By Scott Bandler

On January 12, the UN Security Council voted on a resolution on Myanmar. The resolution, which failed despite gaining the required nine votes in the fifteen-member body, represented the culmination of repeated U.S. efforts to ameliorate the humanitarian crisis in the country. South Africa, Russia, and China expressed their opposition to the resolution; the latter two prevented it from passing by exercising their veto powers.

A U.S.- and British-sponsored resolution called for national reconciliation and democratization, the release of all political prisoners, and an end to human rights abuses in Myanmar, often called by its previous name, Burma, as a refusal to grant legitimacy to the current ruling military regime, the State Peace and Development Council. As part of the democratic process, it advocated the inclusion of the country’s many ethnic minorities in a reform-based dialogue. Most notably, it did not mention punitive measures such as sanctions, an area of considerable controversy even among those wishing to see progressive change in the country.

Despite its opposition to the resolution, China urged the SPDC to “listen to the call of its own people, learn from the good practices of others, and speed up the process of reforms.” Yet in explaining his country’s opposition to the resolution, the Chinese ambassador stated, “Myanmar is now faced with many challenges…but no country is perfect, and every country will have to go through a process of constant improvement.”  He continued, “Similar problems exist in other countries as well. If simply because Myanmar is encountering this or that kind of problem, it should arbitrarily be construed as a prominent or potential threat to international peace and security and placed on the agenda of the UN Security Council, followed by a resolution…then the situations of all other 191 UN member states need to be considered by the UN Security Council.”

How arbitrary was the UN’s concern for Myanmar?  To answer this question, one must begin by examining the problems facing the country and then assess how similar they really are to those of other regions, a task the Chinese ambassador conveniently neglected.

There are an estimated 1,200 political prisoners in the country, including 1991 Nobel Peace Prize recipient Aung San Suu Kyi, the founder of the National League for Democracy. Since the mid-1960s, the Four Cuts military strategy has targeted civilians in order to undermine support for ethnic insurgencies, resulting in considerable internal displacement as well as a refugee crisis that has spilled into neighboring countries. Reports of forced labor and child soldiers abound. (See, for example, the Human Rights Watch’s 220-page report, “My Gun Was as Tall as Me.”) Humanitarian issues have only been exacerbated by the recent closure of two field offices of the International Committee of the Red Cross in Myanmar. Following restrictions on its visits to political prisoners and work in sensitive border areas, the Red Cross had ended its program of providing medical supplies to Myanmar prisons by the end of 2006, cutting off nearly half of all the medical supplies that Myanmar prisoners received.

The country is second only to Afghanistan in opium production, and in the Wa country in particular, ex-Communist militias have diversified into methamphetamine production. These drugs have flooded the market in neighboring Thailand, where methamphetamine pills are called yaba, the crazy drug. Another threat to regional security comes in the form of a growing HIV/AIDS epidemic, not to mention tuberculosis, malaria, and avian flu. A field study conducted in 2005 and 2006 by Dr. Chris Beyrer of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health concluded that the ruling State Peace and Development Council has impeded efforts to combat these diseases.

Although these concerns are enormous, perhaps it is best to expand the focus on Burma beyond recent events. According to Thant Myint-U, the author of a recent history of Burma, The River of Lost Footsteps, the political debate surrounding the country has been “singularly ahistorical.” His approach reaches deeper into the past, beyond General Ne Win’s seizure of dictatorial power in 1962, examining the legacies of British colonialism, the devastating aftermath of World War II, and the Chinese invasions of the early 1950s. He also criticizes the efficacy of isolating Burma. “The assumption is that Burma’s military government couldn’t survive further isolation when precisely the opposite is true,” he writes. “Much more than any other part of Burmese society, the army will weather another forty years of isolation just fine.”

Sanctions represent one such measure for isolating and pressuring the ruling SPDC. The U.S. has increasingly imposed unilateral trade and investment sanctions against Myanmar since 1988, when the Burmese military seized power after pro-democracy protests centered on Rangoon now Yangon led to Ne Win’s resignation. The more recent developments came in 1998 when the U.S. government imposed a ban on new American investment in Burma and in 2004 when a new sanctions law restricted Burmese imports into the U.S. and prohibited most payments into the country. Despite the good intentions behind these measures, critics like Thant Myint-U and Georgetown Professor David Steinberg believe that they have made the ruling military junta all the more resolved to stand up to such pressures.

Even more alarming are the direct effects of isolation. For example, in 2005 the Global Fund, which fights the spread of HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, and malaria, withdrew from Myanmar under heavy pressure from pro-democracy activists. And while the benefits of foreign involvement in the country diminish, new means for the military to tighten its grip on the country present themselves. By the late 1990s, the financial security of the military regime was assured by the discovery of huge offshore natural gas fields valued in the tens of billions of dollars. Recent reports of the Myanmar government’s decision to pipe gas from these fields to China make the Chinese government’s support of the regime understandable. They also go far in explaining why U.S. sanctions will continue to have little success.

Still, there is reason for hope. UN envoy Paulo Sergio Pinheiro recently called for the release of all political prisoners to signify the Myanmar government’s commitment to democratization. He has also acknowledged the scale of the damage caused by the military’s targeting of ethnic minority villages. According to a report to the UN Human Rights Council, “Reliable and independent sources estimate that between 1996 and 2006, 3,077 separate incidents of destruction, relocation, or abandonment of villages have been documented.”

Of course, it is worth questioning how much good a UN resolution would do for a country facing such considerable problems. At least a decision by the UN Security Council would have technically been binding, unlike the twenty-nine consecutive resolutions passed by the UN General Assembly and Commission on Human Rights that called for change in Myanmar. It may also be worth asking whether democratization represents a solution. In a country with considerable ethnic and linguistic diversity, some form of democratic government offers the possibility of legitimacy and the subsequent diminishment of political violence. For Burma, the transition to such a system will not be simple, nor will it be any sort of panacea. Nevertheless, the disastrous record of the SPDC does not offer a desirable alternative.

Scott Bandler is junior History major in Calhoun College. 

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