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THE HINDU : BATTLE OF WITS IN MYANM (r)



Subject: THE HINDU : BATTLE OF WITS IN MYANMAR

BATTLE OF WITS IN MYANMAR

>From the Hindu Newspaper, dated March 28, 1999

(The U.S and the U.K made no secret of their support to Ms. Suu Kyi in her
row with Yangon over the visa application by her husband (since dead).
P.S. SURYANARAYANA reports.)

Strange it certainly is, but the latest human rights row between Myanmar's
junta and the pro-democracy leader, Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi, has so far been
steered by the Yangon regime in a manner suited to its own diplomatic
agenda. It is not just a coincidence, therefore, that the Association of
South East Asian Nations (ASEAN) has once again stood by Myanmar, one of
its members, in its latest diplomatic dispute with the European Union
(E.U.), even as the U.S. and the U.K., besides Australia, have made no
secret of their support for Ms. Suu Kyi in her battle of wits with Yangon
over her cancer-striken husband's visa application for meeting her. (He
has since died.)

The Nobel Peace-laureate had wanted her British husband, Dr. Michael Aris,
to visit her in Yangon so that any move by her to meet him in England
could not be seized upon by Myanmar's ruling State Peace and Development
Council (SPDC) to prevent her, as she feared, from re-entering her native
land. The military establishment, on the contrary, wanted her to visit her
husband taking advantage of her "perfect health" and, in the process, to
save Myanmar's meagre healthcare facilities from being "overburdened" by
the requirements of Dr. Aris.

To many, the Yangon regime's argument is like reading international
convenants on human rights upside down. But not so for the SPDC, which
wanted to prove to the Myanmarese that Ms. Suu Kyi, unlike the archetypal
oriental women, placed her political career above that of the humanitarian
mandate of ministering to her critically ailing husband. The idea is to
portray the living statue of liberty (as Ms. Suu Kyi is seen by her
admirers) as no more than a power-hungry activist with a stone heart. Her
point, as always, is that the SPDC need not fear her is she were
inconsequential.

The junta, in contrast, is only keen on widening what it perceives as an
emerging gap between her and the National League for Democracy (NLD), her
constituency, in the present circumstances of political fatigue. However,
both Ms. Suu Kyi and the SPDC still think that she will make a difference
to the NLD one way or the other.

In recent years, Mr. Aung Shwe, in his capacity as the NLD chairman, wrote
what had been compiled by Ms. Suu Kyi's Myanmarese supporters in exile in
neighbouring Thailand as "letters to a dictator" -Senior General Than Shwe
of the State Law and Order Restoration Council (SLORC) - on all nuanced
aspects of the democracy dilemma in that country. Gen. Than Shwe now heads
the SPDC, a rechristened version of the SLORC. But these letters having
made no difference to the power-play in Myanmar, the NLD activists,
disheartened by what they saw as a military crackdown on hundreds among
their ranks in August-September last year, have now come to believe that
Ms. Suu Kyi's continued presence in Yangon will alone serve as the
League's oxygen kit. She, too, tends to reinforce that view by her refusal
to leave Myanmar on any count. The SPDC also lent credence to this by
insisting that she depart to meet her husband.

Ms. Suu Kyi, at one stage last year, perceived a threat of deportation,
although the authorities did not resort to that, even as she faltered in
her attempts to convene a substantive session of all the surviving members
of a Parliament that was voted in 1990 in Myanmar's only democratic polls
in decades. However, a question with no easy answer was whether ASEAN
would have ensured Ms. Suu Kyi's return to Myanmar in the event of her
departure for Britain for a union with her husband. Any such exit could
put the theory of an NLD-doom in her absence to test.

Now, ASEAN's admission of Myanmar to its fold in a stately ceremony in
Subang Jaya in Malaysia in July 1997 has never gone well with either the
United States or the European union, despite the Association's
justification on grounds of "constructive engagement" with the Yangon
regime with a view to bringing about a qualitative change in its attitude
to political reforms over time. Within months of Myanmar's finest hour in
breaking free of its diplomatic isolation in 1997, the E.U. cancelled a
dialogue with ASEAN, considered important to both sides, to drive home
that point that any linkages with military rulers would carry a price.

By the middle of 1998, even as the U.S. secretary of State, Ms. Madeleine
Albright, roared in Manila against the Yangon regime's roadside showdown
with Ms. Suu Kyi, ASEAN collectively upheld its equation with Myanmar
despite some individualist moves by the Foreign Ministers of Thailand and
the Philippines to take a critical peep into the SPDC's inner portals. The
Thai initiative, known as "flexible engagement," was aimed at entering
into a guarded dialogue (a U.S.-guarded one, according to Bangkok's
critics) with Myanmar about its internal affairs concerning the status of
Ms. Suu Kyi.

The "flexible engagement" has now been virtually redefined as "enhanced
interaction," yet Thailand, as the current ASEAN coordinator for a
dialogue with the E.U. has not settled for discussions between the two
organizations sans participation by Myanmar. This despite the claims by
some pro-West regional analysists that the ASEAN shield for Myanmar had
frayed within a year of anointment as a member of that forum. More
recently, Thailand played host to Gen. Than Shwe for what was seen
primarily as an anti-drugs diplomacy.

However, the latest ASEAN-E.U. impasse over Myanmar could have induced its
South East Asian friends to quietly ask it to lower its obstinacy on the
Suu Kyi issue. At another level, Myanmar's admission to ASEAN is seen to
have been a way of weaning Yangon away from China's strategic embrace.
China's suspected help to Myanmar in installing naval surveillance
equipment from Arakan near Bangladesh to Zadetkyi near the Strait of
Malacca, along the Bay of Bengal rim as it were, is a matter of strategic
concern to India too.

India's most recent official-level engagement with Myanmar on issues other
than human rights, besides ASEAN's unstated dilemma over E.U.'s
anti-Yangon stance, has raised the possibility of the SPDC finding itself
to be the cause of a new grammar of geopolitics. But, as a regional
commentator says, there is need to ensure that Myanmar does not prove Mark
Twain's quip that history may not repeat itself but is often rhymes.