10 Years On, Burma Waits for Reforms
John Brandon
IHT- Saturday, December 8, 2001
WASHINGTON When the Burmese opposition leader Daw Aung San Suu Kyi was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize 10 years ago this Saturday, she was unable to go to Stockholm to receive it because she was under house arrest in Rangoon. In many respects little has changed in Burma since then.
In September 2000, in an attempt to defy a ban to meet with political supporters from the party she leads, the National League for Democracy, Daw Aung San Suu Kyi was placed under de facto house arrest by the military regime. She has not been seen publicly for the past 15 months.
Although Daw Aung San Suu Kyi has been out of view, she weighs heavily on the minds of the Burmese military leadership. Since October 2000, she and the regime have been engaged in a "dialogue" to help build confidence between the two sides and end the 11-year-old political impasse that has caused so many problems for Burma.
Although details of the dialogue have not been made public, the junta in the past year has released 200 political prisoners, allowed the league to reopen some of their party offices, and stopped making disparaging remarks about Daw Aung San Suu Kyi in the state-run media. It has also given lip service to the possibility of establishing a human rights commission. In turn, the league has tempered its criticism of the regime in a good faith effort to facilitate the talks.
The next step is to move beyond confidence building and allow Daw Aung San Suu Kyi and the league to engage freely in political activity. But in recent weeks concern has been growing that the negotiations between the two sides have stalled. Although the league is a legally registered political party, the military has been successful in marginalizing it. More than 800 league members remain in prison; those who are not are prohibited from using photocopying and fax machines, and must get official permission to hold public gatherings.
Paulo Sergio Pinheiro, the UN human rights envoy, stated recently that top league officials are "subject to systematic surveillance by police and military intelligence personnel." Consequently, the military regime no longer threatens to dissolve the league as it once did because the generals believe they have undercut the party's ability to operate effectively.
If the dialogue between Daw Aung San Suu Kyi and the generals is to progress, difficult issues must be addressed. In particular, there is the question of whether the generals will hold a new election or finally recognize the results of the 1990 election in which the league won 82 percent of the parliamentary seats. The generals have hinted that a transitional government composed of military officers and civilians, perhaps even some league members, could emerge.
Razali Ismail, the UN special envoy to Burma, recently spent a week in Rangoon trying to iron out an acceptable compromise between the two sides so that a transitional government might be formed. It is unclear whether Daw Aung San Suu Kyi and the league will make such a compromise. But after more than a decade of political stasis, they may conclude that modest reform is better than no reform at all.
Forty years of economic mismanagement and political oppression under a succession of military governments has denied the Burmese the quality of life they deserve. Burma suffers from a plethora of problems, from a shattered economy and failing health and educational systems to ethnic minority unrest and the proliferation of drug addiction and AIDS.
If Burma is to ever reach its potential, it will need to attract foreign assistance. However, any foreign aid is contingent on the military regime taking concrete steps towards political reform and making a genuine effort to work with Daw Aung San Suu Kyi and ethnic minorities toward national reconciliation.
A failure on the part of the regime to move this process forward will show that its dialogue with Daw Aung San Suu Kyi is nothing more than a delaying tactic. It will make the future task of social and political reconstruction in Burma that much more difficult.
The writer, a Southeast Asia specialist, is assistant director of The Asia Foundation's Washington office. He contributed this personal comment to the International Herald Tribune.