ႏိုင္ရန္ ျပည္သူ႔အက်ဳိးျပဳ မီဒီယာမ်ားလိုအပ္ပါသည္။ ၈၈ ေနာက္ပိုင္း RFA ႏွင့္ DVB တို႔သည္ ဒီမုိကေရစီအေရးကို ေစာင္းေပးမည့္ သတင္းမီဒီယာမ်ားအျဖစ္ ထြက္ေပၚလာ သည္မွာ ကြ်ႏု္ပ္တို႔အားလုံးအတြက္ အားတက္စရာပါ။



ဒီမုိကရတစ္ျမန္မာ့အသံ (DVB) သည္ NCGUB ႏွင့္ ေနာ္ေဝးႏုိင္ငံတုိ႔ ပူးေပါင္းညႈိႏႈိင္း လုပ္ေဆာင္မႈျဖင့္ ေပၚေပါက္လာေသာ အသံလြင့္႒ာနျဖစ္သလို Radio Free Asia လြတ္လပ္ေသာ အာရွအသံ သည္လည္း အေမရိကအစိုးရကြန္ဂရက္ ေထာက္ပံ့မႈျဖင့္ အာရွတိုက္ ဒီမုိကေရစီထြန္းကား လာေရးအတြက္ ရည္မွန္းခ်က္ျဖင့္ ေပၚေပါက္လာေသာ ႒ာနမ်ားျဖစ္ပါသည္။ သတင္းစာဆရာႀကီး ေၾကးမုံဦးေသာင္း NCGUB အစိုးရကို ေဝဖန္ခဲ့ၿပီးေနာက္ ဆရာႀကီး၏ သတင္းေဆာင္းပါးမ်ား၊ ေတြ႕ဆုံးေဆြးေႏြးခန္းမ်ားကို DVB မွ ရပ္ဆိုင္းလိုက္ပါသည္။ ဆရာႀကီးမေသမွီ ကြ်န္ေတာ့ကို ရင္ဖြင့္ သြားခဲ့သျဖင့္ သိရွိရပါသည္။ ဆရာကေတာ္ အသက္ရွင္ေနပါေသးသည္၊ ေမးၾကည့္ႏုိင္ပါသည္။



DVB တြင္ ခင္ေမာင္ဝင္းကို NCGUB မွ ေထာက္ခံမႈျဖင့္ ခန္႔အပ္လိုက္ၿပီးေနာက္ DVB သည္ ခင္ေမာင္ဝင္း ပိတ္ပင္ထားေသာသူမ်ားကို ေတြ႕ဆုံေဆြးေႏြးျခင္း မျပဳလုပ္ေတာ့ဘဲ ပိတ္ပင္ထား ခဲ့သည္ကို ထင္ရွားစြာေတြ႕ရသည္။ ေနာက္ဆုံး DVB သည္ ဘက္မလိုက္ အသံလႊင့္႒ာနျဖစ္သည္ဟု ေျဗာင္ေၾကျငာလာၿပီး NCGUB ႏွင့္ လုံးဝ မသက္ဆိုင္ေတာ့ေၾကာင္း၊ ဘက္မလိုက္ရပ္တည္မည္ ျဖစ္ေၾကာင္း တရားဝင္ ေျပာၾကားသည္အထိ ျဖစ္လာခဲ့သည္။ ကြ်န္ေတာ့အျမင္မွာ DVB သည္ ဒီမိုကေရစီဘက္မွ ထုတ္လႊင့္ေသာ အသံလႊင့္႒ာနျဖစ္သည္၊ ၾကားေနမဟုတ္၊ ဒီမုိကေရစီ အင္အား စုတို႔ဘက္မွ လိုက္၍ အသံလႊင္ရမည့္ တာဝန္ရွိသည္။ ဘက္မလိုက္ မီဒီယာဟု အစကဆိုလွ်င္ ၎တုိ႔ကို မည္သူမွ် အလုပ္ခန္႔မည္မဟုတ္ေခ်။ ကြ်န္ေတာ့အျမင္သည္ ခင္ေမာင္ဝင္းသည္ ABSDF ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံလုံးဆိုင္ရာ ေက်ာင္းသားမ်ား ဒီမုိကရက္တစ္တပ္ဦးမွ ရဲေဘာ္တေယာက္ျဖစ္သည္။ ေတာ္လွန္ေရးသမားဟု အမည္ခံယူခဲ့သူျဖစ္သည္။ DVB တြင္ သူ႔လက္ သူ႔ေျခ ျဖစ္လာသည့္အခါမွ ဘက္မလိုက္သတင္းသမားဟု ဟစ္ေႂကြးသည္မွာ သူ႔သ႐ုပ္ကို ေဖၚျပျခင္းပင္ျဖစ္သည္။ အစက တည္းက စစ္အစိုးရကို ဆန္႔က်င္လာသူဟု ဆိုသူက မီဒီယာသမားအျဖစ္ ေကာင္းစားလာေသာအခါ ယၡင္ေတာ္လွန္ေရးသမားဘဝကို ေမ့ၿပီး ၾကားေန မီဒီယာလုပ္ျခင္းသည္ ေတာ္လွန္ေရးကို သစၥာေဖာက္၍ ကိုယ္က်ဳိးရွာျခင္းပင္ျဖစ္သည္။



ABSDF ဗဟို ေကာ္မီတီတြင္ ျပန္ၾကားေရးတာဝန္ခံလုပ္ၿပီး ညီလာခံတြင္ မည္သည့္ အလုပ္ကိုမွ တင္ျပႏုိင္ျခင္းမရွိဘဲႏွင့္ ကြ်န္ေတာ္ေရးသားၿပီး ႏႈတ္ခမ္းေမႊး ေအာင္သန္းမွ ႐ိုက္ႏွိပ္ ျဖန္႔ခ်ီသည့္ “နီကာရာဂြါ ေ႐ြးေကာက္ပြဲ” “ဖီလစ္ပိုင္ေရြးေကာက္ပြဲ” စသည့္ ေဆာင္းပါးမ်ားကို ၁၉၉၀ ေရြးေကာက္ပြဲ မတိုင္မွီ ပုံႏွိပ္၍ ျပည္တြင္းသုိ႔ ABSDF ျပန္ၾကားေရး႒ာန အမည္ခံၿပီး ျဖန္႔ခ်ီေပးခဲ့ျခင္းကို ၎႒ာနမွ လုပ္ပါသည္ဟု ေျဗာင္လိမ္ခဲ့သူျဖစ္သည္။ တဖန္ တတိယအႀကိမ္ ညီလာခံမွ မွတ္တမ္း မ်ားကို၊ တိတ္ေခြမ်ားကို ျပန္ၾကားေရး တာဝန္ခံအျဖစ္ သိမ္းဆည္းသည့္အခါ “ဒါေတြက တေန႔ ေ႐ႊေတြဗ်” ဟု ေျပာသူမွာလည္း ခင္ေမာင္ဝင္းပင္ျဖစ္သည္။



ကြ်န္ေတာ့အေနႏွင့္ မီဒီယာသမားအားလုံးကို မဆိုလိုပါ။ မီဒီယာသမားမ်ားထဲတြင္ အခြင့္ အေရးသမားမ်ား၊ ရန္သူ႔ပုဆိန္႐ိုးမ်ားကို သတိထားရမည္၊ သူ႔လူကိုယ့္ဘက္သမားမ်ားကို ပညာမ်က္စိ ျဖင့္ ၾကည့္တတ္ရမည္ဟု သတိေပးလိုပါသည္။



ကြ်န္ေတာ္တုိ႔ ျပင္ပရွိ မီဒီယာမ်ားတြင္ လြတ္လပ္မႈ အျပည့္ရွိပါသည္၊ မည္သူ႔ကိုမွ် ေၾကာက္လန္႔ ေနစရာမရွိ၊ အစိုးရမွ ျပည္တြင္း မီဒီယာမ်ားကို ထိမ္းခ်ဳပ္၍ မလြယ္၊ ထိုေၾကာင့္ BBC, VOA, RFA ညာေနသည္၊ မိုးလုံးျပည့္ မုသာဝါဒီမ်ား စသည္ျဖင့္ နအဖက တိုက္ခိုက္လာပါသည္။ ကြ်န္ေတာ့ အေနႏွင့္ နအဖေနရာမွ ေန၍ စဥ္းစားလွ်င္ ၎ျပည္ပမီဒီယာမ်ားကို ဘယ္လို ႏႈတ္ပိတ္ေအာက္ လုပ္မလဲဆိုလွ်င္ ျပည္တြင္းကဲ့သုိ႔ အာဏာသုံး၍မရျဖင့္ ဥပါယ္တမ်ဥ္ျဖင့္ မိမိလူမ်ားကို မီဒီယာထဲသုိ႔ သြတ္သြင္းေပးရမည္ဟု ဆုံးျဖတ္ရမည္ျဖစ္သည္။ ကြ်န္ေတာ္ တကၠသိုလ္ ေက်ာင္းသားဘဝ ၁၉၇၃ ခုႏွစ္ေလာက္က ကြ်န္ေတာ့သူငယ္ခ်င္းအိမ္တြင္ အဂၤလိပ္စာက်ဴရွင္ေပးသည့္ ကရင္ေက်ာင္းဆရာ တေယာက္ရွိပါသည္။ တေန႔တြင္ ၎က ဝမ္းသာအားရႏွင့္ သူ႔ကို BBC တြင္ တာဝန္ထမ္းေဆာင္ရန္ အေရြးခံရေၾကာင္း ေျပာသျဖင့္ ဝမ္းသာမိၾကပါသည္။ ထုိသူသည္ ႐ိုးသား၍ ႀကိဳးစားေသာ ျမန္မာ- အဂၤလိပ္ႏွစ္ဘာသာကို ေၾကညက္ေသာသူျဖစ္သည္။ အသံလႊင့္သမားေကာင္း တေယာက္ျဖစ္ႏုိင္သည့္ အသံၾသဇာႏွင့္လည္း ျပည့္စုံပါသည္။ သုိ႔ရာတြင္ ေနာင္သုံးလအၾကာ ၎အတြက္ ပတ္စပုိ႔ ဗီဇာေစာင့္ေနစဥ္ Reject လုပ္ခံရပါတယ္။ အေၾကာင္းမွာ ျမန္မာအစိုးရက ၎သည္ ကြန္ျမဴနစ္စံနစ္ ယုံၾကည္သူတဦးျဖစ္သည္ဟုဆိုကာ သတင္းေပးေသာေၾကာင့္ဟု သိရပါ သည္။ BBC မွ အစိုးရ ေထာက္ခံသူတေယာက္ကို ေရြးယူသြားခဲ့ပါသည္။



ေနာက္တခ်က္မွာ VOA တြင္ အလုပ္လုပ္ခဲ့သူ ဝန္ထမ္းတဦးမွ ကြ်န္ေတာ့အား သူ႔အမည္ကို မေျပာရန္ ဂတိခံ၍ ေျပာၾကာခဲ့မႈျဖစ္ပါသည္။ ၎အား တေန႔တြင္ VOA မွ တာဝန္ရွိသူက ေန႔လည္ ထမင္းစားေခၚယူခဲ့ၿပီး၊ အေမရိကန္ႏိုင္ငံဆိုင္ရာ ျမန္မာသံအမတ္ႀကီး တဦးႏွင့္ ေပးေတြခဲ့သည္ဟု ဆိုသည္။ အေမရိကန္ႏုိင္ငံဆိုင္ရာ ျမန္မာသံအမတ္ႀကီးက ၎အား “ေအး... မင္းေရးခ်င္တာေရး အသံလႊင့္ခ်င္တာလႊင့္ေပါ့ကြာ၊ ဒါေပမဲ့ ငါတို႔ထိခိုက္မယ္ဆိုတဲ့ ဟာမ်ဳိးကုိ ေပါ့ၿပီးလႊင့္၊ အေရးႀကီးတာကို အေရးမႀကီးသလိုမ်ဳိးေပါ့ကြာ၊ နားလည္တယ္မဟုတ္လားဟု ေျပာခဲ့ေၾကာင္း၊ ေနာက္ မင္းလဲတေန႔ ျမန္မာျပည္ကို ျပန္မွာဘဲ လိမ္လိမ္မာမာ လုပ္ေပါ့ကြာ” ဟု ဆုံးမသြားေသးေၾကာင္း ရင္ဖြင့္ခဲ့ပါသည္။ သူ႔အေနႏွင့္ ႒ာနမႈး (ယၡဳ႒ာနမႈးမဟုတ္) က ယၡဳလို သံအမတ္ႀကီးႏွင့္ ရင္းႏွီးႂကြမ္းဝင္ေၾကာင္း ေတြ႕ရ သျဖင့္ Shock ေရွာ့ျဖစ္သြားသည္ဟု ဆိုပါသည္။



ထို႔ေၾကာင့္ သတင္း႒ာန အထူးသျဖင့္ ျမန္မာျပည္သူ သန္း ၅၀ ေက်ာ္ကို တခ်ိန္တည္း သတင္း ေပးႏုိင္ေသာ ေရဒီယို အသံလႊင့္႒ာနမ်ား၏ အခန္းက႑သည္ အလြန္အေရးႀကီးသည့္ အေနအထား တြင္ ရွိပါသည္။ BBC, VOA, တို႔သည္ အစကနဦးတည္းက ဘက္မလိုက္သတင္း႒ာနမ်ားျဖစ္သည္။ VOA သည္ အေမရိကန္ အစိုးရေပၚလစီဘက္သုိ႔ ယိမ္းရသည္ကို မျငင္းႏုိင္ေခ်။ RFA, DVB တုိ႔သည္ ဘက္လိုက္ကိုလုိက္ရမည္ဟု ျမင္သည္။ ဘက္မလိုက္လိုလွ်င္ RFA, DVB မွ ထြက္ၿပီး BBC, VOA သုိ႔ ဝင္ၾကပါဟု တိုက္တြန္းလိုသည္။ ဘက္မလိုက္ ကိုယ္ပိုင္ေထာင္လိုက ေထာင္ၾကပါ။ DVB, RFA နာမည္ခံၿပီးေတာ့ စစ္အာရွင္မ်ားကို တန္းတူအားေပးမႈ မျပဳသင့္ဟု ယုံၾကည္သည္။ ရန္သူသည္ ျပင္ပသတင္း႒ာနမ်ားကို အင္အားသုံး၍ မထိမ္းခ်ဳပ္ႏုိင္လွ်င္ အႏုနည္းျဖင့္ အတြင္းလူမ်ားထည့္ၿပီး လႈိက္စားႏိုင္သည္ လႈိက္စားေနသည္ကို မ်က္စိေဒါက္ေထာက္ၾကည့္ဘုိ႔လိုသည္ဟု သတိေပးလိုက္ ခ်င္ပါသည္။



နိဂုံအားျဖင့္ ဒုတိယကမၻာစစ္အတြင္း အဂၤလိပ္ႏွင့္ ဂ်ာမန္တိုက္ေနစဥ္ အဂၤလိပ္ဘက္မွ အသံလႊင့္သူ မ်ားကလည္း မည္ကဲ့သုိ႔ ေအာင္ပြဲခံေနသည္၊ ရန္သူမည္မွ်က်ဆုံးသည္ကို ေျပာေန သကဲ့သုိ႔ ဂ်ာမန္မွလည္း ထိုနည္းတူေျပာလ်က္ ဝါဒျဖန္႔ခ်ီၾကသည္။ ယေန႔ျမန္မာျပည္သည္၊ ျပည္သူ လူထုႏွင့္ စစ္အာဏာရွင္တုိ႔ စစ္ျဖစ္ေနသည့္ပြဲျဖစ္သည္။ စစ္ပြဲမၿပီးေသး၊ ကြ်န္ေတာ္တုိ႔ အေနႏွင့္ စစ္အာဏာ ရွင္မ်ားကို တန္းတူအခြင့္အေရးေပးစရာမလိုဟု လုံးဝယုံၾကည္သည္။ ရန္သူ႕လူမ်ား မီဒီယာသမားမ်ား ထဲတြင္ ဝင္ေရာက္ေနမည္မွာ ေျမႀကီးလက္ခတ္မလြဲဟု ယုံၾကည္သည္။ ဒီမိုကေရစီ ရရွိေရးကို လိုလား သူမ်ားပီပီ အတိုက္အခံႏုိင္ငံေရးသမားမ်ားကို ေဇာင္းေပး၍ ၎တုိ႔အသံကို ေဖာ္ထုတ္ေပးႏုိင္ ဘုိ႔လိုသည္။ ပုဂၢိဳလ္ေရးမ်ားျဖင့္ ဆင္ဆာလုပ္ ပိတ္ပင္ေနျခင္းမ်ဳိးကို ခြင့္မလႊတ္သင့္ဟု ယုံၾကည္ ပါသည္။ ဒါေၾကာင့္ ၾကားေနရမဲ့ အခ်ိန္ေရာက္ၿပီလားေမာင္တို႔ဟု ေမးလိုက္ပါေၾကာင္း။



ထြန္းေအာင္ေက်ာ္

Transocean’s ties to Burmese drug lords

I would like to expose about a man, drug lord (Lo Hsing Han). Lo Hsing Han's retirement has been much more comfortable than the prison cell he might have expected.
But, like every other drug lord who has lasted long enough to salt his gains into legal trades, the secret of his success is not his guns or cunning, but his connections.

Protected by his friends in Burma's military junta, the man once known as the "Godfather of Heroin" is today among the country's most successful businessmen, his fingers in everything from jade and teak to construction and luxury hotels.

The 73-year-old, once blamed for single-handedly flooding America's streets with heroin, is among dozens of regime "cronies" given government contracts to reconstruct the towns and villages of the storm-hit Irrawaddy Delta – deals likely to earn them millions of dollars in commissions from a fund financed mainly by aid from foreign governments.
Mr Lo's Asia World Company, which is run today by his son, US-educated Steven Law, is among 43 companies already earmarked for reconstruction contracts, according to Burma's state-run press. Many firms are understood to be owned by friends or relations of the generals, whose social lives revolve around Rangoon's golf courses.
Critics fear much of it will end up lining the pockets of the generals and their cronies, the military men disbursing generous contracts to their business friends and taking kickbacks in return.
"This donors' conference will be a cash cow," said Mark Farmaner, the director of the human rights group Burma Campaign UK.

"The generals are giving out contracts to their cronies to assist in the reconstruction, but much of it will disappear in bribes. I am sure that is one reason why they have now decided to let in foreign aid workers: they have realised that cheque-books may start opening."

Asia World was involved in building Burma's new capital, Naypyidaw, including junta leader Than Shwe's house. Mr Lo is also said to have organised the catering for Than Shwe's daughter Thandar's wedding , where she appeared wearing seven diamond-encrusted necklaces and where guests enjoyed a five-tiered wedding cake and gallons of champagne.

In a July 2010, New York Times profile that singled out Deepwater Horizon rig owner Transocean's proclivity for breaking rules, Barry Meier noted that many human-rights activists have been calling for an investigation into the company's relationship with a family of powerful drug lords in Burma. One of their number is indeed Lo Hsing Han, known as the "Godfather of heroin." Now it appears that those activists are finally getting their wish.
The Treasury Department has opened a probe into Transocean's dealings in the region. Last year, Transocean signed a deal to drill in Burmese waters controlled by a family of drug lords. The family's leaders are Stephen Law — whom the U.S. government suspects is a launderer of enormous amounts of drug money — and Han, who "has been one of the world's key heroin traffickers dating back to the early 1970s," the Treasury Department says.

Business dealings with Law and Han would be considered a major breach of U.S. sanctions against Burma. The government hopes to discover whether any of the sanctioned parties are listed on the drilling contract — and to determine if Transocean knew that it was cutting a deal with some of the world's most ruthless international criminals.

The military junta that rules Burma has been accused of committing genocide, and reportedly using to develop nuclear weapons.

GOOD NEWS

အေမရိကန္ အစိုးရက သန္းေရႊ နဲ ့စစ္ေခါင္းေဆာင္ ေတြကို စစ္ရာဇ၀တ္ေကာင္မ်ား အျဖစ္ နိင္ငံတကာ တရားရံုးမွာ အေရးယူေပးဖို့ကုလသမဂ ထံ ေတာင္းဆိုခ်က္ကို နယူဇီလန္ နဲ ့ ကေနဒါ နိင္ငံမ်ား က ေထာက္ခံ ေပးဖို ့ အေမရိကန္ သံတမန္မ်ားက တိုက္တြန္းေနျပီ ျဖစ္ေၾကာင္းသတင္းရရိွပါတယ္။

War crimes probe for Myanmar

Aug 19, 2010
War crimes probe for Myanmar
WASHINGTON - CRITICS of Myanmar are voicing hope for intensified global pressure on the military regime after the United States signalled it would support a UN inquiry into alleged war crimes.

President Barack Obama's administration last year opened a new policy of engagement with Myanmar, also known as Burma, concluding that longstanding Western efforts to isolate the junta had failed to bear fruit.

But the administration has voiced growing dismay over the junta, which has faced allegations it is pursuing nuclear weapons and has stepped up efforts to marginalize democracy icon Aung San Suu Kyi ahead of rare elections.

An administration official said the United States has opened discussions on how to set up a war crimes probe, a longstanding demand of activists as it could lead to the eventual indictment of junta leaders.

The US Campaign for Burma, led by exiled activists, said that Australia, Britain, the Czech Republic and Slovakia have also supported an inquiry. It pledged to shift attention to persuading the European Union as a whole and Canada to offer support.

China, the main commercial and political partner of Myanmar, wields veto power on the UN Security Council, meaning any effort to establish an inquiry would likely come instead at the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva. -- AFP

NLD Sets Election Boycott Officially

Leaders of Burma's main opposition party, the National League for Democracy (NLD), have decided to officially boycott the Nov 7. election, according to Ohn Kyaing, a party spokesperson.

The decision was made at a meeting on Thursday attended by central executive committee and leading party members.

Held at the house of NLD vice chairman Tin Oo in Rangoon, the meeting was attended by top NLD leaders including vice chairman Tin Oo, Win Tin, Nyunt Wai, Than Htun and Hla Pe, said Ohn Kyaing, who also attended.

He said the NLD decided to boycott the election because the 2008 Constitution and the election commission's election law do not guarantee democracy and human rights in Burma.

The NLD also affirmed that voters have the right to decide whether to vote in the election according to the constitution, he said.

In June, detained Burmese opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi said Burmese citizens have the right not to vote in the upcoming election.

However, earlier in August, an article in one of the state-run newspapers warned that anyone who “disrupts” the upcoming elections could face up to 20 years imprisonment.

Ohn Kyaing said he cannot provide detailed information about the election boycott at this moment, but the NLD will hold strategy meetings in the near future for organizing the election boycott.

The Nov. 7 election takes place one week before Suu Kyi is due for release.
အမ်ဳိးသား ဒီမုိကေရစီ အဖြဲ႔ခ်ဳပ္ (NLD) အေနျဖင့္ ၂၀၁၀ ေရြးေကာက္ပြဲကုိ သပိတ္ေမွာက္ရန္ ယေန႔ ဆုံးျဖတ္လုိက္ၿပီ ျဖစ္ေၾကာင္း ပါတီ ဗဟုိအလုပ္ အမႈေဆာင္ ဦးအုန္းႀကဳိင္က ဧရာ၀တီသုိ႔ ေျပာသည္။

NLD ဗဟုိအလုပ္အမႈေဆာင္မ်ားႏွင့္ ဗဟုိဦးစီးအဖြဲ႔၀င္မ်ား ပါ၀င္ေသာ အစည္းေ၀းတရပ္ကုိ ဒုဥကၠဌ ဦးတင္ဦးေနအိမ္တြင္ ယေန႔ မြန္းလြဲပုိင္းက က်င္းပခဲ့ၿပီးေနာက္ အဆုိပါ ဆုံးျဖတ္ခ်က္ ေပၚထြက္လာျခင္းျဖစ္သည္။
“က်ေနာ္တုိ႔ ဗဟုိ အလုပ္အမႈေဆာင္ အဖြဲ႔က ခရီးသြား ေနသူေတြ ကလြဲၿပီး က်န္တဲ့သူေတြ အားလုံး တက္တယ္။ ေနာက္ၿပီး ဗဟုိဦးစီး အဖြဲ႔၀င္ ေတြလည္း တက္တယ္။ ဒီအစည္း အေ၀းကေန ၂၀၀၈ ဖြဲ႔စည္းပုံ အေျခခံဥပေဒနဲ႔ ေရြးေကာက္ပြဲ ေကာ္မရွင္ ဥပေဒ၊ နည္းဥပေဒ ေတြဟာ ဒီမုိကေရစီနဲ႔ လူ႔ခြင့္အေရးေတြ ရရွိဖုိ႔ ဘယ္လုိမွ ဦးတည္ႏုိင္မွာ မဟုတ္တဲ့ အတြက္ ၂၀၁၀ ေရြးေကာက္ပြဲကုိ NLD က သပိတ္ေမွာက္ဖုိ႔ ဆုံးျဖတ္ လုိက္တယ္။ ေနာက္တခုက ေရြးေကာက္ပြဲ ဥေပေဒ ေတြမွာ ေဖာ္ျပထား တဲ့အတုိင္း မဲဆႏၵရွင္ လူထုအေနနဲ႔ မိမိဆႏၵအတုိင္း မဲမေပးဘဲ ေနပုိင္ခြင့္ ရွိတယ္လုိ႔ NLD က သုံးသပ္တယ္”ဟု ဦးအုန္းႀကဳိင္က ေျပာသည္။

တိုင္းေဒသႀကီးလႊတ္ေတာ္ သို႔မဟုတ္ ျပည္နယ္လႊတ္ေတာ္ ေရြးေကာက္ပြဲ ဥပေဒ၊ အခန္း (၁)၊ အပိုဒ္ (၂)၊ အပိုဒ္ခြဲ (ဎ) တြင္ ေရြးေကာက္မႈဆိုင္ရာ အခြင့္အေရးဆိုသည္မွာ ဟူေသာ အပိုဒ္၌ “ေရြးေကာက္ပြဲတြင္ မဲေပးႏိုင္ေသာ အခြင့္အေရး သို႔မဟုတ္ မဲေပးျခင္းမျပဳဘဲ ေနႏိုင္ေသာ အခြင့္အေရးကို ဆိုသည္”ဟု ေဖာ္ျပထားသည္။

NLD အေနျဖင့္ လူထုႏွင့္လက္တြဲ၍ ေရွ႕ဆက္ၿပီး မည္သုိ႔ လုပ္ေဆာင္သြားမည္ ဆုိသည္ကုိမူ အေသးစိတ္ မေျပာႏုိင္ေသး ေၾကာင္း ဦးအုန္းႀကဳိင္က ဆက္လက္ေျပာဆုိသည္။

ပါတီေခါင္းေဆာင္ ေဒၚေအာင္ဆန္းစုၾကည္ကလည္း မဲဆႏၵရွင္မ်ားအေနျဖင့္ မဲမေပးဘဲ ေနပုိင္ခြင့္ရွိေၾကာင္း လြန္ခဲ့သည့္လက ေရွ႕ေနမ်ားႏွင့္ေတြ႔ဆုံစဥ္ ေျပာဆုိခဲ့သည္။

၂၀၁၀ ေရြးေကာက္ပြဲႏွင့္ သက္ဆိုင္ေသာ ဥပေဒ ပုဒ္မ ၃ အရ တားျမစ္ခ်က္မ်ားကုိ မည္သူမဆို ေဖာက္ဖ်က္ က်ဴးလြန္၍ ျပစ္မႈ ထင္ရွားပါက ေထာင္ဒဏ္ အနည္းဆံုး ၅ ႏွစ္မွ အႏွစ္၂၀ အျပင္ ေငြဒဏ္ပါ ခ်မွတ္ႏိုင္ေၾကာင္း ၾသဂုတ္လ အေစာပိုင္း ျမန္မာ့အလင္း သတင္းစာတြင္ ဥပေဒေလ့လာသူတဦး အမည္ခံ ေဆာင္းပါးရွင္းက ေရးသားခဲ့သည္။

ယင္း ဥပေဒ ပုဒ္မ ၃ သည္ ႏုိင္ငံေတာ္ တာ၀န္ကို တည္ၿငိမ္ေအးခ်မ္းစြာ စနစ္တက် လႊဲေျပာင္းေပးေရး၊ အမ်ဳိးသား ညီလာခံ
လုပ္ငန္းမ်ား ေအာင္ျမင္စြာ ေဆာင္ရြက္ေရးတို႔ကုိ ေႏွာင့္ယွက္ ဆန္႔က်င္ျခင္းမွ ကာကြယ္ေသာ ဥပေဒ တရပ္ျဖစ္ေၾကာင္း ဥပေဒေလ့လာသူ တဦး အမည္ခံ ေဆာင္းပါးရွင္က ဆိုသည္။

၁၉၉၀ ေရြးေကာက္ပြဲ အႏုိင္ရ NLD သည္ ၂၀၁၀ ေရြးေကာက္ပြဲ အတြက္ ပါတီထပ္မံ မွတ္ပုံ မတင္ရန္ ၿပီးခဲ့သည့္ မတ္လ ၂၉ ရက္ေန႔ တြင္ ဆုံးျဖတ္ခ်က္ခ်ခဲ့သည္။

ထုိ႔ေနာက္ ႏိုင္ငံေရး ပါတီမ်ား မွတ္ပံုတင္ျခင္း ဥပေဒသစ္က NLD ၏ တရား၀င္ ရပ္တည္မႈကို ပယ္ဖ်က္ျခင္းႏွင့္ ျပည္သူ႔လႊတ္ေတာ္ ကုိယ္စားလွယ္မ်ား တရား၀င္ရပ္တည္ခြင့္ပယ္ဖ်က္ခံရသည့္အေပၚ NLD ပါတီက နအဖကို ဧၿပီ ၂၉ ရက္တြင္ တရားစြဲဆိုခဲ့ေသာ္လည္း ရန္ကုန္တုိင္းတရားရုံးက ေမ ၅ ရက္ ေန႔တြင္ ပယ္ခ် ထားခဲ့သည္။

လာမည့္ ေရြးေကာက္ပြဲတြင္ ယွဥ္ၿပဳိင္ရန္ ပါတီဆက္လက္ တည္ေထာင္ခြင့္ႏွင့္ တည္ေထာင္ခြင့္ေလွ်ာက္ထားသည့္ ႏိုင္ငံေရး ပါတီ ၄၇ ပါတီ ရွိသည္။ ပါတီမွတ္ပံုတင္ခြင့္ ေလွ်ာက္ထားသည့္ ပါတီမွာ ၄၂ ပါတီရွိၿပီး ပါတီ ၄၀ ကို မွတ္ပံုတင္ ခ်ေပးၿပီး ျဖစ္သည္။

မွတ္ပံုတင္က်ၿပီးေသာ ပါတီ ၄၀ အနက္ ေရြးေကာက္ပြဲ ေကာ္မရွင္သို႔ ယမန္ေန႔က ပါတီဝင္အင္အားစာရင္း တင္ျပခဲ့သည့္ ျပည္ေထာင္စု ႀကံ့ခိုင္ေရးႏွင့္ ဖြံ႔ၿဖိဳးေရးပါတီအပါဝင္ ၁၈ ပါတီသည္ ပါတီဝင္အင္အားစာရင္း တင္ျပခဲ့ၿပီး ျဖစ္သည္။

ပါတီစံု ဒီမိုကေရစီ အေထြေထြ ေရြးေကာက္ပြဲကို ၂၀၁၀ ျပည့္ႏွစ္ ႏို၀င္ဘာ ၇ ရက္ေန႔တြင္ လႊတ္ေတာ္ အသီးသီးအတြက္ က်င္းပသြားမည္ဟု ၾသဂုတ္လ ၁၃ ရက္ေန႔တြင္ စစ္အစိုးရက ထုတ္ျပန္ ေၾကညာထားသည္။

polls cannot be 'credible': US

The United States said Friday that Myanmar's planned November 7 elections cannot be "inclusive or credible" under the political circumstances there.

"Given the oppressive political environment in Burma, there is not a level playing field for these elections," State Department spokesman Philip Crowley told AFP, using the previous name for Myanmar.

"They cannot be inclusive or credible under these circumstances."

Myanmar's junta announced Friday it will hold its first election in two decades on November 7 -- a vote critics say is a sham aimed at entrenching the ruling generals' half-century grip on power.

Democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi, who has spent much of the past 20 years in detention and is seen as the biggest threat to the junta, is barred from standing in the polls because she is a serving prisoner.

The election date, announced by state media, falls about a week before Suu Kyi's current term of house arrest is due to expire on November 13.

Her party, the National League for Democracy (NLD), won a landslide victory in 1990 but was never allowed to take office. It is boycotting the upcoming vote, saying the rules are unfair.

The Obama administration last year launched a dialogue with Myanmar, concluding that isolating the regime had not worked. But it has said it will only lift sanctions in return for progress on democracy and other concerns.
President Barack Obama should "renew his support" for Myanmar democracy icon Aung San Suu Kyi and make sure the world is "not tempted to recognize this mockery of the democratic process," said top Senate Republican Mitch McConnell.


U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon called for a "free and fair" vote in Myanmar as the country's state media announced a date for the first election in 20 years.

A statement from Ban noted the announcement and asked that Myanmar's government uphold previous promises to hold "inclusive" elections.

"As essential steps for any national reconciliation and democratic transition process, the secretary-general strongly urges the authorities to ensure that fundamental freedoms are upheld for all citizens of Myanmar," the statement said.

He also asked that the government "release all remaining political prisoners without delay so that they can freely participate in the political life of their country."

Nobel Peace Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi has spent more than 14 of the past 20 years under house arrest. She was first placed under house arrest in 1989. A year later, in 1990, her party won a landslide victory that the military junta refused to recognize. Elections have not been held in the country since then.

The junta recently announced an election law that bars Suu Kyi from taking part in the upcoming race.

UN a clear message for mass killing

When a United Nations human-rights investigator for Myanmar called for an international inquiry to look into possible war crimes by the country's military regime, he added significant weight to similar calls that had been made in other quarters.

But that call in March by Tomas Ojea Quintana, as part of a scathing 30-page report delivered to the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva, has come back to haunt the UN special rapporteur on human rights in Myanmar. Quintana has been
denied a visa by the junta to return to the Southeast Asian nation for his fourth visit, according to diplomatic and UN sources.

Pro-democracy activists in exile are hardly surprised by the treatment given to the Argentine lawyer, who is currently on a visit to Thailand and Indonesia ahead of preparing another report on Myanmar to be presented to the UN General Assembly in October.

His predecessor, Paulo Sergio Pinheiro, was also shut out from the country by the junta following critical reports tabled before the world body.

"It was very clear that Quintana touched on a very sensitive issue for the Burmese [Myanmar] regime when he called for the setting up of an international committee to look into war crimes," said Khin Ohmar, coordinator of the Burma Partnership, an Asia-Pacific network of civil society groups championing democracy and human rights in Myanmar. "The regime cannot tolerate such criticism."

In fact, Quintana broke new diplomatic ground with the strong words he said in March, added the political exile. "It was the first time that a crime[s] against humanity inquiry was called for by a UN human-rights rapporteur."

Despite being denied a visa, "he [Quintana] is still committed to pushing the inquiry forward", revealed David Scott Matheison, Myanmar consultant for Human Rights Watch, a New York-based global rights watchdog. "He is not giving up; he wants to go back inside and engage with as many actors."

The UN established a mandate to look into human-rights violations in Myanmar in 1992. That year also saw the start of resolutions critical of the junta being tabled during the annual sessions of the UN General Assembly.

But it was only in 2002 that the reports on war crimes allegations leveled at the junta began to emerge, confirming a worsening climate of oppression and abuse in a country that already had a growing list of gross human-rights violations. The most damning report was "License to Rape", published by the Shan Women's Action Network (SWAN), a group from Myanmar's Shan ethnic minority.

This disturbing report documented the military's rape of Shan women as part of their war effort against Shan ethnic rebels.

Following that 2002 report, the UN General Assembly approved for the first time a resolution calling for an independent inquiry to investigate cases of rape and other crimes committed by the Myanmar regime in the border areas that are home to ethnic minorities where separatist battles were being waged.

Yet the disclosures in the SWAN report changed little, as reflected in other reports that followed. Some were published by women belonging to the Karen minority living along Myanmar's eastern borders, where a six-decade separatist conflict continues.

The Karen and Shan victims are among those in the north and eastern corner of Myanmar, close to the country's borders with Thailand and China, where some 500,000 internally displaced people live in dire conditions after fleeing conflict situations in their villages.

The impacts of these conflicts on the ethnic civilian population were exposed in a 2009 report authored by five international jurists. Over 3,000 ethnic nationality villages have been burnt to the ground by the military regime, revealed the report produced by the International Human Rights Clinic at the law school of the US-based Harvard University. "This is comparable to the number of villages estimated to have been destroyed or damaged in Darfur [Sudan]."

"The world cannot wait while the military regime continues its atrocities against the people of Burma [Myanmar]," added the jurists from Britain, Mongolia, South Africa, the United States and Venezuela in the report "Crimes in Burma". "We call on the UN Security Council urgently to establish a commission of inquiry to investigate and report on crimes against humanity and war crimes in Burma."

Quintana echoed similar sentiments in his March report: "The UN institutions may consider the possibility to establish a commission of inquiry with a specific fact-finding mandate to address the question of international crimes."

Quintana's report, which followed his third trip to Myanmar in February following his appointment in May 2008, highlighted a litany of violations that included deaths and torture of detainees, forced labor, arrest of dissidents and the lack of freedom of expression and assembly.

"This report was the highest from a UN official and confirmed what ethnic communities living in the war zones have been saying during the past years," said Charm Tong, a ranking member of SWAN. "The victims are still under attack and have to flee the Burmese army."

For this suffering to end, Quintana's concerns and his call for a war crimes inquiry should "break the silence at the UN Security Council", the Shan activist told Inter Press Service. "We want Burma to be discussed at the Security Council."

(Inter Press Service)

RUSSIA TRAINS MYANMAR MILITARY STUDENT OFFICERS

Russia has trained 4,185 Myanmar military officers in nuclear sciences over the past decade but only a "sprinkling" of scholars have pursued the positive uses of the energy source, a Myanmar academic said on Friday. Myanmar's nuclear ambitions have been a subject of concern in recent years after
allegations by defectors that the pariah regime is keen to develop nuclear weapons in cooperation with North Korea.
"Russia has begun to fulfil a 250-million-dollar contract to deliver surface-to-air missiles to seven countries including Libya, Syria and Venezuela and Myanmar, the Vedomosti business daily reported Friday. Russia will also deliver the S-125 Pechora-2M missile batteries to Egypt, Myanmar, Vietnam and Turkmenistan under the contract, the newspaper said, citing a source in the state-owned Russian Technologies corporation", said Aung Naing Htwe (leading members of 88 Generation Students -Exile.

Myanmar's ruling junta, however, claims that its nuclear ambitions are purely medical in nature.

Maung Zarni, a research fellow at the London School of Economics and Political Science, pointed out that only a handful of the Myanmar graduates who have studied nuclear-related technologies in Moscow had medical backgrounds, raising questions about the regime's claims of pursuing nuclear energy for medicinal reasons.

"Between 400 to 600 graduates are sent to Russia every year and out of those graduates only a sprinkling of officers have medical backgrounds," he told a seminar at Bangkok's Chulalongkorn University.

Zarni estimated that only five to 20 of the military graduates attending nuclear-related courses in Moscow since 2001 had medical backgrounds. He had compiled the list of 4,185 based on interviews with former graduates, he said.

"And if the nuclear programme is for medical purposes why isn't there any involvement by the Ministry of Health," Zarni noted.

He acknowledged that it was still difficult to prove whether Myanmar's military junta had acquired or developed nuclear weapons, but argued their intent to do so was pretty clear.

At this stage the junta might be more interested in using the threat of a potential nuclear arsenal as a "big stick" in diplomacy, he speculated.

"The fact that the US and other powers have not done anything substantive to rein in North Korea is because they have the bomb, so that's a role model for a lot of rogue states," Zarni said.

88 VIEW

Than Shwe Is In Hospital

Burmese military chief Snr-Gen Than Shwe was briefly hospitalized at a Rangoon hospital on Wednesday night, according to sources in Naypyidaw and Rangoon.

The 77-year-old junta leader, who is known to have a diabetes, was hospitalized at Pun Hlaing International Hospital in Rangoon, the sources said. But he was believed to be no longer at the hospital on Thursday morning, according to journalists in Rangoon.


Burmese Buddhist monks in India who met Than Shwe during his recent visit there said he appeared to be in ill health.

In December 2006, Than Shwe spent two weeks in Singapore's General Hospital, reportedly receiving treatment for intestinal cancer . He reportedly refused surgery.

Naypidaw sources speculate that the regime chief is likely to seek further medical treatment in Singapore if his health worsens.

UNfair ON BURMA'S POPULATION

The UN has been forced to defend its record on Burma in recent days with the fallout from a leaked memo that slated Ban Ki-moon’s impact on the pariah state showing no signs of easing.

The now-infamous 50-page report, written by Inga-Britt Ahlenius and leaked to the Washington Post in mid-July, said that the UN secretariat is in a “process of decay” after three years of “absence of strategic guidance and leadership” under Ban.

The comments were a parting shot from Ahlenius, who recently finished her post as chief of the UN’s anti-corruption agency, the Office of Internal Oversight (UNOIOS).

“We seem to be seen less and less as a relevant partner in the resolution of world problems,” she said, questioning the UN’s “capacity to protect civilians in conflict and distress…What relevance do we have in disarmament, in Myanmar [Burma], Darfur, Afghanistan, Cyprus, G20…?”

The secretary general used one of his first speeches as UN chief in January 2007 to urge for the release of Burma’s political prisoners, but since his last, and widely criticised, visit to Burma in June last year, he has barely mentioned the country in public.

Moreover, the UN is yet to appoint a successor to Ibrahim Gambari, the equally maligned UN special envoy to Burma who was reassigned to Sudan in late 2009. In January this year it defended the hiatus on reappointing an envoy by claiming that UN Chief of Staff Vijay Nambiar was temporarily filling the role.

But it has again been forced to defend accusations in the wake of the leaked report that it has been lax on pressuring the Burmese junta to reform. One reporter asked Ban’s spokesperson, Martin Nesirky, on 23 July whether the UN had indeed accomplished anything on Burma, which is heading towards widely-criticised elections this year.

“We continue to work, as I also said to you before; the good offices [team] is not one individual, if you like, it’s people working behind the scenes,” he said. “Not everything that happens is in the public eye…Sometimes you see those results quickly, sometimes it takes longer. Certainly we’ve been very public about the need for credible elections in Myanmar.

Nambiar also responded to the Ahlenius report by saying that Ban’s work as secretary general had been “visionary” and that he had balanced his UN role with “providing truly global leadership.”

But critics have argued that his method of dealing in “soft power” has reinforced the growing influence of China within the UN, at a time when Western nations are in a face-off over China’s support for the Burmese junta. Ahlenius said that Ban was “spineless and charmless” and was “struggling to show leadership”, an accusation that has apparently rattled his office.