Myanmar and North Korea share a
tunnel vision By Bertil Lintner
BANGKOK - Under perceived threats from the
US, Myanmar and North Korea are strengthening
their strategic ties in a military-to-military
exchange that includes weapons sales, technology
transfer and underground tunneling expertise.
Myanmar's ruling State Peace and
Development Council last year abruptly moved the
country's capital to a secluded location near the
mountainous town of Pyinmana, 400 kilometers north
of Yangon, where the SPDC has built an entirely
new city in the jungle.
Ordinary citizens
do not have the right to enter the new capital,
Nay Pyi Daw, which is populated entirely by
soldiers and government officials. During the
March 27 Armed Forces Day
celebrations held there,
civilian diplomats were barred from attending and
only foreign defense attaches were invited.
North Koreans, however, are allowed
unfettered access to the secluded new capital.
Last month, Asian intelligence agencies
intercepted a message from Nay Pyi Daw confirming
the arrival of a group of North Korean tunneling
experts at the site. Nay Pyi Daw is in the
foothills of Myanmar's eastern mountains, and it
has long been suspected by Yangon-based diplomats
that the most sensitive military installations in
the new capital would be relocated underground.
The SPDC's apparent fear of a preemptive
US invasion or being the target of US air strikes
was seen as a major motivation behind the junta's
decision to move the capital to what they perceive
to be a safer mountainous location. The
administration of US President George W Bush has
publicly lumped Myanmar with what it considers
rogue regimes, and US officials have recently
referred to Myanmar as an "outpost of tyranny".
That perceived threat has drawn Myanmar
and North Korea closer together in recent months.
One key component of those growing strategic ties
is North Korea's expertise in tunneling. Pyongyang
is known to have dug extensive tunnels under the
demarcation line with South Korea as part of
contingency invasion plans.
Most of
Pyongyang's own defense industries, including its
chemical- and biological-weapons programs, and
many other military installations are underground.
This includes known factories at Ganggye and
Sakchu, where thousands of technicians and workers
labor in a maze of tunnels dug into and under
mountains. The United States suspects there could
be hundreds of underground military-oriented sites
scattered across North Korea.
Curious
connection Myanmar's curious North Korean
connection has been the subject of much strategic
speculation ever since it was first disclosed in
the Far Eastern Economic Review in 2003.
Preliminary reports were met with skepticism
because Myanmar (then known as Burma) had severed
diplomatic relations with North Korea in 1983
after three secret agents planted a bomb at
Yangon's Martyrs' Mausoleum and killed 18 visiting
South Korean officials, including then-deputy
prime minister So Suk-chun and three other
government ministers.
One of the North
Korean agents, Kim Chi-o, was killed by Burmese
security forces in the ensuing gun battle, while
the others, Zin Mo and Kang Min-chul, were
captured. Two years later, Zin, a North Korean
army major, was hanged at Insein jail on the
outskirts of the then-capital Rangoon (Yangon),
while Kang was spared because he cooperated with
the prosecution. Kang still languishes in Insein,
but is reported to be staying in the so-called
"Villa Wing" - a small private house with a tiny
garden surrounded by high barbed-wire fences.
Reports about renewed ties between the two
pariah nations gradually began to emerge - and it
seems that Kang, unwittingly, was the reason the
relationship was restored. In the early 1990s,
secret meetings were held in Bangkok between North
Korea's and Myanmar's ambassadors to Thailand.
Pyongyang negotiated for Myanmar to extradite
Kang, presumably because it wanted to punish him
for betraying the "fatherland".
But the
two sides soon discovered that they actually had
much more in common than their unfortunate
history. Both authoritarian countries were coming
under unprecedented international condemnation,
especially by the US. Moreover, Myanmar needed
more military hardware to battle ethnic insurgent
groups and North Korea was willing to accept
barter deals for the armaments, an arrangement
that suited the cash-strapped generals in Yangon.
The bilateral relationship has reportedly
intensified in recent years as both countries come
under heavy US pressure.
"They have both
drawn their wagons into a circle ready to defend
themselves," a Bangkok-based Western diplomat said
in reference to Myanmar-North Korean ties, adding
that Myanmar's generals "admire the North Koreans
for standing up to the United States and wish they
could do the same. But they haven't got the same
bargaining power as the North Koreans."
Recent regional media reports about North
Korea possibly providing nuclear know-how to
Myanmar's generals are probably off the mark - at
least for now. That said, North Korea has
definitely been an important source of military
hardware for Myanmar. According to Myanmar expert
Andrew Selth, of Australia, the state in late 1998
purchased between 12 and 16 130-millimeter M-46
field guns from North Korea.
"While based
on a 1950s Russian design, these weapons were
battle-tested and reliable," Selth stated in
"Myanmar's North Korean Gambit: A Challenge to
Regional Security?" - a working paper he published
with the Australian National University in 2004.
"They significantly increased Myanmar's long-range
artillery capabilities, which were then very
weak."
Secret visits According
to South Korean intelligence sources, a delegation
from Myanmar made a secret visit to Pyongyang in
November 2000, where the two sides held talks with
high-ranking officials of North Korea's Ministry
of the People's Armed Forces. In June 2001, a
high-level North Korean delegation led by Vice
Foreign Minister Park Kil-yon paid a return visit
to Yangon, where it met Myanmar's Deputy Defense
Minister Khin Maung Win and reportedly discussed
defense-industry cooperation.
The two
sides reportedly did not discuss the reopening of
official ties, still severed since the 1983
bombing incident. The cooperation has instead been
kept low-key and purposefully not officially
announced.
"It's a marriage of
convenience," said an Asian diplomat who is
tracking the expanding ties. "They share common
interests and a common mindset. But [Myanmar]
doesn't want to be seen as having forgiven North
Korea for the [Yangon] bombing, or to antagonize
South Korea, which has become an important trade
partner."
North Korea and Myanmar are
apparently only pursuing conventional arms sales
and technology transfers, rather than high-tech
weapons sales such as long-range missiles. To
date, the most advanced weaponry that North Korea
has delivered, or may be considering delivering,
are surface-to-surface missiles (SSMs) for
Myanmar's naval vessels. Myanmar currently has six
Houxin guided-missile patrol boats, which were
bought from China in the mid-1990s, according to
Selth.
Based at Myanmar's main naval
facility at Monkey Point in Yangon, each vessel is
armed with four C-801 "Eagle Strike" anti-ship
cruise missiles. Selth speculates that similar
SSMs will be mounted on the three new corvettes
that have recently been built at Yangon's
Sinmalaik shipyard, or on to the navy's four new
Myanmar-class patrol boats, which have likewise
recently been built in local shipyards.
In
July 2003, between 15 and 20 North Korean
technicians were seen by intelligence sources at
Monkey Point and later at a secluded Defense
Ministry guesthouse in a northern suburb of the
then-capital. North Korean technicians have since
been spotted near the central Myanmar town of
Natmauk - which led to the assumption they were
involved in Myanmar's nuclear program because of
its proximity to the site where Russia had planned
to build a nuclear research reactor starting in
2000.
There is no evidence to indicate
that Russia ever delivered the reactor, however.
Myanmar's cash-strapped generals reportedly could
not afford the ticket price, and unlike North
Korea, Russia was not willing to accept the barter
deal Myanmar had proposed. Nevertheless, several
hundred Myanmar residents have gone to Russia for
training in nuclear technology over the past five
years, a strong suggestion that Myanmar has not
entirely abandoned its nuclear ambitions.
The North Koreans now situated in central
Myanmar are most likely there to help the SPDC
protect its military hardware and other sensitive
material from perceived US threats. In 2003,
Myanmar's generals built a massive bunker near the
central town of Taungdwingyi with North Korean
assistance. The recent arrival of North Korean
tunneling experts at Nay Pyi Daw lends credence to
the suggestion that they are construction
engineers with expertise in tunneling rather than
nuclear physicists.
Still, the regional
strategic implications of a North Korea-Myanmar
defense relationship are similar. Rather than
making Myanmar more secure and cash-strapped North
Korea richer, news of the two sides growing
strategic ties will likely lead to further
international condemnation of both regimes.
Furthermore, Myanmar is a member to the
Association of Southeast Asian Nations, and fellow
members such as Thailand, Singapore and Malaysia
are not likely to accept passively any sort of
North Korean military presence within the
geographical bloc. There have recently been calls
to expel Myanmar from ASEAN for its abysmal
human-rights record and lack of progress toward
democracy.
By forging an alliance with
Pyongyang, according to Selth, Myanmar's generals
may in fact be encouraging the very development
that it fears the most: active outside
intervention in what they consider to be their
"internal affairs".
Bertil
Lintner is a former correspondent with the Far
Eastern Economic Review and the author of
Great Leader, Dear Leader: Demystifying North
Korea under the Kim Clan. He has also written
many books on Myanmar politics and culture and is
currently a writer with Asia-Pacific Media
Services.
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