European Union nations on Monday mulled tighter sanctions against Burma’s government, but many saw China and India as the best hopes of applying pressure on the junta to free opposition icon Aung San Suu Kyi.
Czech Foreign Minister Jan Kohout, whose country holds the rotating EU presidency, spoke in favour of boosting EU sanctions against the regime as the Nobel peace laureate went on trial facing a further five years in detention.
”We are ready to go forward,” the Czech minister said as he arrived for a meeting in Brussels with his EU counterparts.
”It’s not the moment to lower the sanctions, it’s the moment to increase them,” echoed EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana.
However, other EU foreign ministers and EU officials were looking more for pressure from Burma’s giant neighbours.
”I don’t think additional sanctions will help because you have seen they have not helped,” said EU External Relations Commissioner Benita Ferrero-Waldner.
”We have to reinforce dialogue with Burma’s neighbours … I think that is the way forward it should always be a subject of discussion with China, India and others,” she added.
Finnish Foreign Minister Alexander Stubb said that political sanctions took decades to have an effect in apartheid South Africa and that sort of time lag meant a lot of suffering for the population.
Swedish Foreign Minister Carl Bildt said the matter could be addressed at a meeting in Hanoi next week with foreign ministers from the Association of South East Asian Nations (Asean).
”Our problem with sanctions on Burma is that we have sanctions over virtually everything relevant for the European Union,” he added.
”Our relationship with Burma is nearly non-existent and that makes it complicated from this point of view, but we’ll have to engage with the other countries in the region, those are the ones who have a real possibility of influence.”
Bildt named no countries in particular, but his Luxembourg counterpart Jean Asselborn said the EU must talk in particular to the Chinese ”so that they put pressure on” Burma’s government.
An EU-China summit will take place in Prague on Wednesday.
Nonetheless, the EU foreign ministers were expected to ask European experts to examine the possibility of new measures, with a decision to be taken next month.
Aung San Suu Kyi went on trial amid tight security at a notorious prison on Monday, facing another five years in detention on charges of harbouring a United States man who swam to her home.
The junta, headed by reclusive Senior General Than Shwe, has kept Aung San Suu Kyi in detention for 13 years since 1990, when it refused to recognise her party’s landslide victory in Myanmar’s last elections.
The talk of further sanctions came shortly after the Myanmar authorities prevented the ambassadors of four European countries from entering Insein prison to attend the trial of the opposition leader, according to a Western diplomat in Burma.
Envoys from Britain, France, Germany and Italy were turned back from the prison near Rangoon, where security forces set up a tight security cordon with barbed wire barricades, the diplomat said.
The EU sanctions — in place since 2006 — include a travel ban and the freezing of assets of Burma’s leaders and their relatives, as well as a ban on arms exports to the country.
The sanctions also limit diplomatic relations between the Southeast Asian nation and the European bloc.
Those sanctions were increased in late 2007, following a crackdown on Buddhist protests, to include a ban on timber, metals, minerals, precious stones from Burma and a ban on new investment in Burma’s companies operating in these sectors. — Sapa-AFP