Tick, Tick, Tick, Tick, BURMA

How is regime change in Iraq connected to Burmese nukes?

While the world’s attention is elsewhere, the genocidal Burmese military dictatorship is alleged to be getting into the nuclear market and sidestepping IAEA oversight, courtesy of Moscow:

Last week Burma and the Russian company Rosatom announced a new contract. Rosatom would build Burma a nuclear power station. This news comes at the end of a period in which suspicions have been raised about the intentions of the Burmese regime. Over the last couple of years, both the universities of Rangoon and Mandalay have added nuclear physics departments to their faculties and 2,000 Burmese students have been sent to Moscow to study Nuclear technology. In April of this year Burma resumed relations with North Korea and dissidents have spotted shipments arriving from North Korea into Burma, with the US state department reminding the Burmese that under UN rules the United States is entitled to stop and search any North Korean ship going to Burma. Russian companies have discovered uranium in Northern Burma and it looks possible that the Burmese are delivering uranium to Pyongyang in return either for plutonium or for nuclear knowhow.

The Burmese government is not a nice regime.

Burma’s generals, known in state-controlled media as the State Peace and Development Council, routinely harass and imprison opposition activists. Citizens have been used as slave labor. The junta’s security police have been known to strafe demonstrators with gunfire. In December, an Asian human rights group issued a 124-page report on the Burmese government’s “brutal and systematic” torture of political prisoners.

To deepen the country’s isolation, last November the generals began to move Burma’s capital from the southern coastal city of Rangoon to the mountain stronghold of Pyinmana, deep in the country’s interior. Perhaps the regime’s oft-stated fear of a U.S. invasion prompted the retreat from the coast. That would explain press reports that the junta has surrounded its new capital with land mines. Perhaps the regime is even more afraid of the ethnically diverse and impoverished students of Rangoon. We can’t look for answers to the United Nations’ envoy to Burma. He resigned in January after failing for nearly two years to gain entry into the country.

There’s been a big natural gas discovery off the Burmese coast, so Burma is not short of energy. Why does it need nuclear technology? Is it for weapons? Who or what is it they are scared of, (Well, Danish artists for a start, but that’s a digression) if at all? If they’re not scared, why have they moved the capital?

Some think it is to remove themselves from the danger of a US invasion, since Bush placed Burma on a list of “outposts of tyranny” that includes North Korea, Cuba, Iran, Zimbabwe and Belarus, but the US is unlikely to invade, overextended as it is with its army broken and troops bogged down elsewhere.

Not only that the US has been very cosy with Burma in the past; US energy giant Unocal Corp. and its French partner Total SA built a $1.2 billion natural gas pipeline in the Burmese mountains using forced labour.

Unocal has since been sold to China, but past US collusion in Burma’s cruel, genocidal regime combined with a current need for gas lead one to think that no way the US government, run by energy industry types, would put their energy interests in SE Asia at risk by invading. So it can’t be a US attack the junta’s worried about.

Unlikely as it seems given the two countries’ history of dodgy dealings it could well be that Burma’s drive to acquire nuclear technology from Russia is a totally innocent commercial enterprise and not military at all, according to nuclear specialist John Large:

….Large also said it was possible that the Burmese government intended to use the facility to branch out into the highly lucrative radio-isotopic pharmaceutical market, and not for the production of weapons-grade nuclear components.

“There is a big commercial opportunity here because at the moment . . . what you have in the region . . . is a number of countries vying to establish their radio-isotopic foothold and of course countries like Burma could of course enter this market.”

It remains unclear when or where the facility will be built in Burma with analysts expecting further agreements on the deal to be signed in the near future.

It’s possible, but is it likely, given the regime’s history?

If indeed Burma is after weapons technology it looks as though there’s to be a another member of the new, eastern axis of nuclear powers; India, Pakistan, North Korea, China and now Burma, only 2 of which are even remotely politically stable.

Somehow I doubt this is the New World Order the neocons had in mind when they did their best to gut the International Atomic Energy Authority’s oversight capacity so they could invade Iraq.