US Options Limited on Myanmar Crackdown

	Photo 1 of 2
Paulo Sergio Pinheiro, Special Rapporteur on the situation of Human Rights in Myanmar, informs on the latest developments in the country, during a press conference at the European headquarters of the United Nations in Geneva, Switzerland, Friday, Aug. 31, 2007. The United Nations urges the Myanmar authorities to immediately release peaceful protesters. (AP Photo/Keystone, Salvatore di Nolfi)

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By FOSTER KLUG

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Bush administration and lawmakers from both parties are pushing for the U.N. Security Council to condemn Myanmar's recent crackdown on activists.

But with China and Russia likely to block a U.N. resolution against a country with which they both have strong economic ties, and India clamoring for access to Myanmar's vast energy resources, U.S. options to force change appear limited.

Priscilla Clapp, who was chief U.S. diplomat in Myanmar — also called Burma — from 1999 to 2002, said U.S. and European pressure is important. But, she said, "when you hear the president and others talking about that, it's because they've got nothing else they can do; it's just such a conundrum what you do about Burma."

The ruling military junta in Myanmar has detained scores of activists and used gangs of hired thugs to snuff out protests that began Aug. 19 over higher fuel and consumer goods prices.

In response, President Bush urged the government to "heed the international calls to release these activists immediately and stop its intimidation of those Burmese citizens who are promoting democracy and human rights."

The State Department has said U.S. officials will work to raise the subject at the U.N. General Assembly meeting in September.

Michael Green, Bush's former senior adviser on Asia, said U.S. rhetoric condemning the regime shows Myanmar's "democracy movement that major powers like the United States stand with them. That has meaning. But in terms of affecting the behavior of the regime, I don't think that will happen until the big parties around them start working together."

China and Russia, both of which have veto power on the U.N. Security Council, are the major barriers to a resolution on Myanmar. They argue that the council should deal with matters of international security, not the internal security of a country.

Even a successful U.N. resolution, however, "doesn't solve the problem in Burma; it just gives it a high level of international attention," Clapp said.

The most important pressure on Myanmar probably would come from China, which probably would welcome stronger economic policies in Myanmar as better protection for its investments. Clapp said China covets Myanmar's huge energy resources and in coming years will start making large hydroelectric and gas investments.

The White House and State Department are watching events in Myanmar closely; the country also is of special interest to Bush's wife.

First lady Laura Bush telephoned U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon on Friday to urge him to condemn the junta's treatment of dissidents and to press for the Security Council to prevent more violence in Myanmar.

A statement released by her office said, "Mrs. Bush noted that by staying quiet, the United Nations — and all nations — condone these abuses."

Green noted what he called a growing recognition that Myanmar is becoming a regional problem, with disease, drugs and refugees moving across its borders.

But India, a powerful democracy that is nurturing closer ties with the United States, is turning a blind eye to Myanmar's turmoil, Green said, in an effort to compete with China for strategic and economic influence in Myanmar.

အဳကမ္းဖက္ႎႀိမ္နင္းမႁကို အေမရိကန္သမတ ဴပင္းထန္စၾာ႟ႁတ္ခဵ

႓ငိမ္းခဵမ္းစၾာ ဆႎၬဴပသည့္ ဴမန္မာဴပည္သူမဵားအား စစ္အစိုးရက ႟ိုက္ႎႀက္ ဖမ္းဆီး ႎႀိပ္စက္ေနဴခင္းမဵား ဆက္လက္ ဴပႂလုပ္ေနသည္ကို အေမရိကန္သမတ ေဂဵာ့ခဵ္ ဒဘလဵႃ ဘုရႀ္က အဴပင္းအထန္ ေဝဖန္ ႟ႁတ္ခဵေဳကာင္း ဳသဂုတ္လ ၃၀ရက္ေနႛက ေဳကညာခဵက္ ထုတ္ဴပန္ပၝသည္။ (Photo: AFP)

ဴမန္မာႎိုင္ငံက ဆႎၬဴပသူေတၾကို စစ္အစိုးရ အာဏာပိုင္ေတၾက အဳကမ္းဖက္ ႎႀိမ္နင္းခဲ့တာကို အေမရိကန္သမတ ေဂဵာ့ခဵ္ ဒဗလဵႃ ဘုရႀ္က ဴပင္းဴပင္းထန္ထန္ ေဝဖန္႟ႁတ္ခဵလိုက္႓ပီး ဖမ္းဆီးထားတဲ့ ဆႎၬဴပသူေတၾကို ဴပန္လၿတ္ေပးဖိုႛလည္း ေတာင္းဆိုလိုက္ပၝတယ္။

႓ငိမ္းခဵမ္းစၾာ ဆႎၬဴပဳကတဲ့ ဒီမိုကေရစီလိုလားသူ ဴပည္သူေတၾကို ဴမန္မာစစ္အစိုးရက ဆက္လက္ဴပႂလုပ္ေနတဲ့ ဖမ္းဆီးတာ၊ ႎႀိပ္စက္တာနဲႛ ႟ုိက္ႎႀက္တာေတၾကို မိမိအေနနဲႛ အဴပင္းအထန္ ေဝဖန္႟ႁတ္ခဵတယ္လိုႛ ဳသဂုတ္လ ၃၀ ရက္ေနႛ ေနႛစၾဲနဲႛ ထုတ္ဴပန္တဲ့ သမတ အိမ္ဴဖႃေတာ္ရဲ့ ေဳကညာခဵက္မႀာ သမတဘုရႀ္က ေဴပာဳကားလိုက္ပၝတယ္။

ဒီဆႎၬဴပဴပည္သူေတၾဟာ ေလာင္စာဆီေစဵးႎႁန္းေတၾ အစိုးရက ႟ုတ္တရက္ဴမၟင့္တင္လိုက္တဲ့အေပၞ ပူပန္တဲ့အတၾက္ ဆႎၬေဖာ္ထုတ္ဴခင္းသာဴဖစ္ေဳကာင္း၊ သူတိုႛရဲ့ စိုးရိမ္ပူပန္မႁေတၾကို အင္အားသံုး နႀိမ္နင္းတာထက္ အစိုးရက နားေထာင္ ေဴဖရႀင္းေပးရမႀာဴဖစ္ေဳကာင္း အေမရိကန္သမတက ေဴပာပၝတယ္။

ဴမန္မာစစ္အစိုးရအေနနဲႛ ဆႎၬဴပလႁပ္ရႀားသူေတၾကို ခဵက္ခဵင္းလၿတ္ေပး႓ပီး ေဒၞေအာင္ဆန္းစုဳကည္အပၝအဝင္ လူႛအခၾင့္အေရးနဲႛ ဒီမိုကေရစီေရး ႒ကိႂးပမ္းေနတဲ့ ဴမန္မာဴပည္သူေတၾကို ဖိႎႀိပ္ ႓ခိမ္းေဴခာက္ေနတာေတၾကို ရပ္တန္ႛေပးသင့္တယ္လိုႛလည္း သမတရဲ့ ေဳကညာခဵက္မႀာ ေဖာ္ဴပထားပၝတယ္။

မေနႛက ေနႛလည္က ဴပႂလုပ္တဲ့ အိမ္ဴဖႃေတာ္ သတင္းစာရႀင္းလင္းပၾဲမႀာ ေဴပာခၾင့္ရပုဂၢိႂလ္ မစၤတာ ဒင္းနစ္ ဝီလ္ဒၝးက လာမဲ့အပတ္ ဳသစေဳတလဵႎိုင္ငံ ဆစ္ဒနီ႓မိႂႚမႀာ ကဵင္းပ႓ပီး သမတကိုယ္တိုင္ တက္ေရာက္မဲ့ အာရႀပစိဖိတ္ စီးပၾားေရး ပူးေပၝင္းေဆာင္႟ၾက္မႁ ထိပ္သီး ညီလာခံ (APEC)မႀာ ဴမန္မာကိစၤဟာ အဓိက ဴပႍနာအဴဖစ္ ပၝရႀိမယ္လိုႛ ေဴပာဳကားလိုက္ပၝတယ္။

အဂႆၝေနႛက ဆႎၬဴပပၾဲမႀာ အာဏာပိုင္ေတၾရဲ့ အဳကမ္းဖက္ႎႀိမ္နင္းမႁေဳကာင့္ ေဴခတဖက္ကဵိႂးသၾားတဲ့ အဖမ္းခံရသူ တဦးကို အာဏာပိုင္ေတၾက ေဆးကုသခၾင့္မေပးတဲ့အတၾက္ အစာငတ္ခံ ဆႎၬဴပမယ္ဆိုတဲ့ သတင္းနဲႛ ပတ္သက္႓ပီး အေမရိကန္ႎိုင္ငံဴခားေရးဌာနကလည္း အထူးစိုးရိမ္ေဳကာင္း ဳကာသပေတးေနႛ မနက္က ေဴပာဳကားခဲ့ပၝတယ္။

US presses for action over Myanmar; China, Russia reluctant

Agence France-Presse
Last updated 09:59am (Mla time) 09/01/2007

WASHINGTON--The United States is pressing for international action over Myanmar's military junta crackdown on peaceful protests but is expected to again face opposition from China and Russia.

A day after US President George W. Bush strongly condemned the arrests of pro-democracy activists protesting against a massive hike in fuel prices in the Southeast Asian state, his wife Laura Bush on Friday called on UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon to push the Security Council to act.

In a rare political intervention by the wife of the US president, the First Lady also asked Ban to join the United States in condemning the junta's "brutal crackdown," her press secretary Sally McDonough said in a statement.

"Mrs Bush noted that by staying quiet, the United Nations -- and all nations -- condone these abuses," McDonough said as top American lawmakers also urged Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to demand Security Council action.

Last January, China and Russia vetoed a Security Council resolution pushed primarily by Washington urging Myanmar's (formerly Burma) rulers to free all political detainees and end sexual violence by the military.

"I expect China and Russia to take the same position again if this issue is pushed for some kind of consensus at the UN Security Council," said Mohan Malik, an Asian expert at the Hawaii-based Asia-Pacific Center for Security Studies.

China and Russia, two of five permanent members of the Security Council, have both invested in Myanmar's energy sector, ignoring sanctions imposed on Yangon by the United States and European Union.

Myanmar is also providing China, which is flexing its military muscle in Asia, strategic access to the Indian Ocean. Russia has also ignored US protests to build a nuclear research center for Myanmar.

"The United States has pushed itself into a corner," Malik said, citing years of ineffective US investment and trade sanctions on Myanmar.

The sanctions failed to bite because of Myanmar's strong economic links with China, Thailand, Singapore and India. In fact, foreign direct investments to Myanmar have reportedly increased in recent years.

Washington in June reversed a four-year freeze in high level talks with Myanmar's military junta in the hope of prodding the junta to embrace political reforms. Further talks are now in doubt with the latest crackdown.

Aside from the United States, two other permanent Security Council members, France and Britain, along with Canada, Sweden, Ireland, Denmark, the European Union, and the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights have all condemned the crackdown.

"However, at this critical time, words of support from the world's democracies are not enough," said Tom Lantos, the Democratic head of the House of Representatives foreign relations committee, in a letter to Rice.

"The matter needs to be addressed by the UN Security Council," said Mitch McConnell, the Republican leader of the US Senate.

More than 100 people have been arrested, including some of Myanmar's top pro-democracy leaders, following the largest non-violent demonstrations in the country in five years, that began on August 19 over huge fuel price hikes.

Myanmar's military regime of 45 years has always taken a hardline on the slightest display of dissent. But protesters in recent weeks have defied the threat of arrest and beatings to stage new rallies.

Bush is expected to raise the Myanmar issue with key leaders of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) on the sidelines of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) forum summit in Sydney next week.

ASEAN has come under fire for being too soft with member state Myanmar's generals, who have kept the country's democracy icon Aung San Suu Kyi under house arrest for 11 of the past 18 years.

With little pressure from its neighbours, the generals are unlikely to ease their crackdown on dissent.

"The Burmese military regime has shown nothing but contempt for the UN, secure in the knowledge that when the chips are down, China will come to their rescue at the Security Council because China has too many stakes in the junta's survival," Malik said.


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