Myanmar deal right neighborly of
India By Brian McCartan
CHIANG MAI, Thailand - India, in the face
of Western criticism, continues to economically
engage Myanmar’s ruling generals, providing the
junta a much-needed investment lifeline at a time
when the US and European Union have imposed new
punitive sanctions against the rights-abusing
regime.
The Indian government earlier this
week committed US$120 million to rebuild Myanmar’s
western Sittwe port and construct road and water
links through the facility, which will connect
Myanmar’s western Arakan State to India’s
northeastern state of
Mizoram. The
build-transfer-use Kaladan Multi-Modal Transit
Transport Project comes on top of a previous $27
million investment to improve the 160-kilometer
road from Mizoram to Kalewa, in Myanmar’s Sagaing
division, northeast of Sittwe.
Final
agreement for the Sittwe project, which has been
under consideration for more than six years and
will take nearly three years to complete, is
expected to be signed during a visit of high-level
officials from Myanmar to India in April.
The agreement highlights divergent strains
in India’s policy towards Myanmar. Since the
Myanmar military regime’s crackdown last year on
peaceful street demonstrators, New Delhi has
gently indicated its support for political change
and national reconciliation in its neighbor. That
position was seemingly underscored in December by
India’s unofficial halt of arms transfers to
Myanmar. Yet India’s state-owned companies
continue to sign business deals with the regime
and the government, while tacitly supporting
political change, has declared that it does not
support Western-led new sanctions, preferring
dialogue and negotiations to promote change.
India voted in favor of a resolution at
the United Nations Human Rights Council condemning
the regime’s violent crackdown and calling for the
release of detained pro-democracy leader Aung San
Suu Kyi. However, India’s support for the
resolution was watered down by an official
reservation that the final text of the statement
was not in accordance with India’s preferred
approach of constructively engaging Myanmar.
India gained some mileage out of a January
2 meeting between prime minister Manmohan Singh
and visiting Myanmar foreign minister Nyan Win.
According to Indian foreign ministry spokesman
Navtej Sarna, the foreign minister was told that
there was "greater urgency in bringing political
reform and national reconciliation" and that "this
process had to be broad-based to include all
sections of society including Aung San Suu Kyi and
various ethnic groups in Myanmar." At the same
time the prime minister also affirmed India’s
desire to build on the two sides’ already strong
relationship.
India's approach has
attracted criticism from both outside and within
India. There is widespread local support for Suu
Kyi and her National League for Democracy party,
judging by the well-attended protest rallies held
in New Delhi coinciding with Nyan Win’s visit. All
of India’s major political parties, including
Congress, the Communists and Bharatiya Janta
Party, have called on the government to change its
policy on Myanmar. Civil society groups have
joined this call, especially those representing
ethnic groups located in India’s northeastern
regions, which share a border with Myanmar.
In late December, it was reported that
India had quietly stopped all arms sales and
transfers to Myanmar. Although the policy was not
officially announced, a Washington Post article
cited "diplomatic sources" who said that it "had
been privately confirmed by New Delhi to top US
officials". If so, it would represent a major
turn-around in policy since military contacts had
increased during 2007, with India offering large
quantities of military hardware to the junta.
India is currently one of Myanmar’s two
main military hardware suppliers, the other being
China. India came under sharp media criticism in
2007 for its sale of weapons that would possibly
violate European Union arms embargoes now in place
against Myanmar. In August, Myanmar took delivery
from India of two BN-2 Defender maritime
surveillance aircraft. The deal was done over the
objections of the British government, which
originally sold the aircraft to India.
In
July, a report by UK-based rights group Amnesty
International and several other EU nongovernmental
organizations condemned India for the possible
sale of advanced light helicopters to Myanmar. The
aircraft, made by Hindustan Aeronautical Ltd.
(HAL), can be equipped with rockets and machine
guns, and human rights groups fear they will be
used against insurgent ethnic minority groups and
possibly future street demonstrators. The report
noted that the weapons and many of the systems
within the helicopters originated in EU countries
and thus could violate the arms embargo.
In a November 2006 meeting between Indian
Defense Secretary Shekhar Dutt and Myanmar Vice
Senior General Maung Aye, India offered the
helicopters along with T55 tanks it was retiring
from its inventory, 105mm artillery pieces,
armored personnel carriers, ammunition and
avionics upgrades for Myanmar’s Russian and
Chinese-made aircraft. Although it is unclear
whether any of this hardware has reached Myanmar,
reports indicate that shipments of aircraft,
artillery, armored personnel carriers, tanks,
ships, small arms and ammunition are expected to
be sent in 2008. During the same meeting, India
also offered counterinsurgency training to
Myanmar’s military.
Rights groups have in
the wake of last year’s bloody crackdown called
for a United Nations Security Council-enforced
arms embargo against Myanmar. Support for such a
measure is high in the United States, although any
resolution would have to overcome likely vetoes
from China and Russia, which have in the past come
to Myanmar’s defense. India’s quiet halting of
arms transfers may be a way of staving off a
full-blown arms embargo and resuming transfers
when the international clamor has died down.
Indeed India had for years sent arms, ammunition
and other military equipment to Myanmar with very
little international criticism or attention until
2007.
Many of the reports concerning sales
and transfers of Indian military equipment have
been linked to joint operations along the
India-Myanmar border against insurgents based on
the Myanmar side of the border. Myanmar’s
northwest Sagaing Division and Chin State
insurgencies are small, but the army has shown a
marked lethargy and lack of commitment in its
suppression operations.
At the same time,
India has made no shift in its economic policy
towards Myanmar, which critics say is providing
the ruling junta with much-needed cash flow to
stay financially afloat and buy weapons. For
instance, during Nyan Win’s recent visit to New
Delhi, trade and cooperation in oil-and-gas were
reportedly discussed. Bilateral trade between the
two countries is estimated at nearly $1 billion
and Indian investments in Myanmar include gas,
oil, agriculture, fisheries, pearl cultivation,
infrastructure projects, mining and tourism
ventures.
Those outlays mark a
controversial policy u-turn. India initially
supported Myanmar’s pro-democracy movement after
the popular uprising of 1988 and general elections
of 1990, serving as the first nation to condemn
the military regime when it annulled the 1990
elections it resoundingly lost. Suu Kyi was later
awarded the prestigious Jawaharlal Nehru Award for
International Understanding and successive Indian
governments allowed refugees and political
activists to reside in India.
In the
mid-1990s, the policy shifted and official
criticisms of the Myanmar regime stopped while
business and military delegations made
increasingly frequent visits to the country.
Since, over $100 million has been extended to
Myanmar in the form of credit, including $27
million for road improvements for the link
connecting the town of Tamu on the border with
Mizoram State and Kalewa in Sagaing Division.
India has since grown into Myanmar’s
second-largest market, trailing only Thailand. Top
Indian officials, including the president,
government ministers and senior military officers,
have all in recent years made high- and
low-profile visits to Myanmar. Senior General Than
Shwe, the chairman of Myanmar’s ruling State Peace
and Development Council, last visited India in
2004. Indian President Dr APJ Abdul Kalam visited
Myanmar in 2006 and reportedly avoided mention of
the country’s political problems or the detention
of Suu Kyi during his stay.
Myanmar has
become a key component in India’s "Look East"
policy, which strategically views the neighboring
country as a geographical springboard to markets
in mainland Southeast Asia. Myanmar’s membership
in the Bay of Bengal Initiative for Multi-sectoral
Technical and Economic Cooperation (BIMSTEC)
grouping makes it a key partner in the development
of regional projects in trade energy and tourism,
as well as in the economic development of
northeast India.
India’s real politik
policy is also aimed at diluting China’s regional
influence. China, which has border disputes with
India and with whom it fought a brief war in 1962,
views Myanmar as an outlet for trade from its
remote, landlocked southwestern Yunnan province.
It is also eager to secure oil, gas and other
natural resource concessions from Myanmar to fuel
its rapidly surging economy.
While
protests in Yangon and other towns reached their
height last September, Indian Petroleum Minister
Murali Deora signed a $150 million gas exploration
deal with the SPDC and the Myanmar Oil and Gas
Enterprise on behalf of Oil and Natural Gas
Company (ONGC) Videsh. As part of the deal, the
state-controlled Indian company was granted rights
to explore in three separate offshore blocks.
Myanmar, for its part, appears to play the
two countries off against each other. India was
reportedly disappointed by Myanmar’s decision last
August to give the nod to Chinese state-owned
PetroChina for highly coveted gas concessions in
the large Shwe fields off the coast of Myanmar’s
Arakan State. China edged out South Korea’s Daewoo
International and India’s two state energy
companies, which are currently developing the
field. The Shwe gas field reserves are estimated
to be worth between $37 billion and $52 billion,
with the SPDC scheduled to receive $12 billion and
$17 billion over a 20-year period.
Meanwhile, on December 12, a Memorandum of
Understanding was signed to set up a center for
the sharing of information technology skills in
the old Myanmar capital of Yangon. The agreement
to set up the India-Myanmar Center for the
Enhancement of Information Technology Skills
(IMCEITS) was signed by deputy foreign minister
Kyaw Thu during the first official visit to India
of a Myanmar official since the crackdown.
India’s increasingly cozy relations with
Myanmar come at a cost. Armed groups including the
United Liberation Front of Asom, the National
Socialist Council of Nagaland and the United
National Liberation Front are all involved in a
decades-old insurgency in India’s northeastern
areas and have traditionally used base areas in
Myanmar’s jungle-covered northwestern territories.
Although joint operations are periodically
announced, very little is reportedly actually done
on the Myanmar side, with some speculation that at
the local level the insurgents have good relations
with Myanmar army officers and intelligence
officials.
While these contacts may not
extend to the top of Myanmar’s leadership, the
insurgency is often used as a bargaining chip by
the Myanmar regime to gain India’s support and
military hardware in exchange for proposed
offensives against the insurgents.
India’s
northeastern border problems go beyond the
insurgency, with rampant drug trafficking, arms
smuggling and an increasing HIV/AIDS epidemic all
contributing to instability. Other than close the
border periodically when local trade disputes
arise, Myanmar does little to stop the smuggling.
Refugees fleeing human rights abuses on
the Myanmar side of the border have also become a
problem for India and communal disputes have
frequently broken out in border communities
between Myanmar refugees and Indians. At least for
now, though, India seems willing to look the other
way as long as commercial profits and fuel flow
from the other side of the border.
Brian McCartan is a Chiang
Mai-based freelance journalist.
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