(CNN) -- Myanmar's military junta allowed pro-democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi to meet Friday with three diplomats -- from the United States, Britain and Australia, according to her spokesman and a government official.
Protesters demand release of Aung San Suu Kyi in front of the United Nations in New York on Wednesday.
"The meeting is a consequence of her letter she submitted to Senior General Than Shwe, she sent on September 25," said Nyan Win, Suu Kyi's lawyer and her political party's spokesman. A government official who spoke on condition of anonymity confirmed the meeting.
She requested the meeting with the diplomats -- whose names weren't revealed -- to hear their opinions about economic sanctions against the South Asian nation, also known as Burma. Further details about the meeting were not immediately available.
The Obama administration has said that sanctions will continue, but that they have not worked as a one-tiered strategy. Even as the United States has settled on moving toward diplomacy, detained leader Suu Kyi has called for lifting the sanctions.
Suu Kyi's detention has been a key component in the United States' political tangle with Myanmar.
Critics of the country's ruling junta have accused the regime of convicting Suu Kyi, 64, to keep her from participating in 2010 elections. Suu Kyi, a Nobel Peace Prize laureate, has been confined in her house for about 14 of the past 20 years.
The government opposition leader "does not want to hurt the people of Myanmar. Some of the sanctions do hurt the people," Ibrahim Gambari, the U.N. envoy to Myanmar, told CNN's Christiane Amanpour on Wednesday.
More than 30 percent of Myanmar's population lives in poverty, according to the CIA.
Thaung Htun, Myanmar's government-in-exile's unofficial representative to the United Nations, disagreed about sanctions' effect on the nation's people.
Economic restrictions target the regime, Htun said on the CNN interview program "Amanpour."
"The Burmese people are poor and economy is getting worse because of the mismanagement of the regime," Htun said. "Actually, the regime is getting more money, you know, in the last 20 years. Now they are having $2.6 billion ... just from the sale of gas to Thailand, but they don't use that money for the people."
Myanmar Prime Minister General Thein Sein has called the sanctions "a form of violence" that do not "promote human rights and democracy."
U.S. Senator Jim Webb, D-Virginia, the first congressman to visit Myanmar in a decade, also was on "Amanpour" on Wednesday and said the U.S. State Department "has been clear that they're not going to move forward on issues like sanctions unless there are further reciprocal gestures."
"But we have seen the beginning of a removal of the paralysis," Webb added. "Aung San Suu Kyi has been able to meet twice now over the past week with government leaders."
She is still detained, however, and last week she lost the appeal of the 18-month sentence recently added to time she was already serving. She was sentenced in August for breaching the terms of her house arrest after an incident in May in which an uninvited American, John Yettaw, stayed at her home.
Htun says it's too early to tell whether more talks with Myanmar will affect Suu Kyi's detention or how the regime treats political adversaries.
"If we look at the reality on the ground, there is no improvement," he said.
"There is more violence in the last seven months, more political prisoners, more arrests, and more military attacks in the ethnic minority areas. That's why we need to be very cautious and we need to put pressure on the regime until these benchmarks can be fulfilled by the regime."
WASHINGTON (CNN) -- Sen. Jim Webb will meet with Myanmar's prime minister Monday on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly in New York City, the Virginia Democrat's office announced.
A Myanmar pro-democracy supporter displays a poster outside the United Nations in New York.
"I look forward to continuing the dialogue with Prime Minister Thein Sein that was begun last month," said Webb, according to a statement from his office.
Gen. Thein Sein is the highest official from Myanmar, also known as Burma, to attend the U.N. annual gathering in 14 years, the statement said. He addressed the assembly Monday morning, in which he spoke about working with other countries to alleviate the impact of the global economic crisis on his country.
He also took the opportunity to reject economic sanctions, which have been the heart of U.S. policy toward the military-led country.
"Some powerful nations have been resorting to economic sanctions to pressure developing countries," Thein Sein said. "Their aim is to influence the political economic system of those countries without taking into account the historical and cultural backgrounds.
"Sanctions have no moral basis as they not only hinder the economic and social development of the people, but also interfere in matters which are essentially within the domestic jurisdiction of the country."
United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon also met Monday with Thein Sein, according to a U.N. statement.
Last month, Webb became the first American official to meet with Myanmar's junta leader, Senior Gen. Than Shwe, when Webb went to Myanmar to secure the release of American John Yettaw. Yettaw was sentenced to seven years of hard labor after swimming to the home of pro-democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi in Yangon where she has been under house arrest for 14 of the past 20 years.
Webb, who chairs the East Asia and Pacific affairs subcommittee of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, also met with Suu Kyi during that trip.
According to the U.N. statement, in his meeting with Thein Sein on Monday, Ban "reiterated his clear expectation that Myanmar will respond in a timely manner to the proposals he left with the senior leadership of Myanmar during his visit. In particular, the Secretary-General made clear that the onus was on the government to create the necessary conditions for credible and inclusive elections, including the release of Daw Aung San Suu Kyi and all political prisoners, as well as dialogue with all stakeholders."
Monday's meeting between Webb and the Myanmar prime minister comes at a time when the United States is shifting its policy with the Southeast Asian nation.
Last week, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton announced that the United States will try to directly engage with Myanmar's military leaders without abandoning its existing sanctions. Suu Kyi issued a statement saying she accepted that policy and would be open to working with the junta in order to get economic sanctions against the country lifted.
Previously, Suu Kyi has staunchly opposed lifting any sanctions against the current regime in Myanmar.
Clinton said her announcement was part of a policy review announced in February, which was slowed down in May when Suu Kyi was placed under house arrest again after the Yettaw incident, according to a senior State Department official who talked to reporters on condition that he was not named.
He added that Washington would only consider lifting sanctions "if Burma made progress toward addressing our concerns on the core political issues."
"But at this point, they haven't made any such progress," the official said.
Myanmar's military junta, which has ruled the country since 1962, changed the English translation of the country's name from Burma in 1989, but Suu Kyi's supporters and several governments still use the older name.
"BUKA pintu! Buka pintu!" shout the volunteers through the grill door, into the hallway of the shop lots in Pudu. They are from Rela, a civil volunteer corp formed by the Malaysian government in 1972 to help preserve "peace and national security". They are conducting a raid on undocumented migrants here, in the middle of Ramadan, on 2 Sept 2009. A man comes sleepily to the grill door. The three Rela volunteers, dressed in their green combat-like uniforms, demand that he opens the door fast or they will cut it. They speak in Bahasa Malaysia. The man seems to understand them — he slowly comes out of his daze and realises what is going on. He responds in English, "Wait, wait, I go get the keys."
When he retreats, another Rela volunteer arrives on the scene with a cutter. The Rela volunteers cut the lock on the grill door. When the man returns with his keys, the Rela men say to him in Malay, "You're slow, we had to cut."
They proceed down the hallway, and knock on all the other doors. Another door opens, revealing a senior man and teenage boy, both equally dazed from being awakened. The Rela volunteers demand to see their identity cards (ICs) or any documents. The older man asks to see a search permit. The volunteers say, "The police are down there, the immigration [officers] are down there, go ask permits from them." The teenage boy produces their ICs — MyKads. "My son," the old man explains when the Rela volunteers ask about the boy. "I live with my family." The Rela volunteers demand that the older man open all the doors to see if he is harbouring any undocumented migrants or what they call "Pati" — pendatang asing tanpa izin, or literally "foreign migrants without permission". No "Pati" is found here. A Rela volunteer apologises for the inconvenience. The rest go upstairs to knock on more doors. The older man swears in Cantonese under his breath at this intrusion, and possibly also because he now has to buy another lock.
At another apartment, a group of women are awakened from their sleep, asked to change out of their pyjamas and bring their passports down for immigration officers to check. Five men in Rela uniforms wait outside their room, constantly knocking, and sometimes threatening to knock the door down if they don't hurry up. The women only comprehend when a Rela volunteer speaks in Mandarin to them. One woman asks, "Can't you check now? I've to leave early in the morning to Penang for work." The volunteer responds that he is unable to check their passports — only immigration personnel can — and that it will only take five minutes. The clock on the wall says 2am. The women grudgingly oblige, change into t-shirts and shorts and go downstairs with a Rela volunteer. Rela's ark
On the street downstairs, the women are asked to line up with the other migrants that have been ushered down from nearby apartments. The Rela volunteers ask the migrants to hold their documents. Some people are holding up Malaysian ICs. When a journalist asks about this, Rela volunteers explain that these people were staying with migrants and are thus "suspicious". Their ICs will be checked by the National Registration Department, whose officers are also part of the night's raid.
The men and women are lined up, two by two. Some look disorientated or confused, some anxious and annoyed, and some fearful. Accompanied by three Rela women volunteers and a few more Rela men volunteers, the group walk together towards a main post set up by the Malaysian Immigration Department and Rela for the night. During that five-minute walk, sounds of Rela volunteers fill the night. They shout for doors to be opened, for documents to be shown, and at migrants running away. The rest of the neighbourhood is asleep.
The main post is at a corner of some shop houses, two doors from a nightclub that is playing loud techno music. Three immigration officers sit at a portable table. They have a briefcase with a laptop inside it. Beside them, rows upon rows of migrants are made to squat in line. Rela volunteers collect the documents from the migrants and bring them to the immigration officers. The officers then type out the numbers on the documents into their laptop. If the document — whether it is a passport or work permit — does not show up in their machine, the document is considered invalid and thrown into a plastic bag. The person who owns that document will be hauled into one of the three trucks there — two for men, one for women.
The truck looks exactly like the ones used for prisoners — with planks for seats and grills all around. An Indonesian man in the truck is very upset — he says he has been paying around RM3,000 every year for his work permit. He shows his work permit card for the past three years that proves he has been working in Malaysia and says it has never given him problems.
This year, however, his boss gave him the I-Kad instead of the usual work permit. The immigration officer didn't tell him what was wrong with his I-Kad, just hauled him up the truck. He didn't get a chance to borrow someone's phone to call his employer, who is holding his original passport. He says he tried to talk to a Rela volunteer guarding his truck, and was told to keep quiet and stay in the truck.
"The quota for tonight is 50 people. We have surpassed it already — it's time to close shop," says an officer who identifies himself as Major Aminuddin. He is the top man for tonight's raid. He points at his watch — it is now 3am. As the briefcase is being packed, a man arrives, seeking to release his employees. Two women come down from the truck and go off with the man after 10 minutes of negotiations with Rela and immigration. Meanwhile, the people whose documents check out are given back their documents and are told they can now go home. They happily disperse into the quiet night. The trucks that are crammed with people now head back to Rela's office. Back at the office
At the office, Rela volunteers segregate the migrants into rows according to nationality. "It is for documentation purposes," says a volunteer. "I am a refugee," says a Myanmarese man repeatedly to anyone who is near enough to listen, and repeats the number of his registration card issued by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). Three Rela volunteers come over to reprimand him for not keeping quiet.
Just three hours before this, before heading off for the raid, an officer who identified himself as Lieutenant Johan said, "If the person holds a UNHCR card, he [or she] will be released." But there are UNHCR cards in the plastic bag containing the "invalid" documents and the owners of the cards, mainly Myamarese, are squatting among the migrants here.
When asked about this, Johan says that it is the jurisdiction of the immigration department — if immigration says bring them in, Rela has to bring them in. The documentation here is to be filed as a police report, and then all those rounded up will be taken to the Lenggeng detention camp.
A man, squatting at the back, holds himself tightly and shivers. No one takes any notice. He continues squatting and shivering — he does not have the right documents. Mien Ly is an independent filmmaker, and went on the raid as a translator for a documentary filmmaker from Australia. She has been given permission by the filmmaker to write about her experience. Before she witnessed the raid, a refugee activist from Malaysian human rights organisation Suaram told her that Rela would be on their best behaviour when being watched by the media.
JOHOR BARU: Immigration detention centres in the country must observe better health standards to ensure they do not become a breeding ground for viruses, a Suhakam commissioner said.
Suhakam commissioner Datuk N. Siva Subramaniam raised the seriousness of the matter, saying that about 1,300 detainees had died in six years from infection.
This means an average of 18 people die at the nation’s 22 centres each month.
“Many of them die because of tuberculosis and chikungunya,” Siva said after visiting the Pekan Nenas centre here yesterday, adding that there were also skin diseases.
He added that if these inmates did not undergo proper medical checks, they might spread diseases locally.
“Deaths in custody is a serious matter and vigilant health checks need to be conducted not only for inmates at these facilities but for officers who work around them,” he said.
So far, no immunisation jabs were provided for immigration officers and those working in the immigration department, he said.
“Officers working closely with illegal immigrants have also not been given medical inspections.
“We should not put their health at risk,” he said.
He also said that the process of deporting illegal immigrants should be speeded up as this could reduce the spread of diseases within the facility.
“We have even received reports that some foreigners waited almost two years to be deported.” http://thestar.com.my/news/story.asp?file=/2009/10/2/nation/4824880&sec=nation
A man comes sleepily to the grill door. The three Rela volunteers, dressed in their green combat-like uniforms, demand that he opens the door fast or they will cut it. They speak in Bahasa Malaysia. The man seems to understand them — he slowly comes out of his daze and realises what is going on. He responds in English, "Wait, wait, I go get the keys."
The teenage boy produces their ICs — MyKads. "My son," the old man explains when the Rela volunteers ask about the boy. "I live with my family." The Rela volunteers demand that the older man open all the doors to see if he is harbouring any undocumented migrants or what they call "Pati" — pendatang asing tanpa izin, or literally "foreign migrants without permission". No "Pati" is found here. A Rela volunteer apologises for the inconvenience. The rest go upstairs to knock on more doors. The older man swears in Cantonese under his breath at this intrusion, and possibly also because he now has to buy another lock.
Back at the office
