Today's News From Hongkong Standard

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Today's News From Hongkong Standard, South China Morning Post and Asia
Week
Stance on illegal labourers to ease (HongKong Standard)
Jailed activists' 14-year wait for death (South China Morning Post)
THE LONG WAIT (Asia Week)

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Stance on illegal labourers to ease
(Hongkong Standard - April 30, 1998)
BANGKOK: The Thai government is set to relax its tough stance against
alien workers just two days before the planned expulsion of thousands of
illegal labourers. 
Deputy Labour Minister Jongchai Thiangtham said yesterday a government
committee was close to finalising details of a proposal to relax the
policy which would have seen about one million illegal workers expelled. 
The cabinet on Tuesday refused to decide on the labour ministry's proposal
to soften the policy, saying it did not have enough time to consider it
with just two days to go before the first repatriations began. 
Mr Jongchai said cabinet instead agreed to accept the decision of the
committee, which would likely recommend some alien workers be allowed to
stay in designated industries and provinces for up to one year. 
``We have asked for a relaxation of the policy for certain occupations and
areas because we cannot replace those people immediately with Thai
workers,'' he said. 
Fisheries and rice milling were two industries that would be hit by the
loss of foreign labour, he said. 
- AFP 
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Jailed activists' 14-year wait for death  (South China Morning Post -
Thursday April 30 1998)
AGENCIES in Bangkok  Burma's junta said yesterday it had sentenced six
people to death for carrying explosives. But they have to serve 14 years
in jail first. 
The group includes four members of the All Burma Students Democratic Front
(ABSDF), said the statement. 
"The court sentenced six persons to 14 years' imprisonment and the death
penalty," it said. 
"Four of them are from the ABSDF armed terrorist group caught inside the
country with explosives for sabotage activities, and the other two were
recruited from inside the country." 
The statement named the six as: Ko Thien, 44, Naing Aung, 31, Thant Zaw
Swe, 31, Myint Han, 44, Khin Hlaing, 51, and Let Yar Htun, 29. 
The ABSDF had earlier released a statement in Bangkok in which it said a
court in Rangoon had sentenced Ko Thien and Khin Hlaing to death. 
The group said the pair had been arrested in April for trying to hand a
letter about human rights abuses to a United Nations envoy. 
However, a government official accused the group of "disinformation and
fabrication". 
He said the pair were too old to have been real students when the movement
was formed in 1988 and had not tried to hand UN envoy Alvaro De Soto a
letter during his visit in January. 
Instead, the junta claims they were linked to plans to launch a bombing
campaign and assassinate its leaders. 
In March, the Government said they were associated with Aung San Suu Kyi's
National League for Democracy. 
A further 33 alleged collaborators were accused with the six. They
received prison terms of between seven and 14 years. 
Executions in Burma are normally carried out by hanging, the ABSDF said.
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THE LONG WAIT
(Asia Week - May 1st, 1998)
The years tick by, but Asia's banished rebel movements still dream of one
day going home 
By Ron Gluckman / The Hague 

THERE WERE NO RED carpets when President Isak Chishi Swu visited Europe
last year. Nor were there any motorcades, state dinners or meetings with
prospective investors. His was an entourage of two: the president and a
loyal deputy, Thuingaleng Muivah. Most of the time, the pair cooled their
heels in embassy lobbies, waiting to speak to someone -- anyone -- about
their cause. 
Swu is the self-styled President of the People's Republic of Nagaland, a
sprawling territory of lush hills in northern India, adjoining Myanmar. He
says his government has been in charge there since 1956. The United
Nations and India do not agree. But that doesn't bother Swu, 68. He has
been pushing his case since the 1960s, and is well used to being fobbed
off by diplomats. "This [cause] has been our entire life," he says. Their
European visit at an end, the revolutionaries trundle off to the airport,
bound for Bangkok, where both live as exiles. The president and his veep
carry their own bags and fly economy class. 
So it goes with a host of other "world leaders" that the world doesn't
recognize. Among them: princes from Persia, sultans from Sabah, khans from
Central Asia's lost empires and exiled rulers of nearly every inhabited
rock in the South Pacific. India alone accounts for scores of royal
families from countless forgotten kingdoms. Some lands fall in and out of
international favor, such as East Timor, Kashmir and the Kurdish areas. A
few capture the world's attention, largely due to dynamic leadership --
consider how the Tibetan cause benefits from the Dalai Lama. For the rest
of the globe's fractious, seemingly fictitious wannabe republics, the
world is often content to look the other way. 
"It's extremely difficult for us to articulate our issues," acknowledges
Suhas Chakma, coordinator of the Jumma People's Network, which helps the
indigenous people of the Chittagong Hill Tracts. High in the mountains of
Bangladesh, near the Indian and Myanmar borders, the isolated Tracts are
home to over a dozen tribes. Largely left alone by the British, they have
fared far worse under Bengali rule. Bitterly protested resettlement
policies have sent half a million Bengali Muslims into the Tracts, where
the local population is mainly Buddhist of Tibetan-Mongol descent. "We
have no hatred of the Muslims," explains Chakma, "but we are distinctly
different people." He likens the situation to that of the Nagas, where
nationalists opposed any union with India. "We never wanted to be a part
of Bangladesh or Pakistan," he says. 
Chakma works for an unrelated human rights organization in Delhi, donating
three hours daily to the Chittagong cause. He has been involved for a
decade. "In some ways, things have grown worse," says the activist, who
roams the world, trying to woo sympathy for his case. Interest is slim.
"It's frustrating," he says. "We are a small people, only a half a
million. The Hill Tracts aren't an issue like Tibet." 
Nor is Bougainville, an island in the Solomon Sea that is run from Port
Moresby, in Papua New Guinea. But it has started to appear on the world's
agenda. A protracted guerrilla war -- now nearing settlement -- attracted
little notice until last year, when the government brought in foreign
mercenaries in an attempt to kill off a challenge from the Bougainville
Revolutionary Army. The plan misfired. Prime Minister Sir Julius Chan was
forced to resign and the conflict was elevated briefly to the status of an
international scandal. 
Some credit for the media's interest in the matter must go to
Bougainville's not-so-secret weapon, Martin Miriori. This freedom fighter
won't be found in the jungles of his native land, but up three steep
flights of steps in a cold attic, atop a welfare flat in The Hague. Here,
with a computer, fax and phones, he keeps humanity informed of his
island's ire. He stays in touch with his brother, who leads the rebel
army, by satellite telephone. All the equipment is donated. 
Miriori fled the South Pacific in 1996, after his house was mysteriously
firebombed. Many nations offered him and his family sanctuary, but Holland
became home. The reasons are familiar to numerous rebels who have taken
their causes to the Netherlands, turning the nation into a hotbed of
autonomy activism. Foremost is the central location, ideal for lobbying
powerful European officials. Another attraction can be found by following
Miriori through the diplomatic quarter of The Hague. 
Across from the Polish embassy, he enters a modest three-story block and
instantly is buoyed by a special sense of belonging that only refugees
know. He smiles while scanning a lobby draped in flags rarely seen
anywhere else: the banners of the Batwa of Rwanda and Cordillera of the
Philippines. East Timor and East Turkestan are here, along with Aceh, West
Papua and the South Moluccas. Alongside the colors of Tibet, Tuva and
Tartastan, Miriori spies the blue, green, red, white and black of his
beloved Bougainville. 
This odd assembly of flags, many outlawed at home, adorn the headquarters
of the Unrepresented Nations and Peoples Organization (UNPO). Like a
United Nations of Outcasts, UNPO assists more than 50 would-be states or
peoples that have no say in world affairs. They are mostly unheard of,
but, taken together, they make up a formidable group -- over 100 million
people, many of them persecuted. "The exact number really isn't
important," says Michael van Walt van Praag, founding general secretary.
"What is important is that there is a significant number of people who
feel left out, who aren't properly represented in world bodies." 
Critics deride the UNPO -- founded in 1991 -- as a tool of Western
opponents of developing nations. They point, for instance, to the way it
is funded. Members are assessed annual dues of $1,000, but many have no
means to pay. Even if all did, this would bring in just 10% of the current
UNPO budget. Most of the funding comes from Western governments and
charities. And then there is the matter of the political connections of
the founders. General secretary van Walt and deputy Tsering Jampa have
been closely aligned with the Tibetan cause, while fellow- founder Erkin
Alptekin spent 25 years with Radio Free Europe, beaming Western propaganda
to Turkic countrymen in China and the former Soviet Union. 
There is also a ring of post-colonial revivalism around UNPO's
headquarters in the Dutch capital, where nearly a third of the members are
represented. Unsurprisingly, many of these delegations hail from Holland's
former possessions in Indonesia: such as Aceh and the South Moluccas.
Representatives of other islands, including East Timor and Bougainville,
also live near the UNPO office, where streets are named after places in
the old Indonesian colony: Celebes, Java, Lombok, Riau and Borneo. Sheer
coincidence, says van Walt. When UNPO was formed, various cities were
considered for its headquarters, including New York. The Hague won because
of its European location and generous pledges of community support, he
says. 
Holland prizes its reputation as one of the leading international
supporters of human rights. It spent a billion dollars in 1996 on refugee
services. Among them was the Study and Information Center for Papuan
Peoples (PaVo) -- an organization that assists Holland's estimated 1,000
former Papuans. By design or not, the money also helps to keep rebellion
simmering in their old homeland. PaVo's office in Utrecht, where the
second-story windows overlook majestic church steeples, resembles a
university study hall -- an appearance enhanced by the two students
sitting with office manager Grace Roembiak. All three are in their 20s,
and they talk intensely about saving the world, starting with their part
of it. 
For Roembiak and friends Inaria Kaisiepo and Leonie Tanggahma, their
homeland is called West Papua. Indonesia calls it Irian Jaya. And, since
the Dutch left in 1962, the world has mostly gone along with that. "But
that's changing. Now, people know about West Papua," insists Roembiak, who
is the only one of the three to have been there. Says Kaisiepo, who has
been involved in the cause since she was a teenager: "I try to go to class
and study, but university just isn't my priority. West Papua is everything
for me." Together, the three activists work 150 hours a week to free their
homeland. None of them speaks any of the local dialects. 
For all the apparent indifference to their cause, the Papuans are
enthusiastic, effervescent, seemingly indomitable. "We know we will win,"
Kaisiepo says. "For us it's not so much a question of whether Indonesia
will fall apart, but what will come next, what we can do to prepare for
that." Part of her conviction is inherited. Her father was longtime leader
of Papuan activists and her grandfather an official in the Dutch days.
Tanggahma's father headed West Papua's exiled Revolutionary Provisional
Government. "This does get in your blood," she says. "You grow up with it.
The work becomes your life." 
Last summer, UNPO held its general assembly in Estonia, a founder of the
body and one of its greatest supporters -- part of an elite group of five
former members that have attained the ultimate goal: independence. The
keynote speaker was a true UNPO star, Nobel Peace Prize winner Jose Ramos
Horta, a champion of East Timor's independence from Indonesia. The acclaim
he received underscored a vital point about UNPO: not all autonomy battles
are equal. While many sputter on for ever, unrecognized, sometimes mocked,
others are suddenly taken seriously. 
Horta has done that for East Timor, where the Fretilin resistance movement
continues to battle the Indonesian army. "Our cause is in the forefront
now," says Jose Antonio Amorim Dias, the rebels' European representative
since 1992. "Before the peace prize," Dias says, "we would visit embassies
and they would send out the number two or three. Now doors are open to
us." As he tirelessly makes his rounds, President Isak Chishi Swu must be
wondering when that will happen for him. 
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Yours sincerely,
Kyaw Zay Ya

"If you give a man a fish, he will have a meal. 
 If you teach him to fish, he will have a living. 
 If you are thinking a year ahead, sow a seed. 
 If you are thinking ten years ahead, plant a tree. 
 If you are thinking one hundred years ahead, educate the people. 
 By sowing a seed once, you will harvest once. 
 By planting a tree, you will harvest tenfold. 
 By educating the people, you will harvest one hundredfold."  (ANONYMOUS
CHINESE POET, 420 B.C.)

("If it is not broken, don't fix it" leads to the worst situation.)