Burma’s democratic opposition has dismissed talks between the military junta and UN envoy at Gambari as “a waste of time”. Activists are particularly annoyed with Mr Gambari for negotiating with the generals over their “roadmap” to democracy, which projects elections in 2010.
“Lifting the bamboo curtain” on Burma, Robert Kaplan outlines the strategic rivalry between China and India that helps keep the military junta in power. He interviews civil society and democracy activists in the Thai border region, highlighting competing approaches to promoting change.
“The opposition to the military dictatorship has no strategic and operational planning,” claims one observer. “Aung San Suu Kyi is little more than a symbol of the wrong issue-‘Democracy first!’ Ethnic rights and the balance of ethnic power are preconditions for democracy in Burma. These issues must be faced first, or little has been learned from the lessons of Afghanistan and Iraq.”
Several years after observers began to question whether civil society still existed in Burma, writes the New Yorker’s George Packer, the question was answered by Hurricane Nargis. “Nothing was working except the artists’ associations, the small businesses, the hiking clubs, the student groups, and the networks of friends that are barely allowed to exist in Burma. “They have become a movement,” Thiha Saw, the magazine editor, said. ‘They are writers, comedians, engineers, doctors, small groups-but they become like activists.’”
But, notes Packer, “rather than being a throwback to a more benighted age, Burma might be a picture of the geopolitical future”:
Burma is one of those countries, like Zimbabwe and Sudan, whose brutal rulers have successfully defied Washington and managed to make America seem impotent in its self-righteousness. The occupation of Iraq has been a boon to the Burmese generals. The idea, popular in the nineteen-nineties, that the world may intervene in countries whose governments show no regard for human life is now seen as reflecting Western arrogance; China’s approach of tolerating human-rights abuses in the name of stability and non-interference has become the standard. While the West stays out of Burma, Chinese businessmen are making huge investments in Mandalay, pulling the country’s economy toward the Chinese border.
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