YANGON — Myanmar's ruling junta said Friday it had no intention of building an atomic bomb, brushing aside Western concerns about possible nuclear cooperation with North Korea.
The denial came after the United States raised concerns about "growing military ties" following a report that Myanmar had begun a nuclear weapons programme with Pyongyang's help.
In a statement carried by state media, Myanmar's foreign ministry said: "These reports were baseless accusations that are politically motivated.
"Myanmar is a country that always respects UN declarations and decisions as it is a UN member country. Myanmar is not in a position to produce nuclear weapons. Myanmar has no intention to become a nuclear power."
The statement also said recent nuclear allegations were aimed at undermining renewed dialogue between the United States and Myanmar in the run-up to elections later this year.
The allegations aim "to undermine the political process as Myanmar is striving for democracy by holding general elections this year," the statement said.
The comments follow a recent documentary by the Norwegian-based news group Democratic Voice of Burma (DVB) that said Myanmar was trying to build an atomic bomb.
The documentary cited a senior army defector and years of "top secret material". It showed thousands of photos and testimony from defectors that it said revealed the junta's nuclear ambitions and a secret network of underground tunnels, allegedly built with North Korean help.
The years-long investigation included hundreds of files and other evidence from the defector, army major Sai Thein Win, who said he was deputy commander of a military factory that was part of Myanmar's nuclear battalion.
"They really want to build a bomb. That is their main objective," he was quoted as saying.
US Senator Jim Webb cancelled a planned trip to Myanmar last week in response to the allegations, saying it would be "unwise and potentially counter-productive".
The findings "contain new allegations regarding the possibility that the Burmese government has been working in conjunction with North Korea in order to develop a nuclear programme," Webb said.
Myanmar, which has been under military rule since 1962, has been accused of violating a UN Security Council ban on North Korean arms exports imposed last June.
Following a visit there in May, US Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs Kurt Campbell expressed concern about a suspected arms shipment from North Korea to Myanmar.
President Barack Obama's administration last year launched a dialogue with Myanmar's military rulers, after concluding that attempts to isolate the regime had met with little success.
But Washington has sharply criticised preparations for this year's elections -- the first in 20 years -- as well as raising the nuclear concerns.
Myanmar severed ties with Pyongyang in 1983 following a failed assassination attempt by North Korean agents on then-South Korean president Chun Doo-Hwan while he was visiting the Southeast Asian nation. The attempt left 21 people dead.
But with both countries branded "outposts of tyranny" by the United States they have tried rebuilding relations in recent years.
Myanmar is preparing for rare elections later this year that critics have dismissed as a sham due to laws that have effectively barred opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi from participating.
Copyright © 2010 AFP
Showing posts with label AFP News. Show all posts
Showing posts with label AFP News. Show all posts
Friday, 11 June 2010
Wednesday, 9 June 2010
ျမန္မာျပည္ေရႊးေကာက္ပြဲကို ေအာက္တိုဘာ ၁၀ရက္ (၁၀.၁၀.၁၀)မွာက်င္းပနိုင္ေၾကာင္း US Senator Jim Webb ေျပာၾကားလိုက္ျခင္း
WASHINGTON — US Senator Jim Webb said Wednesday he expected Myanmar to hold elections on October 10 and urged support for the vote despite the military regime's exclusion of the democratic opposition.
Webb is a leading US advocate for engagement with the junta, although he called off a trip to Myanmar this month due to allegations the country was developing nuclear weapons with support from North Korea.
Myanmar plans to hold its first elections in two decades later this year, although the regime has not set an exact date.
"What I'm hearing is that they will take place... on 10-10-10," Webb, a member of President Barack Obama's Democratic Party who represents Virginia, told the Asia Society.
The Obama administration last year initiated dialogue with North Korea but has voiced concern about the elections, ahead of which Nobel laureate Aung San Suu Kyi's National League for Democracy was forcibly dissolved.
Webb acknowledged that the election was designed to preserve the military regime, but said it was a step forward that the country would allow at least some opposition figures to stand for seats.
"In East Asia, in Southeast Asia, you have to build the future a step at a time," Webb said.
"When's the last time China had an election? When's the last time Vietnam had an election?" he said. "It doesn't mean we don't talk to them, and it doesn't mean we don't try to advance the notions of a fairer society."
Webb's position has upset many Myanmar democracy activists, who believe the election is a way to delegitimize Aung San Suu Kyi.
Her National League for Democracy won the last vote in 1990 but she was never allowed to take office and has spent most of the ensuing years under house arrest.
Webb is a leading US advocate for engagement with the junta, although he called off a trip to Myanmar this month due to allegations the country was developing nuclear weapons with support from North Korea.
Myanmar plans to hold its first elections in two decades later this year, although the regime has not set an exact date.
"What I'm hearing is that they will take place... on 10-10-10," Webb, a member of President Barack Obama's Democratic Party who represents Virginia, told the Asia Society.
The Obama administration last year initiated dialogue with North Korea but has voiced concern about the elections, ahead of which Nobel laureate Aung San Suu Kyi's National League for Democracy was forcibly dissolved.
Webb acknowledged that the election was designed to preserve the military regime, but said it was a step forward that the country would allow at least some opposition figures to stand for seats.
"In East Asia, in Southeast Asia, you have to build the future a step at a time," Webb said.
"When's the last time China had an election? When's the last time Vietnam had an election?" he said. "It doesn't mean we don't talk to them, and it doesn't mean we don't try to advance the notions of a fairer society."
Webb's position has upset many Myanmar democracy activists, who believe the election is a way to delegitimize Aung San Suu Kyi.
Her National League for Democracy won the last vote in 1990 but she was never allowed to take office and has spent most of the ensuing years under house arrest.
Monday, 31 May 2010
Strong quake hits Andaman Islands: seismologists
NEW DELHI, Monday 31 May 2010 (AFP) - A strong 6.4-magnitude earthquake hit off India's Andaman Islands early Tuesday, seismologists said, but no widespread tsunami was expected.
The quake struck at a depth of 127 kilometres (80 miles), said the US Geological Survey (USGS), with the epicentre 120 kilometres from Port Blair on the Andaman Islands, which are located in the Bay of Bengal.
The Hawaii-based Pacific Tsunami Warning Center said there was a very small possibility of a local tsunami near the centre but no threat of a destructive widespread tsunami.
Myanmar lies to the north of the Andaman Islands and Indonesia to the south
New Delhi is more than 2,500 kilometres away to the northwest.
The Andamans were badly hit by the 2004 Asian tsunami, which was triggered by an earthquake off the Indonesian island of Sumatra that sent giant waves crashing into countries around the Indian Ocean.
The Andaman Sea area witnesses frequent earthquakes caused by the meeting of the Indian plate with the Burmese microplate along an area known as the Andaman trench.
The quake struck at a depth of 127 kilometres (80 miles), said the US Geological Survey (USGS), with the epicentre 120 kilometres from Port Blair on the Andaman Islands, which are located in the Bay of Bengal.
The Hawaii-based Pacific Tsunami Warning Center said there was a very small possibility of a local tsunami near the centre but no threat of a destructive widespread tsunami.
Myanmar lies to the north of the Andaman Islands and Indonesia to the south
New Delhi is more than 2,500 kilometres away to the northwest.
The Andamans were badly hit by the 2004 Asian tsunami, which was triggered by an earthquake off the Indonesian island of Sumatra that sent giant waves crashing into countries around the Indian Ocean.
The Andaman Sea area witnesses frequent earthquakes caused by the meeting of the Indian plate with the Burmese microplate along an area known as the Andaman trench.
Sunday, 9 May 2010
US envoy to meet Myanmar opposition leader Suu Kyi
YANGON: A top US diplomat was due to meet Myanmar's detained opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi on Monday as the ruling junta faces criticism over preparations for its first elections in two decades.
Kurt Campbell, assistant secretary for East Asian and Pacific Affairs, is scheduled to meet Suu Kyi and members of political parties as part of his two-day trip to the military-ruled country, a government official there said.
Campbell arrived in Myanmar's capital Naypyidaw on Sunday and held discussions with officials including Information Minister Kyaw Hsan.
Suu Kyi's National League for Democracy (NLD) was forcibly dissolved last week under widely criticised laws governing elections that are scheduled for later this year.
The Nobel peace laureate, 64, has been in detention for 14 of the past 20 years. Campbell met her in Yangon last November when he became the highest-ranking US official to visit Myanmar in 14 years.
Before his trip, the US envoy said he was worried about election preparations in Myanmar, which has been ruled by the military since 1962.
"We're troubled by much of what we've seen and we have very real concerns about the elections laws and the environment that's been created," Campbell said at a Bangkok press conference Sunday.
The NLD refused to meet a May 6 deadline to re-register as a party -- a move that would have forced it to expel its own leader -- and boycotted the vote, which critics say is a sham designed to legitimize the junta's grip on power.
Under election legislation unveiled in March, anyone serving a prison term is banned from being a member of a political party and parties that fail to obey the rule will be abolished.
US President Barack Obama's administration last year launched a policy of engaging the junta in a bid to promote democracy and improve human rights, but has since sharply criticised the junta's approach to elections.
Washington faces a tricky task dealing with Myanmar, said Aung Naing Oo, an independent Myanmar analyst.
"They know they have to engage the military and the progress is probably going to be painfully slow," he told AFP.
Last week, top US Republican senator Mitch McConnell called for the renewal of tough sanctions targeting Myanmar junta leaders for their failure to make "real progress" on democratic reforms.
The NLD, which was founded in 1988 after a popular uprising against the junta that left thousands dead, won a landslide victory in 1990 elections but the junta never allowed it to take office.
A faction within the NLD said last week it would form a new political party but had not decided whether to run in the upcoming polls.
There have been a series of explosions in Myanmar in recent weeks as the country gears up for elections.
Grenade attacks on April 15 in Yangon left 10 people dead and about 170 wounded. Police said last week they had arrested a man in connection with those blasts, which they blamed on an exile group set on disrupting the polls. - AFP/fa
Kurt Campbell, assistant secretary for East Asian and Pacific Affairs, is scheduled to meet Suu Kyi and members of political parties as part of his two-day trip to the military-ruled country, a government official there said.
Campbell arrived in Myanmar's capital Naypyidaw on Sunday and held discussions with officials including Information Minister Kyaw Hsan.
Suu Kyi's National League for Democracy (NLD) was forcibly dissolved last week under widely criticised laws governing elections that are scheduled for later this year.
The Nobel peace laureate, 64, has been in detention for 14 of the past 20 years. Campbell met her in Yangon last November when he became the highest-ranking US official to visit Myanmar in 14 years.
Before his trip, the US envoy said he was worried about election preparations in Myanmar, which has been ruled by the military since 1962.
"We're troubled by much of what we've seen and we have very real concerns about the elections laws and the environment that's been created," Campbell said at a Bangkok press conference Sunday.
The NLD refused to meet a May 6 deadline to re-register as a party -- a move that would have forced it to expel its own leader -- and boycotted the vote, which critics say is a sham designed to legitimize the junta's grip on power.
Under election legislation unveiled in March, anyone serving a prison term is banned from being a member of a political party and parties that fail to obey the rule will be abolished.
US President Barack Obama's administration last year launched a policy of engaging the junta in a bid to promote democracy and improve human rights, but has since sharply criticised the junta's approach to elections.
Washington faces a tricky task dealing with Myanmar, said Aung Naing Oo, an independent Myanmar analyst.
"They know they have to engage the military and the progress is probably going to be painfully slow," he told AFP.
Last week, top US Republican senator Mitch McConnell called for the renewal of tough sanctions targeting Myanmar junta leaders for their failure to make "real progress" on democratic reforms.
The NLD, which was founded in 1988 after a popular uprising against the junta that left thousands dead, won a landslide victory in 1990 elections but the junta never allowed it to take office.
A faction within the NLD said last week it would form a new political party but had not decided whether to run in the upcoming polls.
There have been a series of explosions in Myanmar in recent weeks as the country gears up for elections.
Grenade attacks on April 15 in Yangon left 10 people dead and about 170 wounded. Police said last week they had arrested a man in connection with those blasts, which they blamed on an exile group set on disrupting the polls. - AFP/fa
Monday, 26 April 2010
နအဖ ၀န္ၾကီးခ်ုဳပ္ ဗိုလ္ခ်ဳပ္သိန္းစိန္ အပါအ၀င္ အနည္းဆံုး ၀န္ၾကီး ႏွစ္ဆယ္သံုးဦးခန္႔ႏွင့္ ၄င္းတို႔၏ လက္ေထာက္အရာရွိၾကီးမ်ား ယေန႔ တနလၤာေန႔ေႏွာင္းပိုင္းတြင္ ၄င္းတို႔၏လက္ရွိရာထူးမ်ားမွ အသီးသီးႏႈတ္ထြက္သြားၾကေၾကာင္း စစ္တပ္သတင္းရပ္ကြက္မ်ား၏အဆိုအရ သိရသည္။ အဆိုပါ ႏႈတ္ထြက္သြားၾကသူမ်ားထဲတြင္ နအဖစစ္ေခါင္းေဆာင္ ဗိုလ္သန္းေရႊႏွင့္ အနီးစပ္ဆံုးဟုလူသိမ်ားသည့္ ဗိုလ္ခ်ဳပ္ေဌးဦးအျပင္ ျပည္ထဲေရး၀န္ၾကီး တို႔လည္း ပါ၀င္ေၾကာင္းသိရသည္။ ေနာက္ေန႔မ်ားမွာလည္း ရာထူးမွ အနားေပးသည့္ကိစၥ ဆက္လက္ျဖစ္လာႏိုင္ဖြယ္ရွိျပီး ယေန႔အနားေပးလိုက္သည့္ အုပ္စုကေတာ့ ပထမဦးဆံုး အသုတ္ျဖစ္ေၾကာင္းသိရသည္။
၄င္းတို႔ ယခုလို ႏႈတ္ထြက္သြားၾကျခင္းမွာ လာမည့္ ေရြးေကာက္ပြဲအတြက္ ၀င္ေရာက္ယွဥ္ျပိဳင္ရန္ လုပ္ေဆာင္သည့္ ေျခလွမ္းမ်ားျဖစ္ႏိုင္သည္။ အဆိုပါသတင္းႏွင့္ပတ္သက္ျပီး စစ္အစိုးရခ်ဳပ္ကိုင္သည့္ သတင္းဌာနမွ အတိအက် သတင္းထုတ္ျပန္ ေၾကျငာခ်က္မရွိေသးဟုသိရသည္။ AFP
Saturday, 17 April 2010
Bomb blasts hit dam project in Myanmar
A series of bomb blasts at the site of a controversial dam project in a remote part of Myanmar destroyed cars and buildings and left one man injured on Saturday, an official said.
The explosions took place in the early hours of the morning at four locations where the Myitsone Dam is under construction in the country's northernmost Kachin state, the official said on condition of anonymity.
'One engineer was slightly injured. Some cars and buildings were destroyed because of the blasts,' he said.
The Myitsone Dam project has been under way since 2005 and is being built by Myanmar's ruling junta in partnership with the China Power Investment Corporation and China Southern Power Grid Corporation (CSG).
Environmental and rights activists have campaigned against the dam, which is being built a mile below the confluence of two rivers to create a giant reservoir.
AFP
Sunday, 28 February 2010
US lawmaker seeks to punish Myanmar on Suu Kyi
WASHINGTON — The United States on Friday criticized Myanmar's Supreme Court for not releasing Nobel laureate Aung San Suu Kyi, with one lawmaker saying the time had come to tighten sanctions.
The military-ruled nation's highest court rejected an appeal by the democracy champion to be freed from house arrest. The verdict comes ahead of elections which have raised deep suspicions among the opposition and overseas.
"We condemn the Supreme Court's decision," a State Department official said, saying that Aung San Suu Kyi was being held under house arrest "for purely political reasons."
The official, who by protocol could not be named, said that the United States "strongly" urged Myanmar to free other political prisoners and allow them to participate fully in the political process.
Representative Joe Crowley, a Democrat who has long championed Aung San Suu Kyi, said the time had come for the United States to implement tighter sanctions that target military leader Than Shwe's regime.
"Aung San Suu Kyi's 14-year imprisonment has been a sham from day one," Crowley said.
"The cruel military junta must face consequences for violating the human rights of the Burmese people," he said, using Myanmar's former name of Burma.
The United States last year opened dialogue with Myanmar as part of the Obama administration's policy of reaching out to adversarial regimes.
The Obama administration argued that the previous tactic of isolating Myanmar had failed, although it said it would only ease sanctions in return for progress on democracy.
Aung San Suu Kyi has been under house arrest for most of the past two decades since her National League for Democracy swept 1990 elections. The junta plans to hold fresh elections later this year.
The opposition leader had her incarceration lengthened by 18 months in August after being convicted over a bizarre incident in which a US man swam to her lakeside home.
The military-ruled nation's highest court rejected an appeal by the democracy champion to be freed from house arrest. The verdict comes ahead of elections which have raised deep suspicions among the opposition and overseas.
"We condemn the Supreme Court's decision," a State Department official said, saying that Aung San Suu Kyi was being held under house arrest "for purely political reasons."
The official, who by protocol could not be named, said that the United States "strongly" urged Myanmar to free other political prisoners and allow them to participate fully in the political process.
Representative Joe Crowley, a Democrat who has long championed Aung San Suu Kyi, said the time had come for the United States to implement tighter sanctions that target military leader Than Shwe's regime.
"Aung San Suu Kyi's 14-year imprisonment has been a sham from day one," Crowley said.
"The cruel military junta must face consequences for violating the human rights of the Burmese people," he said, using Myanmar's former name of Burma.
The United States last year opened dialogue with Myanmar as part of the Obama administration's policy of reaching out to adversarial regimes.
The Obama administration argued that the previous tactic of isolating Myanmar had failed, although it said it would only ease sanctions in return for progress on democracy.
Aung San Suu Kyi has been under house arrest for most of the past two decades since her National League for Democracy swept 1990 elections. The junta plans to hold fresh elections later this year.
The opposition leader had her incarceration lengthened by 18 months in August after being convicted over a bizarre incident in which a US man swam to her lakeside home.
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