Time to Act on Burma
Another test for the United Nations

August 9, 2006
The Washington Post
Original Source: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/08/08/AR2006080801230.html

THIS MIGHT seem the least likely moment to expect the U.N. Security Council to take up the question of Burma. Lebanon is burning; Iran is going nuclear -- do the world's diplomats really need one more intractable problem?
But in one sense, the fact that Burma is not at the top of anyone's agenda is exactly the reason the Security Council should act. Burma, also known as Myanmar, offers the United Nations a chance to show that it can deal with a threat to global security before it explodes onto the front page. Burma is not engaging in nuclear blackmail, and it has not attacked a neighboring country. But its malevolent dictatorship does represent a threat to peace: Its depredations at home (mass rapes, enforced child labor, burning of farms and villages) push masses of refugees across its borders. Its economic failures make it a locus of AIDS and other diseases. Its corruption makes it a leading source of illegal drugs. And its population of 50 million suffers under a regime whose repressiveness is rivaled only by North Korea's.
In the face of this anguish, the beleaguered democrats of this Southeast Asian nation are asking only that the Security Council put their misery on its agenda. They are not asking for U.N.-mandated sanctions, let alone peacekeepers or intervention -- only some attention from Secretary General Kofi Annan and the international body that promised, not so long ago, not to let notions of national sovereignty keep it from standing up for human rights.
This shouldn't be a hard call. Unlike many dictatorships, Burma boasts a clearly legitimate alternative: the National League for Democracy, which demonstrated overwhelming popular support when the hubristic junta mistakenly permitted free elections in 1990. Many party leaders have been in prison since, and the NLD's leader -- Nobel Peace Prize laureate Aung San Suu Kyi -- is under house arrest. But despite that treatment, she and her colleagues are asking only for dialogue about a gradual transition to democracy. The Security Council needs to put Burma on its formal agenda and then adopt a resolution calling for her freedom and the release of all political prisoners; for a process of national reconciliation with the democrats at the table; for U.N. and other international aid to flow directly to Burma's most vulnerable people, not through the corrupt bureaucracy; and for Mr. Annan to report back regularly on progress made on all these points.
The United Nations would enhance its own stature by associating itself with Burma's nonviolent democrats.