The unseen force
By Richard S Ehrlich

BANGKOK - Muted in her lakeside mansion in Myanmar by a decade of house arrest, the world's most famous political prisoner, Aung San Suu Kyi, scored a psychological victory when she helped force the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) to ditch her country's military regime.

Myanmar had been anxiously squelching international condemnation of its human-rights violations - extrajudicial executions, torture and forced labor - while hoping to be the next host of ASEAN, a mostly profit-minded group that wants good relations with the United States, Europe and other trading partners.

ASEAN includes Myanmar, Laos, Thailand, Cambodia, Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, Brunei, the Philippines and Vietnam, and rotates its chairmanship.

Several of these countries enjoy lucrative investments in Myanmar, while shrugging off US-led demands to boycott the country in an effort to pressure its unelected military leaders to step down.

Suu Kyi's checkmate against Myanmar, however, was revealed on Tuesday when ASEAN issued a concluding, 7,600-word "joint communique" at its 38th-ministerial meeting in Vientiane, Laos, which said: "We have been informed by our colleague, Foreign Minister U Nyan Win of Myanmar, that the government of Myanmar had decided to relinquish its turn to be the chair of ASEAN in 2006 because it would want to focus its attention on the ongoing national reconciliation and democratization process."

The face-saving communique continues, "We also express our sincere appreciation to the government of Myanmar for not allowing its national preoccupation to affect ASEAN's solidarity and cohesiveness."

Myanmar's humiliation at not being able to host the next showcase gathering of its neighbors was partially cloaked by the communique's language, which did not name Suu Kyi.

Behind the scenes, diplomats and analysts said ASEAN did not want to be tainted by Myanmar's pariah status and be spurned by Washington, the European Union and other governments because that would make it difficult for ASEAN to clinch deals with the international community.

Myanmar officials will now go home and push compliant supporters into writing a new constitution, with loopholes granting immunity to the military against prosecution, according to dissidents from Myanmar. When Myanmar convinces ASEAN it will not embarrass the organization, the country will be allowed to host the next conference, appears to be the message from ASEAN.

But Suu Kyi and her limping National League for Democracy (NLD) party have refused to participate in the regime's "national reconciliation and democratization process" because the new constitution will also allow the military to continue dominating Myanmar, which is mainland Southeast Asia's biggest country.

The election "would surely give a majority of seats to the government and its affiliated parties", Thailand's Nation newspaper noted in an editorial examining ASEAN's conundrum.

The regime insists that Suu Kyi incites violence when she is allowed onto the streets because her supporters and opponents indulge in bloody skirmishes. The government also denounces her as a patsy being sinisterly used by Washington and other foreign powers to infiltrate Myanmar and seize its vast natural resources and strategic location.

"Some big powers are putting pressures on the Tatmadaw [military] government with the intention of installation of a puppet government," the regime's New Light of Myanmar newspaper said on July 5. "She is a power maniac," it said.

But the slender 60-year-old woman, confined under house arrest, ironically helped make Myanmar's officials go home from the ASEAN meeting, unable to strut a public stage.

If she had not been languishing under house arrest, the US, European Union and other governments would not have been able to loudly demand her release, and point to her as a popular symbol of Myanmar's repression.

And if she had not been staunchly opposing the regime's bid to write a new constitution and then hold fresh elections, Myanmar's generals could have already orchestrated their "national reconciliation and democratization process" and not be in trouble with ASEAN.

In the eyes of Washington and the European community, true national reconciliation and democracy can only be achieved with her release and the rightful placement in power of her NLD, in keeping with its 1990 landslide election victory, which the generals usurped.

Myanmar would also have had to release hundreds of other political prisoners, allow a democracy with freedom of the press and other checks and balances, and end its extensive human-rights abuses.

As long as the Nobel Peace laureate suffers house arrest, Myanmar will remain a vulnerable sore spot for ASEAN, which the US and Europe can poke at and which ASEAN cannot ignore.

Even if freed, she has vowed to continue her opposition to the regime's "national reconciliation" scheme, which includes the government's manipulation of the text of a new constitution, restrictions over the scope of a new election, and disregard for the 1990 poll results.

Despite being suppressed, Suu Kyi's highly vocal role in Myanmar has resulted in a stumbling block for ASEAN, an organization increasingly weary of being tainted by a wayward member.

In January, she also scored a victory when US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice castigated Myanmar as an "outpost of tyranny" alongside North Korea, Iran, Belarus and Cuba. Rice declined to attend this week's ASEAN meeting of foreign ministers, and sent an underling, in a move widely seen in Southeast Asia as a "snub".

Richard S Ehrlich is a Bangkok-based journalist from San Francisco, California. He has reported news from Asia since 1978 and is co-author of Hello My Big Big Honey!, a non-fiction book of investigative journalism. He received a master's degree from Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism.

(Copyright 2005 Richard S Ehrlich)