Rage against the machine

by The Guardian

Three months after crushing pro-democracy demonstrations, Burma's military junta are in confident mood. Last week Senior General Than Shwe expelled Charles Petrie, the head of the United Nations' Development Programme in Burma, after he accused the government of failing to meet the basic human needs of its people.

The UNDP said the average household was forced to spend three quarters of its budget on food. One in three children under five suffered from malnutrition and fewer than half of all children were able to complete their primary education. Up to 700,000 people were suffering from malaria and 130,000 from tuberculosis, while 60,000 HIV sufferers were denied access to anti-retroviral drugs. This was not what the junta wanted to hear, intent as they are on rewriting the history of September's demonstrations as the work of foreign plotters. Last week the government summoned diplomats to its new capital Naypyidaw, claiming to have uncovered a plot to bring down the regime, involving bogus monks, a little known exile group and George Soros's Open Society.

But as the Guardian reports today from Mandalay, the grievances which fuelled the mass protest are still bubbling away below the surface. And the purges of the monastries are still continuing. Just before World Aids Day on December 1, Maggan monastery in Yangon which serves as a hospice for HIV/Aids patients was sealed by the military and all the monks were expelled. Most of the monks who have been arrested and released have returned to the villages, fearful that their families will suffer retribution. If the regime has scared the opposition into silence, it has done so at a cost. The 81-year-old former guerilla fighter Thet Pyin claims the conflict has changed. It is no longer between the government and its people, but between the religion and the government. As 80% of the population and all of the army are Buddhist, that will be its downfall.

No one can predict the next crisis. It could well be an internal one, if significant sections of the army do indeed support an increased role for Aung San Suu Kyi's National League for Democracy (NLD). She is Burma's Nelson Mandela, the only figure with the moral authority to reunite the nation when the junta falls. But this will have to happen with the army's support and officers reluctant to carry out orders against the monks have been purged. The generals are skilled in terrorising a nation into submission. Many of their victims draw consolation from the prospect that they will face the Buddhist equivalent of divine retribution. One opposition leader in hiding told us the junta are in for a nasty surprise in their afterlife.