THEY FLY no flag, they rule no territory, yet winners of the Nobel Peace Prize have earned the right to act, at certain times, as representatives of the world's conscience. This was never more true than in the statement on Burma issued this week by Archbishop Desmond Tutu of South Africa and signed by eight of his fellow Nobel laureates.
After the ruling military junta shot and beat saffron-robed Buddhist monks and other citizens peacefully demonstrating for democracy last fall, most governments only dithered. The United Nations sent a special envoy to Burma to beg the despotic generals for some gesture of reconciliation with a population that despises them.
Predictably, the regime of General Than Shwe went on rounding up monks and other pro-democracy activists. In a show of disdain for their own people and the rest of the world, the generals announced this week that they will hold a vote in May on a new constitution - a phony referendum on a document that their hand-picked stooges have spent 14 years drafting. And they rubbed salt in their victims' wounds by decreeing that Nobel Peace Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi will not be allowed to participate in elections envisioned for 2010.
Suu Kyi has been under some form of arrest for 12 of the past 18 years, since her National League for Democracy won 82 percent of parliamentary seats in a 1990 election the junta has refused to honor. In their appeal, the Nobel winners declared, "We stand firmly in support of our fellow Nobel Laureate Aung San Suu Kyi and have repeatedly called for her release, as well as the release of Buddhist monks and all political prisoners in Burma." Because Suu Kyi, her National League for Democracy, and Burma's oppressed ethnic minorities have been excluded from the regime's "roadmap" to a new constitution and elections, the laureates said, the junta's version of reconciliation is "flawed."
Bishop Tutu, in his own accompanying statement, was more pointed.
"The election promised by the military regime is a complete sham," declared the courageous clergyman who headed South Africa's post-apartheid Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Just as an arms embargo was imposed on apartheid South Africa after police massacred black demonstrators in the 1960s and '70s, Tutu said, the UN and the nations of the world should "immediately impose arms embargoes and targeted banking sanctions on Burma following the Saffron Massacre."
Governments habitually act - or refuse to act - for reasons of state. By calling on those states to impose meaningful penalties on uniformed gangsters who murder and torture nonviolent monks and civilians peacefully petitioning for democracy, Tutu and his fellow peace prize winners are defending the interests of humanity.
