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Tackling Myanmar’s junta

With several people including Buddhist monks and a Japanese journalist killed, scores brutally set upon by security forces, and many others arrested in overnight raids on monasteries, Myanmar is into an unprecedented time of troubles. The menace of soldiers and policemen milling in front of Buddhist shrines and entering activist monasteries did not stop a sea of monks and nuns defying the Yangon curfew. Some of the country’s most revered monks marched in protest on W ednesday from the famous Shwedagon pagoda to the downtown Sule pagoda. The clerics have called for public support for their weeklong protest marches across many major towns in Myanmar. The popular response has been heartening. What is plain is that this military dictatorship is hell-bent on perpetuating its brutish, reactionary rule and suppressing all democratic opposition, whether it comes from political or religious quarters. But this time it may have miscalculated badly. The monks, the people, and the organised political forces are coming together in a way that suggests the surge and scope of a freedom movement. The immediate provocation for the mass protest by monks and nuns may be the doubling of the prices of petrol and other commodities but at the heart of the saffron upsurge lies a yearning for democracy and human rights.

Such street protests and demonstrations were last seen in Myanmar in 1988, when the junta called for a general election, clearly failing to anticipate the consequences. With the National League for Democracy (NLD) led by Aung San Suu Kyi sweeping the polls, the junta’s unashamed response was to annul the democratic exercise. Since then, Nobel laureate Suu Kyi — a great heroine of our times — has been in detention or under house arrest. Political activity remains banned and predictably the junta failed to unveil Myanmar’s promised new constitution, work on which began over 15 years ago. Pressure is mounting on the international community to tighten sanctions, with the United Nations Security Council demanding that the junta show restraint. Unfortunately, there is no unanimity among the major powers, with China and, to an extent, Russia opposing sanctions. The Association of South East Asian Nations, which attempted in recent years to civilise — or at least moderate the ways of — the Myanmar generals through a policy of accommodation and incentives, has virtually thrown up its hands. It has been unable to persuade its member state even to open a political dialogue with Ms. Suu Kyi and the leaders of other democratic groups. The thinking within Asean seems to be that only Myanmar’s big neighbours, China and India, can do something constructive now. What is clear is that only the hard-pressed people of a desperately underdeveloped and isolated land with an overdeveloped military can win their liberation — and in this difficult struggle they need every ounce of the world’s support, moral as well as material.

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