天堂.受难记

Myanmar and the world

Destructive engagement

Sep 27th 2007
From The Economist print edition

The outside world shares responsibility for the unfolding tragedy in Myanmar

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LIKE North Korea's Workers' Party, another vile dictatorship that has visited misery and penury on its own people, Myanmar's junta has survived in part through diplomatic triangulation. Like North Korea, it has borne isolation and rhetorical hostility from the West by cosying up to the neighbours, notably China. And it has tried to avoid total subservience to any one of these by playing them off against each other.

Reuters

No way out?

As in the past, the world's initial response to the junta's violence was marked by bickering and point-scoring. On September 27th, the United Nations Security Council met in response to pressure from the West for co-ordinated sanctions. But Russia and China argued that the unrest was an internal matter that should not be on the council's agenda at all.

America announced new sanctions against the regime, in keeping with a policy some Western countries have pursued for nearly two decades. They are cheered on by a vocal and well-organised exile movement, and, when she was able to make her views known, by Aung San Suu Kyi herself. Her heroic stature has helped make Myanmar a fashionable cause. Awarded the Nobel peace prize in 1991, she has attracted the backing not just of fellow winners such as the Dalai Lama and Desmond Tutu, but also of Laura Bush, the president's wife and Gordon Brown, Britain's prime minister. The next Rambo movie features our hero taking on the tatmadaw single-handed.

Shareholder-activists and ordinary consumers have also done their bit to encourage a boycott. But the campaign to punish the regime sometimes seems to have lost sight of its real goal, and to be ready to celebrate isolation itself, not the change it is supposed to bring.

In fact, isolation has never really been on the cards. Any gap is eagerly filled by Myanmar's neighbours—not just China, but also India and Thailand and other members of the Association of South-East Asian Nations (ASEAN). Even in the Western camp there have been differences in approach between the three most important members, America, the EU and Japan.

American leaders have insisted the junta honour the 1990 election result and step aside. To this end, they have imposed wide-ranging sanctions. The most important of these block foreign aid and lending to Myanmar by the World Bank, IMF and Asian Development Bank. Official aid flows to Myanmar are among the lowest of any poor country in the world—around .50 a head each year, compared with, for example, in next-door Laos.

The EU has been more equivocal, demanding greater respect for human rights and a transition to civilian democracy, but appearing to accept fresh elections as the way to get there. Its sanctions have been correspondingly milder. Japan has been softer still. Burma's biggest aid donor until 1988, it has continued to provide small-scale help, apparently hoping to retain a smidgen of influence.

These days, however, if any countries can sway the junta they are the regional ones: ASEAN, especially Thailand; India; and above all China. When ASEAN controversially admitted Myanmar in 1997, on the organisation's 30th anniversary, it said membership would be an engine for positive change through “constructive engagement”. ASEAN's culturally sympathetic but fast-growing founder members would show Myanmar the way. This was guff.

Viewed most cynically, Myanmar's accession was part of a bid by ASEAN members to secure access to the country's rich resources: timber, oil, gas and minerals. Using more sophisticated (but no less cynical) geopolitical arguments, ASEAN diplomats justified admitting the unsavoury bunch as a way to prevent Myanmar becoming an arena in which China and India would vie for influence.

But this is happening anyway. China had a head start, and is maintaining its lead comfortably. Itself responsible for quelling an uprising with a massacre in 1989, China's government had few qualms about expanding ties with Myanmar during the 1990s. It supplied weaponry, including multiple-rocket launchers, fighter aircraft and guided-missile attack craft.

Western and Indian analysts worry that China sees Myanmar as part of its so-called “string of pearls” policy of building naval and intelligence bases around the Indian Ocean. There were reports that China was delivering signals equipment for monitoring stations on various coastal sites, and had a permanent presence on Great Coco Island (see map). Such talk has fuelled Indian paranoia, though Western analysts dismiss it.

Border trade, through the thriving, sleazy town of Ruili, also boomed. In the 1990s it included opium and heroin; shared needles produced China's first HIV epidemic, helping teach China the importance of “stability” in its neighbour.

In recent years the economic relationship has been transformed by China's hunger for energy and its involvement in big infrastructure projects. According to EarthRights International, an American NGO, Chinese firms are by now involved in about 40 hydropower projects and at least 17 onshore and offshore oil-and-gas projects. They have also announced plans to build a 2,400km (1,500 mile) oil-and-gas pipeline from Arakan in western Myanmar to China's Yunnan province.

China has also given the junta diplomatic support, helping for years to keep its behaviour off the agenda of the United Nations Security Council. But Myanmar is far from a client state. This week Chinese spokesmen called for restraint in responding to the protests. Their pleas seem to be falling on deaf ears.

Myanmar

Monks on the march

Sep 20th 2007 | BANGKOK
From The Economist print edition

The junta incurs the powerful clergy's wrath

Reuters

Meritorious service

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THE generals who rule Myanmar must have been hoping they had successfully crushed the protests over their drastic increase in fuel prices last month. Arrests of suspected protest leaders and attacks on demonstrators by civilian goon-squads seemed to be doing the trick. But then, earlier this month, the army incurred the wrath of the country's respected Buddhist clergy by firing over the heads of a group of protesting monks in the central town of Pakkoku.

Some reports said monks were also beaten and arrested. The clergy demanded an apology. The junta refused. So the monks took to the streets of Yangon and other cities in their thousands, marching and chanting prayers. They urged laymen not to join the protests. They have also threatened, in effect, to excommunicate the junta by refusing to accept alms from them.

Raising the stakes, the army fired tear-gas canisters and warning shots to break up one of the biggest protests this week, in the western town of Sittwe. For two days, plain-clothes security men blockaded the golden Shwedagon Pagoda in Yangon, the country's most sacred Buddhist shrine. On September 20th they gave way and allowed around 1,000 monks, who had marched on the shrine through the pouring monsoon rain, to enter it. Irrawaddy, a newspaper run by Burmese exiles from neighbouring Thailand, claimed the junta had declared an emergency and authorised its forces to open fire on protesters if necessary.

All of this has recalled the mass pro-democracy uprising of 1988, which the regime put down harshly with the loss of thousands of lives. That, too, began in economic disgruntlement when the junta abruptly cancelled high-value banknotes. It then spread to a political movement in which students and monks played leading roles. Two years later the clergy imposed a boycott of military families similar to the one now being threatened.

This week's, like other, smaller protests over the years since then, failed to budge the junta. Hopes have risen, time and again, that demonstrations would gather momentum and trigger an unstoppable revolt, only to fade away.

But if there is one group in Burmese society that the generals might hesitate to confront, it is the clergy. Not just because it might whip up the masses to overthrow their tyranny at long last, but because of the influence Buddhists believe they have over the process of rebirth. Giving alms to monks is one of the main ways to make “merit”, so if this is denied the generals, they may lose their chance of advancement in their next life. A punishment amply merited.

Turning from the international stage of APEC to the local drama of the election, John Howard has no interest in political suicide.
In 1941, Prime Minister Robert Menzies returned to Australia after attending Winston Churchill's War Cabinet in London for 10 weeks and delivering speeches in New York, Washington and Chicago. He had, he said, a sick feeling in his heart that he "must now come back to my own country and play politics". John Howard emerged from APEC with more than an inkling of how his idol felt. After strutting the international stage (sort of) and being treated as an equal (almost) by George W. Bush, Hu Jintao and Vladimir Putin, he found himself forced to come down to earth and get back to domestic politics.


And it was no fun at all. Awaiting him was yet another awful opinion poll, confirming Labor's enormous lead and showing Kevin Rudd's approval rating ahead of Bob Hawke's before the 1983 election. Worse, near panic had broken out in sections of the Liberal Party, and there were discussions about how to avoid an electoral train wreck. The idea getting currency - embarrassingly, while APEC was still in progress - was to persuade Howard to emulate Captain Lawrence Oates, the brave soul who sacrificed himself in a bid to give other members of Scott of the Antarctic's ill-fated polar expedition a chance of survival. But Howard was not greatly attracted to the suggestion that he leave the tent at the height of a blizzard with the announcement that "I am just going outside and may be some time".

Of course you can catch a grab or two on the nightly news. But it doesn’t tell you the full story. No, to decipher the nuance and the mood in the opposition and on the Treasury benches, you need to watch the whole hour or so on the box or, better still, sit in the public gallery and peer over the edge.

Those hardcore types who tuned in yesterday might have detected a change in the mood of both the government and the opposition.

After what has been a disastrous couple of months for the government that has been dominated by nose-diving opinion polls and continued leadership speculation, suddenly there was new energy in the Coalition. Politicians routinely say that they don’t pay too much attention to opinion polls. But it’s just not true.

The Howard biographers reveal the truth about their Costello interviews, and how the treasurer's dummy-spit demonstrates exactly why he'll never be PM. By Wayne Errington and Peter Van Onselen.


The Liberal Party's best parliamentary performer had a whale of a time in September 2005 when Mark Latham's diaries rocked the Labor Party. Latham's unflattering descriptions of Beazley and his lieutenants gave Peter Costello the opportunity to do what he does best - ridicule his opponents. Costello knows full well, then, the impact that frank opinions about colleagues can have on the normally controlled national political environment.