2 Letters to Editor re ODA

[carol@xxxxxxx]

The Daily Yomiuri, Thursday, March 12, 1998

RECONSIDER MYANMAR AID

	The majority of the Burmese people were very disappointed to learn that the
Japanese government decided last week to lend 2.5 billion yen to the
military regime of Myanmar (Burma) to help repair a runway at Yangon's
international airport.  The intention of the official development assistance
is to help the Burmese people, which is good, but in fact it will only
benefit the generals and Japanese airlines that are doing business with
generals, not the Burmese people.
	Japan's assistance will no doubt be seen by the pro-democracy movement as
evidence that Japan backs the brutal junta and cuddling up to the military
junta to benefit its own self-serving economic interests.
	Nothing else has changed in Burma, at least not for the better.  No change
in conditions of democratization and human rights in Burma can be found
behind the Japanese government's latest decision to resume economic aid.  In
November 1996, the military junta again restricted Daw Aung San Suu Kyi's
freedom of political movement.  Attempts to initiate dialogue between the
military junta and the National League for Democracy, the winning party of
1990 elections, led by Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, have been stalled since July
1997.  Nothing has yet improved, in fact, the situation has gotten even worse.
	Having suffered painfully under the long military dictatorship, as a
Burmese citizen, I therefore humbly request the Japanese government to
emphaticallly reconsider its decision to resume economic aid that only
serves to encourage the brutal military regime of Myanmar (Burma) to prolong
its campaign of terror against the people of Burma.

Kyaw Lun Tin
Tokyo

* * *

Japan Times, Sunday, March 15, 1998

PEACE-LOVERS DON'T SUPPORT DICTATORS

	Why is Japan rewarding the Myanmar military regime with a 2.5 billion yen
loan to repair a runway at Yangon's international airport?  Does this not
violate Japan's ODA Charter, which states that such aid should promote
democracy and be refused to regimes, like Myanmar's, that plunder the
national treasury to buy arms?  	
        The excuse the Foreign Ministry offers -- "safety" -- is absurd.  In
Myanmar, one is far less likely to die in an airplane crash than from abuse
by the military regime -- as a prisoner in its jails, as slave labor in one
of its "development" projects, as a porter or child soldier in one of its
assaults on the country's indigenous peoples, or as one of those ruthlessly
persecuted minorities.  
	Since 1988, when Japan froze ODA to the regime, the Myanmar army has
swollen from less than 200,000 troops to nearly 500,000 -- an army that
"eats the people's food and uses guns purchased by the people to kill the
people," to borrow a phrase from Chinese dissident Wei Jingsheng.  Why
weren't the resources squandered on this ominous build-up used instead for
civilian projects like Mingaladon Airport?  Why isn't good-faith dialogue
with Aung San Suu Kyi and her National League for Democracy a precondition
to such aid? 
	If Japan is the "peace-loving nation" it claims to be in its ODA Charter,
its citizens ought to lodge an immediate protest with the Foreign Ministry.

Carol Schlenker
Tokyo