Sun Sep 30, 12:40 AM ET

YANGON, Myanmar - Die-hard protesters waved the peacock flag of the crushed pro-democracy movement on a solitary march Saturday through the eerily quiet streets of Myanmar's largest city, where many dissidents said they were resigned to defeat without international intervention.

Housewives and shop owners taunted troops but quickly disappeared into alleyways. According to diplomats briefed by witnesses, residents of three neighborhoods blocked soldiers from entering the monasteries in a crackdown on Buddhist monks, who led the largest in a month of demonstrations. The soldiers left threatening to return with reinforcements.

The top U.N. envoy on Myanmar, Ibrahim Gambari, arrived in the country but many protesters said they were nonetheless seeing a repeat of the global reaction to a 1988 pro-democracy uprising, when the world stood by as protesters were gunned down in the streets.

"Gambari is coming, but I don't think it will make much of a difference," said one hotel worker, who like other residents asked not to be named, fearing retaliation. "We have to find a solution ourselves."

On Sunday, a senior Japanese official headed for Myanmar to press the military government to move toward democracy and to protest the killing of Japanese journalist Kenji Nagai during the crackdown on protesters. Deputy Foreign Minister Mitoji Yabunaka was to arrive in Yangon by Sunday evening, according to a ministry official who spoke on condition of anonymity in line with policy.

Soldiers and police have been posted on almost all corners in the cities of Yangon and Mandalay. Shopping malls, grocery stores and public parks were closed and few people dared to venture out of their homes.

A young woman who took part in a massive demonstration in Yangon Thursday said she didn't think "we have any more hope to win." She was separated from her boyfriend when police broke up the protest by firing into crowds and has not seen him since.

"The monks are the ones who give us courage," she said. Most of the clerics are now besieged in their monasteries behind locked gates and barbed wire.

Gambari was taken immediately to Naypyitaw, the remote, bunker-like capital where the country's military leaders are based. The White House urged the junta to allow him to have access to Aung San Suu Kyi — the Nobel Peace Prize laureate who is under house arrest — and ordinary Myanmar residents.

The demonstrations began last month as people angry over massive fuel price hikes took to the streets — then mushroomed into the tens of thousands after the monks began marching.

The junta, which has a long history of snuffing out dissent, started cracking down Wednesday, when the first of at least 10 deaths was reported, and then let loose on Thursday, shooting into a crowd of protesters and clubbing them with batons.

The crackdown triggered an unprecedented verbal flaying of Myanmar's generals from almost every corner of the world — even some criticism from No. 1 ally China.

But little else that might stay the junta's heavy hand is seen in the foreseeable future.

The United States, which exercises meager leverage, froze any assets that 14 Myanmar leaders may have in U.S. financial institutions and prohibited American citizens from doing business with them. The leaders, including Than Shwe, are believed to have few if any such connections.

The United Nations has compiled a lengthy record of failure in trying to broker reconciliation between the junta and Suu Kyi. Gambari's efforts have been stymied, while his predecessor, Razali Ismail, was snubbed or sometimes barred from entry by the State Peace and Development Council, as the ruling junta is formally known.

The United States, Japan and others have turned a hopeful eye on China — Myanmar's biggest trading partner — as the most likely outside catalyst for change.

But China, India and Russia do not seem prepared to go beyond words in their dealings with the junta, ruling out sanctions as they jostle for a chance to get at Myanmar's bountiful and largely untapped natural resources, especially its oil and gas.

"Unless and until Beijing, Delhi and Moscow stand in unison in pressuring the SPDC for change, little will change," says Thitinan Pongsudhirak, a political scientist at Bangkok's Chulalongkorn University.

Some Chinese academics and diplomats say the international community may be overestimating what Beijing can do.

"I actually don't think China can influence Burma at all except through diplomacy. China's influence is not at all decisive," said Peking University Southeast Asia expert Liang Yingming.

India has switched from a vocal opponent of the junta to one currying favor with the generals as it struggles to corner energy supplies for its own rapidly expanding economy.

The Association of Southeast Asian Nations, or ASEAN, a 10-member bloc which includes Myanmar, also has given no indication that it is considering an expulsion or any other action.

As governments heap criticism on the junta, Myanmar and foreign activists continue to call for concrete, urgent action.

"The world cannot fail the people of Burma again," said the National Coalition Government of the Union of Burma, an exile group based in Washington. "Selfless sacrifices deserve more than words and lip-service. They want effective intervention before it is too late."

Sat Sep 29, 10:54 PM ET

YANGON - An urgent United Nations mission to bring Myanmar's ruling generals and their many foes to the peace table was shrouded in secrecy on Sunday with no word on progress from the country's new jungle capital.

Officials were unreachable in Naypyidaw, 240 miles to the north of Yangon which has been the centre of an uprising led by Buddhist monks. Since mid-week the junta has been squeezing the life out of the protests by arresting or confining monks and barricading off the city centre.

There was no word even on who U.N. envoy Ibrahim Gambari has met in Naypyidaw, the greenfield site where the junta moved the entire government apparatus at just a few hours notice in 2005, apparently because astrologers had defined the auspicious hour for the shift.

The generals, directing moves to throttle the protests in Yangon and other cities from Naypyidaw, usually ignore outside pressure. Yet they bowed to the chorus of international concern that followed soldiers shooting down peaceful protesters last week to allow Gambari in at short notice.

The heavy-handed suppression of the protests had prompted criticism even from China, the closest the junta have to an ally, and rare condemnation from ASEAN (the Association of South East Asian Nations), of which Myanmar is a member.

State-run media have proclaimed the restoration of peace and stability, and insist that security forces handled the protests "with care, using the least possible force." Diplomats flown to Naypyidaw received similar assurances.

FEW ON STREETS

At their height last Monday and Tuesday the protests in central Yangon, formerly Rangoon, filled five city blocks. They are now reduced to a few hundred people taunting and cursing security forces, who have fenced off the protest area between two main pagodas, then vanishing into alleys when charged.

There is no sign now of the maroon-robed monks, the moral core of the deeply Buddhist nation, whose column stretched nearly a kilometer (more than half a mile) at the height of the protests against 45 years of military rule.

The monks were either arrested by the hundreds in overnight raids on their monasteries, or are penned in there by surrounding security forces who began a crackdown on Wednesday in Yangon, formerly known as Rangoon.

Soldiers and police fire occasional warning shots, ensuring the city remains scared of a repeat of 1988, when the army put down an uprising killing an estimated 3,000 people.

But there have been no further reports of deaths in the protests, which began in August with small marches against shock fuel price rises. The official count is 10 killed. Western governments believe the real toll is much higher.

GAMBARI TO MEET SUU KYI

The United States said Gambari going virtually directly to Naypyidaw, whisked out of Yangon as soon as he arrived from Singapore on Saturday, was a reason to worry about his mission, which followed an emergency U.N. Security Council meeting on Myanmar prompted by the bloody crackdown on protests.

"We have concerns that Mr. Gambari was swiftly moved from Rangoon to the new capital in the interior, far from population centers," White House National Security Council spokesman Gordon Johndroe said in a statement.

He urged the junta to allow Gambari wide access to people, including religious leaders and detained pro-democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi.

Gambari was due to meet Suu Kyi, who has spent about 12 of the last 18 years in some form of detention, when he returned to Yangon.

The two met a year ago, the last time any senior foreign figure has seen the democracy icon, who has been confined to her lakeside Yangon villa without a telephone and requiring official permission, granted rarely, to receive visitors.

Since she was last detained in May 2003, some of her countrymen have been able to see her just once -- early in the monk-led protests when marchers were allowed through the barricades sealing off her street.

Suu Kyi, whose National League for Democracy won a landslide election victory in 1990 which the generals annulled, appeared at the gate of the house, riot police between her and the protesters.

There has been no explanation, and no repeat, of the incident.

However, in a sign any concessions to the protesters by the generals would be limited, state television is publicizing marches around the country condemning the Yangon protests and officials say there will be more during Gambari's visit.

Sat Sep 29, 12:52 PM ET

WASHINGTON - US First Lady Laura Bush Friday branded as "deplorable" and "horrifying" the Myanmar military regime's crackdown on demonstrators and expressed doubts about the official death toll in the violence.

"The deplorable acts of violence being perpetrated against Buddhist monks and peaceful Burmese demonstrators shame the military regime," Bush said in a statement.

"Tens of thousands of Burmese are turning to the streets to demand their freedom -- and the country's military dictatorship has countered with horrifying abuses. Non-violent demonstrations by Buddhist monks and nuns have been met with tear gas, smoke grenades, baton beatings, and automatic weapons," she said.

"The regime admits to killing 10 people, but unofficial reports suggest the number is much higher," she added, noting that the regime's shutdown of communication links has cut off the flow of reliable information from Myanmar.

She also demanded that UN special envoy Ibrahim Gambari be allowed to meet with sequestered opposition figurehead Aung San Suu Kyi, and reiterated her husband President George W. Bush's call for nations closest to the regime like China "to support the aspirations of the Burmese people, and to join in condemning the junta's use of violence on its own people."

Sat Sep 29, 12:16 PM ET

Lech Walesa and Desmond Tutu speak of solidarity. Vaclav Havel hopes for another "Velvet Revolution." Wei Jingsheng warns of a bloody sequel to Tiananmen Square.

Some of the globe's most prominent former dissidents — acutely aware of what can go right and wrong when a repressed society attempts to shake off tyranny — see shades of their own past struggles in Myanmar's drama.

In interviews with The Associated Press and other media, they offered insight and advice to the Buddhist monks and pro-democracy protesters who have defied Myanmar's military government — and to the world leaders and ordinary people watching it all unfold.

"If there's not enough international pressure, and China offers support in the background, then there will very likely be in Myanmar something like Tiananmen Square: a big massacre," Wei, China's best-known ex-dissident, told the AP in a phone interview from the U.S., where he lives in exile.

Hundreds, possibly thousands, were killed in 1989 when the Chinese army cleared the Beijing square of pro-democracy protests.

Wei, who spent 17 years in Chinese prisons for challenging the communist monopoly on power, called for more international pressure on Myanmar's ruling junta and on China for its perceived backing of the regime.

Walesa, who founded Poland's pro-democracy Solidarity movement and became the nation's first post-communist president, said the only hope for Myanmar's monks and activists was to stick together — and for the world to rally around their cause.

"My advice for them is to build their own internal solidarity and to make efforts to win international solidarity," he said in an AP interview.

But Myanmar in 2007 is markedly different from eastern Europe two decades ago.

Isolated under a regime that has crushed dissent for the past 45 years, the country formerly named Burma missed out completely on the wave of reform and revolution that swept through the world in the late 1980s.

In 1989, when Havel's followers packed Prague's Wenceslas Square to denounce a regime he famously mocked as "Absurdistan," their sheer numbers and determination prevailed over truncheons and tear gas.

When demonstrators tried the same thing in Myanmar in 1988, thousands were gunned down.

"If they have no solidarity today, they will lose and will have to approach the issue many times again," Walesa said.

Yet "even if they fail, the price (they pay) will speed up the process," he added.

The Nobel Peace Prize winner, who marshaled tens of thousands of workers in 1980s strikes at Gdansk's gritty shipyard, says the showdown in Myanmar has rekindled a little of his own old fire.

"Maybe I will join in, too," Walesa said. "I will certainly do something because I cannot remain indifferent. ... I like to win."

Fellow laureate Tutu, who won his Nobel Prize for his role in South Africa's anti-apartheid movement, was preparing to join a march in Sweden protesting events in Myanmar when he spoke by telephone to the AP Friday.

"In South Africa we had rolling mass action that covered the action taken by the people. We also had an alliance of faith-based organizations," Tutu said. In Myanmar, "the important thing is that religious leaders have now put their lives on the lines and I admire them for that."

Tutu said he would call on China to use its "very powerful leverage" on Myanmar's leaders. If China did not respond, he said he would join calls to boycott the Beijing Olympics.

Havel, the playwright-turned-president whose nonviolent movement toppled totalitarian rule in Czechoslovakia, said he's also ready to go to Myanmar if opposition leader and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Aung San Suu Kyi emerges from longtime house arrest and takes power.

"You can't imagine how happy I would be to travel there as soon as possible," Havel, now 70, told the Czech newspaper Mlada Fronta Dnes.

Two years ago, Havel joined the Dalai Lama and other dignitaries to write a poignant letter decrying Suu Kyi's ordeal. "Neither walls nor weapons can silence even the most isolated voice of courage and truth," it said.

But today, asked about the specter of heavy bloodshed, he responded: "I am afraid."

Tutu said of Suu Kyi: "I hope she knows how much the world supports her. She is a remarkable woman."

In another letter last week, Nobel literature laureate Nadine Gordimer, known for her works about the inhumanity of apartheid in her native South Africa, appealed to U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon to do something "in the name of shared humanity."

"No one anywhere in our world who respects the sanctity of life, justice and the freedom of people to demand reconciliation of conflict through peaceful means can turn aside from the spectacle of Burma," she said.

Sat Sep 29, 11:48 AM ET

YANGON, Myanmar - Myint Myint makes little more than a dollar a day as a construction worker. When the ruling junta doubled fuel prices last month in one of the world's poorest countries, she and her children fell further into poverty.

"Now they are getting used to eating just a meal a day," said Myint Myint, 35, who lives in the outskirts of this city in a thatched shack so rundown that monsoon rains seep through the roof.

The fuel hike triggered what has become the biggest wave of anti-government demonstrations in this isolated Southeast Asian nation since a failed uprising in 1988. It also emphasizes what is driving the protests: A deep and desperate poverty.

Myint Myint comes from one of many neighborhoods around Yangon where electricity and running water are rare and naked children play in muddy, potholed roads. Families from the countryside crowd into one-room homes and eat little more than rice. Jobs are few.

Experts said the government's mistake was raising fuel prices Aug. 15 overnight, without first publicly explaining the increase or considering a phased-in price hike, as other Asian countries have done. A similar misstep sparked the 1988 protests which the junta suppressed by killing 3,000 demonstrators, just after the government increased the price of rice and voided the kyat currency.

"It is a policy that has been applied overnight in a draconian manner," said Charles Petrie, the U.N. humanitarian chief in Myanmar, also known as Burma. "(The protests) are a popular expression of discontent because people do not have the cash reserves to absorb the shock."

The government, which holds a monopoly on fuel sales and subsidizes them, raised prices from 1,500 kyats ($1.16) to 3,000 kyats ($2.33) for about a gallon of diesel. The price of natural gas increased as much 500 percent.

Prices on commodities such as eggs, cooking oil and poultry have increased by an average of 35 percent. Gold prices have gone up while the kyat has weakened. Bus fares cost more.

The government has defended the price hikes as necessary to free up funds for social programs and reduce subsidies, which have increased along with the price of oil.

"The government has no recourse but to remove the subsidies," Thaung Tun, Myanmar's ambassador to the Philippines, told The Associated Press in August. "If you won't do that, it'll be very costly to the government. ... It's not politics."

Fuel prices in Myanmar remain among the lowest in Southeast Asia, despite the subsidy cut, Thaung Tun said. He acknowledged that average residents feel the pinch, but said Myanmar's military leaders would not reverse the move.

As they have done for decades, many of the poor are bearing the new hardships with stoicism. But others in this country where an estimated 90 percent of the population live on about $1 a day have taken to the streets.

Petrie and other economic experts argue the price hike shows the government either is not aware of or doesn't care about the plight of its poorest citizens, especially given its military leaders' taste for the good life.

The image of Gen. Than Shwe, head of the State Peace and Development Council, as the ruling junta is formally known, took a blow last year when video of an extravagant wedding for his daughter leaked out. It showed Thandar Shwe wearing a collection of diamond jewelry and receiving wedding gifts worth $50 million at a fancy reception.

Blessed with abundant natural resources and fertile land, Myanmar should be one of the region's most prosperous countries. But years of government mismanagement have placed it among the 20 poorest countries in the world, the United Nations estimates, with a per capita income of only $200 — 10 times less than its neighbor Thailand.

Its last fiscal surplus was in 1962, the year the military took power.

Sean Turnell, an expert on the Burmese economy with Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia, said Burmese are taking dramatic measures just to survive. Many are walking miles to work to avoid paying higher bus fares while others have begun selling furniture and other household goods.

"There are a lot of people who think they have nothing to lose," Turnell said of the frustration in Myanmar. "This isn't about assertions of political or human rights. It's about not having enough money to buy food."

On paper, there are upbeat government predictions of double-digit growth and weekly announcements of oil and natural gas deals with Chinese, Thai and South Korean companies. But experts on Myanmar said the government overstates its economic growth and that most of the oil and gas deals worth an estimated $2 billion are years away from producing significant revenue.

Complicating matters is the cost of building the country's new capital in Naypyitaw and maintaining one of the world's largest armies. Economic sanctions slapped on the regime by the United States and Britain have also hurt.

Strapped for cash, the government has been forced to come up with unorthodox measures to generate revenue, such as printing more money, raising customs duties and cutting fuel subsides.

"The state cannot raise funds in legitimate ways," Turnell said. "There is a real squeeze on the country's finances. If they can survive it for a couple of years, they might get there. But they don't have that cushion."

____

On the Net:

Burma Economic Watch: http://www.econ.mq.edu.au/burma_economic_watch

Sat Sep 29, 11:44 AM ET

YANGON - A UN special envoy arrived in Myanmar on Saturday for talks with the ruling junta, which has locked down the nation's biggest city in a violent campaign to choke off mass demonstrations.

The United States has called on Myanmar's generals to also allow Ibrahim Gambari to meet with opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi, the democracy icon who has been held under house arrest for most of the past 18 years.

UN chief Ban Ki-moon dispatched the Nigerian-born Gambari to broker negotiations between the isolated military regime and its pro-democracy opponents, who have mounted two weeks of nationwide mass rallies.

A violent crackdown to end the demonstrations -- which has claimed at least 13 lives since Wednesday -- appeared to have largely succeeded in deterring anti-government campaigners from returning to the streets.

In two clashes Saturday, troops beat and dispersed protesters in Yangon, but for the most part the country's largest city was eerily quiet with security forces outnumbering demonstrators and locking down Buddhist monasteries.

At Bogyoke Aung San market, a major tourist destination also known as Scott's Market, warning shots were fired to disperse about 500 anti-government demonstrators, and an unknown number were arrested, witnesses said.

Nearby at the Pansoedan bridge, another 100 protesters gathered, but when they started to clap their hands a squad of about 50 security forces baton-charged them and arrested about five, witnesses said.

"They beat people so badly," said one Yangon resident who witnessed the scene. "I wonder how these people can bear it."

The crackdown, in which hundreds have been arrested, had already succeeded in reducing the intensity of the protests Friday, when only about 10,000 turned out in Yangon compared with up to 100,000 at the height of the rallies.

However, in the central city of Pakokku, witnesses said that Buddhist monks led thousands of protesters Saturday in a peaceful two-hour march which appeared to have been mounted with the approval of local authorities.

"About 1,000 monks led the protest, and they were followed by more people on bicycles and motorbikes," said a witness.

The recent wave of protests has been Myanmar's biggest since an uprising in 1988 that ended with troops killing some 3,000 people, and the regime's bloody response this week has drawn outrage from around the world.

The UN's Gambari said en route to Myanmar that he was looking forward to "a very fruitful visit" and expected to "meet all the people that I need to meet."

After arriving in Yangon he flew straight to the new capital of Naypyidaw where he was expected to meet with regime leader Senior General Than Shwe.

Myanmar's secretive generals last year shifted the capital from Yangon to Naypyidaw, 450 kilometres (250 miles) to the north, in a move observers believe may have been driven by astrologers' advice or fears of a US military attack.

Gambari has visited Myanmar twice before, and on one occasion was allowed to see opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi, a Nobel Peace Prize laureate who last week was able to briefly meet protesting monks.

The monks who initially led the protests were nowhere to be seen in Yangon after a brutal campaign of arrests, bashings and monastery raids which has shocked the country.

Troops have blockaded many big monasteries, including those in the religious capital of Mandalay in central Myanmar, and monks are only allowed to move around in small groups.

A Western diplomat based in Yangon said Saturday there were reports of divisions within the military on how to handle the crisis in Mandalay, home to the majority of Myanmar's 400,000 monks.

On Friday, diplomats said they had received information from several sources about "acts of insubordination" within the army and that some soldiers were willing to take the side of demonstrators.

The World Food Programme, meanwhile, said the bloody crackdown has hampered efforts to distribute food to 500,000 vulnerable people, mostly children, and appealed to the junta "for access to all parts of the country."

Myanmar's main Internet connection, cut Friday, remained off Saturday, severely reducing the flow of video, photos and first-hand reports of the violence, which helped inform the world of the crisis in the isolated nation.

Sat Sep 29, 8:43 AM ET

NEW DELHI - Myanmar refugees, including children and monks, staged a protest rally in the heart of the Indian capital and asked for India's intervention.

Carrying posters of pro-democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi and banners reading "Down with military regime," the group of around 100 protestors shouted slogans against military rule.

"The junta has been very brutal. We condemn this killing of the monks and demand that it should be stopped immediately," said Neng Boi, a spokeswoman.

Neng Boi said the protestors handed over a letter to the Indian prime minister's office, asking New Delhi to put pressure on the Myanmar regime.

On Friday, Indian parliamentarians from various political parties attacked the Myanmar regime for the crackdown, which has resulted in hundreds of arrests and has left at least 13 dead.

The protest came as India walked a diplomatic tightrope, juggling energy and security concerns with a commitment to democracy.

New Delhi kept the military junta at arm's length after a 1988 crackdown on democracy protests and until the mid-1990s was a staunch supporter of pro-democracy icon Aung San Suu Kyi.

But it changed tack when it realised its security interests in its far-flung rebel-infested northeastern region, which neighbours Myanmar, were in jeopardy.

There are an estimated 1,700 refugees from Myanmar in New Delhi.

Sat Sep 29, 5:19 AM ET

BANGKOK, Thailand - Just last Sunday — when marches led by Buddhist monks drew thousands in Myanmar's biggest cities — Indian Oil Minister Murli Deora was in the country's capital for the signing of oil and gas exploration contracts between state-controlled ONGC Videsh Ltd. and Myanmar's military rulers.

The signing ceremony was an example of how important Myanmar's oil and gas resources have become in an energy-hungry world. Even as Myanmar's military junta intensifies its crackdown on pro-democracy protests, oil companies are jostling for access to the country's largely untapped natural gas and oil fields that activists say are funding a repressive regime.

China — Myanmar's staunchest diplomatic protector and largest trading partner — is particularly keen on investing in the country because of its strategic location for pipelines to feed the Chinese economy's growing thirst for oil and gas.

Companies from South Korea, Thailand and elsewhere also are looking to exploit the energy resources of the desperately poor Southeast Asian country.

France's Total SA and Malaysia's Petroliam Nasional Bhd., or Petronas, currently pump gas from fields off Myanmar's coast through a pipeline to Thailand, which takes 90 percent of Myanmar's gas output, according to Thailand's PTT Exploration & Production PLC.

But investing in Myanmar has brought accusations that petroleum corporations offer economic support to the country's repressive junta, and in some cases are complicit in human rights abuses. This week's bloody clampdowns on protests have escalated the activists' calls for energy companies to pull out of the country.

"They are funding the dictatorship," said Marco Simons, U.S. legal director at EarthRights International, an environmental and human rights group with offices in Thailand and Washington. "The oil and gas companies have been one of the major industries keeping the regime in power."

Demonstrations that started a month ago over a spike in fuel prices have become a broader protest against the military rulers. Ten people were killed in two days of violence this week. Soldiers fired automatic weapons into a crowd of demonstrators in Yangon on Thursday and occupied Buddhist monasteries and cut public Internet access Friday. The moves raised concerns the crackdown on civilians was set to intensify.

Myanmar's proven gas reserves were 19 trillion cubic feet at the end of 2006, according to BP PLC's World Review of Statistics. While that's only about 0.3 percent of the world's total reserves, at current production rates and Thailand's contract price for gas, the deposits are worth almost $2 billion a year in sales over the next 40 years.

"It points to the potential that Myanmar has," said Kang Wu, a fellow at the University of Hawaii's East-West Center in Honolulu.

Altogether, nine foreign oil companies are involved in 16 onshore blocks exploring for oil, enhancing recovery from older fields, or trying to reactivate fields where production has been suspended, according to Total's Web site. A block is an area onshore or offshore in which an oil company is granted exploratory and discovery rights.

Offshore, nine companies, including Total, Petronas, PTTEP, South Korea's Daewoo International Corp., Chinese state-run companies China National Offshore Oil Corp., or CNOOC, and China Petroleum & Chemical Corp., or Sinopec, are exploring or developing 29 blocks, Total said.

Despite economic sanctions against Myanmar by the United States and the European Union, Total continues to operate the Yadana gas field, and Chevron Corp. has a 28 percent stake through its takeover of Unocal. Existing investments were exempt from the investment ban.

Both Total and Chevron broadly defended their business in the nation.

"Far from solving Myanmar's problems, a forced withdrawal would only lead to our replacement by other operators probably less committed to the ethical principles guiding all our initiatives," Jean-Francois Lassalle, vice president of public affairs for Total Exploration & Production, said this week in a statement.

French President Nicholas Sarkozy urged Total this week to refrain from new investment in Myanmar; the French concern said it had not made any capital expenditure there since 1998.

Chevron's interest in the Yadana project is "a long-term commitment that helps meet the critical energy needs of millions in people in the region," said Nicole Hodgson, corporate media adviser for Asia.

Total and former partner Unocal Corp. were accused of cooperating with the military in human rights violations while a pipeline was being built across Myanmar to Thailand in the 1990s. Both companies have denied the accusations but Unocal settled a related lawsuit in the U.S. in 2005, prior to being acquired by Chevron.

Always worried that instability on its border could affect the juggernaut Chinese economy, Beijing has been gently urging Myanmar's leaders to ease the recent strife. On Thursday, it issued a plea for calm, asking the government to "properly deal" with the conflict.

"The Chinese prefer to separate business and politics," said Kuen-Wook Paik, an energy analyst at Chatham House, a think tank in London. "They want to take a neutral stance. They don't want to risk the relationship with the Myanmar authorities."

But China's chief interest, analysts say, may lie in its strategic location as a site for pipelines to move oil and gas shipped from the Middle East to southern China, avoiding the Malacca Straits, which Beijing worries could be closed off by the U.S. Navy in a conflict.

By building a pipeline, "you start stitching together a crisis management capability," said William Overholt, director of the Center for Asia Pacific Policy at RAND Corp., an American think tank.

Beyond interests in exploration blocks in the Bay of Bengal off Myanmar, India also plans to build a pipeline to eastern India, but disagreements with Bangladesh have delayed the plans.

India is not facing any diplomatic pressure to reduce investment in the country, said R.S. Sharma, chairman of the state-run Oil and Natural Gas Corp.

"There is a trade-off between the two: That is a moralistic position and these strategic interests," said Muchkund Dubey, president of the Council for Social Development, a New Delhi think tank, and the former top bureaucrat at India's Foreign Ministry.

Thailand's PTTEP, a partner in Total's Yadana and Petronas' Yetagun gas projects, said in a statement that production of natural gas is at the normal rate, and should not be affected by the unrest.

"It is business as usual," said Sidhichai Jayamt, the company's manager for external relations. "When we have a contract with the government, it doesn't really matter who the government is."

Sat Sep 29, 2:02 AM ET

TOKYO - Japan will urge Myanmar to punish those who are responsible for shooting dead a Japanese journalist in a bloody crackdown on anti-government protests, newspapers said Saturday.

Kenji Nagai, 50, a video-journalist for Tokyo-based APF News, with years of experience covering world hotspots, was the first foreigner killed, when the government sent troops to quell protest in Yangon Thursday.

Japan's Deputy Foreign Minister Mitoji Yabunaka is scheduled to visit Myanmar Sunday to deliver the demand to the military regime, the Yomiuri Shimbun said, quoting government sources.

Japan, one of the leading donors to Myanmar, will consider a ban on Japanese investment in the country after receiving its reaction to the demand, the mass-circulation daily said.

Japan in 2003 suspended low-interest loans for major projects, such as infrastructure, to protest the continued detention of pro-democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi.

But Japan says aid continues for emergencies and humanitarian purposes.

The United States and European nations have decided to tighten sanctions on Myanmar and called for the world to ramp up pressure due to the bloody crackdown.

But Japan, which often jostles for influence with China, Myanmar's main ally, has so far preferred the approach of most regional nations of trying to engage the junta.

The junta's crackdown on the biggest wave of public dissent in nearly 20 years has left at least 13 people dead, hundreds more jailed and sparked international outrage.

Toru Yamaji, president of APF News, left Tokyo on Saturday for Yangon to recover the body of Nagai and his belongings, particularly a video camera Nagai was using at his last gasp.

"It was obvious that a soldier shot him on the back," Yamaji told reporters at Tokyo's Narita Airport before his departure, saying his video may provide details of the killing.

In Tokyo, some 80 demonstrators rallied outside the regime's embassy, carrying pictures of Aung San Suu Kyi and Nagai's body lying on the road against the backdrop of people rushing away from troops.

Separately, some 10 Myanmar nationals began a 42-hour hunger strike in Nagoya, central Japan, to protest the junta's action and call for democratisation of the country, Kyodo News reported.