UN envoy is 'encouraged' by talks with Burmese generals 
International Herald Tribune
June 10, 2003
Thomas Crampton

An about-face on Monday may indicate a minor breakthrough in the showdown between Burma's ruling generals and the international community over the detention of the Nobel peace laureate Aung San Suu Kyi.

Razali Ismail, the UN envoy who has been brokering Burma's reconciliation talks for more than two years, emerged uncharacteristically upbeat after talks on Monday with two senior generals.

Razali met the army chief, Deputy Senior General Maung Aye, and the head of military intelligence, General Khin Nyunt, with the dual objectives of obtaining a meeting with Aung San Suu Kyi and pressing for her release.

"I am encouraged by my meeting today," Razali said to reporters in Rangoon. "I am hoping I'll be able to fulfill one or two of the objectives of my visit."

He arrived in Burma on Friday, intending to cut short his visit if the military refused permission for him to see Aung San Suu Kyi.

"I'm not leaving today," Razali said, declining to elaborate on whether he had received permission to meet her.

The Nobel laureate has been locked incommunicado in a jail outside Rangoon for more than a week after a bloody clash between her supporters and a pro-government mob.

A mass beating with bamboo and iron rods may have killed up to 70 supporters of Aung San Suu Kyi's National League for Democracy, according to dissident exile groups. The government has denied reports that Aung San Suu Kyi was hit by a brick on the head and said just four people had been killed.

Despite meetings over the weekend with Khin Nyunt and Foreign Ministry officials, the government seemed set against any meetings between Razali and Aung San Suu Kyi.

Speeches published by the state-run media claimed that she was to blame for the violence on May 30 and suggested that Razali's demands might not be met.

Ever since her arrest, however, mounting condemnation by the international community has brought pressure to bear on the government.

In addition to objections against detention by the UN secretary-general, Kofi Annan, the United States extended a visa blacklist against top Burmese officials and said the State Department would examine other possible new sanctions against the government in Rangoon.

Perhaps the strongest new pressure, however, has come from other Southeast Asian nations, Asian and Western diplomats in the region said.

Unusually, several members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations have spoken up against the detention of Aung San Suu Kyi.

Thailand's prime minister spoke with uncharacteristic candor on the situation, the Philippine foreign secretary summoned Burma's ambassador for an explanation and the Cambodian government has commented on the issue.

Razali, who has pressed strongly to see Aung San Suu Kyi, is a confidant of the Malaysian prime minister, Mahathir bin Mohamad.

"These Southeast Asian countries have not been speaking as loudly as we would like," said a Rangoon-based Western diplomat. "But they have overcome their habitual refusal to speak about the internal affairs of a neighboring country."

Pressure against the detention may well increase over the next week as the region's foreign ministers prepare for a long-scheduled meeting next week in Cambodia.

While such moves may speed access to Aung San Suu Kyi, most analysts and diplomats say that reconciliation talks have been derailed for the near future.

The deadly clashes of May 30 came after weeks of repeated intimidation of Aung San Suu Kyi and her party by pro-government groups.

After lengthy negotiations spearheaded by Razali, Aung San Suu Kyi had been permitted to open the offices of her party, the National League for Democracy, and travel around the country to give speeches for the first time in years. She had spent much of the last decade under house arrest after the government refused to recognize the landslide victory by her party in 1990.

The recent newfound openness and steps toward reconciliation went well until the government realized that the charismatic pro-democracy leader had retained her tremendous popularity among ordinary people, Rangoon-based diplomats and analysts said.

"The government witnessed her power to draw crowds despite the years of negative publicity against her," a Rangoon-based businessman said. "But most dangerous of all was her ability to bring together disparate ethnic groups."

Burma has long been divided between semiautonomous ethnic minorities and the central government in Rangoon. While Aung San Suu Kyi and her party have often been seen as part of the ethnic Burmese and Rangoon-based power structure, her recent trip upcountry demonstrated that she appeals to a wide variety of mutually distrustful ethnic groups.

In recent months Aung San Suu Kyi has visited at least half a dozen ethnic minorities, including the Karen, Kachin, Arakhan, Shan, Chin and Mon.

Following a model established under British colonial rule, the Rangoon government has long employed a strategy intended to divide the minority groups by pitting them against each other. That Aung San Suu Kyi could travel between the groups and garner unified support greatly upset the government, a Rangoon-based diplomat said.

Although the moves toward national reconciliation over the last year have often been viewed as a tug of war between top generals, the government appears unified in its determination to jail Aung San Suu Kyi for now.

Of the generals who met with Razali on Monday, Maung Aye has been thought to head a faction preferring to stall reconciliation talks with Aung San Suu Kyi while many view Khin Nyunt as preferring pragmatic steps to appease the outside world.

But neither general could tolerate the evident rising stature of Aung San Suu Kyi among the ethnic groups, diplomats said on Monday, adding that self-preservation keeps the general much more united than some analysts portray the situation.

Copyright © 2006 the International Herald Tribune