Offering Hope for the Year Ahead

By YENI

Christmas and the New Year are times of celebration for families around the world; but in Burma, there is little to lift the spirits of relatives of those who will be spending this holiday season—and many more to come—behind bars.

This year, hundreds of pro-democracy activists were added to the long list of political prisoners languishing in Burma’s gulag—a fact that would normally serve as merely further evidence of the ruling regime’s callous disregard for human dignity.

But this time, the imprisoned dissidents and their families must bear an added insult: the knowledge that the generals are growing ever more confident that their efforts to cement their hold on power will ultimately win the grudging acceptance of the international community.

This, at least, is the message of hopelessness that seems to be emanating from the United Nations, which started the year with a flurry of activity in response to the junta’s highly publicized atrocities in late 2007, only to end it with an exasperated shrug of the shoulders.

In early December, a group of 112 former presidents and prime ministers decided it was time to press UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon to return to Burma to talk to the junta. “We urge you to make it clear that all political prisoners in Burma must be released by the end of this year, regardless of whether you travel to Burma,” they wrote.

Later, more than 240 Asian lawmakers also joined forces to call for UN action on Burma, and a group of Nobel laureates made a similar appeal. But a spokesperson for the UN chief, who had visited Burma in late May to persuade the regime to accept full-scale international assistance to deal with the devastation caused by Cyclone Nargis, made it clear that neither he nor his special envoy, Ibrahim Gambari, would return to the country in the foreseeable future.

At a year-end news conference, Ban expressed his deep “disappointment” at the unwillingness of the Burmese military junta to listen to the world community’s calls to reestablish democracy in the country.

But this did little to assure Burmese pro-democracy activists and their supporters that the UN was serious about pushing the Burmese regime to start a peaceful reconciliation process, as called for in UN Security Council resolutions.

In their recent declaration, the Nobel laureates voiced concern that the UN’s drive for Burmese reconciliation was at a standstill. “We feel at risk of losing a precious opportunity for peace in Burma,” they announced.

But Ban defended his position, saying that his direct involvement was “not enough” to break the current political deadlock in Burma. He also urged Burma’s neighbors to play a more assertive role, although he knows as well as anyone else that China, India and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations are all more interested in exploiting Burma’s resources than in solving its political problems.

In the meantime, the pro-democracy opposition is losing confidence in Gambari’s efforts, and the regime is growing more contemptuous of his attempts to represent the UN’s position on Burma’s political and human rights issues. In a secret document leaked to The Irrawaddy by a Burmese foreign ministry source, the junta indicated that it had no interest in meeting with him again in the near future.

It is a sad statement on UN efforts to end Burma’s political deadlock that this year, for the first time ever, democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi also saw no point in meeting with the special envoy during his latest visit in August.

If Suu Kyi, who has become an international symbol of commitment to the universal values that the UN espouses, has reached this point, how much deeper must be the despair of those who know that their voices may never again be heard beyond the bars of their prison cells?

In the year ahead, the UN must redouble its efforts to resolve Burma’s political crisis, and this must involve sending an unequivocal message to the junta that no amount of “cooperation” with relief efforts in the cyclone-stricken Irrawaddy delta will obviate the need for the political changes that the people of Burma demand.

This means, above all, removing all doubt about where the UN stands on the junta’s planned election in 2010, which it has already given every indication it has no intention of losing. The UN’s failure to come out clearly against the junta’s farcical “road map” to a phony democracy is the primary reason that there has been no meaningful progress in Burma over the past year.

UN officials may argue that rejecting the generals’ pet project will only lead to further impasse. But this is far better than condemning another generation of Burmese to the political future envisioned by the junta.

If the UN wants to send the Burmese people a message of hope for the coming year, it could do no better than to tell Burma’s rulers that sham reforms are not the way forward.