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BURMA: Japan renews hopes for profi
- Subject: BURMA: Japan renews hopes for profi
- From: moe@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Thu, 16 Dec 1999 14:21:00
Subject: BURMA: Japan renews hopes for profitable relations
VIA LEXIS NEXIS
World News / Asia-Pacific
15/12/99
BURMA: Japan renews hopes for profitable
relations
Tokyo may decide to revive links that go as far back as
the second world war. William Barnes reports
A bruised Japanese soldier in the
popular post-war novel, The Harp
of Burma, argued that the
Burmese "possess something
marvellous that we can't even
begin to understand".
Burma has held a peculiar
fascination for many Japanese
since the Greater East Asian war when its anti-colonial
heroes fought the British side-by-side with their
Japanese "liberators".
That sentimental undertow may help explain why Japan
is urging Burma's military regime to ease its iron grip on
the country sufficiently to permit Japan to start helping it.
Keizo Obuchi last month became the first Japanese
premier in 15 years to meet his Burmese counterpart
when he talked to General Than Shwe at the summit of
the Association of South-East Asian Nations in Manila.
Mr Obuchi told Gen Than Shwe that Japan was ready to
support the regime if it carried out "serious" economic
reforms. His senior foreign policy adviser, Ryutaro
Hashimoto, followed this up with a four-day tour of Burma
to "size up its economic needs". A 48-member
delegation from the powerful business organisation, the
Keidanren, has also just visited the country. Why should
Japan be quickening its engagement with a widely reviled
military regime when - according to a recent World Bank
report - "lacklustre economic performance. . . could have
devastating consequences for poverty, human
development and social cohesion in Myanmar [Burma]"?
One Japan-based analyst argues that Japan's niggling
worries over security should never be underestimated:
"Economic survivalism remains at the core of Japanese
perceptions of themselves and the outside world,
especially Asia," the analyst said. A feeling that Burma's
potential is too rich to ignore is reinforced by a concern
that if Japan or others do not move in, China will.
Japan has made Burmese friends under western noses
before. The vanguard of the anti-colonial movement
trained in wartime Japan. The "thirty comrades" included
Aung San, father of Aung San Suu Kyi, current
opposition leader, and also Ne Win, the future dictator
If the relationship turned sour before hostilities ended,
friendships created during the war helped ensure
Japanese aid provided a prop for an often isolated
economy from the mid-1950s to 1988.
Tokyo eventually rebelled against the Ne Win regime's
eccentric management with an unprecedented warning in
early 1988 that the bilateral relationship would be in
danger if fundamental economic reforms were not
introduced. The blunt threat encouraged a newly-formed
junta to announce the opening up of the economy in late
1988, though by then the massacre of anti-military
protesters had already caused aid to be cut off.
The big Japanese trading houses are eager to see a
resumption of large-scale overseas development
assistance to provide them with lucrative, risk-free
procurement contracts; they are too wary of political
instability, corruption and infrastructure problems to risk
doing much on their own.
The Keidanren, and a Japan-Myanmar Association of big
corporations, is strongly supported by pro-business
members of the ruling Liberal Democratic party who are
moving closer to Burma's powerful military intelligence
establishment.
One influential LDP leader, Kabun Muto, established a
"Parliamentarians' Group to Support the Myanmar
Government" in 1988.
Earlier this year another powerful LDP figure, Koichi
Kato, inspected, with intelligence chief Lt Gen Khin
Nyunt, a crop-substitution project (for growing buckwheat
rather than opium poppies) in Kokang State.
Aung San Suu Kyi, the Burmese opposition leader, has
her own links with Japan, especially through her father,
whose life she researched in Kyoto University in the
mid-1980s. However, Ms Suu Kyi's visibility in Japan has
declined sharply this year. This is important in a country
where personal relations count for more than abstract
ideas such as democracy, at least with the political and
business elite.
Japan lifted its 1988 freeze on humanitarian aid in 1995
after Ms Suu Kyi was released from house arrest. It
resurrected a pre-1988 aid project in March last year by
lending $22.1m (£13.6m) for the repair of the dangerously
rundown Rangoon airport.
Any moves to resume new aid lending must first
overcome the Ministry of Finance's own reservations
about extending more credit to a country that is not, in
effect, servicing its existing debt to Japan.
Trickier still is the row provoked by breaking ranks with
the west on sanctions. Japanese policymakers may
resent US and European moralising, but the potential
rewards in Burma are not worth risking a rupture with
trade partners.
Both Mr Obuchi and Mr Hashimoto made appeals for
more democracy and reconciliation, but critics of the
regime fear that in its eagerness Japan will encourage it
to make just token gestures.
"The leaders of Myanmar should retire from the military,
stop wearing uniforms and should form a political party,"
argued the president of The Nippon Foundation, Yohei
Sasakawa, who accompanied Mr Hashimoto to Burma.
"Every nation has its own pace in terms of democracy
and moves towards a market economy."