BANGKOK - Myanmar's military rulers have
launched a major new crackdown on the country's
main opposition National League for Democracy
(NLD) party, fueling widespread speculation that
the hardline State Peace and Development Council
(SPDC) intends to eliminate its harassed and
beleaguered rival completely within the next 12
months.
According to Burmese-language
notes from a January meeting between Myanmar's
police chief Major-General Khin Yi and top
commanders across the country reviewed by Asia
Times Online, the national police corps was
specifically instructed to undermine the NLD using
stealth and intelligence rather than their traditional
use of brute force.
That message hasn't completely trickled
down, however. Young NLD activists and students
have been detained and questioned, while others
have even been sentenced to several years'
imprisonment on trumped-up charges. Some key
leaders of the student movement have also been
attacked and one recently died from the injuries
sustained during a particularly brutal battering.
In the past, Myanmar's police have been
accused of planting drugs, especially heroin, on
young activists and students, then arresting them
and sentencing them to several years of
imprisonment. These tactics are being complemented
with a more subtle strategy aimed at crippling the
NLD's ability to operate and recruit, according to
the recent police meeting notes.
The junta
has recently stepped up its pressure on the NLD,
harassing more than 50 members into resigning from
the party, including a senior member of the
Mandalay branch. "The authorities have put immense
pressure on them to resign, and they have
succumbed to it," a senior NLD party member said
in an interview. "It is one of the key ways the
SPDC is trying to weaken the party."
Information Minister Brigadier-General
Kyaw Hsan last month warned the NLD that it could
be "outlawed" on charges of cooperating with
so-called terrorist organizations. "The government
has strong evidence that the NLD was involved with
anti-government groups as well as terrorist
organizations that would justify it being declared
illegal," he recently told a press conference.
A Western diplomat based in Yangon said,
"This threat in intended to keep up the pressure
on the NLD's leaders." For now, the diplomat said,
"it suits the SPDC to have the NLD registered, but
impotent".
Myanmar-watchers contend that
the junta's long-term aim is to marginalize
charismatic opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi,
who is currently under house arrest, and move to
eliminate her party as part of its so-called
"national reconciliation" process. To some degree,
the junta has successfully portrayed Suu Kyi, a
winner of the Nobel Peace Prize for her
non-violent approach to political confrontation,
as part of the problem because of her
unwillingness to compromise in some diplomatic
quarters.
The SPDC-led National
Convention, which the NLD has boycotted and the
junta has stacked with pliant representatives from
the country's many ethnic-minority groups, is set
to resume drawing up principles for a new
constitution in November. The junta is expected to
hand power to a civilian incarnation of itself
after the constitution is finally promulgated.
Foreign Minister Nyan Win told his
counterparts at the Association of Southeast Asian
Nations (ASEAN) retreat in Bali last month that
Myanmar's new constitution should be completed by
the end of next year.
"[Senior General]
Than Shwe's strategy is clear, before the
constitution is drafted and put to a referendum,
all the pro-democracy parties and ethnic groups -
both those with ceasefires and those who haven't -
will be targeted and eliminated, or at the very
least made impotent," said Win Min, an independent
Myanmar analyst based in Thailand.
If so,
it's not an altogether new tack. Two years ago,
SPDC leader Than Shwe ordered the junta's Union
Solitary Development Association (USDA) - the
junta's national grassroots organization, which is
tipped to become the SPDC's political arm after
the new constitution comes into force - to harass
NLD members violently across the country.
In a confidential government document
obtained by Asia Times Online, Than Shwe ordered
the USDA to "eliminate the activities of the
opposition; destroy the opposition's business so
that they lose their property and market; create
splits among opposition family members; get
opposition members to sever their relationship
with the group; and frighten and intimidate the
most stubborn members of the opposition to flee
from its membership".
That hard-knocks
plan was hatched soon after the savage May 2003
attack on Suu Kyi's traveling caravan, where USDA
thugs killed scores, if not hundreds, of her
supporters. The NLD leader had been traveling in
the northern region of the country to reinvigorate
her party, and massive crowds had gathered to hear
her speak.
Aung Lynn Htut, Myanmar's
ambassador to Washington, defected to the US this
year. He has since spoken out about Than Shwe's
plan to obliterate the NLD by the end of the year.
After his defection, the former top SPDC diplomat
told opposition scholars based in the United
States and the United Kingdom that he had received
reliable information that the junta had ordered
the "routing" of NLD members and their families.
Analysts say the increased harassment and
intimidation of the NLD are being driven by both
internal and external factors. "Than Shwe has
become increasingly concerned over the last months
of the possibility of pro-democracy demonstrations
erupting, especially in Rangoon [Yangon]," Win Min
said. "That's one of the reasons for retreating to
the new capital, Pyinmana."
Sources close
to the SPDC's top leadership say that Than Shwe
has apprehensively monitored recent international
and regional news from his fortified bunker in
Pyinmana, including the street rallies that last
month drove Thai Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra
to abandon his political post, and Nepalese King
Gyanendra's recent acquiescence to more violent
street protests where demonstrators called for a
return to democracy.
These events have
"rocked the old man, who now more than ever fears
a repeat of the mass pro-democracy demonstrations
of 1988 which forced Ne Win to stand down", said a
close confidant of Than Shwe. In response, the
SPDC leader has reportedly ordered police to crack
down on even the faintest signs of political
ferment.
Than Shwe, whom the confidant
said surfs the Internet every morning in his
military headquarters, had been particularly
piqued by the NLD's new initiatives and renewed
assertiveness. The NLD has increased its political
activities coinciding with SPDC Prime Minister
General Soe Win recent telling Malaysian Foreign
Minister Syed Hamid Alber that Suu Kyi was now
"irrelevant" to Myanmar's political future.
According to NLD leaders, the party has
recently come around to the idea that Myanmar's
often splintered pro-democracy groups need to
present a much more united front against the SPDC.
As such, they have recently made overtures to
other democratic groups, including student- and
ethnic-minority-led political parties that operate
along the country's war-torn border areas,
according to diplomatic sources in Yangon.
In recent months, the NLD has held a
series of grassroots meetings across the country
and the party's senior provincial officials
recently traveled to Yangon for high-level
consultations. One new move: policy review
committees were recently established as the NLD
looks for ways to press its agenda more
effectively while highlighting the SPDC's many
policy failures.
"Our latest policy is
focusing on how to solve the country's
humanitarian crisis through dialogue and
compromise," NLD spokesman Myint Thein said in an
interview.
Indeed, the NLD in February
offered the SPDC a sort of olive branch through a
press statement released to coincide with Union
Day, which offered to recognize the military
regime as Myanmar's "de facto" government on the
condition that the junta eventually allowed a
"people's parliament" to convene.
"The
SPDC would be in charge of the transitional period
until a government was formed by the parliament
made up of the representatives elected in the
national elections held on May 27, 1990," the
statement said. The NLD won more than 80% of the
vote in that election, which the junta declared
null and void.
Typically, the SPDC at
first ignored the NLD's compromise. Last month,
Information Minister Kyaw Hsan flat out rejected
the fig leaf, saying that the SPDC would not hold
any dialogue with the NLD outside of the national
convention, which the NLD has boycotted as
undemocratic. "The NLD no longer enjoys the
support of the people and it does not represent
them anymore," Kyaw Hsan said.
The NLD's
new drive to reassert itself has reportedly
enraged Than Shwe, who has sanctioned an all-out
campaign to crush the party. "There is a definite
trend here: when the NLD confronts the junta and
reminds them that they are in effect the only
legitimate government, the SPDC reaction is to
pressure and further weaken the NLD," said
political analyst Win Min.
He sees
parallels to when the SPDC cracked down on the NLD
in 1999 and 2000 after the opposition party
established the Committee Representing the
People's Parliament and moved to convene the body
on the authority of the SPDC-annulled 1990
election results.
Then, many NLD members
of parliament and senior members were arrested or
forced to resign their positions in the party, and
many fled the country. NLD offices were raided and
shuttered, with SPDC officials seizing the party's
internal documents.
"We expect worse to
follow as the military authorities go all-out to
eliminate us by the end of the year," said a
senior NLD official on condition of anonymity
because of his fear of reprisals for speaking to
the foreign media.
For the international
community, any attempt to de-register and abolish
the NLD would be widely condemned, even by the
SPDC's erstwhile allies in China and Thailand. The
SPDC's recent statements insisting that the NLD
and Suu Kyi were irrelevant to the country's
political future have gone over like a lead
balloon inside the 10-member ASEAN.
More
important, among Myanmar's people, judging by the
increasingly disfranchised chatter of its
population, the battered and bruised NLD remains
the country's only legitimate political entity and
real hope for democratic change. As the SPDC moves
to eliminate the NLD forcibly, the ruling junta
could cause itself more problems than it solves.
Larry Jagan previously covered
Myanmar politics for the BBC. He is currently a
freelance journalist based in Bangkok.
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