The Hindu : Suu Kyi's protest fast poses a challenge to ASEAN leaders

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Wednesday, Sep 03, 2003

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International

Suu Kyi's protest fast poses a challenge to ASEAN leaders

By P. S. Suryanarayana

YOGYAKARTA (Indonesia) Sept. 2. With the United States breaking the news that Myanmar's celebrated democracy campaigner, Aung San Suu Kyi, has begun a "hunger strike'' to protest against her detention by the military rulers in Yangon, the Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN) finds itself with a new political challenge concerning one of its members.

Indonesia, the largest member of the ASEAN, is to host the association's next annual summit in Bali next month. From the ASEAN's perspective, the question is how far Ms. Suu Kyi's fast against her detention can be addressed by the "new political policy'' that Myanmar's new Prime Minister, Khin Nyunt, announced on August 30, the day that marked three months of her detention. Gen. Khin Nyunt was appointed Prime Minister only on August 25 in what was the 14th reshuffle of the military Government in Yangon since the formal renaming of the old State Law and Order Restoration Council (SLORC) as the State Peace and Development Council (SPDC) in November 1997. Both the SLORC and the SPDC are military outfits.

Gen. Khin Nyunt's appointment follows the SPDC's supreme leader, Senior General Than Shwe's decision to shed the prime ministership as one of his portfolios. Given that Myanmar is still regarded as a country with little or no political transparency, it is not clear within the ASEAN circles as to whether Ms. Suu Kyi had begun her "hunger strike'' (as monitored by the U.S.) before Gen. Khin Nyunt outlined a plan for political change without any time-table.

While regional diplomats and analysts do not discern anything dramatically new about the latest plan, its significance is traced to the two factors that Myanmar's new Prime Minister is a moderate within the ruling junta and that the ASEAN's own comfort level in its collective equation with Yangon as a constituent member has already begun to come under strain following Ms. Suu Kyi's latest arrest.

Silent on her detention as also about her relevance to a planned future political road map for democracy in Myanmar, Gen. Khin Nyunt's plan is based on the central theme of summoning a long-suspended national convention, which last met in March 1996. It was not specified whether the convention, which was constituted in January 1993, would be reconstituted.

Deprived of the right to form a government on the basis of an electoral victory in 1990, Ms. Suu Kyi's National League for Democracy dissociated itself from the national convention in November 1995.

By then, it became abundantly obvious that the convention was an arguably "constitutional" device to annul the results of the 1990 democratic elections. Now, related to the re-summoning of the convention are the other aspects of Gen. Khin Nyunt's seven-point roadmap for democracy.

These proposals are: the convention is to lay down principles for a new constitution, a new basic statute may then be drafted, a referendum is planned to be held on such a draft, a general election on a "free and fair'' basis is also considered a possibility, a new Parliament can be convened by the people's representatives so elected and, finally, a fresh government could emerge from such an elected Parliament at some unspecified point in the future.

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