Obama s Burmese Gamble

Mr. Lolo (Nigeria) congratulated Mr. Diallo on his re election as Executive Secretary of the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification.

The Women's League of Burma, 11 individual organizations of Burmese women came together because there's strength in numbers.

Facilitator, Mr. Paul Lolo (Nigeria), under agenda item 52 (g) (Implementation of the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification in Those Countries Experiencing Serious Drought and or Desertification, Particularly in Africa)

Facilitator, Mr. Paul Lolo (Nigeria), under agenda item 52 (g) (Implementation of the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification in Those Countries Experiencing Serious Drought and or Desertification, Particularly in Africa)

We're advising the Burmese opposition, the government of Southern Sudan, which you heard it here first is going to be a new country within the next few years.

Although China has expressed some vague concerns over the crisis to the Burmese government, it has not taken any action that could meaningfully affect the regime s calculations, despite its singularly unique leverage.

Physicians for Human Rights, No Status Migration, Trafficking and Exploitation of Women in Thailand Health and HIV AIDS Risks for Burmese and Hill Tribe Women and Girls (2004), p. 8. http www.phrusa.org campaigns aids pdf nostatus.pdf

China s economic ties to Burma s rulers are strategically important for both sides. Annual bilateral trade, estimated at 1.1 billion a huge figure, given Burma s total GDP of 9.6 billion provides an economic lifeline for the Burmese government.

Indeed, without Chinese support, it is debatable whether the Burmese regime could sustain itself. So, while the current crisis in Burma is not of China s making, any peaceful settlement may be possible only if China acts to support it.

Wounded demonstrators are reported to have been buried alive in mass graves, and there are confirmed reports of bodies washing ashore in the waterways near Yangon (Rangoon). The regime is brutalizing the Burmese people, and lying to the world about its actions.

Nevertheless, four years on, a UN investigation has yet to take place, because the military junta refuses to grant the UN access to the country. Incidents of rape continue to be reported, and the Burmese military surely must know what is happening.

Informal informal consultations, convened by the Facilitator, Mr. Paul Lolo (Nigeria), on the draft resolutions on agenda item 52 (g) (Implementation of the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification in Those Countries Experiencing Serious Drought and or Desertification, Particularly in Africa), will be held today, 22 November 2005, from 4.30 to 6 p.m. in Conference Room A.

Informal informal consultations, convened by the Facilitator, Mr. Paul Lolo (Nigeria), on the draft resolutions on agenda item 52 (g) (Implementation of the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification in Those Countries Experiencing Serious Drought and or Desertification, Particularly in Africa), will be held on Wednesday, 23 November 2005, from 2 to 3 p.m. in Conference Room A.

Informal informal consultations, convened by the Facilitator, Mr. Paul Lolo (Nigeria), on the draft resolution on agenda item 52 (g) (Implementation of the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification in Those Countries Experiencing Serious Drought and or Desertification, Particularly in Africa), will be held on Thursday, 17 November 2005, from 3 to 4.30 p.m. in Conference Room A.

Informal informal consultations, convened by the Facilitator, Mr. Paul Lolo (Nigeria), on the draft resolutions on agenda item 52 (g) (Implementation of the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification in Those Countries Experiencing Serious Drought and or Desertification, Particularly in Africa), will be held today, 1 December 2005, from 3 to 4.30 p.m. in Conference Room A.

As an inducement to peaceful change, China can also guarantee the personal safety and wealth of the military junta should its members have to leave Burma suddenly. But China should make it clear that such protection requires the Burmese generals to cooperate in finding a peaceful solution.

The Burmese monks, together with nuns in pink robes, were soon joined by students, actors, and others who want to be rid of the military junta. But it was the monks and nuns who took the first step they dared to protest when others had mostly given up.

Then, of course, there is the Burmese Nobel Peace Prize laureate Aung San Suu Kyi. The daughter of the founder of independent Burma, Suu Kyi is now engaged in perhaps the most delicate task of her remarkable political career trying to engineer a true democratic transition from decades of military dictatorship.

SWAN and SHRF argue that rape is used as a weapon in the Burmese military s war against ethnic minorities. Women and girls are particularly vulnerable owing to gender as well as ethnicity to a horrific practice whose aim is to demonstrate the army s power and punish those who confront it.

We are both Burmese Buddhist monks a leader of the All Burma Sangha Coalition that led the recent protests, and a scholar teaching in the United States. One of us is in hiding today, because Burma s military government met the peaceful protests of our Buddhist brothers and sisters with violence and brutality.

Indeed, President Thein Sein s government has begun to release thousands of political prisoners, including the monk who led the massive street protests of 2007. Sein s government has also listened to Burmese public disquiet at China s massive influence in the country, and has canceled a huge 3.6 billion dam that Chinese firms were building.

Sometimes the competition with China is direct. At the Shwe gas fields along the Burmese cost, estimated to be among the largest reserves in the world, two pipelines are to be constructed one to China from the nearby port of Kyauk Phru, and the other to India from the port of Sittwe.

Yet China may be able to pre empt such an outcome by making the option of a brutal crackdown prohibitively high to the Burmese regime. It should privately threaten to cut off all aid and trade links, and to end its protection of the regime within the United Nations from any additional international sanctions.

Of course, China benefits greatly from access to Burma s energy and other natural resources. But, by playing a positive role in bringing about a successful and peaceful transfer of power, China can secure a friendly neighbor in Burma more effectively than with its current policy, which merely incurs the hatred of the Burmese people.

In a statement issued on September 27, ASEAN foreign ministers expressed a surprising degree of condemnation of the crackdown in Burma. They could play an essential leading role in a process including the Burmese parties, China, India, the European Union, Russia, and the United States that could devise a roadmap for change in Burma.

The two recent natural disasters in Burma and China have put this idea to a severe test. China has not fared too badly, largely because its government was forced by the Burmese example, bad publicity surrounding the Tibetan demonstrations, and the impending Olympic Games to allow far more freedom of information than it normally does.

Yet Suu Kyi, and much of the Burmese opposition, is beginning to admit that today s political liberalization might be the real thing. Because Burma s generals say almost nothing in public, it is difficult to fathom why they allowed elections that elevated Thein Sein to power, or to explain their willingness to embrace dialogue with the long suppressed opposition.

Poland is making its own direct contribution, above all by helping senior Burmese decision makers, opposition leaders, and business representatives to understand the technology of transition nbsp that is, the sequencing of technical reforms, which has helped to make Poland one of Europe s healthiest economies today. Our business representatives came with me to present large scale investment projects.

In Myanmar, the bilateral goal was to nudge the government toward greater openness and democracy something that has unquestionably happened. The pro democracy leader and Nobel laureate Aung San Suu Kyi was released from house arrest her party won seats in parliament and millions of Burmese are now studying their country s constitution and have petitioned for amendments.

Indeed, China s pandering to dictators in its quest for resources contradicts its long term interest in being acknowledged as a benign and legitimate power and commanding the international respect that it craves. Had China put pressure on the Burmese junta to stop slaughtering its own people, it would have earned substantial moral credit around the world.

Poland is making its own direct contribution, above all by helping senior Burmese decision makers, opposition leaders, and business representatives to understand the technology of transition that is, the sequencing of technical reforms, which has helped to make Poland one of Europe s healthiest economies today. Our business representatives came with me to present large scale investment projects.

Since I have never had either the benefits or misfortunes of adhering to any religion, it might smack of hypocrisy for me to defend those who have. But watching the Burmese monks on television defy the security forces of one of the world s most oppressive regimes, it is hard not to see some merit in religious belief.

Because China has been competing with India for access to Burma s natural resources, India also needs to be actively included in efforts to pressure the Burmese regime, a process that the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) might effectively coordinate. In a statement issued on September 27, ASEAN foreign ministers expressed a surprising degree of condemnation of the crackdown in Burma.

One such corridor extends 800 kilometers from the Bay of Bengal across Burma to southern China. In addition to gas pipelines the first is scheduled to be completed this year it will include a high speed railroad and a highway from the Burmese coast to China s Yunnan province, offering China s remote interior provinces an outlet to the sea for the first time.

Given the Burmese generals' hard line stance to date, it will likely prove to be necessary for Ban to go to Burma to meet face to face with its leaders. One idea is to pressure the generals to agree to multiparty talks based on the North Korean model an, approach that Ban helped to forge from his days as South Korea s Foreign Minister.

Perhaps its leaders recognized that the country, once the world s largest rice exporter, was falling far behind its neighbors. Perhaps they heard the message of the Arab Spring, or simply understood that, with more than three million Burmese living abroad, it was impossible to isolate the country from the rest of the world or prevent ideas from seeping in from its neighbors.

NEW YORK Why are French, British, and American warships, but not Chinese or Malaysian warships, sitting near the Burmese coast loaded with food and other necessities for the victims of Cyclone Nargis? Why has the Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN) been so slow and weak in its response to a natural calamity that ravaged one of its own members?

In 1885, during an earlier era of great power competition in Asia, Lord Randolph Churchill, Winston Churchill s father, impulsively annexed Burma to the British Raj in India following the Third Anglo Burmese War. Thant Myint U, a leading historian of contemporary Burma (and the son of former United Nations Secretary General U Thant), likened Churchill s move to throwing Burma off a cliff.

Popular support for the creation of a pan Asian security structure can be found not only in the election outcomes in Japan and South Korea, but also in the ecstatic crowds that greeted Obama in Myanmar (Burma) during his recent tour. Ordinary Burmese well understand that their country s democratic transition is the direct result of its recoil from China s excessive demands on its natural resources.

Burma s rulers have said that the vote will be delayed in the areas hardest hit by the cyclone until May 24, but the referendum will still go ahead as planned in other parts of the country. With this move, the military leaders are putting their sham vote aimed at tightening their repressive grip on power ahead of the well being of the Burmese people.

Feeling the heat, including threats from some US senators to link America s nuclear deal with India to its actions in Myanmar, India has announced that it is asking for the release of Burmese democratic opposition leader and Nobel Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi from house arrest. But the credibility of all democratic regimes, not just India s, is at stake in what unfolds in Myanmar.

In particular, unlike previous situations ranging from the Burmese response to Cyclone Nargis to the Sri Lankan military s civilian massacres masquerading as a legitimate response to terrorist insurgency there is little conceptual disagreement now about what are, and are not, RtoP cases. For all of the lamentable inadequacy of the Security Council s response to the situation in Syria, no one has seriously argued that it is not an RtoP case.

For the Nobel laureate Aung San Suu Kyi, who suffered two decades of incarceration and house arrest, the country must aspire to something beyond getting rich if it is truly to overcome the decades of military misrule a transforming, revolutionary idea. That idea, of course, is democracy, which is something very new to Myanmar Burma, for the British practiced little of it when they ruled, as George Orwell s Burmese Days makes clear.

In February, I participated in seminars in Yangon (Rangoon) and the recently constructed capital, Naypyidaw, organized by one of the country s leading economists, U Myint. The events were momentous, owing both to large and actively engaged audiences (more than a thousand in Yangon), and to the thoughtful and moving presentations by two world famous Burmese economists who had left the country in the 1960 s and were back for their first visit in more than four decades.