If Sunday's elections in Burma were supposed to change the way the Burmese people regard their military regime, they failed resoundingly. Early reports suggest turnout nationwide may have been as low as 35%.
Restrictions on campaigning and fielding candidates guaranteed that the military would retain control of the new parliament. But even those safeguards weren't enough for the skittish ruling generals.According to reports, voters arrived at polling stations on Sunday to find ballot boxes stuffed with countless "advance" votes. In the weeks leading to the elections, army representatives harassed opposition parties and cajoled, threatened and bribed people into voting for junta-backed candidates.
Then again, Burma's rulers didn't go to the trouble of holding these elections for the benefit of their own people. Burma's Asian neighbors have long sought an opportunity to justify stepping up their trade and investment in the resource-rich country, and even a sham election might be a good enough first step toward international legitimacy for their purposes.
China's government sent its good tidings in advance of Sunday's vote: A Foreign Ministry spokesman declared late last week that Beijing "hopes to see a smooth election as well as continuous progress in democracy and development." India and Thailand, two other bordering countries that do brisk business in Burma, have voiced similar sentiments.
They may have reason to regret being so sanguine. Already, the election seems to have re-ignited the regime's long-running civil war with ethnic-minority groups, some of which hold sway in states along the country's borders. Armed conflict has driven hundreds of thousands to seek refuge in neighboring countries, and escalated fighting may prove to be a significant turnoff for foreign business. Two planned pipelines for carrying gas and crude oil into southern China run directly through war-torn regions.
Even though voting in many minority-dominated areas had been canceled under various pretexts, extensive violence was reported along the border with Thailand on Sunday. By the end of the day, the government declared a nationwide state of emergency. An observer along the Thai border told the Bangkok Post that the ethnic splinter groups were not likely to accept the new government any more than they did the old one: "After the election, the war will start."
Then there's beleaguered Nobel laureate and pro-democracy activist Aung San Suu Kyi, whose house-arrest sentence is scheduled to end Saturday. The National League for Democracy, the party she led to overwhelming victory in the country's last election in 1990, was officially dissolved for refusing to field any candidates on this year's ballot. But she remains a potent symbol of opposition, which is why the regime may try to use her release as another ploy to relieve some of the pressure to clean up its act.
That's why it's critical that Western nations not let Burma fall out of public view. So far, the signs aren't encouraging. An international Commission of Inquiry into the regime's human-rights abuses, floated earlier this year as a way to sow divisions within the junta, may have already lost momentum. A draft resolution on human rights in Burma, presented last month to the U.N. General Assembly, made no mention of a commission.
It remains to be seen whether the junta will embark on economic reform and opening to build more good will with its small circle of Asian friends. A massive asset privatization earlier this year, when huge swathes of state wealth were sold off to regime cronies, could mean that the junta hopes to follow China's path toward a liberalized economy with centralized political control. But it may just as easily have represented a move to ensure that those officers who gave up their commissions to run for civilian posts in the new legislature would keep their share of state treasure.
Burma's generals gambled that they could harness the trappings of democracy for their own ends without sparking unrest. The Burmese people have put paid to the latter hope. It's up to the outside world to put paid to the former.