A SHOW OF AUTOCRACY

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A SHOW OF AUTOCRACY

The Hindu (New Delh)
September 9, 2000

A DEMOCRATIC RENAISSANCE in Myanmar is still a dream in considerable
peril. That certainly is the message which the military junta, the
self-styled State Peace and Development Council (SPDC), has sought to
convey to the celebrated leader of the democracy movement, Ms. Aung San
Suu Kyi, by thwarting her latest attempt at reviving the transparently
sagging spirit of her followers. In the process, the Yangon regime
resorted to yet. Another show of authoritarianism which was nasty by any
standards, although it did not as a matter of some small mercy result in
the use of physical force against Ms. Suu Kyi, who still prides herself
on being a votary of non-violence. The roadside showdown between her and
the security minions of the SPDC at a location outside the capital was
almost similar to the previous standoff in 1998. In the new battle of
attrition, the motorcade of Ms. Suu Kyi and her small entourage was
halted by the State officials while she was on her way to a rural
constituency to deliver a presumptive pep talk to the activists of her
National League for Democracy (NLD). She predictably refused to beat a
retreat and decided to camp in the open, defiantly resorting to a
familiar form of political resistance. The military rulers claimed, as
before, that she would be better advised to avoid what could turn out to
be a hazardous journey. Finally, she was 'escorted' by the
'low'-enforcement officials back to her residence after a nine-day
confrontation.

The international community, led by the U.S. President at the U.N.
millennium summit, has now been quick, as indeed it was in 1998, to
condemn the perceivably ruthless state apparatus of Gen. Than Shwe. But
the question remains unanswered about the extent to which the major
powers, including in particular the European Union in the case of
Myanmar, will be willing to go in forcing the SPDC to open a political
dialogue with Ms. Suu Kyi to defuse the simmering tension. It requires
no emphasis that the larger issue is restoration of democracy in that
South-East Asian state of substantive strategic importance to some of
its neighbours including notably India and China for opposite reasons.
As in 1998, the U.S Secretary of State, Ms. Madeleine Albright, has at
present thundered against the SPDC's flagrant deprivation of Ms. Suu
Kyi's rights to freedom of movement as also political expression within
her own country. The Western envoys in Yangon have now been quick to
protest against a denial of diplomatic access to Ms. Suu Kyi and the
perceived crackdown on the NLC activists across the country. The
reaction by an irate SPDC is that the NLD would need to be investigated
for alleged links with an ethnic outfit of terror known as the 'God's
Army' and the Western political 'provocateurs'.

These and other aspects of the idiom, if not also the ideological focus,
of the Myanmarese internal crisis are well know as indeed the
incremental steps that the SPDC's predecessor-regime, the State Law and
Order Restoration Council, took in the early 1990s to reduce Myanmar,
which had held competitive elections even before its independence, to a
pathetic arena of democratic debris. What is less clear, though, is the
current intensity of the revolutionary democratic fervour inside
Myanmar. The doubts are traceable, in one sense, to the varied ways in
which the SPDC has been trying to sideline Ms. Suu Kyi or at least
distance the NLD from her. In this, the Myanmarese junta has quite
openly been exploiting its respectability as a state-actor in the
context of its relative new membership of the Association of South East
Asian Nations. If the ASEAN cited the need for a stabilising engagement
with Yangon as it had in the case of Beijing earlier, official India,
too, cannot be oblivious to the obvious risks of isolating Myanmar.