Pressuring the Generals
Palash Biswas

Contact: Palash C Biswas, C/O Mrs Arati Roy, Gosto Kanan, Sodepur, Kolkata- 700110, India. Phone: 91-033-25659551
Email: palashbiswaskl@gmail.com

Pressuring the Generals
All the collective sanctions by U.N., United States, European Union may not put enough pressure on Burmese military junta who are still flexing their muscles and brandishing guns and bayonets on unarmed Burmese civilians and monks who have dared to protest against their autocrats. Without Chinese and Indian full hearted support behind the international communities' combined efforts, no diplomatic efforts have the possibility of success.

Both China and India are Burma's major trading partners, thus surely these both nations have enormous leverage on Burmese junta and elites.
Bush, UN chief discuss Myanmar

Washington (AP): President George W Bush has called UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, as both leaders prod for change in the repressive regime in Myanmar.

Bush and Ban agreed on the importance of serious conversations between the military regime and the democratic opposition, with the goal of a return to democratic government, White House spokesman Dan Perino said on Tuesday.

To that end, Ban told Bush that UN special envoy Ibrahim Gambari is expected back in Myanmar, also known as Burma, by as early as Thursday.

"The president emphasized the need to maintain a clear message to the military regime that real political change, aimed at a restoration of human rights and democracy,is required to end the crisis," Perino said.

Monks resume protest march in Myanmar
More than 100 Buddhist monks marched and chanted in northern Myanmar for nearly an hour on Wednesday. This was their first public demonstration since the government's deadly crackdown last month on pro-democracy protesters.The monks in Pakokku shouted no slogans, but one monk told the Democratic Voice of Burma, a Norway-based short-wave radio station and Web site.
Meanwhile,Myanmar's military government has freed seven members of Aung San Suu Kyi's pro-democracy party who were held for more than a month following the junta's deadly crackdown, the party said on Wednesday.

The releases on Tuesday night came ahead of a visit by UN special envoy Ibrahim Gambari to seek reconciliation between the junta and democratic forces since month's demonstrations led by Buddhist monks, the biggest protests in the Southeast Asian nation in nearly two decades.

The seven had been detained at the infamous Insein Prison in Yangon, said Nyan Win, spokesman for Suu Kyi's National League for Democracy party.

They included party spokesman Myint Thein and six others: Han Zaw, Lei Lei, Ko Bala, Cin Shin Htan, Htaung Ko Htan and Win Naing, the spokesman said.

''All these people had been arrested unnecessarily and we demand the immediate and unconditional release of all those detained arbitrarily,'' another NLD spokesman Han Tha said.

He added that at least 150 party members out of nearly 300 who had been arrested since September remain in detention.

Han Tha said many of them have been denied proper medical treatment and were living in harsh conditions.

The government had earlier said it detained about 3,000 people in connection with the protests but had released most of them. Many reports have emerged of brutal treatment in custody.

The league said many of the detainees were questioned about links between the party and the protests, which were led by Buddhist monks.

Demonstrations that began August 19 over high prices for fuel and consumer goods mushroomed over several weeks into a broad-based movement that attracted thousands of people in Yangon, the country's biggest city, and other areas.

Troops crushed the protests by shooting at demonstrations on September 26 to 27, arresting thousands including Buddhist monks.

The government said 10 people were killed, but dissident groups put the toll at up to 200 and thousands arrested including a number of Buddhist monks.

The junta accused the league the 88 Generation Students group, exiled dissidents and the United States of inciting the protests.

The station is run by dissident journalists, that it was a continuation of the protests last month.The march clearly was in defiance of the government.

''We walked around the town and chanted. ... We are continuing our protest from last month as we have not yet achieved any of the demands we asked for,'' the monk told the radio station.

''Our demands are for lower commodity prices, national reconciliation and immediate release of (pro-democracy leader) Aung San Suu Kyi and all the political prisoners,'' said the monk, who was not identified by name.

He said they had little time to organize the march so it was small, but ''there will be more organized and bigger protests soon.''

Up to 100,000 people took part in demonstrations in Yangon last month. The protests were crushed when troops fired on protesters on September 26-27.

The crackdown left at least 10 people dead by the government's count, drawing international condemnation. Opposition groups say as many as 200 people may have been killed.

Here is an excerpt from The Hindu's today's editorial:

"There can be little question that as a leading democracy India must join the international community in its efforts to pressure the Yangon regime to move urgently towards democracy and national reconciliation. While practising good neighbourliness, and taking care to ensure that its actions do not constitute an unwarranted interference in Myanmar’s internal affairs, India must not hesitate to use its growing leverage unambiguously on the side of democracy. In the larger global context, India must throw all its weight behind the U.N. good offices endeavour and consult closely with Asean, China, and the western powers to see how best to make it succeed against the odds."

Regards,
Mahbubul Karim (Sohel)
http://sohel. net
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Afraid of the Dalai Lama?
Why is China so afraid of Dalai Lama? This frail looking old man whose charming smile and humorous observations on nature, spirituality and peace have inspired millions many, still causes kind of a frenzied chaotic reaction from China whenever this old man comes to the forefront of world news. Dalai Lama's receiving of Congressional Medal of Honor from U.S. Government has sparked similar knee jerk comments filled with fumes from Chinese one party communist leaders. Why is China so afraid of Dalai Lama? Here are a few points that may enlighten this subject on Tibet, the repressed land that China had forcefully occupied many years ago:

"Why is the mighty People's Republic of China so petrified of this 72-year-old Buddhist monk? True, the Dalai Lama is no ordinary scholar and teacher; he is the living symbol of the Buddhist faith. It seems that Beijing's cadres fear his moral authority and do not want the international community to examine their record in Tibet, because they have a lot to hide.

It has been 48 years since the Dalai Lama eluded capture by the People's Liberation Army and escaped to India, whereupon Chairman Mao Zedong began to plunder Tibet's wealth and murdered more than 1 million of its people. In the mid-1990s, the Chinese politburo implemented the "Strike Hard Campaign" that declared Buddhism "a disease to be eradicated." News of major protests in Tibet has not been widely disseminated in recent years, and now the survival of Tibetan civilization has reached a tipping point. In 2000, China launched a vast infrastructure campaign called "Opening and Development of the Western Regions" and embarked on a new phase of subjugation and control. Construction of rail and road links to Tibet, such as the Qingzang railway that opened last year, has accelerated Beijing's surveillance of Tibetans and has advanced the Sinofication of the Himalayan and Turkic peoples who inhabit China's western territories.

Exploiting Tibet's resources for the mainland's industrial base is a strategic and economic priority for China's government, which suppresses manifestations of Tibetan identity or nationalism with blunt force."
There may be other reasons beside the seemingly "obvious" reason of suppression of Tibetan identity.

"China is accustomed to reacting with brutality when its supremacy is threatened, but now the state is imperiled by forces that neither Maoist thought nor martial law can control. Rapid growth has caused calamitous environmental damage that could lead to food shortages and unhygienic living and working conditions, which in turn could lead to epidemics and, eventually, chaos. China's 1.3 billion people need solutions, not ordinances dictated by the Communist Party's Central Committee. But Beijing, unwilling or unable to relinquish one-party rule, clings to an obsolete worldview that demonizes the Dalai Lama instead of engaging the statesman in a meaningful dialogue on Tibet and China's future."
Like its oligarch dominated "democracy" in other parts of our world, Chinese communist dictators exploit Dalai Lama controversy so that their increasingly restless populace can be galvanized for a neatly crafted nationalistic cause. Sometimes, "God" and "God's man" can prove to be handy tool for even the atheistic creed.

Link:
Afraid of the Dalai Lama?

Regards,
Mahbubul Karim (Sohel)
http://sohel. net

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Turkey, the Kurds and the US: fire in the mountains
www.aworldtowin. org

29 October 2007. A World to Win News Service. Officially Turkey's
threatened massive invasion of Iraqi Kurdistan has been put on hold
pending Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan's scheduled
talks with George Bush 5 November. The apparent delay, however,
doesn't mean that such an invasion couldn't happen anyway, before or
after the Washington meeting. Even if it doesn't happen now, before
snow blocks the roads for the winter, the threat is real and
lasting. This reveals the region's extreme volatility.

Peace hasn't broken out, and it's not likely to, because that's not
what Turkey wants. Ankara sent 8,000 troops and attack helicopters
into battle 28 October in the Turkish eastern province of Tunceli,
hundreds of kilometres from the Iraqi border, where 100,000 more
Turkish troops with tanks and other heavy armour are waiting. Turkey
also staged artillery barrages and probably hit and run incursions
into Iraqi Kurdistan over the last week, as it's done dozens of
times recently.

The reason for the word "probably" is that the American authorities
who control the airspace and watch the whole area from the sky have
steadfastly and pointedly refused to say whether the Turkish army
crossed the border or not, although they certainly know the answer
to that question. According to news reports, they have long chosen
to ignore the presence of a Turkish brigade permanently stationed on
the Iraqi side of the border.

At the same time, the US also rejected Turkey's requests to take
action against PKK camps in northern Iraq, claiming that they don't
know where the camps are located, although PKK headquarters is
marked by a giant portrait in painted stones of its leader Adbullah
Ocalan, visible even from outer space. The top US commander in
northern Iraq, Major General Benjamin Mixon, said he planned to
do "absolutely nothing" against PKK forces in Iraq. (Associated
Press, 27 October)

The US's refusal to take action against either side so far speaks
for itself: they support both sides, to varying degrees and at
various times, although far from equally – they certainly don't give
PKK's few thousand roaming guerrillas the same importance as the
Turkish state and its million-man army. The New York Times' Sabrina
Tavernise, who interviewed many Iraqi Kurdish officials and current
and former American officials as well, wrote 27 October, "The
situation poses a puzzle to the United States…[which] finds itself
forced to choose between two trusted allies – Turkey, a Nato member
whose territory is the transit area for most of the air cargo to
Iraq, and the Kurds, their closest partners in Iraq." To support
this conclusion, she quotes an unidentified man in Sulaimaniya: the
US "is like a man with two wives. They quarrel, but he doesn't want
to lose either of them." This metaphor is OK as far as it goes, but
it leaves out a basic point: that man is determined to keep both of
his wives under his thumb and turn the situation, as far as
possible, to his own advantage.

The Turkish ruling class seized on the deaths of the conscript
soldiers it sent into battle to whip up a hurricane of Turkish
jingoism and anti-Kurdish racism. The media have featured emotional
interviews with the relatives of the dead soldiers. Newspaper
headlines bay for blood. Turkish flags are passed out at football
games, and it is now virtually mandatory for the players at every
game to respect a minute of silence for the dead soldiers. The
soldiers' funerals have been turned into political rallies for
hardcore right wing nationalists, who have been given major media
time to encourage mass lynch mobs that have ransacked the offices of
Kurdish political parties and other Kurdish symbols and beaten any
who resist. Groups of young women are shown on TV massing in front
of army bases to volunteer to go fight the "terrorists" . The few
lone voices who have dared to puncture this reactionary hysteria in
public are branded "traitors".

Turkey's generals met the two decades of armed struggle led by the
PKK with a vicious "dirty war" that literally wiped more than 2,000
Kurdish villages off the map. Tens of thousands of Kurds were
imprisoned. That armed conflict subsided for a time with the capture
of PKK chairman Ocalan in 1999, when the U.S. arranged to have him
handed over to Turkey. At that time, he publicly grovelled before
the Turkish military and called for a peaceful solution to the
Kurdish question within the framework of the present Turkish state
and regime. He also said that Kurdish aspirations could and should
fit in with US interests, including its project for a reformatted
Greater Middle East. This led to disappointment and demoralization
among the ranks of the party and more broadly. Since then and
especially since the US invasion of Iraq, PKK has sought to fulfil
these objectives by finding ways to cooperate with the US and the
Turkish regime, all the while complaining that its efforts have gone
insufficiently rewarded. They ran candidates in local elections in
Turkish Kurdistan, becoming so entangled with mainstream politics
that even while PKK guerrillas were under attack from the Turkish
army the legal political party supported by PKK used the words "our
martyrs" to refer to Turkish army casualties. But this does not mean
that they have given up on using guns to achieve their ends.

Kurdish nationalism does pose an existential problem to the Turkish
regime. The domination of the Kurds is built into the very
foundations of the modern Turkish state. Kemal Ataturk's success in
forging the modern Turkish state out of the ashes of the Ottoman
empire in 1923 was built on beating back the efforts of the European
imperialists to hive off parts of Armenia and Kurdistan so as to
weaken their age-old enemy. For decades after that, the very
existence of the Kurdish people was denied, as the country's 12-13
million Kurds were contemptuously derided as "backward mountain
Turks". Their culture was so suppressed that up to 1991 it was even
illegal to use the Kurdish language in public speech. Its teaching
and use on television is still severely restricted, and Kurds face
social, economic and political national oppression and
discrimination, both in Kurdistan and elsewhere. The Kurdish
population is no longer confined to small villages and towns far
from Turkey's population centres – millions of Kurds now swell the
shantytowns around Istanbul, with hundreds of thousands more in
towns and cities throughout the country.

The Turkish ruling classes are particularly concerned by the threat
of major gains for Kurdish nationalism right on their borders. For
the Turkish ruling classes, the Kurdish question is a festering boil
that just keeps erupting. When the US invaded Iraq, they were given
reassurances by the US that it would not permit the establishment of
a permanent Kurdish state in the region. But as Iraq spiralled out
of control, the Kurdish Regional Government in northern Iraq has
turned out to be the most reliable pro-US ally, giving it a much
greater role in post-Saddam Iraq than US strategists had perhaps
expected. The region has taken on many of the trappings of exactly
the kind of permanent Kurdish presence that the Turkish ruling class
had feared and that the US had promised them wouldn't happen. The
passports of travellers crossing from Turkey into Iraq in this
region are even stamped "Kurdish Region of Iraq". The Kurdish Region
has access to rich oil resources and already fields an army of
60,000 – far larger than PKK's. Ankara fears that it could
potentially act like a magnet to attract the sympathies of Turkey's
own Kurds.

The Turkish military, out of a realistic sense of caution, including
a fear of domestic upheaval, did not take part in the US invasion of
Iraq, although subsequently they have provided the US occupation
with its major air and land lifelines. The recent elections,
ironically, have enabled the ruling classes to unite their own ranks
and hoodwink broad enough sections of the masses so that, if Turkey
were to invade Iraq now, this time it could do so in the name of
democracy and with the blessings of parliament and much of civil
society. The self-style reformers of Erdogan's AK party, which
invited Kurdish support for its candidates, has been involved in the
mob assaults on Kurdish targets, exposing the content of
the "synthesis of Turkey and Islam" they proclaim. Turkey's rulers
feel that now they can make up for that lost opportunity to throw
their weight around and bring Turkey's power to bear, not only over
the Kurds of both countries, but well beyond.

There is thus good reason to suspect that while the Turkish
government does want to cross the border into Iraq to deal real
blows to the PKK guerrillas, they are also eyeing the possibility of
taking the Kurdish Regional Government down a notch or two, and
creating a situation where they have a major say over future
developments in the area. This takes on even greater importance in
light of growing US threats against Iran. Establishing a major on-
going armed presence in northern Iraq would put Turkish troops along
an even larger stretch of the Iranian border, putting them in a
position of potential importance in the event that the US unleashes
a major attack on Iran.

This is likely to be the content of the Bush-Erdogan talks next
week – in fact, it's hard to imagine that it hasn't already been
thoroughly discussed and agreements made. This could be another
major factor in why a spirit of harmony has suddenly and
unexpectedly cast its spell over Turkey's contentious official
political life.

All these contradictions have a life of their own, but they are also
situated within and conditioned by broader contradictions, on the
regional and world level, especially the looming possibility of a US
attack on Iran. Throughout the Middle East – in Lebanon, Iraq, Iran,
Pakistan and Afghanistan just to name a few places – rivets are
popping in the iron structures that once seemed so solid. Alliances,
regimes, and borders that have stood for decades are tottering under
the strains of the headlong drive by the world's only superpower's
to establish a sustainable world empire by what can only be
unleashing chaos on a grand scale and then hoping to pick up the
pieces. The Turkish ruling classes must act decisively, and soon, or
they, too, might see their set-up start to unravel.

One way the US might try to balance its own contradictory interests
in this situation might be to let Turkey strike serious blows at PKK
in Iraq, without eliminating it, which might not be militarily
possible anyway.

However it happens, in a dramatic tank-led all-out offensive or
through other means, and certainly involving a combination of
economic and political carrots for various Kurdish forces as well as
real sticks, an increased Turkish presence in Iraq could be very
helpful to American efforts to both keep that country under its
exclusive control and move its troops on to the next war. And it
would bring Turkish interests and perhaps Turkish troops more
squarely up against the Islamic Republic of Iran, which until now
has been able to use economic and other relations with Turkey as a
valve to release some of the pressure of the US-led blockade.

If the US is convinced that Turkey's intervention will serve its
purposes, then for all the support it has received from the two
governing Iraqi Kurdish parties, it could turn a benign eye on a
Turkish move to assert itself in northern Iraq. Given the historical
evidence, there is no reason to believe that the US won't betray all
the Kurds – as it has before, or that the two Kurdish parties who
are the US's closest allies in Iraq won't betray other Kurds (and
each other), as they have done before as well. US strategists may
believe that they can stab the Kurds in the back and still keep them
on their string, since that's worked before. In this regard, it
should be noted that while the US has declared PKK a "terrorist"
organization, it actually supports the PKK's Iranian Kurdistan
branch, the PJACK (Party of Free Life in Kurdistan), whose leader,
Rahman Haj-Ahmad, visited Washington last summer. Trying to use the
Kurds against the Iranian regime is part of the US plan.

The interests of the US and Turkish ruling classes are not
identical – which is part of what makes this situation so
unpredictable. But they definitely overlap. Each side is urging the
other to take on unprecedented and towering risks in the face of
what is do-or-die time for them both. Bloodshed, and the more of the
people's blood the better, is just the stimulant they both need to
get ready for much more bloodshed soon.
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