Myanmar sheds pariah label

Burma, officially named as Myanmar, is fast emerging from its more than five-decade old international isolation and with a bang uncharacteristic of the Asian pattern of such developments. Over the last some weeks, the Burmese authorities have freed hundreds of political prisoners, legalised trade unions and loosened censorship. It has decided now to halt military operations against ethnicity-based insurgencies in pursuance of what is described as the regime's resolve to pursue 'peace deals' with guerrillas, who are active with varying degrees of intensity ever since independence in 1948 obtaining conditions of civil war in almost one-third of Burma. On Thursday, President Thein Sein ordered his armed forces not to engage Karen rebels unless it become unavoidable in self-defence, having made similar deal with the Shan State Army in December last year as he offered peace talks with the Kachin insurgents. Of the prisoners freed over the last few weeks, a number of them belong to these guerrilla outfits. But of those who would remain in prison are about a dozen who are said to have Taliban connections, says Home Minister General Ko Ko. However, it is the release of hundreds of mainstream political prisoners that would help Burma shake off its international pariah status. The credit for breaking Burmese isolation goes as much to the international sanctions as to the democratic struggle waged by the iconic Burmese leader Nobel Peace Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi. But it seems even such a paradigm shift in Burma would not have been possible without the connivance and support of President Thein Sein, vicariously described as the "Burmese Gorbachev" - courtesy his capacity to forge himself into a pro-democratic leader from his life-long career as an army officer, his role of an irreplaceable cog of the Burmese military machine. The emerging democratic ambience is beholden to the power of the internet, as everywhere else now being buffeted by the 'spring' of freedom, as it is to Shin Gambria, a Buddhist monk who led 2007 street protests and was sentenced to 68 years in prison when he was only 28 years old. Surprisingly, and perhaps equally intriguingly, the dramatic changes in Burma seem to be taking place in step with the high-profile visits by some of the Western leaders, beginning with Hillary Clinton's ice-breaking visit. The then British Foreign Secretary, William Hague, came and last week it was France's foreign minister Alain Juppe who was in Burma. All three made generous promises to help Burma recover from its sanction-ridden economy as 'reward' for reforms triggered by the autocrat-turned-democrat President Thein Sein. Why such enthusiasm is not being expressed from Burmese neighbours including its Asean partners, there is not much of mist about it. Of course, Burma was on the course to change itself particularly since the last elections which the Suu Kyi-led National League for Democracy boycotted, forcing the ruling junta to undergo some transformation, which it was doing but at its own pace. What really triggered the tempo is none else but President Obama's new policy for the region on the Asian shore of the Pacific as part of the 'contain China' drive of the West. "Wondering why Hillary Clinton is in Burma right now. It's all about China," said Foreign Policy journal giving its perspective on the US Secretary of State's visit in December. The question then is: Is there a price, and what that could be, that the West would like to extract from Myanmar. For the present there is no answer to this question, though some analysts do argue, with whatever logic, that having been under Chinese shadow for so long the Burmese leadership would like to stay equidistant. And that is probably what it would, given Burma's long history of staying neutral and non-aligned. Though Aung San Suu Kyi has decided to join the ruling government in case she gets elected in the by-election in April, but still she may not be in position to call the shots because levers of Burmese power would remain in the junta's hands, she has the desired clout to influence her country's foreign policy in the coming months and years. A frail, incarcerated-for-years woman is playing a key role in efforts towards transforming Burma, a tightly shut-up hermit state, into a budding and bubbling democratic country. Copyright Business Recorder, 2012