Burma failure shows need for regime change
If ever a country needed regime change, Burma has to be it.
It was amply evident last fall when the junta of vicious, corrupt generals that have ruled the country by brute force for 18 years bludgeoned Burma's monk-led democracy movement into suppression, again, and has been highlighted in blood-red with the catastrophe of recent killer Cyclone Nargis that slammed into the Irrawaddy Delta on May 3 being compounded by the atrocious refusal of the generals to allow foreign disaster relief workers into the country, presumably partly in fear that it would upset their scheme to hold a rigged referendum on a new constitution last Saturday, while confiscating the trickle of material aid that is being accepted and stamping the tyrants' names on boxes before distributing them.
Meanwhile rice exports continue while many of some 1.5 million cyclone victims are in peril of starving.
Bangladesh-based Burmese exile Narinjara News agency reports that authorities distributed readymade "yes" ballots to the poor families in advance of the May 10 referendum, which would reserve 25 per cent of parliamentary seats for the military, instructing them that the authority had pre-written everything required on the ready-to-cast ballots.
The International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance (IDEA)) notes that Burma's referendum law of Feb. 26 provided for imprisonment of up to three years for anyone found "lecturing, distributing papers, using posters", and so forth protesting the referendum, and that the government considers campaigning for a 'No' vote as being prohibited by that section, for example arresting people for wearing 'No'-t-shirts.
The so-called referendum wasn't monitored by any independent domestic or international observation groups and the generals also rejected offers of UN technical assistance in organizing the referendum.
The situation in Burma is so surreal as to provoke UN officials into abandoning their customary cautious diplomatic language and declaring the junta to be an "insane regime."
Unhappily, it's unlikely that the civilized world, notwithstanding pro-forma handwringing over the sickening humanitarian tragedy unfolding in Burma, has any stomach for standing up to the cruel generals and their UN Security Council defenders in an open confrontation over aid delivery, let alone a regime change operation.
The U.S. and France have called for international aid to be delivered to cyclone victims without the permission of the Burmese government if it continues to block foreign aid workers and material assistance, arguably with legal authority under a 2005 UN resolution establishing an international "responsibility to protect" people when nations fail or refuse to do so themselves. Incredibly, France's motion to raise Burma's case before the UN Security Council on May 8 was opposed by China, Russia, South Africa, and several developing countries, for whom the ideology of non-intervention is evidently more important than the lives of hundreds of thousands of Burmese people, making the moral distinction between their leaders and the whack-job Burmese generals a matter of degree and not kind.
Even U.S. President George Bush's declaration that "every civilized nation has a responsibility to stand up for people suffering under a brutal military regime like the one that has ruled Burma for too long" is likely long on words and short on follow-through toward restoring freedom that's been denied Burma's citizens since communist autocrats seized control of the country in 1962, and especially after the military nullified the 1990 general election victory of Nobel laureate Aung San Suu Kyi in the wake of pro-democracy demonstrations in 1988, when the dictatorship killed an estimated 3,000 peaceful demonstrators in mass shootings -- roughly three times the estimated toll in China's Tienanmen Square massacre a year later.
NATO and the United Nations have essentially abandoned Suu Kyi and the Burmese people for nearly two decades.
I'm pretty confident a majority of Burmese would welcome Western intervention restoring Suu Kyi as Burma's democratically-elected president, and there are factions such as the Thailand-based Burmese government-in-exile and New York City based Coalition for Regime Change in Burma, hoping to turn the tide of world opinion to restore democracy in Burma by whatever means necessary. The Coalition vocally advocates immediate regime change in Burma, and calls for a boycott of the 2008 Beijing Olympics to protest China's tacit support of the tyrannical Burmese generals.
Burma's propinquity with China is a big part of the problem. China's communist dictators who seemingly never met a tyrannical despot they didn't like, covet Burma's petroleum resources, and are the provenance of most weaponry and what diplomatic support there is propping up Burma's junta. Political scientist and Burma expert Josef Silverstein has noted that China is eager to complete roads and railroads, to develop mines and assimilating Burma under its economic control.
What the civilized world needs to do now is to exercise an extraordinary leverage opportunity that is currently available -- the Olympics. Threatening a boycott of the Olympics unless China stands down and supports most urgently cyclone relief, and in the bigger picture re-establishment of democracy in Burma, would exert massive pressure on Beijing, sensitive about loss of face and desperately wanting its Olympics to be a success and present the face of the "New China."
Unhappily, the old China lurks and festers malignantly under that happy-face facade.
n Charles W. Moore is a Nova Scotian freelance writer and editor whose articles, features, and commentaries have appeared in more than 40 magazines and newspapers in Canada, the U.S., the U.K., and Australia.
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