CHIANG MAI - If the United Nations special
envoy to Myanmar, Ibrahim Gambari, is to be
believed, the situation in the military run
country has changed for the better in the past few
weeks, with the junta taking a qualitatively
different line from when it cracked down on street
demonstrators in late September.
Reporting
to the UN Security Council on his recent visit to
Myanmar on November 13, he urged its members to
give his "diplomatic effort time to succeed". But,
as he was speaking in
New
York, in Yangon and other Myanmar cities arrests
of dissidents were still in full swing. On the
exact same day, Su Su Nway, a prominent female
activist who had been in hiding for several weeks,
was picked up by the secret police as she was
trying to convey a message to another UN official,
human rights envoy Paulo Pinheiro, who just had
arrived in the country.
A few days before
the arrest of Su Su Nway, U Gambira, a Buddhist
monk and leader of the All-Burma Monks Alliance,
was also apprehended. He was one of the leaders of
the monk-led, anti-government protests in
September, and had been in hiding since the
military's armed crackdown on September 26-27. U
Gambira has been charged with treason, the
punishment for which is life in prison or death.
The monk's father and brother have also been
arrested while his mother and three other family
members were interrogated by military authorities.
In the old capital Yangon, eyewitnesses
reported seeing young people recently being
apprehended in one of the city's markets as they
were handing out leaflets. And, at night and
pre-dawn morning - usually around 1 am - secret
police officers continue to raid people's homes
and drag suspected dissidents away.
Those
actions give the lie to Gambari's statement on his
arrival in Singapore from Myanmar on November 8
that "we now have a process going which will lead
to a dialog between the government and Daw Aung
San Suu Kyi". He also brought with him a statement
from the detained opposition leader, saying that
she was ready to cooperate with the country's
military rulers "to pursue national
reconciliation". She may have said that, but of
course that is nothing new.
Aung San Suu
Kyi has been calling for a dialog with the
country's rulers since she and other pro-democracy
politicians on August 15, 1988, delivered an open
letter to then secretary of the Council of State,
Kyaw Htin, suggesting the formation of a "People's
Consultative Committee" to solve the political
crisis that was then engulfing the country. She
has also met with Myanmar's military leaders on
several previous occasions, the first time in
1994, even before she was released from her first
round of house arrest in 1995.
The problem
is that Aung San Suu Kyi, the UN, and the ruling
State Peace and Development Council (SPDC) are not
speaking the same language. The official
mouthpiece newspaper The New Light of Myanmar
wrote in its November 10 edition that "while
putting energy into the democratization process,
the government has been making efforts for the
national reconsolidation [sic]".
And, "As
part of efforts for transition to democracy by
implementing the seven-step road map [to
democracy] and ensuring peace and stability and
bringing about development of the country ...
Minister of Labor U Aung Kyi was assigned [to
meet] Daw Aung San Suu Kyi." From these public
statements it would seem that nearly nothing has
changed. The junta's "seven-step road map" is
designed to perpetuate military rule in Myanmar,
and "national reconsolidation" is hardly the same
as national reconciliation.
Failed
interventions Despite his bravado in the
Security Council, it is highly unlikely that
Gambari will achieve more than a host of other UN
envoys who have over the past 17 years visited
Myanmar and failed to achieve any progress towards
more democracy. Consider the UN's record. The
first "independent expert" the UN sent to the
country to "study" violations of human rights was
Sadako Ogata, a Japanese professor who later went
on to become the United Nations High Commissioner
for Refugees.
The report she submitted to
the UN's Commission of Human Rights on December
27, 1990, was unusually bland for a rights
advocate. "General elections had been held that
year in May, resulting in a landslide victory for
Aung San Suu Kyi's National League for Democracy
(NLD) party and Ogata concluded in her report that
"it is not in dispute that it will be the task of
the elected representatives of the Pyithu Hluttaw
(National Assembly) to draft a new constitution,
on the basis of which a new government will be
formed. At present, however ... it is not clear
when the Hluttaw will be convened for that
purpose".
In fact, it was never convened.
Instead the government began arresting elected MPs
and three years later formed a "constituent
assembly" consisting of mostly handpicked people
to draw up a new constitution, a task which just
after 14 years has been completed as the first of
seven steps in the junta's "road map".
In
1992, the UN appointed another Japanese academic,
Yozo Yokota, "special rapporteur on the situation
of human rights" in Myanmar - a step higher than
an "independent expert". He compiled some critical
reports, but later resigned in 1996 according to a
statement by a UN spokesman at the time, "because
of planned career changes in Tokyo" as well as
"frustration at the lack of logistical support
from human-rights staff in Geneva", where the
Human Rights Commission is based.
His
successor, Rajsoomer Lallah, a former chief
justice of Mauritius, was not even allowed by the
Myanmar government to visit the country during the
four years he served as "special human rights
rapporteur". According to Jose Diaz, then
spokesman for the UN Commission for Human Rights,
Lallah had "expressed frustration ... with the
little change that he has seen in the country he
follows".
Lallah was succeeded by Paulo
Pinheiro, a Brazilian law expert who in the
beginning was upbeat about his work, including his
belief that he was free to talk to political
prisoners without interference from the
authorities. But his rather positive reports were
severely criticized by NLD spokesman U Lwin, among
others. Pinheiro changed his tune completely when
in March 2003 he discovered a microphone beneath
the table at which he was interviewing a political
prisoner in Yangon's infamous Insein jail. He
immediately left the country in disgust and was
not allowed back until now. In the meantime,
perhaps partially to protect his own credibility,
he has become a vocal critic of the Myanmar
military regime.
Stonewalled
envoys Then there were the several special
envoys, sent not by the UN's Human Rights
Commission, but by the secretary general himself.
Peruvian diplomat Alvar De Soto made six fruitless
visits to Myanmar between February 1995 and
October 1999. He was succeeded in 2000 by
Malaysian diplomat Razali Ismail, who also began
his mission by believing that he could persuade
the Myanmar generals to be more cooperative with
the political opposition inside the country and
the outside international community.
In
November 2001, Razali said he was "hopeful that
some significant progress could be made in the
near future". The following year, he was
instrumental in securing the release from house
arrest of Aung San Suu Kyi, which prompted him to
say: "I am delighted for her and the country ...
we have to give them time. Don't expect things to
happen immediately. I think there is a commitment
on the part of the military to make the transition
[to civilian rule]."
But nothing really
changed and in May 2003 Aung San Suu Kyi was
locked up again after government thugs attacked
her and her entourage at Depayin, a remote village
in northern Myanmar. An unknown number of NLD
supporters were killed in the melee. She was
nearly killed and later escorted back to her
private residence in Yangon, where she has
remained under house arrest ever since.
Razali quit his post in January 2006 after
he was refused entry to Myanmar for nearly two
consecutive years. By then it emerged that his
mission to Myanmar had perhaps not been entirely
altruistic. Apart from being a Malaysian
government civil servant, he is also in private
business as the chairman and 30% stockowner of
IRIS Technologies, a company that during one of
his visits managed to secure a contract with the
Myanmar government for high-tech passports with
biometric features.
A conflict of
interests? Not according to the UN, which came to
his rescue by saying that his kind of part-time
contract with the world organization did not
"carry any restrictions on business
activities".Yet because of the lack of
transparency and accountability, and the absence
of any investigative and critical media inside the
country, Myanmar provides plenty of opportunities
for private business deals. That's true even for
some UN officials and diplomats who are based
there, such as the smuggling of antiques in
diplomatic and UN bags and the sale of duty-free
goods on the black market.
For the junta,
manipulating the UN and sporadically giving false
hopes to the international community buys it time
while it moves to legitimize its hold on political
power through a new charter. Razali's successor as
special envoy, Gambari, has so far continued in
the tradition of previous upbeat UN officials, who
in the end achieved very little if nothing for the
people of Myanmar. When the smoke has cleared, it
will most likely be business as usual in Myanmar.
Another UN envoy or rapporteur may have come, full
of optimism at first, and frustrated by the
junta's intransigence in the end.
Bertil Lintner is a former
correspondent with the Far Eastern Economic
Review. He is currently a writer with Asia-Pacific
Media Services.
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