Page 2 of 2 Myanmar's generals win
one By Clive Parker
agenda, the discussion produced little in
the way of solutions. Russia and China produced
few ideas toward a new approach.
Indonesia, the only Association of
Southeast Asian Nations member of the council,
proposed greater cooperation with the military
regime. South Africa, which along with Russia and
China opposed the resolution, proposed that other
UN organs, namely
the
new Human Rights Commission, were better placed to
address the situation.
Notably, none of
these approaches has worked in the past - and
after nearly two decades since annulling the
results of the 1990 democratic elections which the
military regime resoundingly lost, Myanmar's
ruling generals now maintain one of the most
repressive regime's in the world, with an
estimated 1,200 political prisoners, including
former Nobel Laureate Aung San Suu Kyi.
More recently, the junta has upped the
tempo of its military campaign against armed
ethnic minority groups, against whom they stand
accused by rights groups of using rape as a weapon
against women civilians and targeting food
supplies of the civilian population to starve
armed insurgents out of their jungle redoubts.
Those brutal actions have caused a surge
of refugees into nearby Thailand, where over
145,000 displaced people are now in makeshift
camps - lending particular credence to the US's
and UK's original assertion that Myanmar's poor
rights record represented a threat to regional
peace and security. So, too, do recent independent
reports outlining the junta's tacit support and
enrichment from the narcotics trade - charges the
military government strongly denies.
Those
monitoring the run-up to last week's vote contend
that the majority of UN member states see few
alternatives to future Security Council action
against the military regime, which in the past has
variably welcomed then spurned UN
behind-the-scenes efforts to mediate a process of
national reconciliation between the government and
the pro-democracy political opposition.
Predictably, perhaps, the failure of the
resolution has provided Myanmar's generals, which
strongly lobbied Russia and China not to support
the resolution, the occasion to claim a rare, if
not temporary, diplomatic victory. Addressing the
council after the vote, Kyaw Tint Swe, Myanmar's
ambassador to the UN, thanked both Russia and
China for their support, referring to resolution
references on human-rights abuses, drug
cultivation, HIV/AIDS and forced labor in his
country as "patently false".
Meanwhile,
the state mouthpiece newspaper, The New Light of
Myanmar, described the failed vote as a "victory
of the people of the international community and
the people of Myanmar who love truthfulness". The
harder truth is that the diplomatic win for the
junta is a loss for its own people and promises,
for better or worse, to accentuate competition
between China, Russia and the US for regional
influence.
Clive Parker is a
Thailand-based freelance journalist.
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