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Burma's Neroes fiddle while the people die
Published 10 May 2008
Visiting Research Fellow, Oxford University and Free Burma Coalition Maung Zarni on how, in the wake of Burma's cyclone, the country's dictators put their rotten referendum first and their citizens' lives second. He argues the world must intervene
You have got to love these guys who run Burma – renamed Myanmar.
Nero must have been one of their main sources of kingly inspirations. The flames of the ancient Rome didn’t bother the fabled Nero who kept on fiddling
his violin.
Get this.
The country is going through the aftermath of the greatest national catastrophe in its living memory – with an estimated 100,000 dead and 1.5 million
shelterless and literally on the verge of famine. Yet the generals’ most immediate concern is to hold the Referendum through which the military rule –
already in its 46th year – is once again to be reconfigured, legalized and legitimated.
As if this pathological reasoning is not twisted enough, they apparently ordered their busiest Embassy abroad in Bangkok to take a 3-day weekend holiday, on the convenient occasion of the Thai’s royal ploughing ceremony.
While the neighboring Thai rulers contribute, as a matter of ritual, to the production of the people’s staple , “Myanmarese” rulers act as if they have
little or no concerns beyond photo ops on the State-run TV, of generals handing out a few hundred meals in Styrofoam packages - about the most elemental
needs of the disaster-stricken people.
Over one million victims who desperately need food and clean water in dire conditions are still waiting desperately for relief efforts. For the generals
are insisting – characteristically – that the international community bring and drop off food, money, relief equipment and medical supplies and then leave, a
condition no aid donor is prepared to accept given the regime’s half-century old record of diverting all revenues and resources at its disposal for consolidating
its stranglehold on the population.
Scores of disaster relief workers from various UN agencies, as well as other international NGOs have no choice but to sit on their visa applications for 4
more days, desperate to get in and help distribute high power biscuits and other survival items. Even if there were enough rice to go around among Burmese
victims and survivors – which is not the case – there is no clean water to cook rice, hence biscuits for the rice-eating Burmese.
Here is a perfect living example of a population that needs “humanitarian intervention” – in whatever form it may take. The unceasing Burmese tales of
unimaginable tragedy and misery at the hands of the latter-day Neroes have moved Dr Bernard Kouchner, co-founder of the Doctors Without Borders and now France’s Foreign Minister, to publicly make the case for invoking ‘Responsibility to Protect or R2P.”
R2P is the new international doctrine introduced at the UN in 2001, which uses as its starting point ‘non-intervention amongst sovereign states’. It does not
require as prerequisite for intervention that a domestic situation threatens stability, peace and order internationally or regionally, nor is it confined to
armed conflicts, genocides and mass murders. (See http://www.iciss.ca/report-en.asp )
When a particular state, or those who have usurped power, as in the case of Burma/Myanmar - fail to demonstrably protect, prevent or otherwise address the
massive sufferings of a large population it becomes incumbent upon other states (and national communities) to impose appropriate humanistic measures, militarily if necessary and as a last resort, on a sovereign country.
Over the past week since the cyclone Nargis ripped up hundreds of communities and destroyed hundreds of thousands of human lives, the unmistakably callousness of the Myanmarese senior leadership is for all to see. Like Emperor Nero of ancient Rome, they have, in effect, chosen to be oblivious to the people in distress and the country in flames. Indeed by all objective criteria, the generals have categorically failed to uphold their obligations to the Burmese
people, as well as their membership responsibility to the United Nations to protect the citizens.
It is one thing that authoritarian regimes the world over typically mow down dissidents and rebels on the streets. But it is altogether a different order
of revulsion that the Myanmarese regime’s failure to put the lives and well-being of 1.5 million shelter-less cyclone victims first - the newly born,
the sick and the elderly - rendering them foodless, waterless and without safety and raising the risk of a major outbreak of disease through willful negligence.
Even the ‘evil’ Russia under Putin has the sensibility to waive visas for the British football fans bound for St Petersburg accepting football tickets in lieu
of visa stamps. Yet all international appeals from both hostile and friendly nations have fallen on the deaf ears of the evil rulers of Burma/Myanmar, who
refuse to honour the aid workers’ UN-issued passports.
Indeed, the “Myanmarese” Neroes are fiddling away their Constitutional tune preparing for Saturday’s Referendum , while the country’s 1.5 million victims
wither away with no drinking water or food aid.
The question before the outside world is:
Will those key players in the international community discharge their “responsibility to react” in the face of such evil?
This February, UK Foreign Secretary David Miliband used the occasion of the ‘Aung San Suu Kyi Lecture’ at St Hugh’s College, Oxford to articulate Britain’s
new foreign policy, calling it the ‘Democracy Imperative’. What better opportunity than the unfolding Burmese atrocities for him to put his money where
his mouth is. The “Humanitarian Imperative” based on Responsibility to Protect’ must come first.
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