Sanctions Are Not to Blame for Burma’s Economic Woes

http://www.irrawaddy.org/opinion_story.php?art_id=15229&page=1

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By MOE ZAW OO Tuesday, March 3, 2009

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Recently, some critics of the National League for Democracy (NLD) have taken the party’s leadership to task for continuing to call for sanctions on Burma.

It is not enough to blame sanctions for the prolonged poverty in Burma while urging the NLD to confess policy mistakes. We need to identify and implement a workable strategy that exploits the junta’s weaknesses—not just place blame and point fingers.

Isolation has been the policy of Burma’s military ever since it stole power from the country’s civilian government in 1962. The current junta, the State Peace and Development Council (SPDC), has proved intransigent and has refused to concede any aspect of its policy as a result of sanctions or engagement. Champions of both policies realize this.

The underlying question is this: What will influence the junta to peacefully solve the current crises facing Burma? If sanctions, targeted or total, could be made to work more effectively, policymakers who advocate this approach would be applauded.
Similarly, pro-engagement policymakers would be praised if their strategy actually succeeded in changing the regime.

On October 4, 2007, under extreme pressure from the international community following its brutal crackdown on the peaceful monk-led Saffron Revolution, the SPDC issued Statement 1/2007. This statement called on NLD General-Secretary Daw Aung San Suu Kyi to renounce “confrontation, utter devastation, and demanding all types of sanctions, including economic sanctions,” as a precondition for meeting with junta leader Snr-Gen Than Shwe.

The word “confrontation” entered Burma’s political lexicon in 1989, when the junta accused the NLD and Aung San Suu Kyi of confrontational activities during her organizational trips across Burma. For the junta, any activity that threatens their hold on power is an act of confrontation.

Aung San Suu Kyi introduced the phrase “utter devastation” during a press conference in Burma on July 11, 1995, the day after she was released from her first period of house arrest. “We must choose between dialogue and utter devastation,” she said at the time.

The junta’s call for the elimination of “all types of sanctions, including economic sanctions,” has a long history. However, the sanctions debate is not about the impact of the sanctions on political change in Burma or the international community’s options for imposing pressure on the Burmese junta. Instead, the debate is about whether sanctions negatively impact the people of Burma. Sanctions should not be used as a scapegoat for the economic problems in Burma. The cause of the crisis in Burma is the junta, not the sanctions.

For years, international ministers and diplomats have discussed policy toward Burma and the junta’s disregard of international and public opinion.

Recently, at a news conference in Indonesia on February 18, 2009, Hillary Clinton, the new US Secretary of State, stated that her government was “looking at possible ideas” to try to promote positive change in Burma. “Clearly the path we have taken in imposing sanctions hasn’t influenced the Burmese junta, [but] reaching out and trying to engage them has not influenced them, either,” she said.

In an interview in 2003, former Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad, who was the primary person responsible for admitting Burma into the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (Asean) during the 1997 Asean Summit in Kuala Lumpur, warned that Burma might be expelled from the regional grouping if its military rulers continued to defy world pressure to release Aung San Suu Kyi. “I fought hard for Myanmar [Burma] to be admitted into Asean. I think the leaders of Myanmar should consider public opinion,” he said.

When the UN Special Envoy Ibrahim Gambari visited Burma recently, the SPDC’s Prime Minister Gen Thein Sein told him that “the UN should make an effort to lift economic sanctions imposed on Myanmar, if the organization wants to see a prosperous Myanmar with political stability.”

Thein Sein seemed to suggest that lifting economic sanctions would guarantee Burma’s future prosperity and political stability. Obviously, that would not happen. The special envoy reported to the Security Council after his recent visit that he had achieved “no tangible results” in his efforts to move Burma closer to democracy.

As Lee Kuan Yew, Singapore’s founding prime minister, explained during an interview with a columnist from the University of California’s Los Angeles Media Center, “These are rather dumb generals when it comes to the economy. How can they so mismanage the economy and reach this stage when the country has so many natural resources?”
Lee also asserted that he could not understand how the generals could expect Burma to remain so isolated, adding that even medicine had to be smuggled into the country from Thailand.

The junta manipulates the international community, and the SPDC’s contempt for international opinion is obvious. Neither a confession from the NLD nor blaming sanctions will result in tangible outcomes for democracy in Burma. Therefore, instead of focusing on confession and blame games, we must identify the most effective ways, both internationally and within Burma, to penetrate the junta’s impervious shield.

The author is a former political prisoner and currently member of the foreign affairs section of the National League for Democracy (Liberated Area).