FROM THE ASIAN WALL STREET JOURNAL

[NBH03114@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx]

Errors-To:owner-burmanet-l@xxxxxxxxxxx
FROM:NBH03114@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Burmese Relief Center--Japan
DATE:July 12, 1995
TIME:19:55JST 


THE ASIAN WALL STREET JOURNAL
July 12, 1995

SLORC Smiles For the Camera

After losing six years of her life to house arrest, Burmese
opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi is now free.  Yet as
members of the exiled Demcoratic Alliance of Burma noted
when the news filtered out Monday, the country itself is
still a prison.  Indoors or out, Burma s 40 million citizens
remain firmly under the thumb of the ruling State Law and
Order Restoration Council.

There s no doubt that by freeing Mrs. Suu Kyi, SLORC
seeks to telegraph that the bad days are over.  It s almost as
certain that nations once reluctant to be identified as
business partners of Mrs. Suu Kyi s jailers now see a green
light.  Japanese Foreign Minister Yohei Kono announced
within hours that Japan was ready to begin discussing
projects to rebuild Burma with the  understanding and
cooperation of its people.   

But will they understand and cooperate?  Mrs. Suu Kyi s
release notwithstanding, the military still rules Burma, and
the military seems singularly ill-equipped to take the
country where it needs to go.  After three decades of its
tender guidance, Burma is a country torn apart by ethnic
insurgencies, frozen in time by hermetic socialism, and
running over with heroin and opium.  Indeed, it s now the
source of a runaway addiction crisis across Southeast Asia
and China, and of 70% of the cut-rate heroin on U.S.
streets.

That SLORC continues to survive is a testimony to its
political cyncicism.  By playing on fears of growing
Chinese influence in Burma, the regime has been the
beneficiary of what diplomats call  constuctive
engagement.   The leaders, Thailand and Singapore, argue
that anything is better than letting this wound fester and
become more dependent on China.  But engagement seems
only to have strengthened the miltary s faith in strongman rule. 
In Singapore last month, Brigadier David Abel, Burma s
economic minister, boasted about the great deal of money
Burma has been attracting despite  the trash  put out by human
rights critics.

The release of Mrs. Suu Kyi is an expression of confidence, if
not arrogance.  In 1990 {sic}, the regime slaughtered thousands
of her supporters in the streets, and was down to its last $15
million.  Today, thanks to some $2 billion in Chinese-supplied
arms, the regime is stronger than ever, and seemingly bent on
developing the country as a private plantation of the army.

In January, SLORC s troops drove the ethnic Karen National
Union from its homelands along the Thai border.  The reason
was at least partly to secure the route of a new gas pipeline to
Thailand.  Last week, the army moved against another group,
the Karenni, with whom the regime had signed a ceasefire deal
only months before.  According to one report, SLORC had sold
timber rights in Karenni areas to a Singapore company.  But
more than just economics is at work: The regime is moving
piecemeal to destory ethnic resistence to military rule.

Why did SLORC choose this moment to release Ms. Suu Kyi? 
Later this month, the regime will attend Asean s annual
meeting as a guest of Brunei.  In Washington, a battle is
building between advocates of tougher trade sanctions and
advocates of cooperating with SLORC to get a handle on the
opium problem.  And with Vietnam about to join Asean and
receive U.S. diplomatic recongition, Rangoon saw a rival for
investment flows getting a jump ahead.

But the deeper reason lies in SLORC s destruction in January
of Manerplaw, the headquarters of the Karen movement and
the crucial link between the hinterland ethnic rebels and Mrs.
Suu Kyi s urban based democracy movement.  That victory by
SLORC s troops swept away the last vesitage of the alliance
that, in 1990, came within a hair of toppling the Buremse
miltiary dictatorship after 30 years of misrule.

Mrs. Suu Kyi said on Tuesday,  We have to choose between
dialogue and utter devastation.   If Burma is ever to escape
from the warfare, poverty and drugs that have plagued this
troubled land since independence in 1948, the solution still lies