BURMA:THE IRISH Government should use its leverage with China to help improve conditions in Burma, a senior representative of the Burmese government-in-exile said in Dublin yesterday.
Dr Thaung Htun, who represents Burma's ousted government in the United Nations, is in Ireland to present a report on last year's protests and military crackdown to Minister for Foreign Affairs Micheál Martin.
He is also highlighting the humanitarian disaster that followed in the wake May's Cyclone Nargis. "International aid has only reached 1.3 million people," said Dr Htun. "That's just 50 per cent of the people affected, so 50 per cent have not received any form of international aid. They're surviving only from the donations of the community."
Ireland and the EU can put pressure on Burma to open up its borders to international aid workers, Dr Htun said. "Ireland should use its leverage with Burma's neighbours, including China," he told The Irish Times yesterday.
The Burmese military, which took power after Aung San Suu Kyi's political party won a landslide election in 1990, rules over a pariah state with few diplomatic relations other than with trading partners such as China.
The report of the government- in-exile on last year's protests, called Bullets in the Alms Bowl, is based on eyewitness accounts of the events of last September and October. Most of the interviews were conducted on the Burma-Thai border with refugees fleeing the state crackdown, said Dr Htun.
The document makes for grim reading: accounts of beatings, shootings and horrendous detention conditions are illustrated with photographs of dead and injured protesters.
"We never expected the security forces to act so harshly," the report quotes a 29-year-old man as saying. "The riot police beat up everyone, including the monks and women, before dragging them onto their trucks. The scene was chaotic. We were trapped . . . I got hit once on the back of my head when I was climbing the wall, but managed to escape."
Life became even worse for many Burmese after last year's repression was followed by May's Cyclone Nargis and the deaths of an estimated 133,000 people.
Dr Htun contrasted cyclone relief efforts in Burma with those in China after May's earthquake in Sichuan province, where troops quickly helped in affected areas.
"But rather than the welfare of the people, the Burmese regime is too concerned about losing power to allow foreigners and international aid," Dr Htun said. "It is an indication that they do not trust the people and they do not have the trust of the people."