Junta Determined to 'Guide' 2010 Polls

By MARWAAN MACAN-MARKAR / IPS WRITER

BANGKOK — Burma’s military regime ended 2008 with greater resolve to steamroll over opposition voices in order to pave the way for a junta-friendly government when the country holds general elections in 2010.

On December 30, nine supporters of pro-democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi were arrested when they staged a protest in Rangoon, the former capital, calling for her release. Some of the protesters were wearing the colors of the National League for Democracy (NLD), the party that she heads.

The risk these activists took in placing their lives on the side of political freedom has been heightened in the wake of harsh judgments delivered against leading voices of the country’s struggling democracy movement in November. Some of them were given long jail terms and Min Ko Naing, a widely respected former university student leader, was put away for 65 years.

The November verdicts, which saw 215 political activists sentenced, were largely linked to the peaceful, pro-democracy street protests, led by thousands of Buddhist monks, held in September 2007.

Buddhist monks who were in the vanguard of the protests, which was crushed by the junta, were not spared. U Gambria, a leader of the All Burma Monks’ Alliance, was sentenced to 68 years in jail.

The verdicts delivered by a military-controlled court inside Rangoon’s notorious Insein prison were as harsh on Burmese who led a humanitarian effort to aid the victims of the powerful Cyclone Nargis, which tore through the country’s Irrawaddy Delta in early May, killing tens of thousands and affecting millions.

Zarganar, a well-known comedian who was arrested for leading a team of entertainers to help the cyclone victims, was slapped with a 59-year sentence.

"This is all part of an aggressive campaign to jail good, pro-democracy activists who could run in the 2010 elections," says Debbie Stothard of ALTSEAN, a regional human rights group monitoring abuse in Burma. "Anybody who could be a viable opposition figure has been locked up. There are no signs of the regime easing up."

Even token pressure from marginal voices in the country is being stifled, she revealed in an IPS interview. "The New Year will see more arrests. They are creating another Zimbabwe."

Such ability to crush an already beleaguered people has become possible given the ease with which the junta succeeded in bullying and bluffing the United Nations through the year.

Other members of the international community, including giants China and Russia, also played their part to help the Burmese military dictatorship impose its roadmap for a "discipline flourishing democracy."

The junta’s success at reducing the world body to a minor irritant became more evident after UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon cancelled plans to visit Burma, or Myanmar, in December. That the junta was in no mood for Ban—or for a push by his office for concrete issues to be discussed during such a visit—was hardly a surprise.

Ban’s predicament highlighted a defining feature of how the Burmese regime was responding to international pressure. In May, Ban became the first UN chief to visit Burma following the devastating Cyclone Nargis. But all the assurances he got from the military regime for more openness to enable humanitarian assistance to the victims amounted to little.

The UN received another embarrassing snub from the junta in August, when Ibrahim Gambari, the world body’s special envoy to Burma, was treated like an unwelcome guest and relegated to meeting minor officials during a visit aimed to prod the regime towards democratic reform. Earlier in 2008, Gambari had received a tongue-lashing from Burma’s information minister, removing all doubt about the contempt with which the junta views the Nigerian diplomat.

Yet at the same time, sections of the international community still place faith in the UN to deliver. In early December, for instance, a group of more than 100 former heads of governments and states wrote a letter to Ban, asking him to travel to Burma to secure the release of Suu Kyi and the over 2,100 political prisoners by December 31.

"It is important that Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon travel to the country himself and engage in serious dialogue with the military regime and impress on them the calls by leaders and lawmakers from Asia and around the world for the release of all political prisoners," Kraisak Choonhavan, a Thai parliamentarian, said at the time.

Among the leaders who signed this unprecedented petition were former US presidents George H W Bush and Jimmy Carter, former Australian prime minister John Howard, former Japanese prime minister Junichiro Koizumi and former Philippines president Corazon Aquino.

The petition to Ban drew attention to developments in the UN Security Council in October 2007, when a presidential statement had urged the prompt release of all political prisoners in Burma.

Yet what has prevailed since that rare pressure on the junta from the UN’s most powerful body illustrates the aggressive and defiant position Burma’s military regime is pursuing. In mid-2007, the number of political prisoners stood at 1,200; now it has nearly doubled to over 2,100.

The military regime "will stop at nothing to prevent people from joining demonstrations or be influenced by the voices of the democracy activists," says Bo Kyi, a former political prisoner who heads the Assistance Association for Political Prisoners in Burma, a human rights group based on the Thai-Burma border. "They want to create a greater climate of fear among the general public."

It is all part of the junta’s plan to be certain of victory at the 2010 polls "even before the elections," Bo Kyi explained in an interview. "They want to avoid a repeat of the 1990 elections."

At that poll, held after the regime brutally crushed a pro-democracy uprising in 1988, where close to 3,000 activists were shot to death, the NLD trounced the junta-backed National Unity Party with a thumping majority. But the regime refused to recognize the results and began targeting the elected parliamentarians.

Burmese political activists like Bo Kyi believe that only the international community in 2009 can stall the junta’s plans to hijack the 2010 polls. "The international community needs to exert real pressure that they will not accept the results of the 2010 elections without the release of all political prisoners and a free environment for the polls."