The BurmaNet News: June 25, 1998

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The BurmaNet News: June 25, 1998
Issue #1034

Noted in Passing: "I hereby call on the authorities, in accordance with the
resolution made by the NLD at its eighth [elections] anniversary ceremony,
to convene the Parliament of multi-parties elected within 60 days from
now." -- Aung Shwe [see NLD: CONFERENCE RESOLUTIONS]

HEADLINES:
==========
NLD: CONFERENCE RESOLUTIONS
THE NATION: OPPOSITION DEMANDS HOUSE SESSION
BKK POST: VISA ACCORD SIGNED
THE DAILY MAIL: HEARTACHE OF A BRONZE AGE BOY
GERMAN FOREIGN MINISTRY: RETURN TO DEMOCRACY
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National League for Democracy: Conference Resolutions
27 May, 1998 

[Unofficial Translation.  For original in Burmese, please contact
<sayagyi@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

1.  NLD demands SPDC to convene the People's Parliament with the elected
Members of Parliament of 1990 election, within three months from May 27,
1998.  (NLD makes this demand in accordance with election law.)

2.  NLD believes that the current National Convention under SPDC lacks the
faith and support of the Burmese people.  Therefore, NLD does not recognize
this National Convention.

3.  NLD will not recognize a new election until SPDC honors the results of
1990 election.

4.  NLD always welcomes and is open to genuine national dialogue with SPDC.

5.  NLD confirms the authority given to the Chairman and the General
Secretary of NLD in regards to national dialogue.

6.  Because NLD is a legal, registered, official party, it has the right to
organize freely, to conduct its activities, and to print its materials.
All these rights are legitimate.

7. NLD demands that SPDC recognize and implement actions on the following
UN resolutions: 
	i. Start dialogue with opposition leader Daw Aung San Suu Kyi. 
	ii. Convene the People's Parliament.

8.  NLD condemns SPDC's unjust demands made to the country's farmers to
sell rice by force to SPDC -- euphemistically known as "dutiful,"
"voluntary," or "good will" gestures.

9.  It is SPDC's responsibility if farmers in the country rise up because
of these unjust forced sales.

10.  SPDC must take responsibility to ensure the well-being of workers
under secure and free conditions, and SPDC is responsible for corruption.

11.  SPDC must re-open all universities as soon as possible.

12.  SPDC must allow students to organize and establish student unions.

13. All political prisoners must be released immediately without any
conditions. 

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The Nation: Burmese Opposition NLD Demands House Session
24 June, 1998 

RANGOON -- Burma's opposition National League for Democracy (NLD) yesterday
launched an offensive to legitimise itself by sending a letter to the
ruling military demanding that Parliament be convened within two months.

Aung Shwe, NLD chairman, made the request in the letter to the ruling State
Peace and Development Council (SPDC). The NLD won a landslide victory in
the May 1990 election that was never recognised by the military.

"The authorities had organised free and fair multi-party democracy general
elections on May 27,1990," Aung Shwe said in a letter to the SPDC's
chairman Senior General Than Shwe.

Copies of the letter were handed out at the Rangoon Foreign Correspondents
Club.

"The result of election has been declared where the representative of
people to the Parliament had been elected," said the letter, dated June 23
signed by Aung Shwe. "And I hereby call on the authorities, in accordance
with the resolution made by the NLD at its eighth [elections] anniversary
ceremony, to convene the Parliament of multi-parties elected within 60 days
from now," the letter added.

Parliament should convene before Aug 2, it said.

The NLD move was seen as defying the SPDC, which has said Parliament must
not be convened until a new national constitution has been drafted. The
government and some appointed representatives are in the process of
drafting the new charter.

"The convening of Parliament is impossible without a systematically
drawn-up constitution," Gen David Abel, a minister in the SPDC office, was
quoted as saying recently. Burma's military government established a
national convention comprising hand-picked delegates from across the nation
in early 1993 to draft the new constitution.

But the convention has been in recess since late 1996.

"There is no time-frame for drafting the constitution, but at least
two-thirds of the new charter has been completed," Abel said.

Rangoon-based political analysts said the NLD's move was aimed at
legitimising itself and boosting sagging morale among its members because
of a stalemate with the junta over political differences, including
movement toward democracy and human rights abuses.

Aung San Suu Kyi, the 1991 Nobel laureate, had sought the convening of
parliament late last month as the NLD held a celebration to mark the
occasion of its 1990 election victory.

The NLD and the SPDC have failed to hold a dialogue since Suu Kyi was
released from six years house arrest in mid-1995. The junta has declined to
recognise Suu Kyi as the NLD representative at any dialogue. 

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The Bangkok Post: Visa Accord Signed 
24 June, 1998 

Senior ministers of Burma and Vietnam have signed visa exemption and
bilateral cooperation accord in Rangoon, state-run media there reported on
Monday.

Both documents were signed by Deputy Vietnamese Prime Minister Nguyen Manh
Cam and Burmese Foreign Minister Ohn Gyaw, Television Myanmar reported. 

****************************************************************

The Daily Mail: Heartache of a Bronze Age Boy 
13 June, 1998 by June Kelly 

[BurmaNet Editor's Note: Some aspects of this article are objectionable,
particularly the identification of the Padaung as a primitive tribe whose
culture is "still in the Bronze age."  (Societies and cultures in general
change over time, but to many Westerners "change" is equated with
advancement in technology or acquiring Western habits.)  The implication
that the Padaung have been living the same way for 3,000 years and only
contact with Westerners in 1930's prompted change is absurd and
ethnocentric.  Still, the attention generated by Paschal Khoo-Thwe's life
story offers potential for a greater understanding of the Padaung people
and of Burma.]

It was an inspirational story: Cambridge don rescues a young man from a
primitive tribe whose women still wear giraffe collars of gold, and enrolls
him at his university where he gains a degree.  If only things had been
that simple ...

A tale of derring-do and loyalty, it was worthy of John Buchan or Joseph
Conrad.  In 1988, as Burma collapsed into civil war, Dr. John Casey, a
50-year-old English Fellow at Cambridge University, ventured into the
jungle between Thailand and Burma, accompanied by an SAS man, to rescue
20-year-old Paschal Khoo-Thwee, a member of the remote Padaung tribe whom
he'd met just once - in a restaurant in the Burmese city of Mandalay.

In the unrest after an abortive coup against the repressive Burmese
government, Paschal was forced to live in the jungle for 11 months until
Casey rescued him, brought him to Cambridge, and enrolled him as a student
at Caius College.

The story of this extraordinary exploit is being turned into a £13-million
pound film starring Jeremy Irons.

Paschal's life, however, is more mundane these days.  He lives in a
threadbare housing association flat on the fringes of Musewell Hill in
North London, works as a part-time cook in a local pub, and worries about
how the current weather will affect the cricket that he has learned to love
watching on TV.

At 29, his conversations is that of a refined, rather old-fashioned
Englishman, but he is still every inch a chief from a proud hill tribe
which didn't see white people until the Thirties and fought with the
British against the Japanese in the Second World War.

He looks doll-like, with his large round head and slight, narrow body
wrapped in a simple sarong.  As he talks and sips red wine, he leaves the
rainswept loneliness of urban life far behind, returning to a primitive
people whose culture is still in the bronze age of nearly 3,000 years ago.

But Paschal, like many of his tribe, believes that they were left behind by
the Mongolian ruler Genghis Khan in the 15th Century.  It is clearly with
those people that he still really belongs.  For Paschal is not just any
victim of circumstance, another hapless refugee.  He is important to both
the history and the future of Burma.

His grandfather was the first Padaung to see a white man.  In 1930, while
hunting, he met Father Lusare, an Italian priest.  Having never seen anyone
with a beard or shoes before, he decided this was a "Kimka" - a hairy ogre
with no toes - and locked the priest in a pigsty.  Later, when Lusare
removed his shoes and ate rice, the tribe recognized him as human.

Paschal's grandmother was also remarkable.  A "giraffe" woman whose neck
was stretched to 14 inches by 30 gold and brass neck rings, she was taken
to Britain by Bertram Mills in 1937 and exhibited in his circus as a freak.

"She enjoyed it," her grandson says.  "She was fascinated by the other
freaks, and loved travelling everywhere by train instead of having to walk
through the jungle."

He grew up in a world largely unchanged since his grandmother's day when
girls were put into neck rings at five years old.

"When I was little, I was terrified of spirits," Paschal says.  "My parents
would make charms to ward them off, and the elders would come and tie wool
threads round my hands and spit at the devils.

"We kept our own chickens and pigs.  My father was our equivalent of a vet,
who castrated animals.

"As a boy, I used to plough with a buffalo, sow seed by hand, weed, and
harvest with a sickle.  As children, we farmed on the dry slopes and worked
in the paddy field every evening after school, at weekends and all through
the holidays."
Paschal was taught to hunt with bow and arrow, catapults, traps, homemade
guns, and old Enfield rifles loaded with handmade bullets.  He took honey
from wild bees living in holes in trees and washed in rivers.  The lavatory
was a hole in the ground covered by a plank.

Life followed a simple cycle.  Paschal's grandmother had 13 children, but
lost five sons to the Japanese in the war; his mother (from the Kygeba
tribe, who don't wear neck rings) had ten children.

"After the first three children, she would give birth unattended in the
field," he says.  "She would cut the cord, then carry the baby and the
afterbirth home.  My father would build a hut and put antiseptic herbs into
a pot into which a hot stone had been put.  She would sit on the pot and
fumes would heal her uterus.

"When I was five, I had to start carrying my siblings on my back.  It made
a special bond between us.  As I got older, the younger ones also helped
me.  We were responsible for each other and kept close together.  It is
nothing like the child-rearing in the West."

There are some other remarkable differences.  For example, Paschal has been
a steady drinker since the age of two.  "After breastfeeding is over, our
children are given rice wine with cow's milk," he says.  "The little
children are drunk all the time.

"When they cry or wake up in the night, they are given wine.  They get
protein from the sediment, and we have little alcoholism because we drink
from an early age."

Paschal didn't see television until he was 17 and was entirely happy within
his culture.  His brothers and sisters still farm like their ancestors.
But what distinguishes Paschal - and ultimately attracted Casey's attention
- was his passionate love of English literature.

At St. Theresa's seminary he entered a period of rigorous study when he was
15.  "I was lucky that a priest there taught me Latin," he says.  "It was a
good key to understanding English."

He rose at 5 a.m. and had to recite prayers in Padaung, Burmese, Latin, and
English.  He also discovered A.A. Milne's book, <Now We Are Six,> and
Palgrave's <Golden Treasury.>

"I imagined Britain was a place where people drank tea, surrounded by
beautiful countryside," he says.  "I saw it mainly as Tudor, full of brave
adventurous men."

Later, at Mandalay University in Burma, he bought a copy of <Portrait Of
The Artist As A Young Man,> James Joyce's searing, autobiographical account
of an Irish Catholic education.

The book changed his life.  In late January 1988, John Casey was on a
business trip to Mandalay when friends told him to be sure to eat at the
Apple Orchard Chinese restaurant, where one of the waiters was mad about
Joyce.

Casey had long had an interest in South-East Asia, and travels there
frequently.  His fascination with Burma in particular is based on the old
music hall song The Road To Mandalay.

"It's a country frozen in time since the British left in 1948 - a romantic
imperialist's dream," he says.

Casey expected to meet some aged Chinese at the restaurant, and was pleased
and surprised to find someone so young.

Paschal explained he was working there part-time to supplement his grant,
they chatted about Joyce and. later, Paschal took Casey to see a local
night market, where It was possible to rind books banned by the government.
Then he introduced Casey to his friends who were studying English.

Back in Cambridge, seven months later, he received a disturbing letter.
After leading a student demonstration, Paschal wrote, he had heard his name
read out on the radio, fled from home and was now hiding in the jungle with
other "displaced" students.

His girlfriend, Moe, had been raped and tortured in police custody, and
many of his friends were dead.  He had no choice but to hide.

He and his friends moved continually, dodging Thai or Burmese helicopters
which photographed them from the air so that infantry could find and kill
them.  For 11 months he lived on monkeys, pythons, frogs, rats, moles and
guinea pigs.

Asked what rat tastes like, he replies: "Like bat."  Guinea pig is best, he
explains, because it is fatty, but rat and bat, when dried and preserved,
turn crunchy - "a delicacy."

The highlight of his culinary life was finding a woodpigeon that had eaten
marijuana, but mostly he lived on the bark of the banana plant, yams and
roots.

During his 11 months in the jungle, Paschal kept in touch with the outside
world -- and Casey -- through a secret postal network set up by a Burmese
rebel leader in Thailand.

In December 1988, Casey was able to send him money and provisions.  But
shortly after this bit of good fortune, Paschal was shot after being
betrayed by an infiltrator.  He saved himself by leaping into a river and
swimming across.  Later, he treated his wounds with herbs, using methods
taught by his grandparents.

He recovered and received another letter from Casey, which gave him the
number of a sympathetic contact in an embassy in Bangkok.

Several times Paschal made the long journey to the border to phone Bangkok
but, dressed in rags and starving, he had little chance of passing as a
tourist, so could never risk venturing into the city.

Then Casey arrived in Thailand, accompanied by "Jim," an SAS man with an
Oxford degree, and together they smuggled the passport-less Paschal into a
European embassy in Bangkok.

At first, Paschal and Casey did not recognise each other.  Paschal couldn't
remember Casey's face, and instead of a healthy student, Casey saw a
ragged, emaciated young man who'd been shot, bitten by a snake, and was
suffering from three types of malaria.

Undaunted.  Casey and his friends set about introducing Paschal to Western
ways.  He was shown a bath.  "I was surprised by the hot water," he says.
"We only wash in it when we are very ill.

"And I was shocked to think of lying on my back in something like a cow
trough.  Getting out reminded me of climbing up a slippery rockface."

Despite such lessons, when he arrived in England a month later with a
student visa things were impossibly strange.  "On the Tube from Heathrow I
thought I had gone to the world of the dead," he says.

"My grandmother told me that when you die, you go through a tunnel.  It was
just like that.  The doors made a terrible bang, then no one spoke.  Casey
spoke to me, but I was too scared to reply, and my spoken English was still
poor.  That was the longest day of my life."

In October 1989 he finally arrived in Cambridge.  Casey had not only
enrolled him at Caius College, he'd organised 30 friends as sponsors to
provide the annual £12,000 tuition fees needed for the four-year course in
English literature.

Paschal found himself surrounded by good will. "My first term was very
enjoyable," he recalls.  "Like being young again and, for a time, I could
forget the past.  But it was also an anti-climax after what I'd been
through in Burma."
By his second term, the loneliness had set in.  "I was accustomed to the
mountains and warm weather," he says.  "But Cambridge is flat and cold."
And in his first English winter it was not just the climate that seemed
cold.  "I had been surrounded by comrades, but suddenly I was struggling to
communicate," he says.

"People were kind, but I didn't feel they could really understand what I
had been through.  I felt like a ghost, looking at other people going by
and not really participating.

"At Christmas everyone could go home to their families, but I could not see
mine."

Academic work was hard.  There were language difficulties, and the nature
of learning was different.  In Mandalay, students had to memorise essays
already written by someone else.  Then they merely matched answers to
questions.

"It was a socialist education, designed to make students lazy, he says.

At 18 he'd written his own essay -- and was punished by three months in a
labour camp.  In Cambridge he was encouraged to think for himself.

He became fascinated by the wider world.  Casey took him on holiday to
Italy; he then traveled to Florence and Siena alone, all the time grieving
for his home and family.  He managed two brief visits to see them on the
Thai border.

Paschal last saw his father in 1994, when they had a two-hour meeting which
he videoed.  He didn't know his father had TB.

"I was the only son who'd got to university in Burma, and he had high
hopes," he says.  "That meeting was very emotional and it was so short.  I
wanted to take him for a day or two to Thailand and talk, but he was afraid
the authorities would find out."

Paschal graduated from Cambridge in 1995; soon after his family heard, by
sheer chance, his voice on the BBC World Service's weekly Burmese
broadcast.  He received one more letter from his father, but in January
1996 Casey received word that he had died.  

"I was angry not to see him again," Paschal says. "His death seemed almost
unreal because I couldn't be there at the funeral."

He began having bad dreams, seeing faces of friends who had died as well as
living members of his tribe.  "We communicate by dreams," he says.  "It is
a tradition which goes on."

As an exile, Paschal is lonely but tries not to indulge in self-pity.  He
was brought up to ignore his emotions.  "Burmese has no word for
depression," he says.  "We have only phrases like 'my heart is not rich.'
We don't emphasise sadness at all.  If someone is sad, other people will
cheer them up and encourage them to think about good times in the past, and
what they will do next."

His problem is that there is nothing for him to do next -- except wait
until the government in Burma changes and he can go home.

"If I was at home now, I would be a head man," he says.  "But I don't want
to think about what could have been."

There are many people around to distract him from his unhappiness.
Unassuming and sweet-natured, he has always been popular.  He has friends
in the small Burmese community in London and others from Cambridge.

He has a girlfriend but doesn't speak about her, as in his culture that is
not done.  One senses he is a little tired of nebulous Western mores and
longs for the straightforward ways he left behind.

"Life in Burma was so easy-going and straightforward," he says.  "You were
engaged as a child to someone selected for you, married between 20 and 30,
had children, and worked on the land.  It was all so simple."

He says there would be no problem about one day taking an English woman
back as his wife.

"I know I will return one day," he says.  "In the meantime, I just want to
enjoy myself with my English friends.  I can't cope with thinking about any
more than that."

I asked Paschal which actor he would like to play him in the movie of his
life.  He put his hands up to his face to hide a shy smile.  He doesn't
know many of the actors in the West, but is a great fan of the Carry On
films, because, he says, he could understand them before he spoke any English.

"I like Kenneth Williams," he says.  "There were many comedians in Burma
like Williams but, unfortunately, they are now all locked up."

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German Foreign Ministry: Military Regime in Burma Must Return to Democracy
5 June, 1998 

[Unofficial translation by Burma Bureau Germany]

On June 5th 1998 Minister of State in the German Foreign Ministry Helmut
Schaefer met with Dr. Sein Win, the leading representative of the Burmese
opposition in exile, to discuss the current situation in Burma. Schaefer
stressed that the German Federal Government will continue to strongly
support the democratic opposition in their long struggle for democracy and
human rights. 

"In the 1990 general elections, the Burmese people gave the National League
for Democracy (NLD) under the leadership of Daw Aung San Suu Kyi the
mandate to form a democratic government. Ever since then, people have been
waiting for the military regime to do as it promised and to hand over power
to the democratically elected forces. Up to now, the military have done
nothing of the sort. Instead, they continue to harass the opposition and
try to silence them by arresting members of the NLD. All this must stop,"
said Schaefer. 

The Minister of State welcomed efforts by several ASEAN-member states to
put pressure on Burma which joined the regional grouping in 1997 in order
to force the military regime to carry out political reforms ant to improve
the human rights situation in the country. He assured the Burmese
opposition that the German Federal Government would put the Burma issue on
the agenda of top-level political consultations between the EU and ASEAN
which will take place in Manila on July 28th/29th.

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