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| Southeast Asia |
| Burma Teaches A Lethal Lesson |
| 2007-10-02 |
| Investors' Business Daily Burma is often characterized as a pariah state in the Western media, with its reclusive regime holding few friends or allies. In reality, that's fiction. Burma remains a fine upstanding member of the United Nations while a real Asian democracy, Taiwan, is shut out. Burma is also a full member of the region's Association of Southeast Asian Nations. Burma has China as a patron, doing $2 billion in two-way trade each year and supporting it diplomatically. Burma has relations with North Korea, and other odious states, too. Total, the French oil company, announced a new investment last week. Southeast Asian banks hold cash accounts for the regime's elite. Though Burma's regime has isolated itself from the blossoming prosperity of its Asian neighbors, there's little evidence that it's a pariah state. . . . Now Burma has become a charnel house, its phone lines dead, its Web connections gone, its voices silenced, its entrance closed to the media, with only satellite photographs passively recording fragmentary signs of bloody massacres occurring. Bodies of saffron-clad monks have been photographed floating in rivers. Defector Hla Win, a former Burmese military intelligence official, reports that thousands of Burmese democracy monks have been massacred under the canopy of jungles where satellites are unable to record them. But there is enough evidence to believe him. Velvet revolutions are thought to be the logical end to such regimes when they go rotten, holding neither moral authority nor the capacity to economically sustain themselves. Taken from the name of the bloodless coup that ended communism in Czechoslovakia in 1989, Burma should have had one as thousands of monks majestically marched through the streets of the capital last week in the name of democracy. A high-tech revolution had spread ideas of freedom across the Web. Migrant laborers returned home with tales of glimpsing freer societies. The economy had tanked, with fuel prices doubling and public tolerance of the morally bankrupt regime hitting an all-time low. There didn't seem to be a way this regime could last. There is an exception, however: The brute force of a violent military regime that cares little what the world thinks. It's a message real tyrants send with a soggy U.N. establishment doing nothing. They expect to get away with it. They're counting on a few visits from U.N. officials, a few statements of condemnation, a few expressions of "concern" and then another 20 years of tyranny. After all, they've looked at the opprobrium America drew from this global consensus when it sent in troops to overturn a comparable tyranny in Iraq. That verdict from the global establishment that calls itself "the world" — the Nobel committees, the U.N., regional alliances — certainly did get the word out to regimes such as Burma's that the only real criminal regime out there is U.S. The depth and extent of the crimes committed are not known yet, but their message is clear: Tyrants and democracies that oppress to cling to power, no matter how little legitimacy they have, can sink deep indeed with no need to worry about more than words. For regimes such as those in China, Venezuela, Zimbabwe and Bolivia, Burma serves as a useful benchmark as how low a tyranny can go with little action from a toothless world community. The ultimate lesson of Burma is that it's not the active countries out there that create an environment for mass murdering regimes to flourish, it's the passive ones that prefer the decorum of international institutions. There needs to be a strong response or communities such as the U.N. and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations will forfeit all their moral authority. |
| Posted by:Mike |