BurmaPolitics: Parliament: Aung San Suu Kyi, Pro-democracy leader will run for Myanmar Parliament

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Huffington Post (November 20,2k11)
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YANGON, Myanmar -- Pro-democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi intends to run for parliament in upcoming by-elections, a decision that was expected after her party decided last week to rejoin mainstream politics in long-isolated Myanmar.

Nyan Win, the spokesman of Suu Kyi's National League for Democracy, said Monday she has not yet decided which district she will seek to represent. But she "has the intention to stand for the elections," he told The Associated Press.

In a landmark development, the NLD decided on Friday to rejoin politics and register for future elections, signaling its confidence in recent reforms by the nominally civilian government that took power earlier this year.

The military-aligned ruling party won the November 2010 parliamentary elections held by the junta as part of its promise to introduce democracy and relinquish power after nearly five decades of military rule.

The NLD boycotted the elections because of a law that had prevented Nobel peace laureate Suu Kyi from running. The new government, however, later scrapped the law, allowing the NLD to take part in the political reforms now under way.

According to the new election law, a registered party is required to run for at least three seats in the legislature, made up of 224 members in the upper house and 440 members in the lower house. Of these, 48 seats are vacant for which special elections will be held, although no date has been set.

Suu Kyi had hinted on Friday that she would run for a parliamentary seat in the special elections, saying: "If one is engaged in politics, one has to do what is necessary. If I feel that I should take part in elections, I will participate."

She, however, cautioned that "the road ahead is full of difficulties and the road to democracy is endless."

Bringing Suu Kyi's party back into the fold would give the government greater legitimacy at home and abroad. It has already won cautious praise from international observers and critics, including the United States, for introducing reforms.

President Thein Sein, a former army officer, has shown a willingness to talk to Suu Kyi, lifted some restrictions on the media and the Internet, legalized unions and scrapped an unpopular dam project. Still, hundreds of political prisoners remain in jails.

Thein Sein has welcomed the NLD's decision to rejoin politics, saying it was "a positive signal."

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China: Neibors south: People's Republic neo-imperialism astr+d the region

China gains influence 

with development push 

into Cambodia

by John Pomfret (Dec5,2k10) 

Chinh's news:  all the news from China that's fit to print.

KOH KONG, Cambodia — Down a blood-red dirt track deep in the jungles of southwestern Cambodia, the roar begins.

Turn a corner and there is the source — scores of dump trucks, bulldozers, and backhoes hacking away at the earth.

Above a massive hole, a flag flaps in the hot, dusty breeze. It is the flag of the People’s Republic of China.

Here in the depths of the Cardamom Mountains, where the Chinese-backed Khmer Rouge communists made their last stand in the late 1970s, China is asserting its rights as a resurgent imperial power in Asia.

Instead of exporting revolution and bloodshed to its neighbors, China is now sending its cash and its people.

At this clangorous hydropower dam site hard along Cambodia’s border with Thailand, and in Myanmar, Laos, and even Vietnam, China is engaged in a massive push to extend its economic and political influence into Southeast Asia.

Spreading investment and aid along with political pressure, China is transforming a huge swath of territory along its southern border.
Call it the Monroe Doctrine, Chinese-style.

Ignored by successive US administrations, China’s rise in this region is now causing alarm in Washington, which is aggressively courting the countries of Southeast Asia.

The Obama administration has cultivated closer ties with its old foe Vietnam.
It has tried to open doors to Myanmar, which US officials believe is in danger of becoming a Chinese vassal state.

Relations have been renewed with Laos, whose northern half is dominated by Chinese businesses.

In an Oct. 28 speech about US policy in Asia, before embarking on her sixth trip to the continent in two years, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton used military terminology to refer to US efforts: “forward-deployed diplomacy.’’

During a recent trip to Phnom Penh — the first by a US secretary of state since 2002 — Clinton, while speaking to Cambodian students, was asked about Cambodia’s ties to Beijing.

“You don’t want to get too dependent on any one country,’’ she told them.
Still, China powers ahead.

China has concluded a free-trade deal with all 10 countries of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, while a similar US pact is only in its infancy.
It is cementing ties with Thailand, a US ally, despite recent political unrest there.

In Cambodia, Chinese firms have turned mining and agricultural concessions in the eastern part of the country into no-go zones for Cambodian police. 

Guards at the gates to two of them, a gold mine and a hemp plantation, shoo travelers away unless they are able to pay a toll.

“It’s like a country within a country,’’ Cambodia’s minister of the interior, Sar Kheng, quipped at a conference this year.

China’s real estate development firms have barged into Cambodia with all the ambition, obtrusiveness, and verve that American fruit and tire firms employed in Latin America or Africa in decades past.

One company, Union Development Group of Tianjin, in northern China, won a 99-year concession for 120 square miles of beachfront on the Gulf of Thailand.

There, Chinese work teams are cutting a road and mapping hotels, villas, and golf courses.

The estimated investment? $3.8 billion.

The target market? The nouveau riche from Beijing, Shanghai, and Guangzhou.

In October, China pledged to support the construction of a $600 million railway between Phnom Penh and Vietnam that will bring China a major step closer to incorporating all of Southeast Asia, as far south as Singapore, into its rail network.

Across Cambodia, dozens of state-run Chinese companies are building eight hydropower dams.

The total price tag for those dams will exceed $1 billion.

Altogether, Cambodia owes China $4 billion, said Cheam Yeap, a member of the central committee of the ruling Cambodian People’s Party.

“This takeover is inevitable,’’ said Lak Chee Meng, a reporter on the Cambodia Sin Chew Daily, one of the country’s four Chinese-language dailies, serving 300,000 Khmer-Chinese and an additional quarter-million immigrants and businessmen from mainland China.

“Cambodia is approaching China with open arms. It’s how the United States took over its neighborhood.’’

The perennial question about China’s rise is when will Beijing be able to translate its cash into power.   In Cambodia, it already has.

Cambodia has avoided criticizing the dams under construction along China’s stretch of the Mekong River, structures that specialists predict will upend the lives of millions of Cambodians who live off the fishing economy around the great inland waterway, Tonle Sap.

Cambodia so strictly follows Beijing’s “one China’’ policy that it has refused Taiwan’s request to open up an economic office here despite the many millions of dollars’ worth of Taiwanese investment in Cambodia.

Myanmar: Release of Daw Aung San: Investors prepare to move into Burma

Investors prepare to move into Burma

Albuquerque News.Net
Monday 15th November, 2010

The release of Burmese opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi has caused a flurry of interest in the country from world businesses. 


["Daw" is her Burmese title as an elderly honoured woman.]


Investors have been speculating that her release might lead to the lifting of the sanctions affecting this resource-rich state. 

Ms Aung San has already spoken to her lawyers about getting her party, the National League for Democracy, declared legal again. 

She has also met officials of her National League for Democracy party who have been keeping her political network alive during her years of incarceration. 

Western multinationals [corporations] have up to now been unable to break sanctions put in place by the United States, Australia and the European Union. 

Investors are sizing up the vast potential of the country of 50 million people in need of mining, gas, agribusiness, tourism, financial services and telecommunications expertise.

The foregoing report was picked up and reported by the webs+t  Business and Human R+ts Resource Centre (BHRR) which is devoted to "tracking the positive and negative impacts of over 5100 companies worldw+d.  It's a large and well-organized s+t (English, Spanish, French).  But f+nding up-to-date material can be daunting.  


-- EconoMix

Myanmar: Election results: Losers win, junta govt served, people stayed away from voting polls

I guess in the several nooz reports I read regarding the election results from Myanmar (former Burma) was the headline that the world's parliamentarians, governments, and pundits "dismiss" the elections and their results.  A refugee Burmese noozpaper published in English provides the following report by Ko Htwe in The Irrawaddy (Nov8,2k10).

refWrite refBloggers Insert -- devoted to the freedom to use the Internet, to the freedom to blog, and to freedom of the press / media -- more generally carried an article with a marvellous pix, from Agence Press France, "Burma's Internet Slows to a Stop" in the original and "Burma: Internet: Net winds down to a halt" in rWrBI's coverage.  The article is written by Wai Moe and Min Lwin (Feb2,2k10).

-- Owlb