BURMA: UN Envoy’s Visit Brings Hope, Exposes Limitations

By Marwaan Macan-Markar Reprint | | Print |

Analysis by Marwaan Macan-Markar

BANGKOK, Nov 14 2006 (IPS) - Turning the heat on Burma, the United Nations is discovering that it has limitations in trying to pressure the country’s ruling junta into giving up its dream of creating a military utopia.

All eyes are on Ibrahim Gambari, U.N. undersecretary-general for political affairs, who concluded his second visit on the weekend to one of South-east Asia’s most oppressive countries.

The initial reaction after his three-day visit was that Gambari will have to try harder to make headway where other U.N. envoys, on missions varying from politics to human rights, failed to make a dent.

The only clue Gambari offered as a hint that any progress was made during his latest visit was that there had been ‘’hard bargaining” on some of the troubling political issues with Rangoon’s secretive regime.

That information to reporters in Bangkok, where he stopped over after his visit, was in addition to news on the health of Aung San Suu Kyi, the country’s pro-democracy leader, currently held under house arrest. ”She is in good health but requires more regular medical visits,” said a statement released by the U.N. office in Rangoon following Gambari’s hour-long meeting with the Nobel Peace laureate at a government guesthouse.

Gamabri said that, while he was pleased with the discussions he had with Burmese leaders, the outcome of his visit would be based on ‘’concrete and positive decisions” that are taken by the regime.

The State Peace and Development Council (SPDC), which is the official name of the junta, has been making life increasingly difficult for Suu Kyi. Her personal physician, Dr. Tin Myo Win, has been denied visiting rights for the past two months – down from he once-a-month he was allowed since the start of this year. Apart from two female domestic workers, the doctor is the only contact that Suu Kyi has with the outside world.

The 61-year-old Suu Kyi had a gynaecological operation in 2003 and had severe stomach ailments in June. She has spent over 11 years in detention. Her one-hour meeting with Gambari, during his initial mission to Burma in May, was the first she had had with an outsider in two years.

For Burmese political activists, a test of Gambari’s usefulness will be any gains made towards securing the release of the leader of the National League for Democracy (NLD) and freedom for the over 1,100 political prisoners, including some 12 parliamentarians, languishing in Burmese jails. The junta sees such opposition voices as a threat to its stability, more so as it conducts a constitutional drafting-process with democratic aims that have been described, in some quarters, as ‘’a sham”.

‘’Student leaders in Rangoon feel that Mr.Gambari’s visit will not have an impact because there was no indication that the political prisoners will be released in the near future,” Naing Aung, secretary-general of the non-governmental Forum for Democracy in Burma (FDB), said in a telephone interview. ‘’There is also no conducive atmosphere to conduct talks between the SPDC and opposition groups.”

The student leaders that the FDB spokesman has in mind are those who belong to the 88-Generation, a movement of university students who enjoy wide respect in Burma for their outspokenness and courage. In 1988, they led a popular uprising for democracy on Rangoon’s streets, which was brutally crushed by the junta, and recently, in September, mounted a signature campaign seeking the release of all political prisoners.

Leaders of Suu Kyi’s NLD are also not sanguine about what to expect from the U.N.’s most senior political affairs officer. ‘’NLD sources say that the one hour they got with Mr. Gambari was not enough to relay the countries political problem,” says Zin Linn, an information director of the National Coalition Government of the Union of Burma (NCGUB), the Burmese government forced into exile after the junta refused to recognise the results of the 1990 parliamentary election.

‘’The people inside Burma were not happy with Gambari’s programme, because he spent too much time with the SPDC officials, with the two political organisations affiliated to the military regime and he also went to the National Convention (where the new constitution is being drafted),” he revealed to IPS. ‘’Opposition people who wanted to see him, like the leaders of the ethnic groups and the ‘88-Generation’ leaders were not given a chance.”

If anything, the latest visit shows that the military government appears interested in engaging with the United Nations due to growing international pressure but little else, says Aung Naing Oo, an independent Burmese analyst living in exile. ‘’So far the junta has not given up anything. There have not been any concessions on its part.”

‘’The Burmese military will invite anyone who comes calling as a friend,” he added in an IPS interview. ‘’So long as the U.N. does not criticise the military, it will always be invited. This has happened in the past. They don’t like criticism.”

The last two U.N. envoys who were initially welcome but later denied entry to Rangoon were the Malaysian diplomat Razali Ismail, as the special envoy of the U.N. secretary-general and the Brazilian national Paulo Sergio Pinheiro, as the U.N. special rapporteur for human rights in Burma.

Razali who began his work in 2000 resigned at the beginning of this year following a lengthy period of being shut out from Burma. In late 2002, he played a pivotal role in brokering talks with the SPDC and Suu Kyi, who was freed from detention for a brief period at the time.

Pinheiro began his Burma assignment in December 2000 but has been denied permission to return to the country since November 2003. In September, he delivered his latest report on the country, which catalogued a long list of human rights violations, including forced labour, persecution of opposition political party members, abuse of human rights defenders and indiscriminate attacks of ethnic minorities along the country’s borders. The report also drew attention to widespread accounts of ‘’torture,” ‘’summary executions,” ‘’sexual violence and recruitment of child soldiers.”

Burma, which has been ruled by successive military regimes since a 1962 coup, has come in for more international condemnation of late, particularly with the SPDC showing little signs that it hopes to withdraw the military from its dominance in all sections of the country’s political, economic and social life.

Still, Burma’s current engagement with Gambari is being held in a climate that is different from when Rangoon had its earlier encounters with U.N. envoys. Burma is presently on the agenda of the powerful U.N. Security Council, which is empowered to scrutinise the junta more carefully than before.

The significance of such an intervention has not been lost on Burma watchers. ‘’The situation is different now. Gambari has come in with the power of the Security Council behind him,” says Aung Naing Oo. ‘’The most important thing he can do is keep the Burma agenda under international scrutiny. But people will be looking for results in the end.”