Globe Editorial
SENATOR JIM WEBB of Virginia was acting as an advocate for a more accommodating US policy toward Burma’s despotic junta during his weekend visit to that country. But the folly of his project became obvious when the regime’s numero uno, General Than Shwe, rewarded Webb with the release of an American who received a seven-year sentence for swimming to the house where Nobel Peace Prize laureate Aung San Suu Kyi has long been held under house arrest - but not the freedom of that brave and dignified woman.
Webb has argued that sanctions have failed to alter the generals’ behavior. But there was a telling irony to his audience with Than Shwe and his rare, 40-minute meeting with Suu Kyi. The junta’s decision to grant Webb these two interviews was plainly in response to worldwide denunciations of the 18-month sentence of renewed house arrest imposed on Suu Kyi - but also to expanded European Union sanctions on the junta and US financial sanctions that President Obama signed into law at the end of last month.
The narco-trafficking generals are guilty of using rape as a weapon of war, forced labor on a massive scale, and the razing of thousands of ethnic minority villages. They want to keep Suu Kyi incarcerated until they conduct rigged elections next year under a constitution that will preserve military rule under a veneer of civilian participation.
The time to end sanctions is after Suu Kyi and her 2,100 fellow political prisoners are freed, and the junta enters a genuine political dialogue with ethnic minorities and Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy, winners of Burma’s last free election in 1990.
Webb may mean well, but he risks playing the dupe to a vicious dictatorship.
© Copyright 2009 Globe Newspaper Company.
