Admire roads, ignore chain gangs: This week Aung San Suu Kyi, political prisoner, was allowed to speak to a US congressman. It was Burma trying to put on a better face. It didn't wash. Raymond Whitaker reports
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Your support makes all the difference.Nothing is more unnerving than a despot on a charm offensive. Somehow the smile fails to reach the eyes, and the unaccustomed strain of trying to be nice can lead to a dangerous bout of irritation if things go wrong.
Look at what happened in Burma this week when the military authorities, who call themselves the State Law and Order Restoration Council, or (even less friendly-sounding) Slorc, allowed an American Congressman to visit Aung San Suu Kyi. The opposition leader, whose determination and beauty have made her the symbol of all the regime's victims, has been barred from seeing any outsiders except her husband, the Oxford don Michael Aris, and their two sons since she was put under house arrest in Rangoon nearly five years ago. She refuses to go into exile, as Slorc would like.
A senior military officer hinted recently to Japanese journalists that Ms Suu Kyi's five-year detention order, due to expire in July, might not be renewed. The visit by Bill Richardson, a New Mexico Democrat, seemed to be another hopeful sign. Mr Richardson also met Slorc's leader, Lieutenant-General Khin Nyunt, who in the langue de bois of totalitarianism likes to style himself 'Secretary Number One', and said afterwards that the regime realised it had to negotiate with its awkward prisoner if it hoped to win international acceptance. General Khin Nyunt, he added, had said no decision had yet been taken on whether to renew her detention.
This was nonsense. Another senior officer almost immediately confirmed what Ms Suu Kyi had already been told: she would remain under house arrest until July 1995. Her first year in detention, he explained, had only been an 'arrest period'.
Colonel Kyaw Win, one of Secretary Number One's main associates in the military intelligence apparatus, said the government was willing to talk with Ms Suu Kyi if she made an official request for a dialogue. The only question was at what level the meeting should be held, and that would be determined by her 'rudeness and arrogance' in dealing with Slorc. The government, he added, was 'totally unconcerned' about international pressure to release the dissident and would continue to act as it saw fit.
So much for public relations, about which Burma's military authorities seem to have learnt nothing since they massacred hundreds of pro-democracy demonstrators in 1988. Ten months later they detained Ms Suu Kyi, and were stupid enough to allow free elections to take place in 1990, somehow imagining that her absence would spoil the chances of her party, the National League for Democracy. Naturally it won by a landslide, and its members had to be locked up or hounded out of the country.
It would be easier to make the world forget all this were it not for Ms Suu Kyi. If the regime can behave so crudely towards a Nobel Peace Prize winner who is the daughter of the Burmese independence hero Aung San, outsiders realise that its treatment of less prominent opponents does not bear thinking about.
The opposition leader is confined to her spacious home in University Avenue, Rangoon, which has been made uncomfortable by her decision to sell her possessions rather than accept money from the authorities, but her fate is the subject of constant foreign attention. In Insein jail, where new political prisoners immediately fill the places of those whose release serves some purpose to the regime, it is less easy to find out what is going on.
As well as the political prisoners there are hundreds of thousands of ordinary victims of Slorc - villagers press-ganged as porters in the endless battles with ethnic rebels, often after their wives have been raped and their children murdered, or forced to work on roads and railways for a handful of rice a day.
Burma has always been an isolated and inward-looking nation, but Ne Win (Brilliant as the Sun), who seized power in 1962, seemed determined to take it out of the world entirely. In the name of self-reliance, imports and exports almost ceased, freezing the economy more or less in its pre-independence state. General Ne Win became increasingly obsessed with astrology and numerology - since nine is his lucky number, Burma has 90 kyat and 45 kyat notes as well as the more usual decimal denominations. Residents of Mandalay also claim a little-used railway line starting at the city's 26th Street was built as a ploy to overcome an astrologer's prediction that his power would end after 26 years.
Possibly also to deceive the fates, in 1988 the general announced his 'retirement', 26 years after his coup. Nobody doubts that he remains the supreme power in Burma, but Slorc has abandoned his dreamy socialism and is looking for foreign investors. As in Thailand, a military career is not only no obstacle to success in business, it is positively an advantage.
The PR problem remains, however. Apart from a trickle of humanitarian funds administered by charities, Western aid has been stopped since the cancellation of the 1990 election. Slorc is drawing up a new constitution to give itself legitimacy, and has allowed the foreign press to attend sessions of the constituent assembly, but this too had something other than the desired effect. At the approach of Western reporters, many delegates fled in terror, and one or two who spoke against the military were jailed. The constitution's talk of 'unity' - code for ethnic domination by the Buddhist Burmans over minorities such as the Muslim Rohingyas and the Christian Kachin and Karen - did little to quell the country's many insurgencies.
Despite this, the regime has not stopped trying to show a friendly face. In December it allowed a convoy of Thai and Western adventurers to travel via Burma from Chiang Rai in northern Thailand to Kunming in southern China. The aim was to publicise the opening of a new route for trade across the country's eastern tip, and the authorities were even willing to allow a group of ethnic rebels who control part of the road, the Wa, to be bought off in the interests of public relations.
No trace of slave labour, of course, was meant to be seen. Chain gangs working on the road were withdrawn two days before the convoy went through, but not quickly enough to escape the notice of foreigners travelling on their own. A photographer, Murray White, was brought to a halt in his vehicle by a pile of rocks and was quickly surrounded by ghostly figures in chains begging for water, food and money. Armed guards arrived to separate the prisoners from the foreigners, but not before White had managed to get pictures. The encounter was further evidence that people who do not have to court public opinion at home lose the trick of doing it abroad: they simply forget that they cannot rely on outsiders to behave as predictably as their own terrified subjects.
But if the charm offensive is playing badly in the West, it has a more responsive audience in Asia. China, on which Slorc depends for its arms supplies, is preaching 'reform and opening up', and forced the northern Kachin to make peace by withdrawing its support. Thailand is putting pressure on the Karen to do the same. Japan argues that if it does not do business in Burma, others will.
All this might go some way towards justifying the military's arrogance, reinforced by more than three decades in power, were it not for the uncomfortable presence of Ms Suu Kyi. Many believe that allowing Congressman Richardson to visit her was intended to improve Burma's image ahead of a meeting of the United Nations Human Rights Commission in Geneva next week, when the country expects to be condemned. Instead, the inevitable PR disaster simply drew attention to the regime's nastiness.
(Photographs omitted)
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