By Kanbawza Win
Mizzima News (www.mizzima.com)

1 January 2004

As the New Year rings in and the world takes account of momentous event, Burma was by passed. To the Americans, it seems that only two News were noticed from this miserable country. One is the selling of short-range ballistic missiles (SRBMs) by North Korea (DPRK) to Burma and the other is the American action on the laundering of Narco-dollars. Burma and North Korea cut of relations on Oct 1983, when a bomb exploded in Martyr’s Mausoleum, instantly killing17 persons including four Korean cabinet ministers. Since then Rangoon and Pyongyang have no formal diplomatic relations until today. Now twenty years later both countries have become pariah nations and are surviving on the Narco-economy to keep them afloat. However, Burma faced the arms embargoes, need a wide range of new weapons and equipment for its greatly expanded armed forces which has now become the second largest in Asia having some half a million soldiers. Hence, it cannot be much choosy in purchasing arms.

Given the closed nature of both the Rangoon and Pyongyang governments, and
their shared obsession of getting the dollars by hook or by crook both countries began to involve in narcotic trade using proxies. In 1990 the Junta purchased 20 million rounds of 7.62mm AK47 rifle ammunition from North Korea, for the United Wa State Army (UWSA), a ceasefire ethnic nationalities group that is doing the dirty works of narcotics for the Burmese government. Rangoon soon bought sixteen 130mm M-46 field guns from North Korea, in 1999 arranged through Singaporean intermediaries (because of the lack of formal relations). Soon an unofficial visit to Pyongyang by the Army's Director of Procurement agreed on a barter trade changing Burma heroine No 4 for arms.

According to “Jane's Defense Weekly”, in 2002 the Junta opened discussions with North Korea on the purchase of one or two small submarines. One design
considered was the Yugo class midget submarine, a 23 meters long diesel electric boat and another was the Sang-O class mini submarine that could dive either attack or reconnaissance. Burma has already sent its Navy officers to undergo unspecified submarine training in Pakistan. Currently 20 North Korean technicians are at Monkey Point naval base in Rangoon, are helping the Burmese navy equipped with surface-to-surface missiles. Rangoon is getting a number of Hwasong (Scud-type) SRBMs from North Korea capable of 500 kilometers. On Nov. 21st, eighty military officers (36 from the Air force for air to air missiles training and 44 for surface to air missiles training) flew off secretly from Mandalay directly to Pyongyang.

On the Burmese side, it is assisting North Korea in its clandestine efforts to market drugs to the rest of the world. The 125 kg of heroin seized from a North Korean cargo vessel off the eastern coast of Australia in April 2003 was packaged in bags carrying the Double U O Globe brand, a trademark of the UWSA related group. Besides, the Junta has allowed his narco- technicians (chemist) to go to Pyongyang to advise the North Koreans on how to improve the quality of their own locally produced heroin.

It has already known that Burma is constructing a nuclear reactor at Myothit, near Natmauk town in Upper Burma with the help of Russia, which has agreed to provide assistance for construction and operation. Currently there are 328 commissioned officers training in Russia. But as of today it has been cut off because Burma could no longer afford to pay. Now this reactor was taken over by the North Korea as according to the clandestine arrangement of two Ns (Narco for Nuclear). It can be seen that Air Koryo, the North Korean airlines are landing at military airfields of Meiktila in central Burma carrying the needed equipment. In other words the Junta’s Burma has silently become a potential a major military power to talk back to the super power.

Thus the news of the two Burmese banks, the Myanmar Mayflower Bank and Asia Wealth Bank were designated, as “primary money laundering concern” by Secretary of the Treasury John W. Snow, does not come as a surprise. The Narco-dollars have been passing through several of the prominent Southeast Asian banks. Every body knows where these banks originated from and who are the owners.

But 2003, clearly, was the year of the United States war against Iraq. It was important because the greatest power in the world has mounted a deliberate challenge to the authority of the United Nations and the international rule of law for the first time in 60 years, In fact the US is challenging the whole system of rules that has governed relations between the great powers since the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648, for it is declaring a doctrine of 'limited sovereignty' far more sweeping than the one that Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev decreed for Soviet satellite regimes when he invaded Czechoslovakia in 1970.The Bush administration has made it clear that no nation which Washington suspects of backing terrorists or developing weapons of mass destruction (WMD) is safe from American military intervention. But paradoxically Burma has escaped from that list. The truth is that few governments are willing to admit it in public, is
that most people around the world would be willing to live under a global
American hegemony that guaranteed their security and prosperity, if the US takes the initiative and bears the cost. Even though the American behavior, epitomized by the unprovoked invasion of Iraq, has destroyed the international system of multilateral cooperation that has been the goal of most statesmen since the founding of the United Nations, yet the people reeling under their respective dictatorship are happy to be under the American colony and the Burmese are not the exception.

Now that Burma is acquiring mass weapons of mass destruction with the narcotic drugs spreading throughout the world especially in the streets of America it is high time that Burma should be put in the bull eye of American administration.

Vancouver, Canada