The BurmaNet News: January 14, 1999

[strider@xxxxxxxxxxx]

------------------------ BurmaNet ------------------------
"Appropriate Information Technologies, Practical Strategies"
----------------------------------------------------------

The BurmaNet News: January 14, 1999
Issue #1185

Noted in Passing: "We won't abandon Aung San Suu Kyi. We won't abandon the
pro-democracy activists who are fighting to regain their lost freedom." -
Walter Veltroni (see REUTERS: GET TOUGH ON MYANMAR, SAYS LEFTIST CHIEF)


HEADLINES:
==========
AWSJ: EFFORT TO LURE TOURISTS ENDS IN DISAPPOINTMENT 
REUTERS: GET TOUGH ON MYANMAR, SAYS LEFTIST CHIEF 
SCMP: JUNTA CAN'T STOP PEOPLE SUPPORTING US 
SCMP: GOLDEN TRIANGLE OPIUM OUTPUT DROPS SHARPLY 

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

ASIAN WALL STREET JOURNAL: MYANMAR'S BIG EFFORT TO LURE MORE TOURISTS ENDS
IN DISAPPOINTMENT
13 January, 1999 By Barry Wain

FOR DECADES, the tourism industry both inside and outside Myanmar has
drooled over the country's unspoiled beaches, snow-capped mountains' and
thick, tropical forests, not to mention its rich cultural heritage. But
that potential as a tourist destination has never come close to being
fulfilled. 

Protracted ethnic-based insurgencies that put many areas off limits,
together with a general reclusiveness bordering on xenophobia, kept Myanmar
all but closed to outsiders. In 1988, when military authorities abandoned
socialism and introduced market reforms, Nepal had 10 times and Thai-land
100 times more than the 40,000 tourists visiting what was then called Burma. 

With arrivals tripling from 1993 to 1996, the government aimed to climb
into the big leagues with Visit Myanmar Year. The initial target was
500,000 visitors, but few one-third of that number turned up. 

It wasn't successful," concedes Brig-Gen. David Abel, minister in the
office of the chairman of the ruling State Peace and Development Council. 

He says Singapore and Thailand, whose companies had invested heavily in
hotels in Myanmar, were supposed to promote the country as a side trip for
visitors to their own country. Each was to try to send 10% of its own
tourists on to Myanmar, he says. 

"That would have called for about 1.2 million to 1.5 million tourists
coming into the country," Gen. Abel says. "But they have failed." 

And how. Arrivals in the year ended March 31 totaled around 190,000, up
about 7% from a year earlier, though income from tourism actually fell. The
increased numbers came from South Korea, Taiwan and Japan, officials say. 

But even those disappointing figures - which comprise only people arriving
by air - are overstated, industry sources say. Only about 70,000 visitors
arrived on packaged tours, these sources estimate, many of the others being
backpackers or businesspeople making multiple trips. 

Gen. Abel attributes the failure largely to events beyond anyone's control:
the haze from the Indonesian forest fires; the Asian economic turmoil; even
last year's soccer World Cup in France, which distracted the region. 

Another significant factor is the unsettled political situation in Myanmar,
with Western countries imposing various sanctions against the government
for suppressing the democracy movement. National League for Democracy
leader Aung San Suu Kyi discourages tourism, her stand prompting some
governments - Britain's, for example - to urge their citizens to shun
Myanmar. 


When 18 foreigners were arrested in Yangon for distributing pro-democracy
leaflets last August, Myanmar took precautions to prevent a repetition - at
the expense of tourism, Some tourists were questioned and searched, the
U.S. embassy says, while entry visas temporarily became harder to obtain,
particularly in Bangkok. 

But hotel and tour executives in Myanmar also say the government lacked the
budget to make a success of Visit Myanmar Year, launched in November 1996.
The campaign was overly ambitious, even when the target was lowered to
300,000 visitors, the executives say, since, Myanmar doesn't shave enough
buses, taxis, tour guides and restaurants, outside Yangon, to handle such
an influx. 

The shortfall in predicted visitors has left hotels in the capital nearly
empty. The city has nine international-standard hotels, and all have very
low occupancy rates, notes a US embassy report. 

Their occupancy rates now average about 20%, according to officials, though
hoteliers say 15% is closer to the mark. Average room rates plunged by at
least 30% in 1998 from a year earlier, but occupancy rates still fell by
about20%. 

Almost all the 4,000 hotel rooms in Yangon - 800 more are coming on stream
- were built in the past five years, when tourism was seen as an easy
foreign-exchange earner. According to the Myanmar In-vestment Commission,
$1 billion of the roughly $7 billion in foreign investment the country has
received over the past decade has been in hotels and other tourism ventures. 

The government also invested strongly in tourism in the 1990s. But those
who joined what an analyst has called the "hotel craze" are now, scrambling
for survival. 

Large hotels began closing rooms and laying off staff as early as 1997.
Executives confirm that many aren't covering their operating costs, much,
less their return on capital. 

Brig.-Gen. Maung Maung, secretary of the investment commission and also a
minister in the office of the chairman of the ruling party, is sympathetic. 

He has reduced the rental some hotels must pay the government for leas-ing
their sites. 

"We have to look after them," he says. "They are my guests."

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

REUTERS: GET TOUGH ON MYANMAR, SAYS ITALIAN LEFTIST CHIEF 
13 January, 1999 By Abigail Levene 

ROME, Jan 13 (Reuters) - Italian leftist leader Walter Veltroni, fresh from
visiting Myanmar opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi, urged the
international community on Wednesday to get tough with the Asian state's
military rulers. 

"We won't abandon Aung San Suu Kyi. We won't abandon the pro-democracy
activists who are fighting to regain their lost freedom," an impassioned
Veltroni told a news conference. 

"The international community must do all in its power to step up
its...opposition to the military junta." 

Veltroni, a former deputy prime minister who leads the largest party in
Italy's ruling centre-left coalition, the ex-communist Democrats of the
Left, unveiled a campaign to "create international solidarity with Suu
Kyi's struggle for peace, human rights and the reinstatement of democracy." 


The National League for Democracy, led by 1991 Nobel Peace Prize winner
Suu Kyi, triumphed in the former Burma's last election in 1990 but was
never allowed to take office. 

Suu Kyi is forced to live in semi-isolation at her home in Yangon, where
the Italian delegation met her last week. 

A United Nations report released last October accused the Myanmar military
government of persistent human rights violations, ranging from torture of
prisoners and forced labour to the monitoring of opposition political
parties. 

Veltroni said the conditions in the Asian state were shocking to Western
eyes, with universities shut, forced labour and illiteracy rampant, and
small children at work. 

"We saw a country suffering from problems we hoped never to see at the end
of the century, at the end of the millennium," he told reporters at the
Foreign Press Association. 

Veltroni said Suu Kyi was constantly vilified in the government-owned
Myanmar media but was determined to stay in her country despite threats to
deport her. 

Last October the European Union voiced concern at Myanmar's failure to
promote democracy and human rights and tightened sanctions on Myanmar,
which became a member of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN)
in 1997. 

Veltroni said he favored sanctions but the EU must take a tougher line
against Myanmar's rulers, who had received "a shot of oxygen" from their
acceptance into ASEAN. 

"It is very important that the EU, in its relations with ASEAN, stresses
that there is no place for a regime that violates the most basic human
rights." 

Veltroni urged Italian politicians to focus on weighty international issues
like Myanmar instead of trivial domestic problems, and citizens to support
the democracy movement, even if that meant just wearing a badge with a
picture of Suu Kyi. 

"We who live in the rich, opulent West, who can spend weeks discussing a TV
programme, must remember that there are more serious problems in the world."

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

SOUTH CHINA MORNING POST: JUNTA CAN CRUSH PARTY BUT IT CAN'T STOP PEOPLE
SUPPORTING US, SAYS TOP ACTIVIST 
14 January, 1999 by William Barnes

Burma's military regime may be able to crush the nation's main opposition
party, but it cannot stop the public supporting it, says opposition leader
Aung San Suu Kyi. 

The authorities have forced hundreds of National League for Democracy (NLD)
members to resign and closed many branch offices in recent weeks in what
the party has described as an "evil" campaign. 

Ms Aung San Suu Kyi said breaking up the party's physical group did not
diminish its political power, it merely demonstrated how much the military
feared it. 

"They [the junta] are reporting every day in the news how many NLD members
have resigned. Which country in the world would report daily about
resignations in a local political party and broadcast it as national news?"
she asked the BBC's Burmese language news service. 

"They show how concerned the present military authorities are about the
NLD. That's it." 


The party won 392 out of 485 seats in a 1990 general election that was
contested by - thanks to the military's encouragement - 93 political parties. 

The military ignored the election when its National Unity Party won only a
handful of seats. 

The junta and its election commission later banned 83 parties for reasons
that included having too small a membership, too few leaders and fewer than
five branches. 

Ms Aung San Suu Kyi said that the latest crackdown against her party -
which continues a decade of harassment - was "illegal and unjustified". 

Many observers fear the actions will ultimately be used to prevent the
party from participating properly in fresh elections designed to add
legitimacy to the military's grip on power. 

The junta indicated last year that it might talk to NLD leaders - but not
Ms Aung San Suu Kyi. 

The opposition responded provocatively by creating a Committee to Represent
a People's Parliament which it said would act until enough MPs were freed
to convene the national assembly.

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

SOUTH CHINA MORNING POST: GOLDEN TRIANGLE OPIUM OUTPUT DROPS SHARPLY
13 January, 1999 by William Barnes 

Opium production in the Golden Triangle has fallen sharply this season, but
Burma remains the world's prime source of heroin, US officials said
yesterday. 

China remains a key export route but traffickers are finding new ways of
moving drugs out of the area, according to the United Nations Drug Control
Programme. 

Burma accused the US State Department last month of gross exaggeration in
its annual opium crop estimates for northeast Burma. 

The ruling generals have claimed that narcotics production is used as an
"excuse" by the US to throw stones at a Government it does not like. 

Rangoon recently released what it described as its first comprehensive
survey for a decade of poppy planting, showing the plant covering 64,000
hectares. 

"We had nothing to do with this recent survey and have not seen the report,
but we stick by our figures," a US official said. 

The last State Department figures - for 1997 - show that 155,150 hectares
were used for poppy cultivation. 

Earlier reports showed that from 1987 until 1989 - a period covering the
formation of the junta - the number of hectares devoted to poppy production
jumped from 92,300 to 142,000 hectares. 

The US says opium gum production is thought to have dropped this season
because of severe drought and increased suppression efforts by the regime. 

US officials have accused the regime of housing corrupt soldiers, of
letting the economy benefit from laundered drug profits and showing only a
superficial interest in narcotics suppression. 

Burma and Thailand yesterday began talks on jointly fighting the drugs
trade along their border, officials said. Leading anti-narcotics agents
from both sides met at the Golden Triangle Hotel in eastern Burma's
Tachilek township to discuss how to stamp out the highly organised drug
centers dotting the Burmese jungles. 

Officials from Thailand's Office of Narcotics Control Board said the second
bilateral meeting, sponsored by the UN Drug Control Programme, was aimed at
improving policing efforts in the Golden Triangle.


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







------------------------ BurmaNet ------------------------
"Appropriate Information Technologies, Practical Strategies"
----------------------------------------------------------

The BurmaNet News: January 14, 1999
Issue #1185

Noted in Passing: "We won't abandon Aung San Suu Kyi. We won't abandon the
pro-democracy activists who are fighting to regain their lost freedom." -
Walter Veltroni (see REUTERS: GET TOUGH ON MYANMAR, SAYS LEFTIST CHIEF)


HEADLINES:
==========
AWSJ: EFFORT TO LURE TOURISTS ENDS IN DISAPPOINTMENT 
REUTERS: GET TOUGH ON MYANMAR, SAYS LEFTIST CHIEF 
SCMP: JUNTA CAN'T STOP PEOPLE SUPPORTING US 
SCMP: GOLDEN TRIANGLE OPIUM OUTPUT DROPS SHARPLY 

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

ASIAN WALL STREET JOURNAL: MYANMAR'S BIG EFFORT TO LURE MORE TOURISTS ENDS
IN DISAPPOINTMENT
13 January, 1999 By Barry Wain

FOR DECADES, the tourism industry both inside and outside Myanmar has
drooled over the country's unspoiled beaches, snow-capped mountains' and
thick, tropical forests, not to mention its rich cultural heritage. But
that potential as a tourist destination has never come close to being
fulfilled. 

Protracted ethnic-based insurgencies that put many areas off limits,
together with a general reclusiveness bordering on xenophobia, kept Myanmar
all but closed to outsiders. In 1988, when military authorities abandoned
socialism and introduced market reforms, Nepal had 10 times and Thai-land
100 times more than the 40,000 tourists visiting what was then called Burma. 

With arrivals tripling from 1993 to 1996, the government aimed to climb
into the big leagues with Visit Myanmar Year. The initial target was
500,000 visitors, but few one-third of that number turned up. 

It wasn't successful," concedes Brig-Gen. David Abel, minister in the
office of the chairman of the ruling State Peace and Development Council. 

He says Singapore and Thailand, whose companies had invested heavily in
hotels in Myanmar, were supposed to promote the country as a side trip for
visitors to their own country. Each was to try to send 10% of its own
tourists on to Myanmar, he says. 

"That would have called for about 1.2 million to 1.5 million tourists
coming into the country," Gen. Abel says. "But they have failed." 

And how. Arrivals in the year ended March 31 totaled around 190,000, up
about 7% from a year earlier, though income from tourism actually fell. The
increased numbers came from South Korea, Taiwan and Japan, officials say. 

But even those disappointing figures - which comprise only people arriving
by air - are overstated, industry sources say. Only about 70,000 visitors
arrived on packaged tours, these sources estimate, many of the others being
backpackers or businesspeople making multiple trips. 

Gen. Abel attributes the failure largely to events beyond anyone's control:
the haze from the Indonesian forest fires; the Asian economic turmoil; even
last year's soccer World Cup in France, which distracted the region. 


Another significant factor is the unsettled political situation in
Myanmar, with Western countries imposing various sanctions against the
government for suppressing the democracy movement. National League for
Democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi discourages tourism, her stand prompting
some governments - Britain's, for example - to urge their citizens to shun
Myanmar. 

When 18 foreigners were arrested in Yangon for distributing pro-democracy
leaflets last August, Myanmar took precautions to prevent a repetition - at
the expense of tourism, Some tourists were questioned and searched, the
U.S. embassy says, while entry visas temporarily became harder to obtain,
particularly in Bangkok. 

But hotel and tour executives in Myanmar also say the government lacked the
budget to make a success of Visit Myanmar Year, launched in November 1996.
The campaign was overly ambitious, even when the target was lowered to
300,000 visitors, the executives say, since, Myanmar doesn't shave enough
buses, taxis, tour guides and restaurants, outside Yangon, to handle such
an influx. 

The shortfall in predicted visitors has left hotels in the capital nearly
empty. The city has nine international-standard hotels, and all have very
low occupancy rates, notes a US embassy report. 

Their occupancy rates now average about 20%, according to officials, though
hoteliers say 15% is closer to the mark. Average room rates plunged by at
least 30% in 1998 from a year earlier, but occupancy rates still fell by
about20%. 

Almost all the 4,000 hotel rooms in Yangon - 800 more are coming on stream
- were built in the past five years, when tourism was seen as an easy
foreign-exchange earner. According to the Myanmar In-vestment Commission,
$1 billion of the roughly $7 billion in foreign investment the country has
received over the past decade has been in hotels and other tourism ventures. 

The government also invested strongly in tourism in the 1990s. But those
who joined what an analyst has called the "hotel craze" are now, scrambling
for survival. 

Large hotels began closing rooms and laying off staff as early as 1997.
Executives confirm that many aren't covering their operating costs, much,
less their return on capital. 

Brig.-Gen. Maung Maung, secretary of the investment commission and also a
minister in the office of the chairman of the ruling party, is sympathetic. 

He has reduced the rental some hotels must pay the government for leas-ing
their sites. 

"We have to look after them," he says. "They are my guests."

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

REUTERS: GET TOUGH ON MYANMAR, SAYS ITALIAN LEFTIST CHIEF 
13 January, 1999 By Abigail Levene 

ROME, Jan 13 (Reuters) - Italian leftist leader Walter Veltroni, fresh from
visiting Myanmar opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi, urged the
international community on Wednesday to get tough with the Asian state's
military rulers. 

"We won't abandon Aung San Suu Kyi. We won't abandon the pro-democracy
activists who are fighting to regain their lost freedom," an impassioned
Veltroni told a news conference. 


"The international community must do all in its power to step up
its...opposition to the military junta." 

Veltroni, a former deputy prime minister who leads the largest party in
Italy's ruling centre-left coalition, the ex-communist Democrats of the
Left, unveiled a campaign to "create international solidarity with Suu
Kyi's struggle for peace, human rights and the reinstatement of democracy." 

The National League for Democracy, led by 1991 Nobel Peace Prize winner Suu
Kyi, triumphed in the former Burma's last election in 1990 but was never
allowed to take office. 

Suu Kyi is forced to live in semi-isolation at her home in Yangon, where
the Italian delegation met her last week. 

A United Nations report released last October accused the Myanmar military
government of persistent human rights violations, ranging from torture of
prisoners and forced labour to the monitoring of opposition political
parties. 

Veltroni said the conditions in the Asian state were shocking to Western
eyes, with universities shut, forced labour and illiteracy rampant, and
small children at work. 

"We saw a country suffering from problems we hoped never to see at the end
of the century, at the end of the millennium," he told reporters at the
Foreign Press Association. 

Veltroni said Suu Kyi was constantly vilified in the government-owned
Myanmar media but was determined to stay in her country despite threats to
deport her. 

Last October the European Union voiced concern at Myanmar's failure to
promote democracy and human rights and tightened sanctions on Myanmar,
which became a member of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN)
in 1997. 

Veltroni said he favored sanctions but the EU must take a tougher line
against Myanmar's rulers, who had received "a shot of oxygen" from their
acceptance into ASEAN. 

"It is very important that the EU, in its relations with ASEAN, stresses
that there is no place for a regime that violates the most basic human
rights." 

Veltroni urged Italian politicians to focus on weighty international issues
like Myanmar instead of trivial domestic problems, and citizens to support
the democracy movement, even if that meant just wearing a badge with a
picture of Suu Kyi. 

"We who live in the rich, opulent West, who can spend weeks discussing a TV
programme, must remember that there are more serious problems in the world."

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

SOUTH CHINA MORNING POST: JUNTA CAN CRUSH PARTY BUT IT CAN'T STOP PEOPLE
SUPPORTING US, SAYS TOP ACTIVIST 
14 January, 1999 by William Barnes

Burma's military regime may be able to crush the nation's main opposition
party, but it cannot stop the public supporting it, says opposition leader
Aung San Suu Kyi. 

The authorities have forced hundreds of National League for Democracy (NLD)
members to resign and closed many branch offices in recent weeks in what
the party has described as an "evil" campaign. 

Ms Aung San Suu Kyi said breaking up the party's physical group did not
diminish its political power, it merely demonstrated how much the military
feared it. 


"They [the junta] are reporting every day in the news how many NLD members
have resigned. Which country in the world would report daily about
resignations in a local political party and broadcast it as national news?"
she asked the BBC's Burmese language news service. 

"They show how concerned the present military authorities are about the
NLD. That's it." 

The party won 392 out of 485 seats in a 1990 general election that was
contested by - thanks to the military's encouragement - 93 political parties. 

The military ignored the election when its National Unity Party won only a
handful of seats. 

The junta and its election commission later banned 83 parties for reasons
that included having too small a membership, too few leaders and fewer than
five branches. 

Ms Aung San Suu Kyi said that the latest crackdown against her party -
which continues a decade of harassment - was "illegal and unjustified". 

Many observers fear the actions will ultimately be used to prevent the
party from participating properly in fresh elections designed to add
legitimacy to the military's grip on power. 

The junta indicated last year that it might talk to NLD leaders - but not
Ms Aung San Suu Kyi. 

The opposition responded provocatively by creating a Committee to Represent
a People's Parliament which it said would act until enough MPs were freed
to convene the national assembly.

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

SOUTH CHINA MORNING POST: GOLDEN TRIANGLE OPIUM OUTPUT DROPS SHARPLY
13 January, 1999 by William Barnes 

Opium production in the Golden Triangle has fallen sharply this season, but
Burma remains the world's prime source of heroin, US officials said
yesterday. 

China remains a key export route but traffickers are finding new ways of
moving drugs out of the area, according to the United Nations Drug Control
Programme. 

Burma accused the US State Department last month of gross exaggeration in
its annual opium crop estimates for northeast Burma. 

The ruling generals have claimed that narcotics production is used as an
"excuse" by the US to throw stones at a Government it does not like. 

Rangoon recently released what it described as its first comprehensive
survey for a decade of poppy planting, showing the plant covering 64,000
hectares. 

"We had nothing to do with this recent survey and have not seen the report,
but we stick by our figures," a US official said. 

The last State Department figures - for 1997 - show that 155,150 hectares
were used for poppy cultivation. 

Earlier reports showed that from 1987 until 1989 - a period covering the
formation of the junta - the number of hectares devoted to poppy production
jumped from 92,300 to 142,000 hectares. 

The US says opium gum production is thought to have dropped this season
because of severe drought and increased suppression efforts by the regime. 

US officials have accused the regime of housing corrupt soldiers, of
letting the economy benefit from laundered drug profits and showing only a
superficial interest in narcotics suppression. 


Burma and Thailand yesterday began talks on jointly fighting the drugs
trade along their border, officials said. Leading anti-narcotics agents
from both sides met at the Golden Triangle Hotel in eastern Burma's
Tachilek township to discuss how to stamp out the highly organised drug
centers dotting the Burmese jungles. 

Officials from Thailand's Office of Narcotics Control Board said the second
bilateral meeting, sponsored by the UN Drug Control Programme, was aimed at
improving policing efforts in the Golden Triangle.

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