The Lady should be for turning

Illustration by M. Morgenstern

JEG's: I believe the sanctions were imposd on the generals pockets not the government, the government has the means to provide for the country instead they have opted to squeeze as much of the natural resources for personal gain. Do their "good governance" is shown with education? who for? Is it shown with healtchcare? Who for? What about jobs? do you have to belong and support the junta in order to be employable? The sanctions have nothing to do with the crisis the junta government has created. Suu Kyi has nothing to do with it either, she cannot be responsible for other governments decisions... Junta's greedy and well spread legal corruption has lots to do with the way the country is at present... you make up your mind, no-one forces your to follow DASSK or follow the junta, your choice...

By Banyan
The Economist

Aung San Suu Kyi is remarkable. But Myanmar’s problems are more than just those of democracy denied

JULY 20th marked the 20th anniversary of the day when military rulers first placed Aung San Suu Kyi under house arrest. The leader of Myanmar’s democracy movement has since spent more than 13 years detained at home or, as now, in a Yangon prison. She awaits the verdict of a sham trial in which she was charged with breaking the terms of her detention after an uninvited American, a nut, swam across to her lakeside home. Miss Suu Kyi plays a long game. But so does the military. It seized power in 1962. It has used force to put down two extraordinarily brave sets of pro-democracy protests, in 1988 and 2007. And it has ignored the result of free elections in 1990, convincingly won by Miss Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy.

Miss Suu Kyi, 64 and frail, has not wavered in her call for the junta to respect the election result and free what are now thought to be 2,100 political prisoners. She has long argued for countries to apply pressure by forbidding companies to trade with Myanmar or invest in it. The West has responded with sanctions regimes. Britain’s prime minister, Gordon Brown, recently called for even tougher financial measures against Myanmar.

There is no doubting Miss Suu Kyi’s courage. A decade ago she turned down the generals’ offer to leave the country (presumably, for good) to care for her dying husband. She never saw him again. Two sons have not seen their mother for years. Miss Suu Kyi’s moral stature puts her on a level with other imprisoned or exiled symbols of quiet resistance, the Dalai Lama and Nelson Mandela. She keeps democratic hopes alive in Myanmar; and around the world she inspires campaigners for freedom in the face of thuggish regimes. Elegant and dignified, she is the person any engaged liberal at Harvard or Oxford most wants to invite to dinner but can’t. This year garden parties at British embassies celebrating the Queen’s birthday were decorated with portraits of Miss Suu Kyi. At the embassy in Jakarta, a picture of her is projected onto an outside wall. She is, literally, democracy’s poster girl.

For weeks the military regime has delayed pronouncing a verdict in its trial, perhaps so as not to embarrass fellow members of the ten-country Association of South-East Asian Nations (ASEAN), meeting for its annual summit this week in Thailand. Yet few doubt but that Miss Suu Kyi will be put away for even longer. Her house, which has become a shrine to the democracy movement’s living deity, may be confiscated and razed. Myanmar’s leaders have called for elections next year, but on terms that ensure the military is the force behind civilian rule. Having Miss Suu Kyi to stand and fight is not part of the programme.

An even longer game, then, for Miss Suu Kyi and her supporters. But is it the right one? A growing body of opinion thinks not. It follows a tedious ritual. The world calls for freedom and democracy. The United Nations dispatches a representative to Yangon. He is fobbed off. The Lady continues in detention. The UN’s most recent big cheese was none other than the secretary-general. Ban Ki-moon left Yangon earlier this month without being allowed to meet Miss Suu Kyi.

This costs more than just wasted journeys. Myanmar is rich in natural gas, timber and gems. China and India, strategic rivals to east and west, chummy up to the junta. The Burmese elite has second homes and bank accounts in Thailand. Russia sells the generals arms, as does China, and both provide cover for the generals on the Security Council. So Myanmar does now in fact engage with the world—but its engagement takes the ugly form of a rapacious capitalism with amoral partners. Hillary Clinton, on her first trip to Asia as secretary of state, admitted that isolation “hasn’t influenced the junta”. An American review of Myanmar policy is under way, but official silence over Miss Suu Kyi’s trial hints at a certain confusion. Because there is no engagement, America’s soft power has no traction.

Worse, everyone from the UN down views Myanmar through the lens of democracy above all else—even development. For a desperate country with shocking rates of disease and mortality such a priority is dubious at best, shameful at worst. If nothing else, it fails to acknowledge how development can improve local governance. In the Irrawaddy delta in the wake of cyclone Nargis, which struck last year killing 140,000, deciding how humanitarian aid should be spent has increased civic participation and local autonomy in the face of an uncaring regime. Yet apart from Japan, official aid levels to Myanmar are pitiful compared even with other poor countries.

Icon or obstacle?

Lastly, depicting Myanmar as a kind of velvet revolution gone wrong, as Thant Myint-U, a historian of Burma, points out, is to ignore a big part of the picture. The paranoid regime’s inward-looking cast is conditioned by centuries of invasions, among them by the British and, after independence in 1948, by American-backed Chinese Nationalists. Since independence, the military has faced dozens of communist and ethnic insurgencies. It is true that since the 1990s, ceasefires have been signed in all but two. But independent Burma did not emerge as a unified state and, under early democratic rule, insurgencies flourished. The remaining conflicts, financed by drugs trafficking, are the longest-running wars in the world. They cannot simply be ignored.

Sanctions have helped bring about no democratic transition in Asia—on the contrary. So imagine if the West reversed policy, dropped sanctions and pursued engagement. The generals have already looked at the development paths blazed by China and Vietnam and said they want to follow. In comparison to the regimes in those two countries, Myanmar’s badly lacks legitimacy. So Mr Thant says that development could bring about swift changes to the political landscape, as eventually happened in Indonesia. Development, in other words, could be the fastest path to democracy. Will the courageous Lady admit as much? (JEG's: development could follow if the generals were genuinely interested in the country instead of filling their personal pockets, that is the difference with China and Vietnam, they had their time to prove themselves instead they wasted what is rightful to the citizens in paying thugs and decorating the army barracks with silk and diamonds)

Jul 23rd, 2009

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Goh says Suu Kyi ‘is part of the problem’

(DVB)–Aung San Suu Kyi “is part of the problem” in Burma’s political crisis because she still believes she is the government, said former Singaporean prime minister Goh Chok Tong yesterday.

The comment, reported yesterday in Channel NewsAsia, was made during the inaugural Asia-Middle East Media Roundtable in Singapore yesterday.

Goh Chok Tong, now a Senior Minister in Singapore, had previously urged the ruling junta in Burma to hold free and fair elections next year following a meeting with Senior General Than Shwe in June.

The comments have stirred unrest among Burma observers, with the foreign affairs coordinator of the National League for Democracy-Liberated Areas, Nyo Ohn Myint , saying he was “very upset” by it.

“She has been under house arrest for 14 years and has never had a chance for dialogue or to show her ability to reconcile with the junta,” he said.

“[Goh] should have a look at the real problem, which is not the democracy icon, but is the military junta.”

Singapore is a member of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) bloc, and follows the ASEAN policy of non-interference in internal matters of member states.

But, said Nyo Ohn Myint, the relationship runs deeper than straight diplomacy, with Singapore a significant investor in Burma.

“I think Singapore is protecting its business interests,” he said. “Singapore, and ASEAN countries, always try not to side with the opposition but stick with the ruling generals.”

Burmese political analyst Aung Naing Oo said however that the problem is “a conflict between idealism and pragmatic action”.

“[Singapore] wants the country to move forward, and they see Aung San Suu Kyi as the obstacle, mainly because the military is not moving,” he said.

“In a conflict that is not going anywhere, it is normal for anybody to look for alternatives. From a moral idealisitic point of view, then Goh Chok Tong is not right, but from pragmatic thinking he may be right.”

He added that the comment symbolizes the conflict between Eastern and Western countries on what action to take on Burma, with the likes of China and India refraining from condemnation while the United States and European Union hold tough sanctions on the regime.

Reporting by Francis Wade

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Is the Lady Wrong?

By HTET AUNG
The Irrawaddy News

In a fresh attack on Burma’s pro-democracy icon Aung San Suu Kyi, The Economist proclaimed that she was an obstacle to the country’s development. “Will the courageous Lady admit as much?” the international political journal challenged.

As a student of international development, I was keen to look into the argument through a comparative review of Suu Kyi’s own concept of development.

Before reading my analysis, readers should not lose sight of two fundamental factors: The system and the power.

Politically and economically, Burma has been in a transitional state to democracy, practicing a military authoritarianism and a market economy since 1988 with the military junta exercising legislative, executive and judiciary powers.

Meanwhile, the National League for Democracy (NLD), led by Suu Kyi, won a landslide victory in the 1990 elections. She, however, has been a prisoner of the junta for nearly 14 of the past 20 years.

The notion that democracy can be achieved through development, as Thant Myint-U said in the article, is in fact not new. It was a popular idea in the 1980s when the world witnessed the “economic miracle” in East Asia when countries such as South Korea and Taiwan took off, accompanied close behind by Southeast Asian neighbors Singapore and Malaysia.

Economists viewed these countries’ spectacular development as a consequence of rapid economic growth. They usually reached the conclusion that East Asia had succeeded on a policy of “development first, democracy second,” on the basis that democracy is fragile without a strong middle class.

Thant Myint-U seems to be a member of this camp. Some development theorists advocated that as the East Asian countries in question—the “Asian Tigers” as they became known—were ruled by one-party-dominated governments, the task of development in an authoritarian state was easier to implement than in a democratic one. They pointed to the failure of several Latin American countries’ economies as an example.

But later, a new finding proved that the growth of an economy that over-emphasized GDP (Gross Domestic Product) didn’t reflect that country’s development.

The late former president of the Philippines, Corazon Aquino, invited Suu Kyi to a meeting of the World Commission on Culture and Development in Manila in 1994. Under house arrest, Suu Kyi was only able to send to the meeting a letter which stated her concept on development.

Referring to Francois Perroux’s “A New Concept of Development,” issued by UNESCO (United Nations Education Science and Culture Organization) in 1983, Suu Kyi was aware of the need to redefine the meanings of “development” and “growth.”

“The unsatisfactory record of development in many parts of the world and the ensuing need for a definition of development which means more than mere economic growth became a matter of vital concern to economists and international agencies more than a decade ago,” she said.

Another finding on the recent economic miracles of East and Southeast Asia is that the success of those economies is due to the efficiency of strong government institutions. Ironically, these authoritarian states embraced the core principles of accountability, transparency, a minimum level of corruption, an independent banking system, an effective check and balance system through decentralization to the private sector, and the state’s social investment in education and health.

So, is it logical that the absence of good governance in Burma is due to the economic sanctions of the American-led Western countries? Does it make sense that the junta’s failed economic policies of the past 20 years were caused by the NLD leader’s advocacy of economic sanctions?

No country wants to invest in a country without a rule-based economic environment; and the necessary rules are drawn and adopted by policymakers from the political arena.

The development of China and Vietnam today could not have been achieved without the ability to conduct a series of reforms.

Therefore, it is impossible and even wrong to consider the “development first, democracy second” principle.

The people of Burma have been living without a constitution for 20 years and badly need a functioning political system. They have showed the desire for this many times, most memorably the 1988 pro-democracy uprising and the 1990 elections.

Suu Kyi wrote a special report in the Human Development Report titled “Deepening Democracy in a Fragmented World,” [published by the UNDP in 2002]. In it she wrote:

“Human development encompasses all aspects of human existence. It is generally accepted that its scope includes political and social rights as well as economic ones, but the different rights are not always given the same weight.

“For example, some people still claim that humanitarian aid and economic assistance cannot wait for political and social progress. This insidious idea creates dissonance between complementary requirements.”

After her release from a second period of house arrest in 2003, The Irrawaddy interviewed Suu Kyi, a month before she was attacked in Depayin. She answered questions covering a range of the issues, including humanitarian aid.

“We have never said ‘no’ to humanitarian aid as such,” she said. “We have always said humanitarian aid must be given to the right people in the right way, which of course calls for accountability and transparency.

“And of course we always say that the minimum necessary requirement is independent monitoring.”

In another interview, this time for an Altsean-Burma report—“A Peace of Pie? Burma’s Humanitarian Aid Debate”—Suu Kyi said: What I would like to say is the most important aspect of humanitarian assistance or any kind of assistance is good governance. Unless there is good governance, you cannot ensure that the assistance will really benefit the country.”

The past two decades are adequate testimony to the efficiency of a government with a total lack of “good governance,” which has caused what can only be called a “gross domestic failure.”

If the readers didn’t lose sight of the two fundamental factors, as I mentioned above, they can conclude the correct answer to the question of this article’s title.

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