West must engage with evil for the ultimate good of Burmese people

THE news that Nobel Peace Prize laureate Aung San Suu Kyi’s house arrest is to be extended came as no surprise. How gracious of the Burmese regime to reduce the sentence from three years of hard labour! Micheál Martin issued a suitably withering response.

But before the west cranks up the sanctions another notch, isn’t it time to take a step back and ask ourselves how far the policy of isolating Burma has got us? That Burma is a rogue state, and an intensely paranoid one at that, is pretty universally accepted in Europe and North America. It is also increasingly dangerous.

The junta under Than Shwe is possibly the only government in the world which sees North Korea as a positive model, having secured itself from external interference through possession of nuclear weapons. Words cannot fully capture quite what an unpleasant and anachronistic regime they are running there.

Burma should be a comparatively prosperous nation; it has abundant gas deposits and enormous mineral wealth. It is also a beautiful country ripe for tourist development. But its people have absolutely nothing — apart from the opportunity to admire a very large army.

The satirist PJ O’Rourke once noted that the more references to democracy a country has in its official title, the greater the chance it is run by a grubby totalitarian regime. Hence, the “People’s Republic of China” and the heroically misleading “Democratic People’s Republic” of North Korea.

Burma has its equivalent in the Orwellian-sounding “State Peace and Development Council”. This is essentially a renamed version of the less fluffy-sounding “State Law and Order Restoration Council”. But don’t be misled: there is not much peace in the country and still less in the way of development.

Rather, for Burma’s brutal junta, the “peace” portion of the title signals the army’s self-proclaimed right to maintain internal stability by keeping a malnourished populace crushed underfoot and holding Aung San Suu Kyi captive.

In some ways she is lucky: other opposition politicians are routinely smacked about, tortured or simply disappeared. It’s been like that since General Ne Win’s coup in 1962, which set the country on the glorious path to socialist salvation. But if the generals are out of touch, so are we. The European and American vision of Burma is trapped in that brief moment, now 20 years past, when regime change seemed just around the corner and a democratic leader stood ready to take charge. While life in Burma continues, outsiders seem to relive the day of Suu Kyi’s imprisonment in endless loops, unintentionally forgetting there is more to Burma than a single, extraordinary woman.

As things stand, the west can feel complacent in its condemnation of the Burmese government. But sanctions and isolation haven’t worked and all the while the plight of the Burmese people worsens.

Over the past two decades, the west’s threats have merely hardened the regime’s resistance. Further, these threats have been counterproductive, especially when Burma’s all-important Asian neighbours categorically refuse to jump on the sanctions bandwagon. And the more we continue to isolate Burma, the more we drive it into the welcoming arms of China and the more likely it is to follow North Korea down the nuclear path.

Optimistic analysts hope the appalling suffering in Burma will inevitably lead to the collapse of the junta and its replacement by a government led by Aung San Suu Kyi. It’s a forlorn hope: the Burmese army is willing to kill civilians in large numbers. So long as the army stays united, nothing will change.

Two other stark realities need to be faced. First, there is not the slightest chance of anybody intervening militarily in Burma. Even to talk of it is to partake in self-indulgent prattle.

Second, the primary responsibility for Burma’s plight lies with the Burmese government. Arguments about everything being the fault of imperialism don’t hold water.

But the west pursues policies to have an effect. When those policies have the opposite effect to their intentions they should be discarded. Moreover, these policies, so morally high-blown in intent, must be judged, morally, on their consequences.

The Burmese generals actively pursue a policy of isolation for themselves and for Burmese society. They have had no better friends, no more effective allies, in effect if not in intent, in achieving this isolation than the governments of Europe and America and our human rights lobbies.

China and India fully engage Burma, as do most of its Asian neighbours. That means there is no chance of western sanctions producing regime change. However, even without the support of its Asian neighbours, there is little chance of sanctions producing regime change.

What western sanctions ensure is that Burma is cut off from the most liberalising of all western forces, namely commerce.

Periodically, Burma has flirted with economic liberalisation, but American and European sanctions ban investment in and imports from Burma. This truly is moral vanity and the only people who suffer for it are the Burmese people. Aung San Suu Kyi supports the sanctions, but they are the wrong policy nonetheless. Merely reciting Suu Kyi’s name, utterly admirable woman that she is, does not constitute a policy.

Trade and development for Burma would not mean democracy, but they would mean a vast improvement on the situation today. The Burmese generals rightly fear trade and development because they believe the import of western companies into Burma would involve importing western values with them.

WHILE maintaining our criticism of Burma on human rights, we would have to be able to hold two contrasting thoughts in our head at the one time, often a very difficult feat in democratic debate.

Drawing the Burmese ruling class into the wider international environment ought to be one big object of our policy towards Burma. Cyclones, AIDS, illegal drug industries: the Burmese government neither can, nor wants to, ameliorate these disasters for the Burmese people. But, at present, the only topic on our agenda is Suu Kyi’s continued house arrest.

The counter-argument is that because the overwhelming majority of Burma’s citizens work in the “informal” economy, they would be quite untouched by sanctions, which would simply reduce the flow of money to the military junta.

Addressing the issue of EU investment in Burma, Archbishop Desmond Tutu said, “apathy in the face of systematic human rights abuses is amoral”. But, while apathy is amoral, so is sloganising. Where did chanting “Free Tibet” get anyone?

Sadly, the history of anti-authoritarian protests suggests that moderation and prayer offer no guarantee of avoiding state repression. Indeed, shows of passivity often invite the iron fist. In the end, some more forceful opposition is likely to be needed to bring about the democratic revolution that the Burmese masses deserve.

Until that day comes, however, simply issuing statements and imposing ever more travel bans on the regime’s leaders and apparatchiks won’t work. Engagement with evil is morally fraught but, when all else fails, it has to be attempted as the option of last resort.