The junta's enablers in Beijing

BURMA'S MILITARY junta has been showing its true colors this week, firing automatic weapons at peaceful demonstrators and raiding monasteries to beat and kill Buddhist monks. But the junta's criminal disdain for human rights has also cast a harsh light on China, the principal commercial partner, strategic ally, and diplomatic protector of the junta.

While protesters were being shot in Burma, China was preventing the United Nations Security Council from considering sanctions on the killers - or even issuing a condemnation of the junta's use of lethal force. China's ambassador to the UN justified his government's stance on the grounds that the bloodletting in Burma does "not constitute a threat to international peace and security."

China used the same rationale last January, when it joined with Russia to veto a Security Council resolution that would have called on the junta to release all political prisoners, open a political dialogue with the democratic opposition, and cease its assaults on Burma's ethnic minorities. Had China and Russia allowed that resolution to be approved, the generals in Burma might have been compelled to seek reconciliation with Nobel Peace laureate Aung San Suu Kyi and her National League for Democracy - the party that won more than 80 percent of parliamentary seats in a 1990 election that the generals ignored.

China has its reasons for hiding behind a restrictive, self-serving interpretation of the Security Council's mandate. Beijing maintains important economic and strategic ties with the junta. These include pipeline projects that could assure China of energy deliveries from the Middle East that would not have to pass through the Strait of Malacca, an easily closed passage between Malaysia and the Indonesian island of Sumatra. China also wants access to Burmese ports on the Indian Ocean.

Sad to say, democratic India has also been drawn into the junta's spider web. India is peddling weapons to the junta in exchange for help against insurgents in India's northeast, and is contracting to develop Burma's offshore natural gas reserves. The strategic aim is to counter China's influence in Burma.

But the key is China, and China has its vulnerabilities. In October, Beijing holds a Communist Party Congress at which policy is set for the next five years and leadership promotions are made. Chinese leaders do not want to be associated with a Burmese version of the Tiananmen Square massacre while their Congress is in session. And they don't want the 2008 Beijing Olympics to be ruined because of their complicity with the despots ruling Burma.

Because it exports narcotics, HIV/AIDS, and fleeing refugees, the Burmese junta is a threat to international peace and security. And if China does not rein in its clients in Burma, Beijing too is a threat to international peace and security.