Chiang Mai (Mizzima) – Over the past three years, the German government has regularly invited Burmese diplomats to take part in an annual month-long training programme conducted by the German Foreign Office’s Foreign Service Academy in Berlin, according to documents available on the government’s website.

The training of a handful of Burmese diplomats was also attended by diplomatic colleagues from other Asean member countries.

The training included ‘special courses in diplomatic skills, e.g. international negotiation, diplomatic reporting, public speaking and media training’. Participants were also treated to tickets to Germany’s elite Bundeslig football game and a visit to the office of aircraft maker Airbus.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s government says the programme was an effort to foster human rights and promote democracy in Burma.

While it is perhaps impossible to judge the effectiveness of the diplomatic training program and its long-term pros or cons, critics have raised important questions.

Some Burma democracy advocates claim the training, company visits and perks are not in accord with the EU’s publicly stated line on sanctions against the military regime accused of human rights abuses and failure to foster genuine democracy, a claim German officials dispute.  Furthermore, the activists claim Burmese diplomats are instrumental in monitoring exiled dissidents and blocking journalists and human rights activists from entering Burma.

Germany and other European Union governments are said to be poised for weeks of difficult discussions over the future of economic and other sanctions against Burma ahead of the annual renewal set for April 30, according to the Friends of Europe, a European think tank.

A leaked US diplomatic cable disclosed by WikiLeaks suggest that Germany along with Italy and Spain have been advocating an EU ‘re-engagement’ with Burma.  A related cable dated August 2008 quotes a British official telling American diplomats that in contrast to the UK and other EU members who support sanctions, ‘At the far end opposing sanctions are the Germans and Austrians’.

The EU sanctions were introduced in 1996 and include an arms embargo and a ban on sales of equipment for internal repression. Over the years, the EU’s sanctions were strengthened to add targeted financial sanctions and an EU-wide travel ban for the senior members of the military regime and their family members.

While the EU has been hotly debating sanctions and engagement with the Burmese military junta, the German government has actively trained and engaged with at least four Burmese diplomats, according to documents obtained by Mizzima.

The training of the Burmese representatives coincides with the German government’s decision to increase training of diplomats from nation’s with questionable human rights practices, including Syria, Sudan, Iran and Zimbabwe under similar training programs for diplomats from the Middle East and Africa. 

Press reports surfaced last year that in the lead up to a UN general assembly vote, Germany was advancing its bid to be elected to the Security Council by wooing government officials from African and other places in the developing world with free trips to Germany for them and their spouses. In a response to questions from Inner City Press about these trips, a spokesperson for the German mission to the UN responded that their aim is to ‘make insights available and thereby improve the understanding of Germany. It goes without saying that Germany – as a keen multilateralist – has an interest to provide decision-makers with opportunities of firsthand information’.  Ultimately, Germany was voted to the 2011-2012 Security Council with a healthy margin of support.

Apart from providing training in diplomatic skills and public speaking, the Burmese diplomats were given lectures on international law and visited the offices of Deutche Welle and Theo Sommer, the editor of the weekly Die ZEIT.  On two separate occasions in 2010 and 2009, the diplomats were taken to meet the German Asia-Pacific business association, (Ostasiatischer Verein or OAV), a Hamburg-based industry trade group, whose membership includes more than 500 firms. One of OAV members, Trumpf, has been accused of supplying elements of Burma’s secretive weapons program.

At least four Burmese diplomats have been trained over the last three years. Last September, Burmese diplomat Htuann Naung was trained in Berlin under the four-week programme which in addition to a visit to the offices of Airbus, included meeting with a German-Asia business council, OAV, and a visit to the offices of Chancellor Merkel. The diplomat and the other trainees were also taken to the offices of German chemical manufacturer BASF for a meeting with the firm’s director for Asia-Pacific affairs. 

Htuann Naung and his two Burmese colleagues who took part in the training programme in 2009 and 2008 were also taken to Brussels and the Hague to learn about the EU and the International Criminal Court. 

It is unclear if Htuann Nuang has a military background as many Burmese diplomats are known to have had. A German government spokesperson declined to answer whether the German government would specifically exclude someone who had a military background from the training programme.

The German government reports show that in 2009 Burmese diplomat Sandar Tin took part in the training programme, which included attending a German Bundesliga football game.  Sandar Tin and the other diplomats on her programme were also treated to a trip to Hamburg which included a visit to Airbus and a meeting with representatives of OAV.

UN documents show that Sandar Tin was previously accredited as the junta’s Second Secretary and Alternate Permanent Representative to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization in Rome. 

In 2008, the Burmese diplomat trained was identified as Lei Lei Sein, who is presently registered as the First Secretary at the Burmese embassy in Singapore. According to the report, Lei Lei Sein also had a meeting at the headquarters of Deutche Bank. Lei Lei Sein and her fellow diplomats also had a photo session with Germany’s then Minister of Foreign Affairs Frank-Walter Steinmeier.
Reached for comment, Germany’s foreign office spokesperson Sebastian Fischer told Mizzima that the training programmes ‘are part of the wider effort of the German Foreign office to foster respect for human rights, promote democracy and contribute to international conflict prevention’.

Fischer told Mizzima, ‘the German Foreign Office acts in full compliance with the restrictive measures of the European Union against Myanmar [Burma]. This of course also applies to our training programmes for junior foreign diplomats’.

The training programmes were held yearly in August and September.

Zin Lin, a vice-chairman of the Thailand-based Burma Media Association (BMA) told Mizzima that the German government’s claim that the training of Burmese diplomats would promote democracy was further complicated because the division of the training programme has been for the last three years headed by Dr. Peter Christian Hauswedell, a German official whose remarks following the monk-led protests in 2007 caused great controversy in the activist community. 

Hauswedell, the programme director for Asia-Pacific  International Diplomat Training at the Foreign Service Academy, led a delegation of European scholars to visit Burma that coincided with the protests that were violently suppressed by the military authorities. In an interview with Der Spiegel magazine published in October 2007, Hauswedell downplayed the violence used to repress the monks and their supporters. According to Hauswedell, ‘The generals only used violence with extreme restraint’. 

Prior to working at the Foreign Service academy, Hauswedell was director-general for Asia and the Pacific at the German Foreign Office from 2002-2006.  During that time, he had considerable involvement in Burma-related affairs and attended several high level international ministerial meetings devoted to Burma’s future. 

In December 2007, Hauswedell wrote the introduction to a German language report published by the Friedrich-Ebert-Foundation on the economic situation in Burma. In the preface, Hauswedell said that the EU sanctions policy towards Burma was a failure and should be abandoned, a position sure to raise the ire of the Burma activist community.

In a report summarizing the month-long 2009 diplomatic training seminar in which a Burmese diplomat took part, Hauswedell wrote, ‘Our training programme is especially valuable for states which subsequently decide to send the participants to work at their embassies in Berlin. By applying the knowledge they have gained from the course, alumni can thus contribute to the day-to-day work of the embassies’. 

Many members of Burma’s exiled opposition have long held the belief that Burmese embassy staff are engaged in monitoring the activities of exiled dissidents and draw up blacklists of journalists and human rights activists who should be denied visa entry to their country. 

Aung Lin Htut, a former deputy chief of mission at Burma’s embassy in Washington who sought asylum in the United States, told the Irrawaddy magazine recently that he and his colleagues spent a considerable amount of effort attempting to lift sanctions and sideline pro-democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi.

Khun Myint Tun, an NLD MP elected in 1990 who now lives in Thailand, told Mizzima that he doesn’t see 'how taking junta representatives to Airbus factories and expensive soccer games help human rights’. 

The ethnic Pa-O politician who spent more than seven years in prison for boycotting the junta’s National Convention added, ‘If the German government really cares about human rights, they would support the creation of a UN commission of inquiry to investigate human rights abuses in Burma’.

Last November, a German government spokesperson told Mizzima that with regards to the call for a commission of inquiry ‘to ensure that this new initiative [the inquiry] is successful and has positive consequences, it is important to continue to monitor the situation and crucial to find some co-operation mechanism with the [Burmese] national authorities’.  

In a preface to his organization’s most recent state of the world report, Human Rights Watch’s executive director Kenneth Roth criticized the German government spokesperson’s claim that a commission of inquiry needed the assistance of the Burmese regime to move forward. According to Roth, ‘obtaining such cooperation from the Burmese military in the absence of further pressure is a pipe dream’.

With evidence that some Burmese diplomats actively work to counter the democracy movement and dissent, questions hang over the German training programme for diplomats, small though the numbers may be.

Khun Myunt Tun told Mizzima that he and his NLD colleagues would write to the German government urging them to take a stronger stance with the Burmese regime and reconsider their diplomat training program.

According to Khun Myunt Tun, ‘If Germany wants to spend money on Burma they can help refugees or train doctors and nurses. This would be much better than helping [General] Than Shwe’s diplomats’.