Intelligence (August 2006)
covering burma and southeast asia
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Intelligence (August 2006)


By THE IRRAWADDY AUGUST, 2006 - VOLUME 14 NO.8


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August 2006

 

Former Top Spook Refused Passport

 

A senior intelligence officer who worked under former prime minister and military intelligence chief Gen Khin Nyunt has been denied a passport, a well-informed source told The Irrawaddy.

 

Former Maj-Gen Kyaw Win, number two man in the disbanded Office of the Chief of Military Intelligence, told close friends that he and his family applied for passports at the Home Affairs Ministry but were told that permission to leave the country could not be granted.

 

Kyaw Win, formerly deputy chief of the OCMI, worked closely with Khin Nyunt, who was toppled in 2004 and is now under house arrest. The bespectacled officer joined military intelligence in the early 1990s and was actively involved in ceasefire negotiations with ethnic insurgents. He was also known to be one of the chief negotiators between opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi and government leaders.

 

Analysts believe that junta leader Than Shwe and senior government officers might suspect that Kyaw Win will seek political asylum if he leaves the country. Since the removal of Khin Nyunt and the dismantling of his OCMI, some military intelligence officers and low ranking officials have quietly left Burma and sought asylum in third countries. The risk of such a valuable and high-profile figure as Kyaw Win also defecting to the west is thought to be behind the passport ban.

 

The soft-spoken and intellectual Kyaw Win has written several essays and articles under different pseudonyms and has published a book of his photographic work. He enjoyed close and cordial relations with Than Shwe and escaped the 2004 purge.



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