A country with no hope?

Bangkok Post

April 15, 2008 - The military dictatorship which runs Burma is taking new steps to tighten its already fearful grip on that sad country.

What is most outrageous about this campaign of control by the generals is the claim that its policies will be put to a vote in just under four weeks. The world has seen many free elections, and some whose honesty was questionable. The upcoming vote in Burma will be neither. The so-called national referendum on the military junta's constitution is a laughable charade which hopefully will hoodwink no one into thinking the Burmese regime's polls bear much resemblance to an actual national election.

The May 10 referendum announced by the military junta reverses almost every detail of a free election. The constitution which is the focus of the polls took years to write, but never was debated by the public. A carefully chosen and military-sequestered "national convention" was nothing but a highly controlled rubber-stamp committee. The junta dictated each word of the document. Citizens who want to know what is in the 194-page document being voted on next month have to pay about 30 baht to see it; only government-run bookstores are allowed to distribute it.

The military has already begun a campaign of fear about the polls. Last week, the army and police began a familiar campaign to beat up and warn Burmese trying to organise a "Vote No" campaign. The main opposition leader remains locked up and barred from political activity. In case of doubt, Nobel Peace Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi is also banned from speaking because she once was married to a foreigner. In fact, the military regime has been conducting constant warnings against speaking with foreigners. It also has warned all embassies in Rangoon against what it calls political involvement.

In Burma, speaking with an opposition member is proof in the generals' eyes of "abetting some local political parties to destabilise the country". Many countries ask outsiders to observe their elections as a sort of seal of approval of honesty. The Burmese rudely rejected UN offers of help to organise the referendum.

Last week, the junta ruled there would be no poll observers at all, except for soldiers, of course. The opposition National League for Democracy, minus the voice of its leader Daw Suu Kyi, asked for poll observers, preferably foreign. Without the natural checks and balances of outside observers, the NLD noted, the referendum could not be fair. Anyone suggesting that soldiers could not count the votes honestly clearly was trying to undermine the Burmese military's plan to move towards democracy.

Next month, the military will cite the referendum as a full mandate to hold power in Burma. A parliament is due to be selected in 2010, at an election as free and fair as the one scheduled for May 10. In Burma, the policy continues to be: no steps forward and two steps back. While citizens are asked to participate in a sham election, they also suffer from the worse-run economy in the region, without hope of prosperity. The generals have effectively encouraged a million Burmese to flee to Thailand and work for a pittance. Burma has become a country almost without hope.