The UN's silence on Burma

August 31, 2007
The Boston Globe
Original Source: http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/editorials/articles/2007/08/31/the_uns_silence_on_burma/

PRO-DEMOCRACY activists, students, Buddhist monks, and citizens who are simply fed up with the ruling military junta in Burma have been staging impromptu protests since Aug. 19, when the cancellation of fuel subsidies sent prices soaring. The burden is unbearable for many of the 90 percent of Burma’s population living at or below the poverty line. The regime has responded to the demonstrations with violent repression. Plainclothes security agents and gangs of young thugs working for the junta beat up the protesters and throw them into flatbed trucks. Among those arrested are members of the 1988 democracy movement who have already survived long prison sentences and torture. These followers of Nobel Peace Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi are expressing resistance to the dictatorship even at the risk of losing their freedom once again.
Their resoluteness should not be surprising. And there is nothing novel about the regime’s response. But the resounding silence of the United Nations is hard to fathom.
Secretary General Ban Ki-moon and his special envoy for Burma, Ibrahim Gambari, have had two months to reflect on a June warning about Burma sounded by the International Committee of the Red Cross. Not since it denounced the Rwanda genocide of 1994 has the Red Cross issued such a public condemnation of a government’s behavior.
The junta has destroyed more villages in areas inhabited by ethnic minorities than have been razed in Darfur. Its partnership in the narcotics trade has helped spread addiction and HIV/AIDS infection to Burma’s neighbors. The army’s brutal conscription of forced labor has drawn sanctions from the International Labor Organization. Yet when the Red Cross asked to deliver humanitarian assistance to the victims, or even to engage in dialogue with the military rulers about such assistance, the junta rebuffed its requests.
Because of the United Nations’ shameful refusal to act during the Rwandan genocide, its leaders ought to feel a moral obligation not to repeat that tragic lapse of solidarity with victims of state-sponsored violence. Ban Ki-moon should call for a Security Council meeting to address the new wave of repression in Burma.
Gambari, who visited Asia and Europe recently and spoke airily of dialogue and reconciliation in Burma, ought to be sent to meet with the junta leader, General Than Shwe. He should bring a clear message from the UN Security Council: that all prisoners of conscience in Burma must be released — including Suu Kyi and her fellow members of the National League for Democracy, which won 80 percent of seats in a 1990 parliamentary election the generals refused to honor.
The UN failed to react while another vicious regime was hacking its citizens to death in Rwanda. The world body cannot afford another display of moral blindness.