AT A CONFERENCE I attended last week on Southeast Asia in Washington, D.C., I was struck by two things. First, the number of scholars who asked me to rationalize McCain’s vice-presidential pick (I deserve credit for even trying). Second, and more sordidly, their own rationalization of Southeast Asia’s inaction on Burma, despite a consensus that the international community needs to rework its approach.
The Burma issue ought to make one’s blood boil. For two decades, the ruling junta has been disenfranchising and terrorizing the opposition party which initially won 80 percent of parliament.
But lest ‘democracy promotion’ opponents cringe, consider basic human rights. The junta employs tens of thousands of child soldiers while raping, pillaging and enslaving the country’s ethnic groups. 700,000 refugees have spilled out from the country, along with an unhealthy dose of heroin and HIV/AIDS. And to top it all off, the junta decided to hold a constitutional referendum in the midst of the worst natural disaster in Burmese history when a cyclone struck earlier this year.
For decades, the United States and Europe have imposed feel-good sanctions and prayed that the junta will make good on their hopes for regime change. But even moralistic policies should not escape the scrutiny of practical judgment. Current sanctions have not only failed, but have succeeded in hardening the junta’s grip on power at the expense of the Burmese people. For one, some Asian countries have been more than happy to fund brutal regimes where the West cannot.
When the Burmese textile industry collapsed under sanctions, women who once sewed clothes began selling their bodies. Legitimate industry dried up and it was inundated by a black market of drugs, gems and timber. The regime was able to dismiss hyperinflation as a Western-created phenomenon and dissidents as ‘tools of foreign subversion’. The junta has slowly curled back into its paranoid shell of isolation.
Yet the conference participants were hell-bent on excusing the inexcusable and denying the undeniable. “We come from different civilizations and baselines”, muttered one under his gray, bushy mustache. But in which ‘civilization’ does one hold a referendum while a cyclone kills 146,000 people? “We will do it in our own time”, another counseled soothingly. I would sympathize with this if I were asking for an expedition to Mars or a space walk. But urgency is paramount if people are suffering every day under a brutal regime. My personal favorite: “we all have different ideas of what human rights are.” But does anyone disagree that every human being deserves not to be raped, pillaged and starved by their government? One would hope not.
“Do you want another Iraq or Afghanistan? They are both cakewalks considering what we will encounter in Burma”, cried one exasperated participant. The zaniness nearly caused my eyes to pop out of their sockets. Of course, only the naïve would expect intervention in a place where humanitarian nations have no interests. Let me propose a more “cakewalk-ish” suggestion.
First, waiting for democracy to germinate like Jack’s fabled Beanstalk before rapprochement is a little like hoping Sarah Palin will be well-versed in foreign affairs by tonight’s vice-presidential debate: miracles rarely happen. Hence, there should be a “Seven Party Dialogue” akin to the North Korean talks comprising India, China, the United States, the European Union, Japan, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations and Burma.
To butcher an already butchered election sound bite, there will be no “preconditions” but plenty of “preparations.” As Michael Green and Derek Mitchell suggested last year in Foreign Affairs magazine, the parties would meet to discuss a security guarantee for Burma’s territorial integrity while proposing some form of joint rule between the junta and the opposition. The compromise is realistic because the nationalistic and paranoid junta tends to cling to power tightly as if its survival depended on it. Sometimes one has little choice but to accept a defunct, brutal regime as part of the reconciliation process, much like Zimbabwe’s dictator Mugabe and bruised opposition leader Tsvangirai.
Second, if this grand bargain fails, the international community should coordinate on limited sanctions that dry up assets and investments of the junta rather than the food and water of the Burmese people. Sanctions will not work if some countries continue to privilege value over values. The world may also eventually need to dispatch highly conditional, regulated humanitarian aid to help rebuild infrastructure for the Burmese people.
The world is low on hollow excuses and high on empty rhetoric in its approach to Burma. Sporadic outbursts of attention often inspire a flicker of hope. But with Washington saddled with an economic crisis and two wars, change on this issue is something few seem to believe in.
Prashanth Parameswaran’s column appears Thursdays in The Cavalier Daily.
He can be reached at p.parameswaran@cavalierdaily.com.
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