Myanmar tangles, tangos with the
UN By Larry Jagan
BANGKOK - Rejecting outside intervention,
Myanmar's ruling generals have extended
pro-democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi's detention
order. The decision put paid to rising media
expectations that the United Nations would be able
to resume its previous behind-the-scenes mediation
efforts at breaking the country's political
deadlock and will likely result in Myanmar's
impasse appearing on the UN Security Council's
agenda.
A visit by UN undersecretary
general for political affairs Ibrahim Gambari on
May 18-20 had raised hopes that the ruling State
Peace and Development Council (SPDC) might release
Suu Kyi and renew contacts with her main
opposition party, the National League for
Democracy (NLD). During the UN official's
three-day visit, he met with Suu Kyi - the first
visitor she has been allowed
to
receive apart from her personal physician for more
than two years.
In Yangon diplomatic
circles, there was never any doubt that Suu Kyi's
detention would be extended. The recent
anniversaries of the NLD's overwhelming 1990
electoral victory and the May 2003 attacks by
pro-government thugs on Suu Kyi's caravan, which
many diplomats have characterized as an
assassination attempt on her life, are still open
sore points with the junta.
But SPDC
leader General Than Shwe is under extraordinary
international pressure to change his government's
repressive tack and adopt a more flexible approach
toward the opposition, including the lifting of
limitations on Suu Kyi's movements.
After the excitement following Gambari's visit
and the disappointment of Suu Kyi's
detention-order extension, some senior diplomats believe that
the junta will gradually lift certain restrictions
on Suu Kyi, including more liberal visitation
rights, in an attempt to deflect mounting US and
other Western criticism.
Such
a concession would not represent a
breakthrough, however, but rather a return to the situation
when Suu Kyi was placed under house arrest in
2000 after attempting to travel outside the
former capital Yangon to meet with provincial-based
NLD party members against the junta's orders.
During that period of detention, Suu Kyi was
allowed frequent foreign visitors. The junta
itself sporadically sent delegations to secretly
visit her in a series of UN-promoted
"confidence-building measures", which later broke
down.
Significantly, Gambari's visit
was made at the behest of the SPDC. The UN's
two previous special envoys to Myanmar, Razali
Ismail and Paulo Pinheiro, were both frequently
denied access to the country. Razali, who
was instrumental in urging the hardline regime
to announce its own "roadmap to democracy" and
also convinced the junta in 2002 to free Suu Kyi
from house arrest, resigned this year in
frustration at the lack of progress.
Yangon-based diplomats say that
Gambari's visit was carefully stage-managed by the
junta, aimed mainly to demonstrate a degree of
openness and to generate some positive publicity at a
time when the US is angling to put Myanmar's
political impasse on the UN Security Council's
agenda. Gambari's high-profile visit also helped to dispel
recent reports that the Nobel Peace Prize
laureate's health had deteriorated while in
detention.
Gambari told Yangon-based
diplomats that during discussions with Suu Kyi
that she had reaffirmed her willingness to take
part in a dialogue with the SPDC about the
country's political future. "She feels she has a
contribution to make, and I hope she will be
allowed to make it," Gambari said during his
briefing with diplomats at the end of his visit.
On the other side, General Than Shwe told
Gambari that the SPDC would look for ways to work
with the NLD and expressed his grave reservations
that Myanmar might be placed on the Security
Council's agenda, according to diplomats at the
same briefing. Gambari reportedly told Than Shwe
that he needed to convince the international
community that his government was serious about
introducing democratic reforms and respecting
human rights.
The envoy also strongly
suggested that the regime should immediately
release key political prisoners, naming in
particular aging journalist Win Tin and labor
activist Su Su Nway. The envoy also raised the
UN's reservations about new government
restrictions on international aid organizations
and UN agencies in the country, including the
International Labor Organization and the
International Committee of the Red Cross, which
stopped its prison visits last year after
experiencing official harassment.
The
official UN statement issued at the end of
Gambari's visit also said the envoy raised general
human-rights issues with the generals, including
the recent crackdown on the NLD and military
attacks on the ethnic Karen rebels, which has seen
more than 10,000 villagers flee their homes, while
thousands have sought refuge in neighboring
Thailand.
Open and shut tactics The junta has a long history of playing cat
and mouse with the UN, and the Gambari overture
fits that same past pattern of such tactics that
have kept the UN on its heels. Now, the political
situation in Myanmar is also playing into larger
Asian balance of power politics, pitching the US
and Western Europe against China and an
increasingly assertive Russia. Internal SPDC
documents also show that the junta is concerned
about a possible US-led invasion, similar to the
preemptive intervention in Iraq.
Gambari's visit with Suu Kyi was
arranged abruptly after he met with Than Shwe and
several other key generals in the new capital Pyinmana.
"On the eve of the visit to Pyinmana the
delegation was thoroughly depressed as they were
being treated like grandchildren and did not
expect to have an opportunity to see [Suu Kyi]," a
UN official, requesting anonymity, told Asia Times
Online.
If Than Shwe intends to include
the NLD in the national reconciliation process,
political analysts contend that he would have
offered some sort of concrete concession for
Gambari to take back to the UN Security Council.
He notably didn't, apart from allowing Gambari to
visit Suu Kyi, and it's unlikely that allowing Suu
Kyi easier visitation rights will take the US off
its confrontational course.
Washington,
which has recently referred to Myanmar as an
"outpost of tyranny", is pushing the Security
Council to take up Myanmar's political crisis as a
matter of urgency. Last December, the Security
Council held a closed-door briefing at which
Gambari presented a very distressed view of the
situation there, according to diplomats familiar
with the situation.
Since then, the junta
has sought the support of China and Russia, both
of which have veto power on the Security Council.
Beijing and Moscow have told the SPDC that, in
principle, they support its position, but that the
generals should do more to help them take up their
defense at the UN. Behind the scenes, China has
urged the junta to do more to engage the
international community, and Beijing urged the
junta to receive Gambari, according to a
government official in Beijing.
Nuanced
sticks, juicier carrots Than Shwe has also
agreed to hold discussions with the UN's team
based in Yangon, and he notably appointed the
hardline labor minister to serve as the junta's
point man. During Gambari's discussions, the UN
country team coordinator, Charles Petrie, stressed
that political progress would be reciprocated with
increased commitments of aid.
"There was no offer of
additional assistance as such, rather I made the
point that political progress would make
attracting more institutional support easier on
the issues affecting the people of the country,"
Petrie told Asia Times Online in an e-mail
interview. "I also made the observation that
Myanmar was only receiving aid amounting to US$2-3
per capita compared with 20 to 30 times more in
Cambodia and Laos."
The
overture, diplomats say, was not meant to be
perceived as a reprise of the UN's 1990s promise
of $5 billion in aid and infrastructure budgets.
Then, the regime had opened its doors to some
foreign investment and saw the UN's offer as a
bribe, which it dismissed out of hand. More than a
decade later, Myanmar is now in a far worse
economic situation than it was then and
desperately needs new humanitarian aid and
investment.
The SPDC was reportedly
stunned when the UN-sponsored Global Fund to fight
HIV/AIDs, Malaria and Tuberculosis abruptly pulled
out of the country under political pressure,
particularly from Washington. A replacement fund,
largely financed by the European Union, is on the
verge of being launched, and a move toward
political reform would give it more traction with
donors.
"There is no doubt that the UN
envoy's meeting with Suu Kyi was an important
concession, but we will have to wait and see
whether it's a sign of more to come," a Western
diplomat told Asia Times Online.
Senior
diplomats close to the UN's previous mediation
efforts, all of which failed, contend that the
international community should be more imaginative
in supporting the SPDC's tentative reform
overtures.
"We did not do
enough to support [former SPDC secretary No
1] General Khin Nyunt at the time," former UN
envoy to Myanmar Razali Ismail told Asia Times Online
in a recent interview. "It was a missed
opportunity to further the cause of democratic reform
in Burma."
For good reasons, many
Myanmar-watchers are apprehensive this could
happen again. Those involved in the UN's renewed
efforts to encourage the junta to adopt more
flexibility in negotiations say they now favor a
more nuanced carrot-and-stick approach. While the
US stresses pressure and sanctions, the broad
international community remains divided, with
China, India and Russia favoring a more
conciliatory tack.
"What is needed is
something like the six-party talks on the Korean
Peninsula," said a senior Asian diplomat, who has
followed Myanmar's politics for decades. "The US,
EU, ASEAN, China, India and Russia should hold
talks behind closed-doors with [Myanmar]," he
said. "Whereas the Bangkok process failed, a
Kunming process may hold the key to changing the
generals' resistance to reform."
Larry Jagan previously covered
Myanmar politics for the BBC. He is currently a
freelance journalist based in Bangkok.
(Copyright 2006 Asia Times Online Ltd.
All rights reserved. Please contact us about sales, syndication and republishing
.)
