The Economist - Myanmar and the United Nations

The Economist - Myanmar and the United Nations
Knock, knock
Feb 5th 2009
As usual, the UN finds no one at home in the junta to discuss political reform

AT LEAST he tried. That is probably the best that could be said for Ibrahim Gambari’s latest mission to Myanmar, which ended on February 3rd. The four-day visit was the Nigerian’s seventh as the United Nations’ envoy to the country, a job whose history is strewn with past failures.

On this trip, unlike his visit last August, Mr Gambari was able to see Aung San Suu Kyi, the detained leader of the opposition. He spent over an hour with her and with executives from her moribund National League for Democracy. General Than Shwe, however, the junta leader, was unavailable, as so often when the agenda is political reform. Instead, the job of stonewalling Mr Gambari fell to General Thein Sein, the prime minister. State television reported that the prime minister had asked for the lifting of sanctions on Myanmar as a precursor to “political stability”.

The next envoy to take tea with the regime may be Mr Gambari’s boss, Ban Ki-moon, the UN’s secretary-general. He went to Myanmar last May, in the dreadful aftermath of Cyclone Nargis, and managed to wring some concessions from the junta that helped to get foreign aid flowing more freely. Nobel peace-prize winners (Miss Suu Kyi is one) and others have since urged him to go back to push for greater political freedoms. Mr Gambari’s task was, in part, to test the waters for Mr Ban.

By that yardstick, Mr Gambari may still be out of luck. Late last year Mr Ban aborted a planned trip when it became clear that far from heeding his demands for the release of Miss Suu Kyi and other political prisoners, the regime was busy locking up more. Over 2,100 dissidents are shut away, their ranks swollen since the suppression in 2007 of monk-led protests. In her meeting with Mr Gambari, Miss Suu Kyi repeated her own plea for their release (and her own) to be made a precondition for Mr Ban’s proposed talks with the generals. With no signs of progress on this issue, Mr Ban may find it hard to justify a visit.

The Bush administration’s answer to Myanmar’s bad behaviour was to tighten economic sanctions. Indeed, two more of the junta’s cronies were added to a Treasury blacklist days before Mr Bush left office. Few expect the new administration to change tack. Myanmar’s exiled democracy camp may point to the prime minister’s complaint to Mr Gambari as evidence that sanctions are biting. But Western diplomats in Asia are sceptical of their leverage over Myanmar, as long as Asian powers stand by their neighbour.

Western donors had hoped that international cyclone relief would crack open the door to broader co-operation on aid, and perhaps a dash of glasnost. There is little sign that it did. The World Food Programme recently reported that Myanmar will need 185,000 tonnes of food aid this year, after the cyclone and a rat infestation have ruined crops. But its ability to deliver grain to the needy is strangled by the junta’s controls, particularly in desperately poor western Myanmar.

The Association of South-East Asian Nations (ASEAN) played a useful role last year in channelling cyclone aid into Myanmar. But ASEAN is not prepared to cause a political controversy, despite its recent adoption of a charter that pays lip-service to human rights. Not all its members, which include autocratic regimes such as Vietnam and Laos, are convinced that political freedoms are such a good idea. Myanmar’s frustrated democrats face the choice of holding their nose to contest elections due to be held next year under a constitution entrenching the army’s political role, or sticking to their principles and boycotting a poll that may well be a sham but the only hope of change on offer.