The Burma policy is a dead end. In North Korea, Bush has come to recognize that even a superpower can’t bargain by sheer force and offer nothing in return for something, even when dealing with a crude dictator. In Burma, however, “they’re saying give up power and then we’ll talk. It doesn’t make sense,” says Georgetown University Asia expert David Steinberg. General Khin Nyunt became prime minister amid growing international pressure over the detention of Suu Kyi, whom the United States claims was on a hunger strike last week. So far, the pressure has only inspired the generals to dig in deeper.
They can live in a bunker and defy the West indefinitely. The most famous case of sanctions that helped bring down a ruthless government was South Africa, but the apartheid regime was deeply engaged in trade before the world united to cut it off completely. Many expected North Korea, too, to collapse under sanctions, but it has not. And, like North Korea, Burma has an agrarian, subsistence economy so backward that tougher Western sanctions don’t present a significantly greater threat, yet it still produces enough to keep the narrow ruling elite in great comfort. “They will continue to survive,” says Steinberg. “When you talk about a country collapsing economically, you’re thinking about an industrialized country. In Burma, forget it.”
Bush says new American sanctions send a “clear signal” for the junta to release Suu Kyi and jailed leaders of her movement, hand over power to civilians and return to the barracks. The new Burmese Freedom and Democracy Act freezes assets of the generals in U.S. banks and bans all imports from Burma, which will cost it $356 million in garment sales to the United States. But that’s only a fraction of Burma’s total exports, and the threat hasn’t moved the generals. Nyunt responded by offering his own “road map to democracy,” but with no clear signposts or deadlines. Washington dismissed it as a joke.
So where to go from here? Since the apartheid era, there has been an effort to rethink sanctions as a more precise weapon that targets rulers, not the ruled. Saddam Hussein was allowed to sell oil on the condition that proceeds went to help Iraqis, which at least softened the sanctions blow. Yet in Burma, the new U.S. import ban has thrown at least 80,000 Burmese out of work, and the European Union is poised to impose a similar ban. Washington is trying to get China, India and Southeast Asian nations to follow suit. At the least, new sanctions need to be redrawn to ease the impact on ordinary people.
The United States also needs to give the generals a way to cede power gradually without fear of popular retribution. Some Asians suggest the model of Cambodia, where another brutal military regime proved impervious to sanctions but eventually agreed to lay down arms, form an interim government with the opposition and then hold elections in a peace deal brokered by the United Nations. Steinberg, who has contacts in Rangoon, says the junta may be open to power sharing, as long as it retains at least 25 percent of the seats in Parliament. That would be a small concession to make for democracy in Burma.
title: “On The Road To Nowhere” ShowToc: true date: “2022-12-24” author: “Gretchen Murphy”
It’s about to get worse: the rainy season is coming. Most of the displaced villagers sleep in the open, having lost nearly everything else along with their homes. They can’t reach their fields to plant this year’s crops, and in May, when the rains start, it will be too late. Diseases, especially waterborne ones, are sure to spread. Meningitis has already broken out at a camp on the Chad border. Flooding will likely make some camps inaccessible. Many are largely cut off even now. Khartoum is barring aid shipments from Chad or anywhere else outside its control. And relief groups say militia raids against rebel areas continue despite the regime’s recent signing of a 45-day truce. “African countries and the entire world must decide if we will act to try to stop the genocide in Darfur or if we will respond with silence and inaction as we did in Rwanda 10 years ago,” wrote Richard Williamson, the U.S. envoy to the U.N. Commission on Human Rights, in the Chicago Sun-Times recently. “To fail to act is morally indefensible.”
Last week the White House had a chance to take action. Instead, President George W. Bush certified, as required every six months under the 2002 Sudan Peace Act, that the Islamist regime in Khartoum is negotiating in good faith for an end to Sudan’s other civil war: the decades-old rebellion in southern Sudan. If the president had withheld his signature, he could have unleashed severe economic sanctions against Khartoum. But a southern peace framework seems tantalizingly close, so policymakers faced a tough choice. “It’s frustrating,” says a senior State Department official, “but given all the progress, we couldn’t say they weren’t cooperating.”
The administration badly wants peace between Khartoum and the southern rebels of the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement. Since 1983, the war between northern Muslims and southern animists and Christians has killed some 2 million Sudanese and driven 5 million from their homes. (In the recent conflict over Darfur, where both sides are predominantly Muslim, an estimated 30,000 have died.) Ending the north-south war would be a huge step toward stabilizing the Horn of Africa and would open the way to Sudan’s newly proven oil reserves. Administration officials say Africa will eventually supply as much as 30 percent of America’s oil. But before Sudan can fully exploit its oil, Khartoum and the SPLM have to work out the last few details of how power and revenues are to be divided during the six-year run-up to a referendum on southern autonomy.
The regime shows no hurry. “Khartoum has a vested interest in the status quo–no war and no peace,” says John Prendergast, a Clinton-era National Security Council staffer now advising the Brussels-based International Crisis Group. “It can continue to milk 100 percent of the profits from oil. And with no fighting in the south it can concentrate its military hardware and assets on Darfur.” On Friday the United States took a hard line against Khartoum, casting the lone vote against a U.N. Commission on Human Rights resolution expressing concern about Darfur. The language was too mild, Williamson said; it should have talked about “ethnic cleansing.” There will likely be other chances before the killing stops.
