ASEAN/EU

[moe@xxxxxxxxxxxxx]

Financial Times
BURMA: Asean firm over stance
By Ted Bardacke in Bangkok
The Association of Southeast Asian Nations (Asean) is determined to include
Burma in next month's scheduled meeting in Germany between foreign ministers
from the grouping and the European Union, virtually ensuring that the
meeting is cancelled.


S. Jayakumar, Singapore's foreign minister, said after meeting Win Aung ,
his Burmese counterpart, that Asean "had to adhere to the principle of
non-discrimination on the question of participation of Asean countries in
bloc-to-bloc meetings with the EU". This follows a similar statement by
Indonesia on Thursday.


Senior Burmese officials are banned from receiving visas to EU countries, a
ban that is part of a series of European sanctions against Burma enacted to
punish the country's military junta for its systematic violation of human
rights and lack of political freedoms.


EU diplomats have said they were unwilling to offer a visa to Mr Win Aung
for next month's meeting unless the junta made some type of "humanitarian"
gesture. The regime immediately released two high-profile political
prisoners. At the same time it has refused to deny reports that as many as
270 new political prisoners have been sentenced to long jail terms since
December of last year.


Last month a meeting of officials from Asean and the EU was cancelled for
the third time aver disagreements on Burma's role in such a meeting. The
meeting was set to discuss implementation of a number of joint programmes of
EU technical assistance to the region, programmes worth several million
dollars. Asean had been repeatedly warned by its "dialogue partners" that
admitting Burma to Asean in 1997 would have negative consequences for the
organisation's diplomatic relations.