POLITICS-BURMA: First Meeting Starts Well, Final Outcome Unclear

By Marwaan Macan-Markar Reprint | | Print |

Marwaan Macan-Markar

Dec 15, Dec 15 2003 (IPS) - An unprecedented meeting here to discuss Burma’s political future achieved more ground than what was initially expected, Thai Foreign Minister Surakiart Sathirathai said Monday, although critics say where this will lead to remains up in the air.

Surakiart was effusive in his praise for the commitments made by his Burmese counterpart during this three-hour meeting, which was attended by the governments of 10 other countries from Europe and Asia.

It was a ”breakthrough,” he told a packed press conference at the Thai ministry of foreign affairs, where the talks took place.

”(Burmese) Foreign Minister Win Aung’s presence at the meeting is testimony that Myanmar is ready to participate in a transparent manner,” Surakiart said, referring to Burma as Myanmar, the name that the Rangoon military government gave to the country.

He also shed light on other commitments by the Burmese regime that impressed the meeting’s participants. They included naming 2004 as the year when a national convention involving the country’s political players will be held to draft a new constitution.

As noteworthy, the foreign minister added, was Win Aung’s announcement that ”all eight levels of Burmese social strata” will participate in the process. That would range from academics, villagers, military personnel to political parties, including the opposition National League for Democracy (NLD).

”This is the first time we have been informed about this,” said Surakiart, adding that more details about such changes may be revealed when this meeting, dubbed the ”Bangkok process,” is convened for a second round of discussions next year.

But reactions from Burma watchers and Burmese exiles have been more muted, with some wondering what all the fuss was about, given Rangoon’s notoriety at bluffing the international community in the past with empty promises or cosmetic change.

”The commitment to a date, 2004, to resume the national convention process after it ended in 1996 is, in a way, a small breakthrough,” Debbie Stothard of the Alternative ASEAN Network on Burma, a regional human rights lobby, told IPS. ”But there has to be a democratic process leading up to how the national convention will be structured.”

Burmese editor Aung Zaw was more dismissive of the touted ”breakthrough” that the Thai officials have hailed. ”There is nothing new in these commitments. You can find this information in (the government’s newspaper) the ‘New Light of Myanmar’,” Aung Zaw, editor of ‘The Irrawaddy,’ a news magazine published by Burmese exiles in Thailand, said in an interview.

In 1993, Burma’s junta began a similar process as it plans to do in 2004 – set up a national convention involving political participants approved by it to draft a new constitution. But the process came apart in 1996, when the NLD withdrew in protest that the military regime had denied its members the right to discuss pressing political issues freely. At Monday’s meeting, the Burmese foreign minister also guaranteed to the international participants – including government and foreign ministry officials from Australia, Austria, China, Germany, France, India, Indonesia, Italy, Japan and Singapore – that Rangoon wanted public support for its ”road map” for change.

That would include conducting a referendum once the constitution is drafted ”to gather the public’s view – if they like the constitution or not”, said Surakiart.

But for Stothard, such moves will be futile if this planned plebiscite is conducted under the current climate of political repression and media suppression. ”The public should have access to discuss all the issues, and for that media freedom should be guaranteed.”

Another test of credibility is the junta’s attitude towards Nobel peace laureate and NLD leader Aung San Suu Kyi, who was arrested along with senior party members after goons sympathetic to the junta attacked them on May 30.

”They will have to release Suu Kyi and other NLD leaders before any political discussions are held,” said Stothard. ”The NLD will not participate if their leaders are in prison.”

According to Surakiart, Win Aung told participants at the meeting that Prime Minister Gen Khin Nyunt was maintaining ”good communications and good contact” with the imprisoned Suu Kyi.

But he admitted, ”We should not assume that Khin Nyunt and Suu Kyi actually have had face to face meetings.”

Most likely, say Burmese sources, such contacts are being maintained through the regular meetings that a military official, Brig Gen Than Tun, has been having with the imprisoned pro-democracy leader.

For Aung Zaw, such talk of exchanges between the military government and Suu Kyi amount to nothing more than ”the government trying to give legitimacy to their story that something is going on in Burma, when nothing is.’

On the eve of the just-concluded ”Bangkok process,” the first of its kind the junta had ever agreed to attend, the Thai foreign minister struck a note of caution. ”We do not hold high expectations for this forum. We only hope it will make some contribution to the national reconciliation process in Burma,” Surakiart told journalists on Sunday.

In the run up to the meeting, Burma watchers – particularly critics of the military government – were expecting even less. They expected Monday’s event to give legitimacy to a political process that would guarantee the longevity of the junta.