UN holds false hope for Myanmar By Bertil Lintner November 16, 2007 Asia Times Source: http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Southeast_Asia/IK17Ae01.html CHIANG MAI - If the United Nations special envoy to Myanmar, Ibrahim Gambari, is to be believed, the situation in the military run country has changed for the better in the past few weeks, with the junta taking a qualitatively different line from when it cracked down on street demonstrators in late September. Reporting to the UN Security Council on his recent visit to Myanmar on November 13, he urged its members to give his diplomatic effort time to succeed. But, as he was speaking in New York, in Yangon and other Myanmar cities arrests of dissidents were still in full swing. On the exact same day, Su Su Nway, a prominent female activist who had been in hiding for several weeks, was picked up by the secret police as she was trying to convey a message to another UN official, human rights envoy Paulo Pinheiro, who just had arrived in the country. A few days before the arrest of Su Su Nway, U Gambira, a Buddhist monk and leader of the All-Burma Monks Alliance, was also apprehended. He was one of the leaders of the monk-led, anti-government protests in September, and had been in hiding since the military's armed crackdown on September 26-27. U Gambira has been charged with treason, the punishment for which is life in prison or death. The monk's father and brother have also been arrested while his mother and three other family members were interrogated by military authorities. In the old capital Yangon, eyewitnesses reported seeing young people recently being apprehended in one of the city's markets as they were handing out leaflets. And, at night and pre-dawn morning - usually around 1 am - secret police officers continue to raid people's homes and drag suspected dissidents away. Those actions give the lie to Gambari's statement on his arrival in Singapore from Myanmar on November 8 that we now have a process going which will lead to a dialog between the government and Daw Aung San Suu Kyi. He also brought with him a statement from the detained opposition leader, saying that she was ready to cooperate with the country's military rulers to pursue national reconciliation. She may have said that, but of course that is nothing new. Aung San Suu Kyi has been calling for a dialog with the country's rulers since she and other pro-democracy politicians on August 15, 1988, delivered an open letter to then secretary of the Council of State, Kyaw Htin, suggesting the formation of a People's Consultative Committee to solve the political crisis that was then engulfing the country. She has also met with Myanmar's military leaders on several previous occasions, the first time in 1994, even before she was released from her first round of house arrest in 1995. The problem is that Aung San Suu Kyi, the UN, and the ruling State Peace and Development Council (SPDC) are not speaking the same language. The official mouthpiece newspaper The New Light of Myanmar wrote in its November 10 edition that while putting energy into the democratization process, the government has been making efforts for the national reconsolidation [sic]. And, As part of efforts for transition to democracy by implementing the seven-step road map [to democracy] and ensuring peace and stability and bringing about development of the country ... Minister of Labor U Aung Kyi was assigned [to meet] Daw Aung San Suu Kyi. From these public statements it would seem that nearly nothing has changed. The junta's seven-step road map is designed to perpetuate military rule in Myanmar, and national reconsolidation is hardly the same as national reconciliation. Failed interventions Despite his bravado in the Security Council, it is highly unlikely that Gambari will achieve more than a host of other UN envoys who have over the past 17 years visited Myanmar and failed to achieve any progress towards more democracy. Consider the UN's record. The first independent expert the UN sent to the country to study violations of human rights was Sadako Ogata, a Japanese professor who later went on to become the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. The report she submitted to the UN's Commission of Human Rights on December 27, 1990, was unusually bland for a rights advocate. General elections had been held that year in May, resulting in a landslide victory for Aung San Suu Kyi's National League for Democracy (NLD) party and Ogata concluded in her report that it is not in dispute that it will be the task of the elected representatives of the Pyithu Hluttaw (National Assembly) to draft a new constitution, on the basis of which a new government will be formed. At present, however ... it is not clear when the Hluttaw will be convened for that purpose. In fact, it was never convened. Instead the government began arresting elected MPs and three years later formed a constituent assembly consisting of mostly handpicked people to draw up a new constitution, a task which just after 14 years has been completed as the first of seven steps in the junta's road map. In 1992, the UN appointed another Japanese academic, Yozo Yokota, special rapporteur on the situation of human rights in Myanmar - a step higher than an independent expert. He compiled some critical reports, but later resigned in 1996 according to a statement by a UN spokesman at the time, because of planned career changes in Tokyo as well as frustration at the lack of logistical support from human-rights staff in Geneva, where the Human Rights Commission is based. His successor, Rajsoomer Lallah, a former chief justice of Mauritius, was not even allowed by the Myanmar government to visit the country during the four years he served as special human rights rapporteur. According to Jose Diaz, then spokesman for the UN Commission for Human Rights, Lallah had expressed frustration ... with the little change that he has seen in the country he follows. Lallah was succeeded by Paulo Pinheiro, a Brazilian law expert who in the beginning was upbeat about his work, including his belief that he was free to talk to political prisoners without interference from the authorities. But his rather positive reports were severely criticized by NLD spokesman U Lwin, among others. Pinheiro changed his tune completely when in March 2003 he discovered a microphone beneath the table at which he was interviewing a political prisoner in Yangon's infamous Insein jail. He immediately left the country in disgust and was not allowed back until now. In the meantime, perhaps partially to protect his own credibility, he has become a vocal critic of the Myanmar military regime. Stonewalled envoys Then there were the several special envoys, sent not by the UN's Human Rights Commission, but by the secretary general himself. Peruvian diplomat Alvar De Soto made six fruitless visits to Myanmar between February 1995 and October 1999. He was succeeded in 2000 by Malaysian diplomat Razali Ismail, who also began his mission by believing that he could persuade the Myanmar generals to be more cooperative with the political opposition inside the country and the outside international community. In November 2001, Razali said he was hopeful that some significant progress could be made in the near future. The following year, he was instrumental in securing the release from house arrest of Aung San Suu Kyi, which prompted him to say: I am delighted for her and the country ... we have to give them time. Don't expect things to happen immediately. I think there is a commitment on the part of the military to make the transition [to civilian rule]. But nothing really changed and in May 2003 Aung San Suu Kyi was locked up again after government thugs attacked her and her entourage at Depayin, a remote village in northern Myanmar. An unknown number of NLD supporters were killed in the melee. She was nearly killed and later escorted back to her private residence in Yangon, where she has remained under house arrest ever since. Razali quit his post in January 2006 after he was refused entry to Myanmar for nearly two consecutive years. By then it emerged that his mission to Myanmar had perhaps not been entirely altruistic. Apart from being a Malaysian government civil servant, he is also in private business as the chairman and 30% stockowner of IRIS Technologies, a company that during one of his visits managed to secure a contract with the Myanmar government for high-tech passports with biometric features. A conflict of interests? Not according to the UN, which came to his rescue by saying that his kind of part-time contract with the world organization did not carry any restrictions on business activities.Yet because of the lack of transparency and accountability, and the absence of any investigative and critical media inside the country, Myanmar provides plenty of opportunities for private business deals. That's true even for some UN officials and diplomats who are based there, such as the smuggling of antiques in diplomatic and UN bags and the sale of duty-free goods on the black market. For the junta, manipulating the UN and sporadically giving false hopes to the international community buys it time while it moves to legitimize its hold on political power through a new charter. Razali's successor as special envoy, Gambari, has so far continued in the tradition of previous upbeat UN officials, who in the end achieved very little if nothing for the people of Myanmar. When the smoke has cleared, it will most likely be business as usual in Myanmar. Another UN envoy or rapporteur may have come, full of optimism at first, and frustrated by the junta's intransigence in the end. Bertil Lintner is a former correspondent with the Far Eastern Economic Review. He is currently a writer with Asia-Pacific Media Services. (Copyright 2007 Asia Times Online Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact us about sales, syndication and republishing.) Mixed messages from Myanmar's junta (Nov 13, '07) UN fiddles while Myanmar burns (Oct 23, '07) 1. US eyes Pakistan's nuclear arsenal 2. Muqtada moves to stop a Sunni 'surge' 3. Subprime mortgages, subprime currency 4. Sino-Russian split at regional summit 5. Pakistan, Bush and the bomb 6. America's disappearing middle class 7. The dark side of Mogambo 8. Dying with an anti-war whimper 9. Iran, Pakistan dump India from pipeline deal (24 hours to 11:59 pm ET, Nov 15, 2007)