US, UK ‘lied’ about Iraqi WMD, still none found
go to article

The claims that paved the path to the invasion of Iraq
go to article

WORLD BRIEFS
go to briefs

Health problems hit children of Russia
go to article

Congo military accused of supporting
village massacre
go to article

Burmese military seize Suu Kyi after
rally turns into riot
go to article

Spanish govt. avows legal measures
only in fighting ETA

By Alicia Fraerman

Madrid, Spain, May 30 (IPS)— The Spanish government and opposition parties agree that only legal measures should be used in combating the Basque terrorist group ETA, which carried out another attack Friday, detonating a bomb that killed two police officers in the northern community of Navarra.

A bomb placed under the police vehicle exploded just as the two agents were leaving their workplace in Sangüesa, a town of just over 4,000 people. They were accompanied by a third colleague who was gravely injured in the blast.

The first vice-president of the Spanish government, Mariano Rajoy, and the leader of the opposition Spanish Socialist Workers Party (PSOE), José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, spoke out against the attack, saying ETA must be fought relentlessly, but always within the law.

Judge Baltasar Garzón, internationally renowned for his work on high-profile human rights cases, also condemned the ETA bombing. He learned of the incident, coincidentally, just as he was presenting the new book Lobo, by journalists Antonio Rubio and Manuel Cerdán, a fictionalized history of an agent who infiltrated the radical separatist group’s ranks in the 1970s.

In the book, and as “Lobo” himself confirmed in the presentation, is the story of how the infiltrator “and other agents and police” carried out illegal actions against the Basque terrorist group.

“Lobo,” whose real name is Miquel Legarza, appeared at the book release wearing dark glasses, a wig, and a false beard.

Garzón said that today, “fortunately, these illegal actions no long occur, and if they did they would be crimes that should be brought before the justice authorities.”

Euskadi Ta Askatasuna (ETA, Basque Fatherland and Liberty, in the Basque language) was founded in the 1960s to fight the Spanish dictatorship of Gen. Francisco Franco (1939-1975).

ETA, which shifted its opposition to the military regime towards separatist demands, is known for its terrorist tactics, including car bombs and assassinations, which are blamed for the deaths of more than 800 people over the past three decades.

The two police killed by ETA and their injured colleague were part of a team that was working to facilitate the renewal of identification documents in the rural communities of Navarra, one of the 17 autonomous communities that make up Spain.

The citizens of Navarra voted in a 1979 referendum against forming part of the Basque Country, counter to what the region’s nationalist movement seeks.

In regards to this matter, PSOE leader Rodríguez Zapatero said in a conversation with IPS on Friday, “Five days ago the Navarrans and all good Spaniards expressed themselves with their votes [in local and regional elections]. Today ETA has expressed itself with its own language: that of death.”

Miguel Sanz, president of Navarra, noted that the explosion occurred in a busy plaza, and therefore “the police would have thought it would be practically impossible [for ETA] to place a bomb during broad daylight ... but they have done it.”

Among the people on the street at the time of the explosion, others were injured — a man, two women and an eight-year-old boy — but not seriously.

The mayor of Sangüesa, some 45 km from Pamplona, capital of Navarra, is independent politician José Daniel Plano. He has no links to any of the major parties and was re-elected to the post last Sunday.

Friday’s bomb attack is the ETA’s second so far this year. On Feb. 8, they killed Joseba Pagazaurtundúa, a socialist and policeman from Andoain, a small town in Basque Country.

In denouncing this latest ETA attack, the political leaders were joined by the Union Confederation of Workers’ Commissions (of communist leanings), which expressed its “resounding condemnation and rejection of the terrorist action.”

The Confederation further called on workers and all society “to participate in any demonstrations and acts of protest and denunciation that are staged against this latest act of barbarism and terror.”

The Chambers of Commerce and Industry followed suit, and issued a statement saying, “ETA is fenced in, legally isolated, economically asphyxiated, and for the first time politically excluded from elections.”

“The only way to fight terrorism is through the unity of all democratic parties and strict compliance with the law,” said the communiqué.

Also citing the debilitated state of ETA was “Lobo,” who took the stage at the book presentation after Garzón, the judge who became famous for his effort to have former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet extradited to Spain for trial on charges of crimes against humanity.

“Lobo” said Friday, “ETA is Swiss cheese, an organization full of holes, with as many militants as infiltrators. It is a poorly trained mafia. Its end is near.”

Speaking after “Lobo” was Mario Onaindía, who read an anti-terrorism message. Onaindía, today a socialist senator, served prison time for being a member of ETA during the final years of the Franco dictatorship. After the return to democracy and after being pardoned in 1976, he publicly renounced violence.

In the early years of Spain’s democratic consolidation, several members of the ETA political-militant sector followed in Onaindía’s footsteps and joined legal political parties or withdrew from political activity altogether.

Now there are fewer and fewer militants who have remained with ETA through the years, and increasingly more who joined later and are dedicated to committing indiscriminate acts of violence against Spain’s security forces, politicians and party activists, local officials, academics, and journalists.

ETA’s primary demand is for independence. The Autonomous Communities of Spain, which include the Basque Country, have a level of autonomy from the central Spanish government that is surpassed only by that of the federated provinces of Canada.

back to top

US, UK ‘lied’ about Iraqi WMD, still none found

Compiled by Seán Marquis

June 4 (AGR)— The controversy over whether the administration of President George W. Bush either exaggerated or lied about evidence that it said it had of the existence of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) in Iraq before the US-led invasion has mushroomed over the past week.

Matters took a turn for the worse when the London Guardian reported Saturday about the existence of a transcript, obviously leaked from a senior British official, of an exchange at the Waldorf Hotel in New York between US Secretary of State Colin Powell and British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw just before Powell’s presentation of the evidence against Iraq before the United Nations Security Council Feb. 5.

The exchange about the validity of their respective governments’ intelligence reports on Iraq lasted less than 10 minutes, according to a diplomatic source who has read a transcript of the conversation.

Straw reportedly expressed concern that claims being made by Bush and UK Prime Minister Tony Blair could not be proved. Powell shared the concern about intelligence assessments, especially those being presented by the Pentagon’s Office of Special Plans set up by the US deputy defense secretary, Paul Wolfowitz.

What are called the “Waldorf transcripts” are being circulated in NATO diplomatic circles and they appear to have been leaked by diplomats who supported the war against Iraq even when the evidence about Saddam Hussein’s program of weapons of mass destruction was shaky at best, and who now believe they were lied to.

The document quotes Powell as being “apprehensive’’ about the evidence presented to him by the intelligence agencies. He reportedly expressed the hope that the actual facts, when they came out, would not “explode in their faces.”

US News and World Report magazine said the first draft of Powell’s UN speech was prepared for Powell by vice president Dick Cheney’s chief of staff, I. Lewis Libby, in late January.

According to the magazine, the draft contained such questionable material that Powell lost his temper, throwing several pages in the air and declaring, “I’m not reading this. This is bullshit.”

Among other claims in the speech, Cheney’s aides wanted Powell to include in his presentation information that Iraq had purchased computer topography software that would allow it to plan an attack on the United States, an allegation that was not supported by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).

Powell then appointed his own review team that met several times with CIA Director George Tenet and national security adviser Condoleezza Rice to prepare the speech, in which the secretary of state accused Iraq of hiding tons of biological and chemical weapons.

Powell defended himself on Monday, saying: “it wasn’t a figment of anyone’s imagination” that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction. “There was no doubt in my mind as I went through the intelligence . . . that the evidence was overwhelming.”

Empty desert, empty hands

Since the start of the war in Iraq the US 75th exploitation taskforce has led the search, piling about 1,000 people into the effort including biologists, chemists, arms treaty enforcers, nuclear operators, computer and document experts, and special forces troops.

The weapon-hunters’ first disappointment came in the early days of the war when special forces rushed to secure sites in the western desert of Iraq that were believed to house chemical warheads -- and found no sign of them.

Their success rate did not improve from there.

The leading American marine general in Iraq conceded Saturday that intelligence reports that chemical weapons had been deployed around Baghdad before the war were “wrong.”

Lieutenant General James Conway, the commander of the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force, said he had been convinced that before and during the war, shells with chemical warheads had been distributed to Republican Guard units around Baghdad.

“It was a surprise to me then -- it remains a surprise to me now -- that we have not uncovered weapons, as you say, in some of the forward dispersal sites,” he told reporters in a video-conference at the Pentagon.

“Believe me, it’s not for lack of trying,” he added. “We’ve been to virtually every ammunition supply point between the Kuwaiti border and Baghdad, but they’re simply not there.”

“We were simply wrong,” he added.

The Pentagon has retreated from its initial predictions that a “smoking-gun” justification for the war would be found. Wolfowitz suggested in an interview with Vanity Fair magazine that the elimination of banned weapons was chosen as the main reason for going to war for “bureaucratic” reasons, and that the invasion’s strategic impact on the region -- allowing US troops to be withdrawn from Saudi Arabia -- was a “huge” factor.

“The truth is that for reasons that have a lot to do with the US government bureaucracy, we settled on the one issue that everyone could agree on -- which was weapons of mass destruction -- as the core reason,” he said.

Wolfowitz said that the “criminal treatment” of the “Iraqi people is a reason to help the Iraqis, but it’s not a reason to put American kids’ lives at risk, certainly not on the scale we did.”

Pentagon officials have been scrambling in recent days and have suggested that perhaps Saddam Hussein did destroy all his WMD just before the war, or that he had a “just-in-time’’ weapons system that kept key chemicals separated in civilian neighborhoods or other unlikely areas until the moment they would be combined and used, or that the weapons remain hidden in remote mountain areas deep in the ground where they are unlikely ever to be discovered, or that all the suspect sites were looted before US troops could secure them.

Some have even suggested that Baghdad may have destroyed all the weapons in the early 1990s, but then acted as if it still had them in order to deter an attack. Kenneth Adelman, a member of Rumsfeld’s Defense Policy Board and a major war booster, said he thought that Hussein might have launched a “massive disinformation campaign’’ to that end.

Blair ‘lied to us’

An unidentified expert in Britain’s intelligence network told the BBC on May 29 that Britain’s dossier on Iraq’s weapons contained unreliable information and was “transformed” on instructions from Blair’s office in the week before its release last September, to make it “sexier.”

“The classic example,” the BBC quoted the intelligence officer as saying, “was the statement that weapons of mass destruction were ready for use [by Iraq] within 45 minutes.”

In the dossier, Blair had warned that Hussein could activate a chemical and biological arsenal in that time — a suggestion that became a pillar of Britain’s rationale for going to war alongside the United States against Baghdad.

“That information was not contained in the original draft” that had been prepared for Blair, the officer said. “It was included in the dossier against our wishes ... it wasn’t reliable.”

These statements have been confirmed in part by confidential Whitehall memos between Alastair Campbell, Blair’s communications director, and John Scarlett, chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee, which discuss the insertion and deletion of sections from the draft dossier. Ministers of Parliament (MPs) have called on the government to release the original draft of the 50-page intelligence document — including the missing conclusion taken out on orders by Campbell.

The September dossier also claimed that there was intelligence that Iraq “has sought the supply of significant quantities of uranium from Africa.”

But investigations by the International Atomic Energy Agency, the UN’s nuclear inspections body, soon discovered that documents purporting to show that Iraq was trying to buy uranium from Niger were forged.

A second dossier produced by Campbell’s office in February this year — said by officials to have drawn on the latest intelligence — was partly based on plagiarized material from an American student’s 12-year-old PhD thesis.

Robin Cook, the former foreign secretary who resigned over the war, said: “We were told Saddam had weapons ready for use within 45 minutes. It’s now 45 days since the war has finished and we have still not found anything.

“It is plain he did not have that capacity to threaten us, possibly did not have the capacity to threaten even his neighbors, and that is profoundly important.”

Tony Benn, the former Labor minister, told LBC Radio: “I believe the Prime Minister lied to us and lied to us and lied to us. The whole war was built upon falsehood and I think the long-term damage will be to democracy in Britain.”

Alan Simpson, Labor MP for Nottingham South, said MPs “supported war based on a lie.” He said: “If it’s right Iraq destroyed the weapons prior to the war, then it means Iraq complied with the United Nations resolution 1441.”

The alleged mobile weapons laboratories

In remarks made on Polish television on May 30, Bush, citing two trailers found in northern Iraq last month that US intelligence agencies have said were probably used as mobile biological weapons labs, said US forces in Iraq have “found the weapons of mass destruction.”

“And we’ll find more weapons as time goes on,” Bush said. “But for those who say we haven’t found the banned manufacturing devices or banned weapons, they’re wrong. We found them.”

A joint CIA and Defense Intelligence Agency report released last week claimed that the two trucks were mobile labs used to develop biological weapons. The trucks were fitted with hi-tech laboratory equipment and the report said the discovery represented the “strongest evidence to date that Iraq was hiding a biowarfare program.”

But no traces of biological agents were found on the trucks and experts point out that they were open sided and would therefore have left a trace easy for weapons inspectors to detect.

Sources: Agence France Presse, Financial Times (UK),Guardian (UK), Independent (UK), Inter Press Service, Times (UK)

Corrections and clarifications
On June 5, 2003, British newspaper The Guardian recanted two provocative claims that had been republished in issue #229 of Asheville Global Report. The first was reprinted within the compilation, “’War has not ended’ – US military”. According to The Guardian, the newspaper misconstrued remarks made by the US Deputy Defense Secretary, Paul Wolfowitz, making it appear that he had said that oil was the main reason for going to war in Iraq. “He did not say that,” apologized The Guardian. “He said, according to the Department of Defense website, ‘The ... difference between North Korea and Iraq is that we had virtually no economic options with Iraq because the country floats on a sea of oil. In the case of North Korea, the country is teetering on the edge of economic collapse and that I believe is a major point of leverage whereas the military picture with North Korea is very different from that with Iraq.’ The sense was clearly that the US had no economic options by means of which to achieve its objectives, not that the economic value of the oil motivated the war.”

The second item appeared in the compilation, “US, UK ‘lied’ about Iraqi WMD, still none found”. The Guardian issued a correction to the story, stating that UK Foreign Secretary Jack Straw and his US counterpart Colin Powell had met at the Waldorf Hotel in New York shortly before Powell addressed the United Nations on Feb. 5, 2003. The newspaper said Straw “had now made it clear that no such meeting took place.”

AGR strives for precise journalistic accuracy, utilizing a broad sample of widely trusted and typically reliable, international news resources for our coverage. We deeply and sincerely apologize for any confusion that our unwitting reproductions of these inaccuracies may have caused.

back to top

The claims that paved the path to the invasion of Iraq

Jan. 30, 2002, US President George Bush: “The Iraqi regime has plotted to develop anthrax and nerve gas and nuclear weapons for over a decade ... This is a regime that has something to hide from the civilized world. States like these, and their terrorist allies, constitute an Axis of Evil, arming to threaten the peace of the world.”

Aug. 26, 2002, US Vice President Dick Cheney: “Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction.”

Sept. 12, 2002, George Bush: “United Nations inspections also revealed that Iraq likely maintains stockpiles of VX, mustard and other chemical agents, and that the regime is rebuilding and expanding facilities capable of producing chemical weapons.”

Sept. 24, 2002, UK Prime Minister Tony Blair: “Despite his denials, Saddam Hussein is continuing to develop weapons of mass destruction.”

Feb. 5, 2003, US Secretary of State Colin Powell: “Our conservative estimate is that Iraq has a stockpile of between 100 and 500 tons of chemical weapons agent. That is enough to fill 16,000 battlefield rockets. Even the low end of 100 tons of agent would enable Saddam Hussein to cause mass casualties across more than 100 square miles of territory, an area nearly five times the size of Manhattan.”

Mar. 17, 2003, George Bush: “The danger is clear: using chemical, biological or, one day, nuclear weapons obtained with the help of Iraq, the terrorists could fulfill their stated ambitions and kill thousands or hundreds of thousands of innocent people in our country or any other.”

Mar. 18, 2003, Tony Blair: “ We are asked to accept Saddam decided to destroy those weapons. I say that such a claim is palpably absurd.”

Apr. 28, 2003, Tony Blair: “Before people crow about the absence of weapons of mass destruction, I suggest they wait a little bit.”

May 14, 2003, UK Foreign Secretary Jack Straw: “It [Iraq’s illegal arsenal] certainly did exist. There is no question about that ... It’s not crucially important.”

May 28, 2003, US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld: “It is also possible that they decided they would destroy them prior to a conflict.”

Sources: Guardian (UK), Independent (UK), Washington Post

back to top

Health problems hit children of Russia

By Mark MacKinnon

Moscow, Russia, May 29— Four-year-old Kristina Kharchenko breathes in deeply before exhaling into the spirometer, which is measuring her lung capacity. The tiny, blond girl has a child’s apprehension about medical devices, but has clearly done this before.

Her mother, Ekaterina, nervously watches the results pop up on the doctor’s computer screen from the corner of the room. She’s been trying for months now to figure out what’s wrong with her daughter’s lungs. Kristina could have asthma, her mother hypothesizes, or some form of bronchitis. She certainly coughs too much for an otherwise healthy girl her age. But few children in Russia these days are without illness.

“I don’t know a single child who’s completely healthy,” including all of those in Kristina’s kindergarten class, Kharchenko says. “Every one of them has either this or that problem. Even women who had normal pregnancies, there’s something wrong. Lungs, blood pressure ... it’s always something.”

It’s a problem that goes far beyond Kristina’s play group. A recent nationwide study, conducted by the federal health department, found that only 34 percent of Russian children could be considered “healthy.” That means two-thirds of the children living in what is nominally a G8 country either have or are in the process of developing a chronic illness or physical disability.

“More cases of tuberculosis, alcoholism, drug addiction, and substance abuse have been recorded among children,” deputy health minister Olga Sharapova said as she read out the report’s grim details at a recent press conference.

The picture she painted wasn’t one of a country firmly set in the developed world, and it’s a side of Russian life that won’t be advertised this week as Russian President Vladimir Putin plays host to more than 40 world leaders amidst the marble and gold of the restored city of St. Petersburg.

A decade ago, a methodologically similar study to the one Sharapova ordered found 46 percent of children fit the same definition of healthy — an uncomfortably low number, to be sure, but the downward spiral since is what most worries children’s health professionals in this country.

With average lifespans already falling in Russia — men can expect to live just 58 years here, women 15 years more — the number of sick children may point to an even bigger societal crisis down the road.

“Our task now is to save this generation,” said Irina Zvezdina, a top pediatrician at the Russian Academy of Sciences.

Dr. Zvezdina says there’s no single factor to blame for the current situation. The health-care system is not what it was in Soviet days, she says. And Russia is the site of some of the world’s worst environmental problems, something that has an untold effect on people’s health.

But to her, the sharp decline in children’s health here is more a sign of Russia’s widespread social decay than anything else. The average Russian family is poorer than it was a decade ago, and as a result children are eating less well. Over the same time, smoking and alcohol consumption has risen sharply, even among preteens. So has that Western demon, stress.

“It’s especially affecting this new generation,” Dr. Zvezdina said in an interview at her downtown Moscow office. “All these social and ecological factors did not emerge yesterday, but somehow more children are being affected now than ever before.”

There was a time when the state took care of Russians’ health-care needs, to the point that some say they were taught that it was egotistical to think at all about their own health. Children were given mandatory checkups and inoculations and were forced to spend much of their summer and winter holidays outside the cities, getting regular exercise at Communist youth camps.

Now that system is gone, for better or worse. In its absence, many young parents simply don’t know how to look after their children’s health.

The health system has also fallen off sharply.

Maya Ignatova, a doctor at the Moscow Research Institute for Pediatrics and Child Surgery — one of the top concentrations of child-medicine knowledge in the country — said she remembers a time a few decades ago when the Soviet medical system was among the best in the world.

Since then, she says, it has declined steadily, leaving top-notch doctors frustrated that they don’t have the funding or the technology to properly treat their patients.

Some, including some of Dr. Ignatova’s superiors at the pediatrics institute, believe the statistics overstate the problem.

The institute’s second-in-command, Alexei Krapivkin, said Russia seems to have a higher number of sick children because Russian doctors “hyper-diagnose” and are quicker to label a child ill than their counterparts would in Western Europe or North America.

Source: Toronto Globe and Mail

back to top

Congo military accused of supporting
village massacre

Compiled by Eamon Martin

June 2 (AGR)— As many as 253 people may have died over the weekend in a Congolese fishing village in the country’s troubled north-eastern region.

Eight hours after Ugandan troops pulled out of the Congolese town of Tchomia, Lendu militias, possibly backed by some elements of Congo’s Kinshasa government army, massacred a total of 253 Hema villagers on Sat., May 31.

The dead included 57 children under 10 years of age. Twenty-seven of the dead were patients in Tchomia Hospital who were slaughtered in their beds.

Hema chiefs said the killing and pillage took only three hours.

“We are not burying the dead until the United Nations observer team comes from Bunia to see what Kinshasa soldiers and Lendu militias have done to the Hema,” Kisembo Bitamara, the Hema paramount chief for South Bahema, said.

He said, “The Hema are dying because the Hema are stopping Congolese president Joseph Kabila and Mbusa Nyamwisi from accessing the oil deposits at Kasenyi and Tchomia.”

He said Heritage oil and gas company which signed the oil deal was itching to start drilling the oil which is in the area that is occupied by the Hema.

Brigadier Kale Kaihura, who commanded some 6,000 Ugandan troops in Congo until their withdrawal, put the death toll at about 100. He said that Lendu tribal fighters armed with machetes and rifles had attacked the village on Saturday.

Kisembo Bitamara — a spokesman for Pusic, a faction of the Hema fighters based in Tchomia — said that 352 Hema men, women and children had been killed by Lendu fighters backed by Congolese government troops.

Brig. Kaihura dismissed Pusic’s higher death toll as “exaggerations.”

The Congolese government also denied Pusic’s claim that government troops had backed the Lendu fighters. “Allegations that government troops are supporting the Lendu are totally false. We have no soldiers in the area except the ones that are safely cantoned in [the immediate] Bunia area,” Kikaya bin Karubi, Congo’s minister for information, said.

Bitamara said that the hundreds of Lendu attackers were armed with mortars and rocket-propelled grenades as well as the more traditional machetes and rifles. He said this indicated weapons had been supplied by the Congolese army, which has begun to send troops into the Ituri region that is nominally controlled by rebels backed by Uganda and Rwanda.

Speaking from the Ugandan border, Brig. Kaihura said many of the Hema living in the area had already fled to Uganda. The village of Tchomia is located 30 miles northeast of Bunia, the capital of the troubled Ituri province. More than 400 people have been killed in tribal clashes in the past month in Bunia, and aid workers estimate that about 50,000 people have died in Ituri since 1998.

Brig. Kaihura said: “These people had refused to leave. They were prominent, well-known Hema figures, and they thought they would not be killed.”

Rwanda and Uganda sent troops into Congo in August 1998 to back rebels seeking to oust the then-president, Laurent Kabila, whom they accused of undermining their security. Congo, Africa’s third-largest nation, was roughly divided in two by a 1999 cease-fire, with the rebels holding the north and the east.

Since then, most of the fighting has stopped, except in the resource-rich east where a confusing array of rebels and tribal militia — each with their own Congolese, Rwandan or Ugandan backers — fight for control of territory containing gold, coltan, and valuable tropical hardwood.

The United Nations sent a 3,500-member mission to Congo to monitor the cease-fire, but its mandate is only to protect unarmed military observers and UN installations. Two of its observers were captured, tortured and killed last month by unidentified tribal fighters.

Last week the UN Security Council authorized the deployment of an emergency French-led international force of 1,400 to Bunia under a so-called “chapter 7” mandate that allows them to shoot to kill.

Brig. Kaihura recalled that he had warned of a security vacuum after his troops withdrew from Ituri under international pressure and in accordance with a separate peace deal with Congo.

A national transitional government for Congo was to have been inaugurated last week under a power-sharing agreement among rebels and the Congolese president, Joseph Kabila. However, one of the rebel groups balked at the last minute over control of key army posts.

Sources: Guardian (UK), New Vision (Kampala)

back to to

Burmese military seize Suu Kyi after
rally turns into riot

By Jan McGirk

Bangkok, Thailand, June 2— Burma’s military junta has isolated Aung San Suu Kyi, the opposition leader, and closed the offices of her National League for Democracy (NLD), after four people died during rioting at a political rally.

Suu Kyi was expected to be brought to the capital, Rangoon, late last night, although the government denied she was under formal arrest.

The 1991 Nobel peace laureate, Burma’s most prominent political voice, was taken into what Rangoon authorities described as “protective custody” after a two-hour riot at a stop on her tour of northern Burma on Friday night. Whether Suu Kyi had agreed to be detained is unclear, as she is held incommunicado. Nineteen other NLD party leaders were also reported to be in custody.

Officials said that four people had been killed and 50 injured when members of the government-sponsored Union Solidarity Development Association clashed with more than 5,000 opposition supporters in Yaway Oo, about 400 miles north of the capital.

“They are local militias, equipped with slingshots and bamboo sticks, who come out and harass NLD supporters,” said Aung Zaw, the exiled editor of The Irrawaddy, published in Bangkok. Violence was triggered when Suu Kyi’s motorcade was cut off, witnesses said.

It is feared that the renewed crackdown will rule out any meaningful political discussions between Suu Kyi, who was elected president of Burma in 1990, and the military regime that has prevented her from taking office and held her prisoner on and off for nearly eight years.

In May last year, after Suu Kyi was freed from 19 months of house arrest, political suppression by the military appeared to be easing. But Suu Kyi’s popularity has not waned, as the junta had hoped, and her recent rallies were well attended. The authorities decided to act before Suu Kyi was due to address a huge gathering in Mandalay.

Diplomats fear the bloodshed may derail United Nations efforts to facilitate a democratic future for Burma, a country under military dictatorship for four decades and renamed Myanmar in 1989.

Kofi Annan, the UN secretary general, said on Saturday that the events “underline the urgent need for national reconciliation in Myanmar.”

Red Cross representatives in Rangoon are reported to be seeking access to Suu Kyi, whose “inflammatory speeches” have upset the generals.

On the 13th anniversary of her election last Tuesday, Suu Kyi called for the regime to recognize her victory and release its stranglehold on the Burmese people. For the past month, she has derided the military’s lack of progress on reform and its reluctance to negotiate with her.

Government forces were said to be surrounding the homes of her political allies in Rangoon after raiding party offices. Ten NLD party loyalists were arrested last month and more than 1,300 are held as political prisoners. Razali Ismail, a United Nations special envoy, is scheduled to arrive in Rangoon to attempt to restart talks on Friday.

Source: Independent (UK)

back to top