Can Indignation Alone Move A Junta?

Reporter's Notebook: With Myanmar's Leadership Unwilling To Accept Help For Cyclone Victims, Aid May Be Forced

(CBS)  By CBS News correspondent Allen Pizzey.

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Several years ago, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees had a poster which sums up the plight of an estimated 2.5 million victims of the Myanmar cyclone.

It showed a hungry African child sitting with an empty bowl before him. The headline read: “I was hungry and you formed a committee to discuss the matter.” Across the bottom of the poster was the simple message: "Thank you.”

The refusal of the ruling military junta to allow international relief workers to assist in the disaster has provoked frustration, moral outrage and righteous indignation - but no concrete action. What is needed now is a serious consideration at the highest levels, both United Nations and governmental, of forced intervention.

French foreign minister Bernard Kouchner has argued that Myanmar (also referred to as Burma) is a legitimate case for such coercive involvement under a principle called “responsibility to protect” which was unanimously endorsed by 150 heads of state at the 2005 U.N. World Summit.

The proposal (sometimes referred to as R2P) is concerned with protecting vulnerable populations from “genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity."

Kouchner is more gung-ho than is usual for foreign ministers, an attitude born out of the zeal that led him to found Medecins Sans Frontieres (Doctors Without Borders), the relief agency with arguably the best record of any NGO for being first-in/last-out of some of the most dangerous and needy places in the world.

But he has a point.

The definition of “crimes against humanity," as laid down in the Rome Statute establishing the International Criminal Court, as well as in customary international law, embraces widespread or systematic torture and other such persecution and “other inhumane acts of a similar character intentionally causing great suffering, or serious injury to body or to mental or physical health."

There is a danger of overstating or misinterpreting the case, to the detriment of intervention is future crises, according to Gareth Evans of the International Crisis Group, who helped draw up the R2P doctrine.

But as Evans wrote in a recent article:

“If what the generals are now doing, in effectively denying relief to hundreds of thousands of people at real and immediate risk of death, can itself be characterised as a crime against humanity, then the responsibility to protect principle does indeed cut in. The Canadian-sponsored commission report that initiated the R2P concept in fact anticipated just this situation, in identifying one possible case for the application of military force as ‘overwhelming natural or environmental catastrophes, where the state concerned is either unwilling or unable to cope, or call for assistance, and significant loss of life is occurring or threatened’.”

With UNICEF warning of starving children, health officials fearfully monitoring cholera, and a body count that even the regime was forced to admit was at least double its original estimates, the Myanmar’s government's intransigence is approaching that definition by any reasonable interpretation.

The case is slowly being made.

Interviewed on the BBC over the weekend, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown condemned the sluggish response of the generals who make up Myanmar's ruling junta as “inhuman.” Brown said that a natural disaster “is being made into a man-made catastrophe by the negligence, the neglect and the inhuman treatment of the Burmese people by a regime that is failing to act and to allow the international community to do what it wants to do.”

Part of the problem may be that the generals are not even really aware of just how dire their situation is. The junta’s leader, Senior Gen. Than Shwe, is the only one who can make the decision to let foreign relief workers in, according to U Win Min, a lecturer at Payap University in Chiang Mai, Thailand, and an expert on Myanmar’s military.

As far as is known, General Shwe has not left his remote capital of Naypyidaw to look at the storm-damaged delta in the south, and the chances are good that even if his underlings understand the gravity of the situation, they are not telling him what is going on.

“They do not dare to give their ideas to the top general,” Win Min told CBS News in an interview. “They live in the air. They are out of touch with reality. I mean, they don’t want to hear about bad news. So the people under him are not reporting accurately what is happening on the ground.”

The reclusive regime’s paranoia about surrendering even a modicum of its control has held up tons of water, food, blankets, tents, mosquito nets, tarpaulins and medicine in the overburdened main airport - victims of poor infrastructure, bureaucracy and other chokeholds.

Win Min suggested that it was up to world leaders, including U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon, and especially the Chinese leadership, to tell the junta what is going on (although there is no guarantee, of course, that the generals will listen).

“What they are trying to do,” Win Min said, “is limit the international assistance to the level that people just barely survive.” That way, the chances of open dissent are minimized.

But it may not be working.

In a report datelined Yangon, The New York Times reported on Sunday that a banner hung on the outside of a seven-story apartment building in Yangon read: “We don’t want gold, we just need water.” The Times report pointed out that “in the Burmese language, the written words for gold and water are nearly identical. The banner also took a swipe at General Shwe. In Burmese, shwe means 'gold.'”

The international community seems to fear that any unapproved intervention will provoke General Shwe and his regime into the kind of violent reaction it has shown towards internal dissent.

Along with a French ship loaded with relief supplies and 11,000 U.S. sailors and Marines in a task force off the Myanmar coast already, British, French and Australian warships are converging on the area. Thai and Indian military missions have also been approved by their governments.

Whether or not a Myanmar child replaces the African urchin on a poster may well depend on whether or not they replace righteous indignation.

[nyeinc]

The Australian Newspaper reports, citing the Thai Foreign Minister that the Myanmar foreign minister would like to host the pledging conference on the 22nd or 23rd of May in Yangon (Rangoon)," Mr Noppadon told AFP ahead of the meeting. "Myanmar would like to host that meeting although the UN secretary general would like to host the ASEAN-UN pledging conference in Thailand. But we have to listen to Myanmar''s opinion first." (Burma wants aid-pledging conference, May 19, 2008)
If the international donors are NOT invited to stay on to observe the referendum in the remaining 47 townships near Yangon on 24th May, I support the idea although, I still think, it is quite a big gamble. Otherwise, I do NOT support his idea, given that the pledging conference could be politicized. I DO support the new constitution. I believe that Burmese people should and did vote for it and that it will provide an exit (low-cost, low-risk, and medium-return exit) out of the ongoing political gridlock in Burma. However, I prefer the idea of holding the pledging conference in Thailand.

[nyeinc]

Shari Villarosa, the senior diplomat at the United States Embassy in Yangon, said the military leaders%u2019 reluctance to admit more foreign aid and aid workers exasperated ordinary people, whose discontent over sharp inflation and political repression erupted last September in an uprising led by Buddhist monks. %u201CAnger is still there,%u201D Ms. Villarosa said in an interview on Sunday. %u201CDiscontent is still there. And now there is a growing discontent that there is international assistance out there that can be brought in, so why aren%u2019t we getting it?%u201D (A New York Times Correspondent in Yangon, Myanmar, Burmese Leader Visits Refugees, The New York Times, May 19, 2008)
So saying, a step towards a people%u2019s power revolution has been made by a veteran expert of those revolutions, Shari Villarosa whose career assignments, found in the public-accessible CV, coincide with the occurrence of people%u2019s power revolutions, the latest being in Indonesia in 1997-8.

[lewiston14]

downsteamjim: lets use liar. gives you the best chance to figure out nothing and make up your own stories as you go along. I doubt ill read any.

[nyeinc]

In case of another attempt at people%u2019s power revolution from the part of regime opponents, politicizing the disaster and capitalizing the presence of foreign troops, that of international aid workers and the unusual attention of international media, the Burmese military government will immediately attempt, euphemistically speaking, to maintain law and order; they might succeed in so doing. The Burmese military government will also wait for a few days and may restore law and order only later or in Tibet. Even its earlier, less decisive, attempts might FAIL. The 2nd and 3rd scenarios would inevitably result in the withdrawal of its troops from some areas, as in 1988 in Burma, leaving the population (and the Asian aid workers) to face the Hobbesian dilemma to choose between the anarchy and Leviathan state. In anticipation of the 2ndand 3rd scenarios, the international aid workers are advised to seek accommodation in the high-rise hotels where the helicopter rescues are possible. Yes, it will cost forty or fifty dollars more than the small, family-run, motels which cost ten or twenty dollars per night. In order to be able to rescue the international aid workers out there in the field immediately, it is necessary for them to instantaneously update their location to the local authorities or even higher authorities, including the relevant ministries.

[nyeinc]

A strategic weakness of inviting Asian aid workers into Burma is that the Western governments would be less concerned for their security and the regime opponents might act more recklessly. On the other hand, the Asian relief workers would be more willing to stay inside their lodgings during the crackdown than their Western counterparts. The death of the under-covered Japanese reporter might probably make them more aware of the fact that it is very difficult to distinguish Thai and Indian relief workers from the Burmese regime opponents taking the streets to oust the military government. The best would be for the Burmese regime opponents to self-restrain from their unwise decisions/actions. So far, no sign of self-restraint from the part of regime opponents, their state/non-state supporters and the sympathetic media have been found. It is better safe than sorry, just in case of the unthinkable.

[ubrew12]

Title: "Can Indignation Alone Move A Junta?"

I don''t know. It hasn''t worked with Cheney/Bush yet!

[minnick8-2009]

The military leaders of Myanmar who are denying their people international aid must be pure evil, selfish, despicable, hateful, disgusting, and totally lacking in any kind of humanity or conscience. I don''t have words to adequately describe the level of disgust their inactions inspire in me. Since I cannot personally go and deliver aid to the millions who are in dire need, I hope can only hope the leaders of the military regime all die a slow, agonizingly painful, hellacious death.

[downsteamjim]

A fossil, a liar, or a racist.

[lewiston14]

A white chick, a boon, and an old man is this going to work? NO

[lewiston14]

Oh I forget to the middle east nations woman are second class and OBM is third class you think excpt a few photo ops they would sit down at the same table? All of them are not worth a dime the election should be cancled until they find some real people