[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index
][Thread Index
]
Burmese Daze by Madeleine Albright
- Subject: Burmese Daze by Madeleine Albright
- From: maung@xxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Tue, 28 Nov 1995 19:18:00
A T r i p To R a n g o o n
------------------------------------
B U R M E S E D A Z E
*************************
By Madeleine K. Albright
From
THE NEW REPUBLIC, Page 16
December 4, 1995
An extraordinary human and political drama is being played
out in Burma. At center stage is the State Law and Order
Restoration Council (SLORC) a hydra-headed military junta
that has dominated the country since repressing a democratic
uprising six years ago. Sharing the spotlight is the
charismatic Aung San Suu Kyi. Nobel Prize-winning leader of
the pro-democracy forces, daughter of the founder of modern
Burma, Aung San. Observing intently, but almost silently are
Burma's educators, professionals and ordinary citizens,
scarred by the past and wary about promises of a better
future.
The unresolved question is whether the SLORC will release
the stranglehold it has imposed on Burmese political life
and allow real freedom. In September, I became the highest-
ranking U.S. official to visit Burma since the junta took
power. I went to remind the SLORC that a fundamental change
in its relationship with the United States will occur only
when there is a fundamental change in its relationship with
the Burmese people. I also went to express American
solidarity with Aung San Suu Kyi.
Shortly after my arrival in Rangoon on September 8 in a huge
room adorned with tulips, teapots and elephant tusks, I sat
down with Lieutenant General Khin Nyunt. He is the chief
of SLORC intelligence and the government's interlocutor
of choice with Western officials. The general began our
discussion with a verbal jog through his country's unsettled
past. He argued that outsiders (like myself) cannot
appreciate the three factors that set Burma apart from its
democratic neighbors: its Buddhist culture; its ethnic
diversity; and the special role the military has played over
the forty-seven years since the country gained its
independence. He claimed that the military had saved the
country from chaos on three occasion, 1958, 1962 and l988,
the last time by rescuing Burma from a fate worse than
Bosnia's by imposing peace upon anarchic, Communist-inspired
mobs.
Ignoring for the moment this distortion of history. I
informed the general that the purpose of my visit to talk
about the future, not the past. Whatever the perceived
justification for its earlier actions, the SLORC now faces
an historic choice between the status quo and a democratic
transition.
The general insisted that the SLORC's approach is the best
way to guarantee stability and that the Burmese people
support its efforts to rebuild the economy and ensure law
and order.
"Even at midnight," he said, "you can walk around to without
danger: that is why the Burmese people have such happy
faces." I replied that during a lifetime of studying
repressive regimes I had found the smiling quotient in many
of them to have been quite high. Authoritarian leaders
often delude themselves that they are loved, but the smiles
they see are usually prompted not by affection, but fear.
The next morning. I met Aung San Suu Kyi for breakfast at
her lakeside home. This is the place to which she had
returned from England in 1988 to care for her dying mother:
where she had soon thereafter written her first political
speeches; and where -- until her release this past July --
she had spent almost six years under house arrest. In our
discussion, Aung San Suu Kyi called for a dialogue between
the pro-democracy forces and the SLORC. Asked when that
dialogue should start, she referred to an old SLORC slogan:
"Precisely, correctly, Quickly."
I was struck, during our conversation, by her seeming
contradictions. Outwardly fragile, she is clearly very
strong; outwardly serene, her reserves of patience have worn
thin; obviously determined, she avoids confrontation and
seeks reconciliation. In the room where we had breakfast,
there hangs an immense photograph of Aung San. Other photos
show him surrounded by his family, including a 2-year-old
girl with deep piercing eye. Aung San was assassinated in
1947 at the age of 32, but today, it is Aung San Suu Kyi,
and not the SLORC, who represents Burmese national identity
and pride. In the last thirty years, only she and the
movement she leads have received a mandate from Burmese
people.
For years, controversy has surrounded programs conducted
within Burma by United Nations agencies, including UNICEF
and the UN Development Program. Their efforts raise a
classic policy dilemma: how to help people living under
despotism without helping the despots themselves. In Burma
most U.N. agencies walked the line by funneling their
assistance directly to people in need.
I visited UNICEF projects that clearly meet this criterion:
a school, a health center and a potable water project.
Nevertheless, local U.N. officials admitted the difficulty
of carrying out effective development work in the face of
government efforts to turn that work to its own advantage.
What, then, is Burma's future? How will the drama play out?
How, for example, will the SLORC respond to Aung San Suu
Kyi's recent visit to a dissident monk: to her hosting
student political event over SLORC objections; and to her
party's decision to re-appoint her general-secretary in
apparent contravention of a SLORC decree?
If donor countries deny the SLORC international
respectability and development assistance, its leadership is
more likely to acquiesce in this gradual enlargement of
political space. Unlike kleptocracies elsewhere, the
SLORC genuinely views itself as the guardian of Burma's
economic future, however contemptuous it remains of
political freedom. Over time, it may have to admit the
connection between economic growth and political reform.
The United States should expedite this realization. Poverty
in Burma is endemic, development spotty, the foreign debt is
$5.5 billion. Most farming. road repair and construction is
done with equipment many years out of date. Western capital
has helped other Southeast Asian economies to expand. And so
it is no wonder that SLORC seeks foreign investment and
international loans. But the U.S. has stopped its economic
assistance program and urged others to do the same.
Next year. the SLORC will launch a massive tourism campaign.
It will offer the world breathtaking scenery, visits to
fabled Mandalay, beautiful Buddhist temples, ancient
palaces, picturesque lakes and unique handicrafts. But the
roads and sights they are invited to see will have been
refurbished through the sweat and toil of forced labor.
Democracies should be ashamed to encourage their business
people to be "first in Burma," for this would provide the
SLORC with the booty it needs to resist mounting pressure
for a political opening. "Constructive engagement: must be,
in fact, "constructive." International banks must not bail
the SLORC out. And economic sanctions--especially in
strategic industries--should neither be discarded nor
triggered rashly, but rather kept in reserve.
The world should have faith, like Aung San Suu Kyi, in the
strength of the democratic forces of Burma. Despite their
poverty. the Burmese are a sophisticated, highly literate
people, who have learned from bitter experience that
justice, law and political rights are essential to national
development. In an ethnically diverse country, a strong
sense of national pride has survived. According to the
clich,, dictators ride on tigers' backs: either they stay on
top or they are eaten. But recent experience belies this.
Peaceful transitions to democracy, have occurred on five
continents.
If the SLORC sincerely wants to build a multiparty
democracy, it should go ahead. This can be done, in the
SLORC's favorite phrase, "systematically"; but it should
begin soon and must not take forever. After all, South
Africa--with problems at least as intractable--went from
apartheid to Nelson Mandela's inauguration in less than five
years.
Vaclav Havel, who endorsed Aung San Suu Kyi for the Nobel
Peace Prize, has told me many times how important it was for
those struggling to bring freedom to Eastern Europe to know
that they had friends and supporters around the globe. It
is essential now that democratic forces abroad maintain
solidarity with those pursuing change in Burma. The SLORC
has a choice--one road leads to isolation and ultimately to
disaster: the other to respect and participation in the
region's economic miracle. Half treasures or phony measures
(such as the SLORC-orchestrated National Convention) are not
enough. The SLORC must choose. If it does, the United
States will help and so will others. And Burma may become a
model of the successful transition from tyranny to
democracy, for its neighbors and for the world.
---------------------------------------------------------
MADELEINE K. ALBRIGHT is U.S. Permanent Representative to
the United Nations.
---------------------------------------------------------