NY Times, July 14, 2000

By SANDY BARRON

In downtown Yangon, Internet entrepreneur Aye Min Oo is busy selling space on a Web site that he cannot access.

To woo advertisers who are also forbidden to access the World Wide Web in military-ruled Myanmar, formerly Burma, he transports his tourist-oriented Web site's pages the old-fashioned way.

"I travel around Yangon and demonstrate the pages on the hard drive of my laptop," he said. "We e-mail new pages to the webmaster in Belgrade. Hopefully, some day we will see it online here ourselves."

Aye Min Oo's roundabout access to the Internet may not be ideal, but it is a rare privilege in isolated Myanmar, a Southeast Asian country of 48 million people where some of the world's toughest Internet restrictions are vigorously enforced.

The measures, aimed at fending off the online campaigns of exiled Burmese opposition groups, restrict e-mail access to fewer than a thousand people who are close to the ruling party, the State Peace and Development Council (SPDC).

Access to the World Wide Web is strictly banned, and unauthorized use of a modem is punishable by 7 to 15 years in jail.

Just one other Web site operates consistently from the country, which has been widely condemned for human rights violations and the suppression of democracy. It is the government's own site, which is only available outside the country. It features tourist and army news in four languages, along with regular fiery criticism of opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi, whose National League for Democracy party won a 1990 election that the military refused to recognize.

In the decade since then, thousands of democracy activists have been jailed or have fled the country once known as the "rice-bowl of Asia," now one of the world's poorest.

Among Yangon's tiny, struggling expatriate and business communities, where the daily struggles are with boredom and marginalization, the lure of the Internet has been hard to resist. Dialing into foreign servers is an obvious if illegal route for frustrated staff members at embassies and other organizations.

In May, communications minister Brigadier-General Win Tin ordered that "outsiders" be stopped from making illegal use of international telephone and e-mail services. The order was apparently in response to a bungled attempt by foreigners to set up satellite equipment in a Yangon hotel. But it was also the latest in a series of warnings from a government determined to leave no communications loophole unplugged.

Until last December, foreign organizations could use a handful of private e-mail services, which were permitted to operate on a self-censoring basis.

One such service was Eagle IT, which was set up in 1996 by Pat James, a Texan businessman, along with the London-based service provider Digiserve. In advertisements placed on a venture capital site in the United States last year, Eagle claimed that "with no domestic competition" and arrangements for intranet deals with the government, its potential growth was "limitless."

But in late December, the government abruptly closed down the private firm's service, and staff members were taken in for questioning by military intelligence officials.

"It was a bit of a disaster," said Mike Blanche, Digiserve's managing director. "The government just took it over. It just stopped working."

The SPDC then told stranded users that it would be Myanmar's sole e-mail provider. Recently it announced a plan to expand the number of e-mail accounts it provides, to 1,000 from around 800, with prices reduced to $290 a year from around $1,100. Time online costs $3 an hour -- and, predictably, the user's privacy.

One 70-year-old Burmese expatriate said she was spooked to discover the fate of a message she had sent from a private office in Yangon during a vacation to Myanmar.

'I'd given all the gory details of my time there: bad roads, bridges broken down, well-nigh starvation and misery in the villages," said the woman, who did not want to be identified because she has relatives inside the country. "When I got home to Australia, I found out my son had received a mere three lines. Someone had censored my letter."

Critical information that does make it out of Myanmar travels via circuitous routes before arriving at Burmese pro-democracy sites like Burmanet, which is financed by George Soros' Open Society Institute.

Opposition groups based in remote outposts along Myanmar's porous, forested borders with Thailand and India use laptop computers to post news from refugees and underground activists. The SPDC denies the reports of forced labor, forced relocations and extrajudicial killings that flow out of regions where the foreign press is denied entry.

The government has been unable to halt the damaging effects of cyber-campaigns by groups like the Free Burma Coalition. The reports helped push companies like Pepsi to withdraw from Myanmar and led the United States and the European Union to impose economic sanctions on the country.

"There's no greater economic sanction on Burma than the one the regime imposes on itself: keeping out the Internet," said Pat Raleigh of the Burma Action Group's branch in Dublin.

As the rest of Asia rushes toward cyberspace, Myanmar's generals make no apologies for the country's deepening isolation. "As soon as we find a way to keep out the undesirable elements, we will make the Internet available," a spokesman says on the lonely government Web site.

Source: TANJUG - July 5th, 2000

MYANMAR MINISTER ARRIVES IN YUGOSLAVIA

BELGRADE - Myanmar Foreign Minister U Win Aung arrived in Belgrade on Wednesday on an official return visit to Yugoslavia at the invitation of Foreign Minister Zivadin Jovanovic.

Speaking to reporters at Belgrade Airport, U Win Aung stressed the spirit of friendship that links Yugoslavia and Myanmar.

He went on to say he had come personally, as a friend, to visit the brave and patriotic Yugoslav people who had offered heroic resistance to NATO's brutal aggression and who do not allow foreign interference in their internal affairs.

At Belgrade Airport, U Win Aung was welcomed by Jovanovic and aides, Minister coordinating relations with international financial bodies Borka Vucic, Yugoslav Army representatives and Myanmar Ambassador to Yugoslavia U Kyar Nyo Chit Pe and his staff.

Editor's comment: Take a notice where Aye Min Oo sends data. Will Milosevic introduce the same punishment for the Internet remains to be seen.