DEMOCRATIZATION WITHOUT MASS PARTICIPATION?

ANTI-DICTATORSHIP PEOPLES’ FREEDOM MOVEMENT IN BURMA

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OUR THOUGHT:

UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said, “As to my visit, when I said I will be personally engaged, that meant that I would be willing to pay a return visit to Myanmar [Burma] at an appropriate time,” And, “But you should also know that without any tangible or very favorable results to be achieved, I may not be in a position to visit Myanmar without any expectations.”.

The UN Secretary General under training has finally exposed his immaturity by saying such remark. If he is qualify enough to be a Secretary General, he wouldn’t say such thing because it means UN and its Secretary General have no credibility to gain the respect for the regime like Than Shwe and others around the globe. Also, he has no clue whatsoever how to level with the regime in order to get what UNSC demands for. In addition, it renders that he has no well-plan to tackle our crisis effectively at all.

Anyhow, Mr. Moon has lowered his expectation because he is afraid that he might not be able to persuade the regime on one hand and might be treated like Gambari by the regime. And, his remark also is another way of confessing the failure mission of Gambari, who always said things were better and improved in Burma. In reality, as long as there is no sustainable mandate by the UNSC or UN itself to contain the regime, his visit will hold no water at all except humiliation and embarrassment on his part in the long run. He might eventually be duped by the regime like Razali and Gambari in the past.

In any case, with this kind of vague and incompatible nature, Mr. Moon’s visit to Burma will again be nothing but an attempt to beat around the side-winds anyway. To our part, it does not really matter whether he goes or not. The bottom line is whether he can persuade the regime to release all the political prisoners immediately and to let them participate in the democratization of Burma. The question here is that what else he is going to do if he decides not to go and what about UNSC’s reflection on his skepticism in this regard. Frustration on our side is mounting over the world body’s prolonged failure to act upon Burma’s crisis that stands still because of the stubborn regime’s non-compliance gesture against the diplomatic measure currently maneuvered by the UN.

The super power nations like Great Britain and France dare not to directly interfere the crisis of the third world nations because of the institution of the UN originally written based on the ugliness of Colonialism that is not the case nowadays. In addition, the outdated UNSC’s regional approach has let the dictators around the world to ruin the lives of their own people especially in the cases of Africa and else where. If a super power like the US had not stood up, the survival of Israel should be at stake under the UNSC’s regional approach for sure. In the dark-side of the free-market and globalization, the nations rather want to see their neighbors remain under the dictatorship rule so that they can exploit their resources and cheap labors these days. It is one of the main reasons for the regional approach to fail especially in our case. The economic sanctions and embargos designed to punish the dictators for their human rights violations have a little or no impact whatsoever to those dictators standing still to bully their own people. Sadly, no nation dares to speak out for the complete -overhaul of the UN until today.

As a result, the hope of the opposition leaders both inside and overseas dreaming that UN eventually will find a way to solve our crisis has gone down to the drain. The bad news is that the longer we wait it the more the people will suffer the regime’s aggression day by day. Ironically, the passive mode by the leadership of NLD came up flat and ineffective in combination with the lack of vision to give hope that the people needed very much have discouraged the people to join in the struggle. As a result, the current situation is demanding a leader, who can command the people to do whatever is required for them to sacrifice promising that we will see the light at the end of the tunnel at a certain time. Other than countering what the regime has done for almost two decades, we must have a strategy to attack the regime by searching the regime’s strength and weakness. By tackling the regime with both defensive and offensive ends, we the people of Burma must make our first move to attack the regime in a united way other than waiting for its move by saying what we should do for the regime’s upcoming 2010 elections.

As we have mentioned earlier, even if the UN has a chance to intervene our nation’s crisis, its way of implementing the democratization in Burma would not be the way we wanted it. Without the people’s awareness and active participation in the political process, the democratization of Burma, if we got lucky, under the supervision of the UNSC will be much less than the democracy of Cambodia or much worse than Zimbabwe itself.

Campaign Planning Committee
Anti-Dictatorship, People's Freedom Movement in Burma
Washington DC, USA