Here have been disturbing signs recently of a penchant in the State Department to whitewash the brutal military junta that rules Burma. Last month the US charge d'affaires in Rangoon told a newspaper controlled by the junta that the regime ''has done a good job on counter narcotics.'' The diplomat, Carmen Martinez, even said: ''We can understand how it is difficult to have a democracy in a multiracial and multireligious society.''
This was one of several hints that some officials in the Bush administration may have been maneuvering to change Burma's designation as a major producer of narcotics.
This is a priority for the junta and the lobbying firm it has hired to alter its deserved reputation for cruelty and criminality. The next step would be to end US sanctions against new investment in Burma. These sanctions are meant to last as long as the regime refuses to engage in genuine political dialogue with the Nobel Peace Prize laureate Aung San Suu Kyi, whose National League for Democracy won 392 of 485 seats in Parliament in a 1990 election that the junta has refused to honor.
The junta has not stopped protecting drug lords and their money-laundering operations. In recent years there has also been an explosion in methamphetamines, which are produced under the junta's jurisdiction and exported to neighboring Thailand with calamitous consequences.
Within Burma, a combination of drug use, poverty, and scanty health care has fostered a rapid rise in rates of HIV and AIDS. For Burma's neighbors, the catastrophe wrought by the junta has become a multiform regional threat. The dictatorship's suppression of a legitimately elected government has led, step by step, to a flood of deadly exports: drugs, AIDS, and cross-border violence.
One of the junta's most horrific crimes has been its army's systematic and widespread raping of women and girls from ethnic minorities such as the Shan and the Karen. To its credit, the State Department's Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor sent an investigator to the Thai-Burma border in August to evaluate reports by local human rights groups of hundreds of Shan women and girls being brutally raped, most often by officers. A State Department report confirming the earlier reports was declassified last month.
Congress should hold hearings on the junta's human rights abuses and focus on the use of rape to terrorize civilians. With the United States about to regain its seat on the UN Human Rights Commission in Geneva, President Bush should ask for a UN inquiry into all the junta's human rights violations. And to help bring about a democratic regime change in Burma, all imports from that country should be banned, at least until the junta engages in a dialogue with Suu Kyi that can lead to the revival of democratic government.