World Raises Volume on Myanmar, but Does Junta Care? 
By Reuters
January 12, 2006
The New York Times
Original Source: http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/international/international-myanmar.html

BANGKOK (Reuters) - If you listen to exile groups and anti-junta lobbyists, Myanmar's generals are on their last legs.
Hemmed in by U.S. sanctions, riven by internal feuding, in line for a ticking off from the U.N. Security Council and with an ever-shrinking circle of friends, the junta is falling apart.
However, throughout 44 years of unbroken army rule in the former Burma, optimistic forecasters of impending change, coalescing around opposition leader and democracy icon Aung San Suu Kyi, have had a habit of being wrong and disappointed.
There is little to suggest they will be any less wrong or less disappointed this time around, analysts say.
``The exile community gets excited when they think the West is finally going to do something,'' said Robert Taylor, a researcher at Singapore's Institute of South East Asian Studies.
``It's human nature. You've got a group of very frustrated people who think they've got a winning cause and who can't understand why it doesn't win. They get optimistic when they hear all this noise from the outside.''
It is true that the volume of the international anti-Myanmar chorus has grown over the last two years, led by the United States, which has tightened sanctions against Yangon and branded it an ``outpost of tyranny'' for its house arrest of Suu Kyi.
Myanmar's normally acquiescent partners in the Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN) are also getting fed up with the generals' intransigence and last year forced them to forgo their scheduled chairmanship of the 10-member group in 2006.
In addition, a report signed off by former Czech president Vaclav Havel and South African archbishop Desmond Tutu has pushed Myanmar and its myriad problems, which range from narcotics to HIV to civil wars, toward the United Nations Security Council.
An informal Council meeting on the issue in December raised hopes that the international community was finally serious about tackling the junta, which lost 1990 elections by a landslide but refused to hand over power.
``People are starting to believe this regime is going to come down and maybe it won't be too long now,'' said Mark Farmaner of the Burma Campaign UK, a pro-democracy group.
``We see the regime as a raw egg: hard on the outside but soft on the inside -- and the first cracks are starting to show.'' 
GLORIOUS ISOLATION
For all the external rumblings, there are few signs the generals, who are busy moving the capital to a half-built complex in the middle of the jungle, are that bothered.
Last week, they blew off a planned ASEAN visit to assess the junta's own ``roadmap to democracy,'' saying they were too preoccupied with the move.
For the last 23 months, they denied a visa to the UN's special envoy to Myanmar, Malaysian diplomat Razali Ismail, causing him to quit this month at the end of his contract.
They also know that formal Security Council scrutiny or major resolutions remain doubtful, given that veto-wielding members Russia and China do not take such a dim view of Yangon's failure to embrace meaningful democratic reform.
Among possible options available to the Security Council, a visa ban for junta members and hangers-on could be the most significant, said Dominic Faulder, a Bangkok-based journalist who has covered Myanmar for 25 years.
``If you start making it difficult for the wives of hugely corrupt generals to get visas for shopping trips to Singapore, they could get seriously annoyed,'' Faulder said.
``But will it bring results? I just don't know. With this sort of situation, you just have to keep adding straws to the camel's back -- and hope.''
Finally, and probably most important, there is Myanmar's strategic location between China and India and its plentiful reserves of oil and natural gas -- a cash lifeline for the junta even as its policies have crippled the economy.
``Do you think the Chinese and the Thais are going to stop buying natural gas from Myanmar just because there's a U.N. resolution?'' Taylor asked.