Jonathan Manthorpe . Burma's generals

Jonathan Manthorpe
The Vancouver Sun
February 14, 2008

One positive thing that can be said about Burma's military regime is that its generals don't bury their lies in the small print.

When they feel the need to tell a great big whopper they do it in big bold capital letters and right in your face.

Which is why it doesn't even take a second glance to see that the plans for a constitutional referendum in May and elections in 2010 announced by the generals on Saturday are nothing more than a sham.

The result of this farce will be to make things worse by legitimizing military rule behind a facade of civilian institutions.

The referendum and elections will certainly not bring to power Burma's most popular political party, the National League for Democracy.

In 1990 elections the NLD won 82 per cent of the vote; that appalled the generals and they have always refused to accept the result.

The junta, led by Gen. Than Shwe, has already moved to ensure that NLD leader Aung San Suu Kyi, who has spent 12 of the past 18 years under various forms of detention, can never become government leader.

A constitutional amendment has banned people from running for parliament if they are or were married to foreigners. Suu Kyi was married to British academic Michael Aris, who died in 1999.

The main reason for this unusually honest approach to lying is that the generals have discovered they don't need to disguise their duplicity.

The countries and institutions that seriously worry about the Burmese generals' brutal assaults on human and political rights - such as the European Union, the United States and liberal democratic United Nations members like Canada - are a long way away and of limited daily annoyance.

The countries that could seriously inconvenience the generals' 46-year hold on power, such as the nine fellow members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations or lustful economic partners India and China, are too fixated on self-interest to be a real problem.

There's good reason to think China's self-interest has played a significant part in prompting Than Shwe and his junta to produce this pantomime of transition to civilian rule.

The crushing of mass demonstrations by Buddhist monks and their supporters in August and September last year pushed the Burma question high up the international agenda again.

This is a problem for China, which has made Burma into what amounts to an economy colony. But China does not want its support for the Burmese regime to be yet another cause for boycotts or protests during this summer's Beijing Olympics.

So Than Shwe has been persuaded to speed up his seven-step "roadmap to democracy." In its early years this had all the hallmarks of a stalling tactic rather than an initiative.

The constitutional convention of hand-picked delegates started meeting in 1993, but only infrequently and, of course, did not include the NLD or Suu Kyi.

International uproar at the crushing of last year's demonstrations has made it expedient to move ahead on the roadmap.

We know a little about what the constitutional convention has suggested should be put to the people in a yes-or-no referendum and it is not encouraging.

The new dispensation would make the president a military appointee, and the generals will have the right to seize power if they feel national security is threatened.

A quarter of the parliamentary seats will be reserved for military appointees who will also control the key ministries.

It is also unlikely the May referendum on this travesty will be a plebiscite in any recognizable sense.

Responsibility for organizing the referendum and the 2010 elections is being given to the United Solidarity and Development Association.

The USDA is an organization of paid thugs and off-duty civil servants which claims to have 24 million members, almost half the population of Burma.

It has experience in arranging referendums, such as the 1994 outpouring of popular support for the constitutional convention. People were bribed or intimidated to attend mass rallies and thus "approve" the work of the convention.

The USDA will not only vet and select the candidates for the 2010 parliamentary election, it is also set to become a political party and the only one whose victory the generals will accept.

Jonathan Manthorpe writes for the Vancouver Sun.

Source: The Ottawa Citizen