http://www.nationmultimedia.com/home/2010/05/31/opinion/ASEANS-NEW-DILEMMA-Burmas-nuclear-ambitions-30130505.html
By Kavi Chongkittavorn
The Nation
Published on May 31, 2010
THE US ACTION was swift following confirmation of a North Korean ship with suspicious arms cargoes docking in Burma last month in violation of the UN Security Council Resolution 1874. A few days later, in the third week of April, the US State Department dispatched an urgent message to the Asean capitals recommending the scheduled Asean-US Economic Ministers' roadshow in Seattle and Washington DC, from May 3-5, proceed without the Burmese representation at "all levels." The drastic move surprised the Asean leaders.
The American ultimatum was not a bluff but a genuine show of frustration. This time Washington wanted to send a strong signal to Burma and the rest of Asean that unless something was done about Burma's compliance with the relevant UN resolutions on North Korean sanctions, there would be dire consequences. Political issues aside, Burma's nuclear ambition can further dampen Asean-US relations in the future. Already, there was the first casualty when the US downgraded the high-powered economic roadshow which was meticulously planned months ahead between the Office of US Trade Representatives and Asean economic ministers through the US-Asean Business Council.
Since nearly all Asean countries, except Singapore, decided to dispatch their trade or industry ministers to join the campaign, they agreed the roadshow should continue without the Burmese delegation as requested by the US. After some bargaining, the US softened its position agreeing to accept a representation at the charge d'affaires level from the Burmese Embassy in Washington DC. But Rangoon chose to opt out as it wanted diplomats directly dispatched from Rangoon. Without a consensus in Asean, a new name - absurd as it seemed - was in place, as the Southeast Asia Economic Community Road Show. It would be a one-time only designation.
When Kurt Campbell, Assistant State Secretary for East Asian and Pacific Affairs returned to Burma for the second time recently, he was blunt telling the junta leaders to abide and fully comply with the UN Security Council Resolution 1874. That has been Washington's serious concern due to the growing link between North Korea and Burma and their existing transfer of nuclear-related technology. Last June, a North Korean ship, Kang Nam, was diverted from going to Burma after being trailed by the US navy.
Since 2000, Western intelligence sources have been gathering evidence of North Korea providing assistance to Burma to build a nuclear reactor that can produce graded plutonium used in assembling future weapons of mass destruction. Last year, reports were released using data collected from two defecting Burmese military officers, intercepted calls and messages as well as human intelligence along Thai-Burmese border, all finger-pointing to Burma's nuclear ambitions.
When they came out last fall, scepticism was high among military experts and strategists on the junta's nuclear intentions. Most said there was insufficient evidence. Some viewed them as attempts to further discredit the regime's international standing. As additional interviews were conducted, especially with a former major in the Burmese Army, Sai Thein Win, who was directly involved with the recent secret nuclear programme, it has become clearer that Burma is investigating nuclear technology. This week, a special report on a huge new body of information, with expert comment from a former official working for the International Atomic Energy Agency, will be released.
As such, it will have far-reaching implications on Asean and its members, who signed the 1995 Southeast Asian Nuclear Weapons Free Zone (SEANWFZ) and Non-proliferation Treaty. Asean is currently working hard to persuade all major nuclear powers to sign the protocol to the SEANWFZ. The grouping has even delayed China's eagerness to accede to the protocol.
Further complicating the issue, Asean has not reached a consensus on how its members would move forward with a common approach on nuclear energy and security. In general, Asean backs nuclear disarmament, which the Philippines has played a leading role as chair of the just concluded Review Conference of State Parties to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation on Nuclear Weapons. Asean also backs the ongoing efforts of US and Russia over non-proliferation.
One sticky problem is that Thailand, Brunei Darussalam, Burma, and Indonesia have yet to ratify the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. In the case of Indonesia, it is on the Annex 2 list of the treaty which, to enter into force, must be reatified by all 44 states on this list. At the upcoming Asean summit in Hanoi (October), Asean leaders will study a matrix of common positions that have been or could be taken up by Asean. It remains to be seen how Asean would approach some of the sensitive issues such as the South China Sea, climate change and issues related to nuclear technology.
At the recent Nuclear Summit in Washington DC, leaders from Vietnam, Indonesia, Malaysia and Thailand were invited by US President Barack Obama to share their views on non-proliferation and peaceful use of nuclear energy. They supported the summit's plan of action to prevent nuclear terrorism. All these Asean members have long-term plans to build nuclear power plants for peaceful use as energy sources. Vietnam has long decided on building two, while Thailand is planning one in the next ten years. Indonesia has serious parliamentary support to explore a nuclear option. Even the Singapore Economic Strategies Committee has recommended nuclear energy should be considered as a possible long-term solution to the island's energy security. Obama will certainly raise the issue again when he visits Indonesia in the second week of this month.
What is most intriguing has been the lack of serious attention from the Thai security apparatus regarding the nuclearisation of Burma. Apart from the two informal meetings convened by the Defence Council at the end of last year, the topic has been discussed only among a handful of military intelligence officials who have worked closely with their Australian counterparts. The National Security Council still does not believe Burma has that kind of ambition, not to mention the overall nuclear capacity to embark on the controversial programme. Concerned officials argued that domestic problems still have precedence.
ASEAN'S NEW DILEMMA: Burma's nuclear ambitions
ေမ(၃၀)ဒီပဲယင္း ႏိူင္ငံေတာ္ လုပ္ႀကံမႈႀကီး (၇)ႏွစ္ျပည့္ ၀မ္းနည္းျခင္း အထိမ္းအမွတ္ အခမ္းအနား(တိုက်ိဳ)။
၂၀၁၀ ခုႏွစ္ ေမလ(၃၀)ရက္။
ေမ(၃၀)ဒီပဲယင္း ႏိူင္ငံေတာ္ လုပ္ႀကံမႈႀကီး (၇)ႏွစ္ျပည့္ ၀မ္းနည္းျခင္း အထိမ္းအမွတ္ႏွင့္ ဘာသာေပါင္းစုံ ဆုေတာင္းပြဲ အခမ္းအနားကို တိုက်ိဳၿမိဳ ့ ရွီနာဂါ၀ါ အရပ္ရွိ ျမန္မာစစ္အခြန္ရုံး(သံရုံး)ေရွ ့တြင္ ေန ့လည္ ၃း၀၀ နာရီမွ ၄း၄၀ရီ အထိ ဂ်ပန္ႏိူင္ငံေရာက္ ျမန္မာ့ဒီမိုကေရစီ အင္အားစုမ်ားတို႕မွ ပူးေပါင္း က်င္းပျပဳလုပ္ခဲ့ပါသည္။
အခမ္းအနားမွဴးအျဖစ္ အမ်ိဳးသားဒီမိုကေရစီအဖြဲ႔ခ်ဳပ္(လြတ္ေျမာက္နယ္ေျမ) ဂ်ပန္႒ာနခြဲ႕ အေထြေထြ အတြင္းေရးမွဴး ဦးေဇာ္မင္းထြန္း မွ တာ၀န္ယူေဆာင္ရြက္ၿပီး ဒီပဲယင္းလုပ္ႀကံမႈႏွင့္ ပတ္သက္၍ ရွင္းလင္းေျပာၾကားရာမွာ လူထုေခါင္းေဆာင္ ေဒၚေအာင္ဆန္းစုၾကည္ႏွင့္ သူရဦးတင္ဦးတို႔၏ ျမန္မာျပည္ အထက္ပိုင္း စည္းရုံးေရးခရီးစဥ္တေလွ်ာက္တြင္ လူထုေထာက္ခံအားေပးမႈ အထူးရရွိခဲ့သည့္အတြက္ နအဖ စစ္အုပ္စုမွ အလြန္စိုးရိမ္လာသည္အတြက္ ဒီပဲယင္းၿမိဳ႕နယ္ က်ည္ရြာအနီးတြင္ စနစ္တက် ခ်ဳံခိုတိုက္ခိုက္သည့္ ႏိုင္ငံေတာ္ လုပ္ႀကံမႈႀကီးကို က်ဳးလြန္ခဲ့ၾကပါသည္။
လူထုေခါင္းေဆာင္ ေဒၚေအာင္ဆန္းစုၾကည္ႏွင့္ သူရဦးတင္ဦးတို႔၏ အသက္ကို ကာကြယ္ရင္း အသက္ေပး စြန္႔လႈခဲ့ၾကသည့္ သူမ်ားအတြက္ ၀မ္းနည္းျခင္းအထိမ္းအမွတ္အျဖစ္ ဘာသာေပါင္းစုံ ဆုေတာင္းပြဲ အစီအစဥ္ က်င္းပျပဳလုပ္ရျခင္းျဖစ္ေၾကာင္း ေျပာၾကားသြားပါသည္။ တက္ေရာက္လာၾကသည့္ အဖြဲ႔အစည္းအသီးသီးမွ တာ၀န္ရွိသူမ်ား ေျပာၾကားသြာရာမွာ ေမ(၃၀)ဒီပဲယင္း လုပ္ႀကံမႈတြင္ ပါ၀င္ခဲ့ၾကသည့္ သူမ်ားကိုလည္း ယေန႔အထိ တစုံတရာ အေရးယူ ေျဖရွင္းေျပးသည္ကိုလည္း မေတြ႔ရသည့္အတြက္ အေရးယူ ေျဖရွင္းေပးရန္တိုက္တြန္း ေတာင္းဆိုသြားခဲ့ၾကပါသည္။
ဆုေတာင္းပြဲ အစီအစဥ္မွာ ဗုဒၶဘာသာ ဆရာေတာ္ ဦးဓမၼေဇာတိ မွလည္ေကာင္း၊ ခရစ္ယာန္ဘာသာဆရာ ဆရာက်ဲဆန္းကုန္း ႏွင့္ အစၥလာမ္ဘာသာ၀င္ ဦးသက္လင္းတို႔မွ မိမိတို႔ ဘာသာအလိုက္ ဆုေတာင္း ေမတၱာပို႔သေပးခဲ့ၾကၿပီးသည္ေနာက္ လြတ္သူ ့ပန္းေခြခ်ျခင္း အစီအစဥ္ျပဳလုပ္ကာ အခမ္းအနားကို ၿပီးဆုံးခဲ့ပါသည္။
ယေန ့အခမ္းအနားတြင္ ဂ်ပန္ႏိူင္ငံေရာက္ ျမန္မာ့ဒီမိုကေရစီ တက္ၾကြစြာ လႈပ္ရွားခဲ့ၾကသည့္ ျမန္မာႏိူင္ငံသားမ်ား စုစုေပါင္း (၅၀၀) ခန္႔ တက္ေရာက္ပူးေပါင္း ပါ၀င္ခဲ့ၾကပါသည္။
သတင္းမွတ္တမ္း။ Mai Kyaw Oo
UN experts say NKorea is exporting nuke technology
By EDITH M. LEDERER, Associated Press Writer Edith M. Lederer, Associated Press Writer – Fri May 28, 2:38 am ET
UNITED NATIONS – North Korea is exporting nuclear and ballistic missile technology and using multiple intermediaries, shell companies and overseas criminal networks to circumvent U.N. sanctions, U.N. experts said in a report obtained by The Associated Press.
The seven-member panel monitoring the implementation of sanctions against North Korea said its research indicates that Pyongyang is involved in banned nuclear and ballistic activities in Iran, Syria and Myanmar. It called for further study of these suspected activities and urged all countries to try to prevent them.
The 47-page report, obtained late Thursday by AP, and a lengthy annex document sanctions violations reported by U.N. member states, including four cases involving arms exports and two seizures of luxury goods by Italy — two yachts and high-end recording and video equipment. The report also details the broad range of techniques that North Korea is using to try to evade sanctions imposed by the U.N. Security Council after its two nuclear tests in 2006 and 2009.
Council diplomats discussed the report by the experts from Britain, Japan, the United States, France, South Korea, Russia and China at a closed-door meeting on Thursday.
Its release happened to coincide with heightened tensions between North Korea and South Korea over the March sinking of a South Korean navy ship which killed 46 sailors. The council is waiting for South Korea to decide what action it wants the U.N.'s most powerful body to take in response to the sinking, which a multinational investigation determined was caused by a North Korean torpedo.
The panel of experts said there is general agreement that the U.N. embargoes on nuclear and ballistic missile related items and technology, on arms exports and imports except light weapons, and on luxury goods, are having an impact.
But it said the list of eight entities and five individuals currently subject to an asset freeze and travel ban seriously understates those known to be engaged in banned activities and called for additional names to be added. It noted that North Korea moved quickly to have other companies take over activities of the eight banned entities.
The experts said an analysis of the four North Korean attempts to illegally export arms revealed that Pyongyang used "a number of masking techniques" to avoid sanctions. They include providing false descriptions and mislabeling of the contents of shipping containers, falsifying the manifest and information about the origin and destination of the goods, "and use of multiple layers of intermediaries, shell companies, and financial institutions," the panel said.
It noted that a chartered jet intercepted in Thailand in December carrying 35 tons of conventional weapons including surface-to-air missiles from North Korea was owned by a company in the United Arab Emirates, registered in Georgia, leased to a shell company registered in New Zealand and then chartered to another shell company registered in Hong Kong — which may have been an attempt to mask its destination.
North Korea is also concealing arms exports by shipping components in kits for assembly overseas, the experts said.
As one example, the panel said it learned after North Korean military equipment was seized at Durban harbor in South Africa that scores of technicians from the North had gone to the Republic of Congo, where the equipment was to have been assembled.
The experts called for "extra vigilance" at the first overseas port handling North Korean cargo and close monitoring of airplanes flying from the North, saying Pyongyang is believed to use air cargo "to handle high valued and sensitive arms exports."
While North Korea maintains a wide network of trade offices which do legitimate business as well as most of the country's illicit trade and covert acquisitions, the panel said Pyongyang "has also established links with overseas criminal networks to carry out these activities, including the transportation and distribution of illicit and smuggled cargoes."
This may also include goods related to weapons of mass destruction and arms, it added.
Under council resolutions, all countries are required to submit reports on what they are doing to implement sanctions but as of April 30 the panel said it had still not heard from 112 of the 192 U.N. member states — including 51 in Africa, 28 in Asia, and 25 in Latin America and the Caribbean.
While no country reported on nuclear or ballistic missile-related imports or exports from North Korea since the second sanctions resolution was adopted last June, the panel said it reviewed several U.S. and French government assessments, reports from the International Atomic Energy Agency, research papers and media reports indicating Pyongyang's continuing involvement in such activities.
These reports indicate North Korea "has continued to provide missiles, components, and technology to certain countries including Iran and Syria ... (and) has provided assistance for a nuclear program in Syria, including the design and construction of a thermal reactor at Dair Alzour," the panel said.
Syria denied the allegations in a letter to the IAEA, but the U.N. nuclear agency is still trying to obtain reports on the site and its activities, the panel said.
The experts said they are also looking into "suspicious activity in Myanmar," including activities of Namchongang Trading, one of the companies subject to U.N. sanctions, and reports that Japan in June 2009 arrested three individuals for attempting to illegally export a magnetometer — which measures magnetic fields — to Myanmar via Malaysia allegedly under the direction of a company known to be associated with illicit procurement for North Korea's nuclear and military programs. The company was not identified.
ဂ်ပန္နိုင္ငံရိွ ျမန္မာ့ဒီမိုကေရစီေရး လႈပ္ရွားေသာအဖဲြ ့အစည္းမ်ားအၾကား ထိေရာက္စြာပူးေပါင္းဆာင္ရြက္ႏိူင္သြားရန္ ညိုႏိႈင္းစည္းေ၀း။
ယေန ့(၁၆-၀၅-၂၀၁၀)ေန ့တြင္ ဂ်ပန္နိုင္ငံတိုက်ိဳျမိဳ ့ရိွ ညီညြတ္ေသာ တိုင္းရင္းသားမ်ားအဖဲြ ့အစည္း(AUN-Japan)ရုံးခန္းတြင္ ဂ်ပန္နိုင္ငံရိွ ျမန္မာ့ဒီမိုကေရစီေရးကို ေဆာင္ရြက္ေနေသာအဖဲြ ့အစည္းမ်ားအႀကား ပူးေပါင္းေဆာင္ရြက္ရန္ အထူးအစည္းအေဝး တစ္ခုကို က်င္းပခဲ့ရာ ေအာက္ပါ အခမ္းအနား(၂)ခုကို အားလုံးလက္တဲြ က်င္းပသြားရန္ သေဘာတူ ဆုံးျဖတ္ခဲ့ပါသည္။
(၁) (၇)နွစ္ေျမာက္ ဒီပဲယင္းနွစ္ပတ္လည္အခမ္းအနား။
(၂)၂၀၁၀ ေရြးေကာက္ပဲြနွင့္ ပတ္သက္၍ ဂ်ပန္ေရာက္ျမန္မာနိုင္ငံသားမ်ား၏ ဆႏၵေဖာ္ထုတ္ပဲြ။
(၁) (၇)နွစ္ေျမာက္ ဒီပဲယင္းနွစ္ပတ္လည္ အခမ္းအနားကို လာမည့္(၃၀-၀၅-၂၀၁၀)ေန ့တြင္ ဂ်ပန္နိုင္ငံ တိုက်ိဳျမိဳ ့ရိွ နအဖ အခြန္ရုံးေရွ ့တြင္ ညေန(၃)နာရီမွ (၅)နာရီ အထိအဖဲြ ့အစည္းအားလုံးပူးေပါင္း ေဆာင္ရြက္က်င္းပသြားရန္ သေဘာတူညီခဲ့ျပီး အမ်ိဳးသားဒီမိုကေရစီအဖဲြ ့ခ်ဳပ္လြတ္ေျမာက္နယ္ေျမ(ဂ်ပန္ဌာနခဲြ) NLD-LA-JAPAN မွအခမ္းအနားမႉးတာဝန္ကို တာဝန္ယူရန္အမ်ား သေဘာတူ ဆုံးျဖတ္ခဲ့သည္။
(၂) ၂၀၁၀ ေရြးေကာက္ပဲြ နွင့္ ပတ္သက္၍ ဂ်ပန္ေရာက္ ျမန္မာနိုင္ငံသားမ်ား၏ ဆႏၵေဖာ္ထုတ္ပဲြ အဆိုပါ အခမ္းအနားကို BURMA PARTNERSHIP ၏ GLOBAL CAMPAIGN အေနျဖင့္ ဂ်ပန္နိုင္ငံရိွ ျမန္မာ့နိုင္ငံေရးအဖဲြ ့အစည္းအားလုံး ပူးေပါင္းေဆာင္ရြက္ျခင္း ျဖစ္ျပီး ၊ ယခင္ကတည္းက ဂ်ပန္နိုင္ငံတြင္ ျပဳလုပ္သြားရန္ ဂ်ပန္နိုင္ငံရိွ နိုင္ငံေရး အဖဲြ ့အစည္းမ်ားက စီစဥ္ေနခဲ့ေသာ အစီအစဥ္ျဖစ္သည္။ အခမ္းအနားကို
အိခဲဘုခုရို ု ရိွ ခင္းခိုးပလာဇာ(7-F)တြင္ လာမည့္(၁၃-၀၆-၂၀၁၀)ေန ့၌ မြန္းလဲြ (၁) နာရီမွ (၅)နာရီအထိ ျပဳလုပ္မည္ျဖစ္ျပီး အခမ္းအနားမႉးတာဝန္ကို ျမန္မာ့ဒီမိုကေရစီေရး ပူးေပါင္းေဆာင္ရြက္မႈေကာ္မတီ(JAC) မွတာဝန္ယူရန္ အမ်ားသေဘာတူ ဆုံးျဖတ္ခဲ့ႀကသည္။
သတင္းမွတ္တမ္း။ ကိုဘုန္းလိႈင္
မွတ္တမ္းဓါတ္ပုံ။ Lian Khan Sum(CNC-Japan)
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