BURMA RELATED NEWS AUGUST 12, 2012.

ABC News - Opposition Leader Suu Kyi Meets Myanmar President
YANGON, Myanmar August 12, 2012 (AP)

Myanmar opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi held her first talks with the country's president Sunday since becoming a member of parliament.

She and President Thein Sein discussed a wide range of issues but details of the two-hour meeting were confidential, said Col. Zaw Htay, director of the president's office. The talks took place in the capital, Naypyitaw, where parliament is currently in session.

Also present at the meeting were senior Cabinet ministers Aung Min and Soe Thane, who head the government's peace committee that has brokered several cease-fires with ethnic groups. The pacts are seen as major steps toward ending long-running insurgencies.

Nyan Win, spokesman for Suu Kyi's opposition party, called Sunday's meeting "most welcome" but said he had no immediate details.

Thein Sein and Suu Kyi are key players in Myanmar's political transformation after a half-century of military rule. They have met on two previous occasions, most recently in April. That meeting followed by-elections won by Suu Kyi's party but preceded her entry to parliament.

Suu Kyi, a Nobel Peace Prize laureate, now heads the main opposition group with 43 seats in parliament, which is overwhelmingly dominated by allies of the former military regime. Last week, she was named head of a 15-member parliamentary committee that is tasked with the challenge of helping to implement rule of law in the country.

Suu Kyi has long struggled for democratic rule and spent about 15 years under house arrest during the former military regime. Her party boycotted a November 2010 general election, saying it was unfair and undemocratic.

But when Thein Sein, a former general and prime minister, became president last year, he introduced reforms that eased the political landscape after almost five decades of military repression.

The international community has praised the reforms, but human rights groups say the government and army continue to commit human rights abuses in isolated areas away from international view.

Suu Kyi's party platform included three main objectives: to seek an end to ethnic conflicts, to try to achieve peace and rule of law and to amend the country's constitution.
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Saudi Arabia gives $50 million aid to Myanmar Muslims
Reuters – 5 hrs ago

RIYADH (Reuters) - Saudi Arabia's King Abdullah has ordered $50 million in aid be sent to a Muslim minority in Myanmar which a human rights group said has been targeted by the authorities since sectarian riots in June.

A report on the Saudi state news agency said the Rohingya community had been "exposed to many violations of human rights including ethnic cleansing, murder, rape and forced displacement".

"King Abdullah ... has ordered that assistance of the amount of $50 million be provided to the Rohingya Muslim citizens in Myanmar," said the report which was carried by Saudi media on Sunday. It did not say who was to blame for the abuses.

However, Human Rights Watch said on August 1 that the Rohingyas had suffered mass arrests, killings and rapes at the hands of the Myanmar security forces. The minority had borne the brunt of a crackdown after days of arson and machete attacks in June by both Buddhists and Rohingyas in Rakhine state, the monitoring group said.

Myanmar, where at least 800,000 Rohingyas are not recognized as one of the country's many ethnic and religious groups, has said it exercised "maximum restraint" in quelling the riots.

Saudi Arabia sees itself as a guardian of global Muslim interests thanks to being the birthplace of Islam and home to some of the religion's holiest sites in Mecca and Medina. However, Riyadh also regularly draws criticism from campaigners for its lack of democracy.

Last week the Saudi cabinet condemned the violence against Muslims in northwest Myanmar and at a meeting on July 31, the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) in the kingdom's second city of Jeddah urged members to send Rohingya Muslims aid.

The OIC is holding a summit in Mecca on Tuesday.
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Myanmar gives green light for aid to Rohingya: OIC
AFP – 22 hrs ago

The Organisation of Islamic Cooperation on Saturday announced it has received a green light from Myanmar to assist Muslim Rohingya displaced by sectarian violence.

It said Myanmar gave its agreement to the OIC following talks in Rangoon on Friday between a delegation from the pan-Islamic body and President Thein Sein on the "deplorable humanitarian situation in Rakhine state."

The delegation assured Thein Sein that Islamic humanitarian organisations were willing to provide aid to all residents of the strife-torn state.

Saudi King Abdullah decided Saturday to grant $50 million to the Rohingya, the country's news agency SPA reported, describing them as victims of "several rights violations, including ethnic cleansing, murder, rape and forced displacement."

Violence between Buddhists and Rohingya has left scores dead, with official figures showing that 80 people died from both sides in initial fighting in June.

The entire state has been under emergency rule since early June with a heavy army and police presence.

New York-based Human Rights Watch has accused Myanmar forces of opening fire on Rohingya, as well as committing rape and standing by as rival mobs attacked each other.

Decades of discrimination have left the Rohingya stateless, and they are viewed by the United Nations as one of the world's most persecuted minorities.

The bloodshed has cast a shadow over widely praised reforms by the president, including the release of hundreds of political prisoners and the election of opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi to parliament.

Myanmar's government has rejected accusations of abuse by security forces in Rakhine, after the United Nations raised fears of a crackdown on Muslims.

In a rare conciliatory move over the issue, Thein Sein welcomed the OIC delegation's visit.

"The president said he hoped the OIC secretary could witness the reality (in Rakhine)," state mouthpiece New Light of Myanmar reported Friday, adding tens of thousands of displaced people from both sides were being given food and shelter.

OIC head Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu had proposed sending a mission to probe "massacres... oppression and ethnic cleansing" of Rohingya in Rakhine.
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Index On Censorship - ‎“Welcome to Myanmar, Mr BBC”
12 Aug 2012

In 2007, Fergal Keane reported for Index on the near impossibility of working as a reporter in Burma. Returning in 2012, he found much had changed. But though the military is slowly loosening its grip, restrictions remain

Old habits die hard. Walking to the door I felt my shoulders flinch. Any second now they would come running to tell me it was a mistake. “Please step this way. Step this way NOW.” Yet nobody stopped me.

In fact the senior officer who had been summoned to passport control to inspect my journalist visa smiled and said “Welcome to Myanmar Mr. BBC”. I gibbered some words of thanks and headed out into the sweltering, glorious night.

In the old days you presented yourself at passport control with a pounding heart and a dry mouth, convinced that at long last you were about to be found out. After all, you had made so many visits as a tourist even the most gullible of immigration officers would be bound to question your devotion to the beauty of Burma.

It didn’t help when my “tourist” trips nearly always coincided with some major political upheaval. What kind of person wants to holiday in Rangoon while thousands of people are being locked up and tortured?

Yet I was never asked that question. Usually the bored officer flicked through the pages until he/she found the required visa, paused for a gut churning few seconds and stamped me into the country.

The real problem was not the men and women who stamped passports. It was the ghosts who haunted the short walk from immigration to customs. If you were going to get nailed going into Burma on a tourist visa it would happen in this little space. So I always made a point of not looking at the spooks from Military Intelligence who were scanning the faces of new arrivals. I knew they had a blacklist of journalists and photographs of their most hated. For some years I numbered among these.

Very occasionally a journalist visa would be issued, usually for an event like the opening of parliament or founders day. But most of the time we were forced to adopt the disguise of tourists. This led to your correspondent parading around Rangoon in a Hawaiian shirt, Bermuda shorts and flip-flops during the 2007 “Saffron Revolution”; I cut a figure so florid, plump and ludicrous that nobody could possibly have suspected me capable of appearing on television.

Reporting in those days meant following certain essential rules:

1. Never leave a compromising document, piece of paper in your hotel room.
2. Destroy all notes when you were finished with them.
3. Change taxis at least twice on your way to and from appointments with dissident figures. Lose yourself in markets and busy public places if you suspect you are being tailed.
4. Say NOTHING on the phone that didn’t sound like tourist blather.
5. Make sure to schedule several tourist activities each day so that anybody watching won’t have undue reason to be suspicious.
6. Never identify an informant on camera. This could have profoundly unpleasant consequences for them.
7. Never travel with your tapes. Find an alternative route for them out of the country. Its funny how many different people prove helpful when they know the story is an important one. This is one of the really pleasant surprises, for me, of clandestine operating. There are more idealistic people, committed to press freedom, than you think.

As the list –– and it is by no means complete –– indicates reporting from Burma in those days could be an exhausting business. Getting caught could mean a very unpleasant interrogation and deportation for the correspondent, but much worse for any of his informants. It was the knowledge of what could happen to the people who helped you that made reporting from Burma such a distinctly unnerving experience. Jail and torture were routine for those who took a public stand against the regime.

Since the beginning of 2012 I’ve visited Burma three times. Each trip has been on an official journalist visa. Not once have I been harassed, intimidated or interfered with. I have reported from city slums and rural villages, from huge opposition rallies and from within sedate government compounds. On my first “official” trip I walked the streets of downtown Rangoon interviewing people at random. Again my expectation was that a secret policeman would appear from the shadows and bundle myself and the camera team away. But nothing happened.

Suddenly it was possible to hire fixers who could organise interviews and translate without fear of arrest. We sat at a teashop in the middle of the city with a recently released pro-democracy activist who discussed his plans for the forthcoming by-elections. There were press conferences at Aung San Suu Kyi’s lakeside residence; they could be prolonged, crowded and exhaustingly democratic occasions: every backpack blogger travelling in Asia seemed to turn up with a question and was given an answer.

On the domestic media scene the iron fisted censorship has been substantially eased. I met young newspaper reporters out on the streets and asking questions of election candidates. The government has lifted restrictions on 30,000 websites, many of which provide political news and commentary.

The privately owned press is testing the boundaries of this new freedom. Exiled journalists were invited to come home for consultations on a new media bill. The only private TV station in the country felt free to broadcast footage of Aung San Suu Kyi addressing the British parliament. The first ever Rangoon Film Festival featured a vivid documentary on the suppression of the Buddhist Monks protests in 2007.

Yet there are still highly problematic areas. Journalist visas still tend to be issued only for landmark occasions: visits by foreign dignitaries, elections, national days of commemoration. Some foreign correspondents are thought to be still on a government blacklist. All blacklists must be scrapped.

As for visits to troubled areas the old habits of concealment and restriction still rule. As a consequence the reporting of the ethnic violence in Rakhine state — which displaced tens of thousands earlier in the summer — was often confused or biased.

Interviews with senior government ministers, especially the President, are very rare. The consequence is that an essential strand of the narrative of change is under-reported. How I long to ask the men at the top why they decided to embark on a process of such profound change, or to challenge both them and the opposition on their response to events in Rakhine state.

Aung San Suu Kyi’s party, the National League for Democracy, was strangely lethargic on the devastating abuses of human rights known to be taking place. It has been criticized for failing to challenge the outpouring of ethnic chauvinism directed against the Rohingya Muslim minority. In fact senior opposition activist Ko Ko Gyi, a former political prisoner, was among the louder voices that joined in the public marginalization of the minority.

On a more general level the NLD’s media operation can be exasperating. Interview requests can vanish into the ether. Finding the right spokesperson on a given issue is invariably a chore. Some of this is down to the inevitable stresses of a long suppressed organization struggling to come to terms with new freedoms. But the centralizing of the media focus around Aung San Suu Kyi leaves the international media largely ignorant of other voices. Local journalists have also complained about their struggles with the NLD’s press bureau.

For all these misgivings the advance of media freedom in Burma is exciting. Burma has never really known a free press — not in the long years of British colonialism, not in the decades of military rule. The challenge now is to embed a culture of openness in which government and opposition are routinely challenged.

Fergal Keane is an award winning journalist and author. His most recent book is Road of Bones: The Epic Siege of Kohima 1944
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The Nation - The Myanmar gold rush is on
Eric Rosenkranz
Special to The Nation August 11, 2012 1:00 am

"They're off!"

The multinationals are flooding into Myanmar. A hotel room cannot be had for love or money. A hotel that used to charge US$75 per night is now $150 and is over- booked. Everyone and his brother is queuing up for visas. People are deliberately flying from Phnom Penh to Yangon on Myanmar Air because it is the only flight where you can get a visa onboard.

Silk Air is now charging a small fortune for a business-class seat from Singapore; that is, if you can get one. The queue to get a visa in Singapore is over two hours long. In Bangkok, at the consulate off Sathorn Road, I recently showed up at 8am and the queue was 200 people long, and the visa office didn't open until 8.30.

Opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi is dining with rock stars when she is not accepting Nobel prizes. People who had never heard of Myanmar a few months ago are now booking tours. And The Nation, among other great publications, has decided to start calling the country by its legal name.

This is all terrific news, and long overdue, but people need to understand one key thing: The pace of economic reform in Myanmar is greatly behind the pace of political desire.

What does this mean?

The government (and the generals behind the government) is very much in support of reform. The changes being implemented are real, and will not be reversed. They are here to stay. This is not an idle claim, but a fact. Aung San Suu Kyi, who was afraid to leave the country to be at her husband's side when he was dying, for fear she would not be let back in, has left Myanmar twice already in the last months and returned. Political prisoners are being released (though clearly not all, not yet).

But while the country is making tremendous strides politically, economic reform, though desired, is not yet being accomplished.

The banking system is a mess. There are no real loans available for businesses, no mortgages, not even ATM machines.

The legal system is a mess. Anyone worried about the "rule of law" should stay away.

Corruption is still endemic, and little is being done to control it.

Most people still lack cell phones. There are widespread protests against the government for failing to provide enough electricity.

The farming sector still overwhelmingly dominates the economy, and many farmers barely have enough to eat.

Property rights are still very confused.

All of these issues, and more, will change, and change may come quickly. The government is hiring world-class experts to advise them on how to reform the economy. But it will still take time.

Despite the best intentions of everyone concerned, it is reasonable to anticipate that economic reform may happen more gradually than people want. Remember, the people that have a lot to lose (and also gain) from economic reform are the big local businessmen, who have succeeded and thrived under the old prevailing conditions. Change to them is a threat.

What is the international businessman, who sees a great opportunity and whose home office is clamouring for action, to do?

1. Recognise the varying paces of reform, and don't expect a new economy overnight.

2. Get on the ground fast. Whatever decision you make cannot be properly made from Bangkok, Singapore or New York. It must be made from Yangon. Establish a presence on the ground and study the terrain. Then make the decision.

3. Find the right partners. Don't expect to do this on your own. You must seek advice from people who know the territory. One company that many people say is good for this is West Indochina (hwww.westindochina.com) who I consult for.

4. Bring international standards with you. People, quality control, laws, all may not be up to your desired levels. You can help effect change.

5. Be ready to take risks. A former ambassador from Myanmar recently told me there are risks in entering the country today, and there are risks in staying away. Each company has to analyse those risks and make the decision that is right for them.

Enter now, and risk running afoul of laws and entrenched customs. Stay away, and risk giving away first-mover advantage to your competition. The choice is yours.

Eric Rosenkranz (www.ethree-asia.com) spends a lot of time in Myanmar advising Myanmar companies how to improve. He runs a strategic advisory in Southeast Asia assisting both existing companies as well as start-ups to develop their long-term strategy and achieve success in their business.
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The Nation - Development banks back Myanmar for credit
THE NATION August 13, 2012 1:00 am

The opening of the World Bank Group and the Asian Development Bank (ADB) offices in Yangon has paved the way for Myanmar to regain access to financing from official development banks and foreign governments, Moody's Investors Service said.

"Engagement with the World Bank and ADB will enhance Myanmar's nascent political and economic reform process, which followed 2010 elections. If all goes according to plan, an opening and growing economy will attract new foreign investment from the private sector as well," the rating company said in a statement.

It added that the offices add credit positive to Myanmar, which has not been given any ratings yet.

Both multilateral development banks ceased approving new loans to Myanmar in the late 1980s after the country suspended its debt repayments. The last formal consultative group meeting between Myanmar and the World Bank was in 1986. The country owes approximately US$780 million (Bt24.5 billion) to the International Development Association (IDA), the World Bank's fund for the world's poorest countries, of which $397 million is in arrears. Overdue loan payments to ADB's Asian Development Fund are close to $500 million.

Japan is facilitating the return of the World Bank and ADB to Myanmar. A consortium of Japanese banks may provide bridge funding worth $900 million to allow for the repayment of the overdue amounts to the multilateral banks. The World Bank and ADB would then provide low-interest loans to Myanmar so it can repay the bridge loans.

ASSISTANCE HAS BEGUN

Once it clears the arrears, Myanmar will have access to funding from the multilaterals' concessional funds and the International Finance Corporation, the World Bank's private-sector lending arm, which also has an established presence in Yangon.

"Although the process of clearing the multilateral development bank arrears will take until January 2013, technical and capacity building assistance has already begun," Moody's added.

The ADB's focus is on helping Myanmar improve its transportation and trade infrastructure with neighbours in the Mekong Delta. The World Bank will advise the Myanmar government on modernising its financial system and improving its business environment.

In addition, the United States government formally eased its sanctions against Myanmar three weeks ago, officially unlocking the gate for American companies to invest in the former pariah state. These recent developments follow the Japan's announcement in April that it will write off $3.7 billion of Myanmar's bilateral debt and will resume full financial aid for the country, a development that can be considered credit positive for Myanmar.
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Asia News Network - Myanmar national murdered in fight with roommates
By News Desk in Kuala Lumpur/The Star | Asia News Network – 10 hours ago

Kuala Lumpur (The Star/ANN) - Police found a Myanmar national dead with stab wounds in his chest, at a double storey terrace house in Taman Midah, Cheras here.

Cheras police deputy chief Supt Abdul Rahim Hamzah Othman said they received a report from the man's house mate about 11:40 pm Saturday night and suspect the victim was involved in a fight.

"The victim, in his 20s, was found sprawled in the upstairs living room. We also discovered two knives at the scene," he said when contacted by Bernama, here Sunday.

Abdul Rahim Hamzah said two Myanmar men, believed to be the victim's roommates, have been detained since.

"They have apparently been in Malaysia for only a month, working at a car wash here," he said.
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