Unite On Burma
Nations Must Stand
Together Against Regime
November 5, 2007
David Steinberg may have been the only American
to meet with a senior member of the Burmese government after the
brutal repression of pro-democracy demonstrations in September.
Steinberg is a Burma expert at Georgetown University, and he says
the Burmese agreed to see him late last month because, for years,
they have looked to him for honest, often blunt, assessments of the
government's standing in the world. This meeting was no exception.
"I will tell you things your staff won't tell you," Steinberg said
he told a senior minister he is not permitted to name. "Your
government is following a policy that is disastrous for society. You
have lost legitimacy. Your explanations are not believed by anyone
internally or externally."
The minister listened quietly. He offered no particular reaction
except to say, "There is no socioeconomic crisis here."
This week, Steinberg's acknowledged that his
visit had no apparent effect. The same can be said for the world's
fitful efforts to break the Burmese junta's destructive hold on the
country over the past 20 years.
For two decades, the United States, the United Nations, Burma's
Southeast Asian neighbors and other countries have fretted about the
Burmese people now and then and applied vacillating, contradictory
policies. At times, in some countries, isolation is the policy de
jour. At other times in other capitals, engagement is offered as the
cure.
Now it is plain: None of this has worked, and after all these years
the junta's grip is strangling the country. U Gambria, a Burmese
monk leader, spoke by phone to Radio Free Asia in September and had
this to say:
"To Buddhists all over the world and activists and supporters of the
Burmese movement, please help to liberate the Burmese people from
this disastrous and wicked system. ...Many people are being killed,
imprisoned, tortured and sent to forced labor camps."
My hope is that Manmohan Singh, the Indian prime minister, happened
to be listening to Radio Free Asia that day. But I doubt it would
have made any difference, given India's shameful behavior toward
Burma. At the height of the demonstrations, while soldiers were
torturing and killing monks, the Indian government proclaimed that
Burma remained "a close and friendly neighbor" and dispatched its
petroleum minister there to make a deal.
India is not the only villain. China sells arms to the Burmese
military and buys natural gas. Thailand pays the military dictators
$2.8 billion a year for natural gas. Malaysia's state-owned oil
company pumps natural gas for the junta.
So does Chevron, the American company. It gets a grandfather
exemption from U.S. sanctions because it has been operating there
for so long.
Late last month, President Bush condemned the junta's barbarous
crackdown and tightened longstanding American sanctions. But Maureen
Aung-Thwin, a Burmese who heads the Burma Project at the Open
Society Institute, believes Bush's declamations are
counterproductive.
"You just don't want to hear this loud voice from America anymore"
because people don't want to seem to be following Washington's lead,
she said.
International dysfunction runs even deeper. While Washington
ratchets up sanctions, the United Nations is promoting closer
engagement - and chooses to refer to the nation by the dictators'
favored name, Myanmar. Ibrahim Gambari, the U.N. envoy to Burma,
suggested that "a combination of strong encouragement of the
authorities in Myanmar to do the right thing along with some
incentives" would show that "the world is not there to just punish
Myanmar."
Well, if the Burmese leaders had any inclination "to do the right
thing," we'd have heard about that decades ago. All of this presents
a cacophony of conflicting approaches that have emboldened the
military dictators and enabled them to weather international scorn
with hardly a worry.
If President Bush really cares about the Burmese people, rather than
haranguing one day and then moving on, why not call the various
players in this debate - the United Nations, European Union, Burma's
neighbors - to a conference? Maybe they could agree on a unified
strategy. Maybe, under the klieg lights and the skeptical gaze of
1,000 reporters, China and India and Singapore might be shamed into
doing the right thing.
Joel Brinkley is a former Pulitzer Prize-winning foreign
correspondent for The New York Times and now the Lorry I. Lokey
visiting professor in journalism at Stanford University. This was
distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services.
http://www.courant.com/news/opinion/hc-brinkley1105.artnov05,0,564770.story
