Burma: Sending a Message to the UN

August 22, 2008 – (The Irrawaddy) Has Aung San Suu Kyi started playing a new game? If so, the latest visit of UN Special Envoy to Burma Ibrahim Gambari could mark the beginning of a subtle but significant shift in the pro-democracy leader’s tactics, which have remained almost unchanged for the past 20 years.

By refusing to meet with Gambari on two occasions—at a scheduled meeting on Wednesday and again on Friday—Suu Kyi appeared to be sending a silent message that she was less than happy with the outcome of his efforts to date.

On Friday morning, the scene outside Suu Kyi’s home, where she has been under house arrest since 2003, descended into farce. Neighbors reported seeing aides of the UN envoy repeatedly shouting his name, evidently hoping to persuade her to meet with him.

As Gambari comes to the end of his latest five-day visit to Burma—his sixth since taking on the role of special envoy—it’s beginning to look like it might be his last.

Normally, it would be up to the generals to relegate yet another failed emissary to the diplomatic dustbin. This time, it seems that Suu Kyi has done the dirty work.

What has prompted Suu Kyi to snub a representative of the United Nations, an organization which she once worked for?

"We don’t know the reason why Daw Suu didn’t meet Mr Gambari. But we know that she was unhappy with [the] situation,” said Win Naing, a spokesman for Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy (NLD).

"We are not satisfied with it either,” he added.

On Friday, in response to a request from Gambari, five senior members of the NLD agreed to meet with him again, after it had become clear that an earlier meeting on Wednesday did little to allay concerns that the party was getting short shrift from the UN envoy.

Win Naing said that Gambari spent only 20 minutes speaking with the NLD officials during the first meeting. The Friday meeting lasted 90 minutes.

"The meeting shouldn’t have been so short,” he told The Irrawaddy by phone on Friday, adding that Gambari was simply allowing himself to be led around Rangoon by the authorities. Senior members of the regime have also refused to meet him.

Although there are reports that Gambari will extend his visit until Saturday, it is unlikely that Suu Kyi will meet him before he leaves the country.

For the past two decades, Suu Kyi has always played along with the UN’s diplomatic efforts, in keeping with her belief that only dialogue will break Burma’s political deadlock.

However, with little to show for years of effort, the UN appears to be drifting toward a position of tacitly accepting the regime’s so-called “road map” to “disciplined democracy.” This would effectively erase the results of a 1990 general election that the NLD won by a landslide, leaving the party out in the cold.

During the meeting with the NLD members on Wednesday, Gambari asked how they would feel about planned elections set for 2010 if they were free and fair. They responded by asking him what he thought about the results of the 1990 election. He did not answer, said Win Naing.

Gambari also had no answer when asked why he had spent most of his time meeting with groups formed by the military government.

On Thursday, the Washington-based US Campaign for Burma questioned claims in an official UN statement that said the envoy had held “ten separate meetings with political parties and civil society groups, including members of the Central Executive Committee of the National League for Democracy, student representatives and elected individuals from the 1990 elections.”

"This statement is not only misleading but patently false—Gambari did not meet with ‘political parties and civil society groups,’ with the exception of the NLD. Instead, the UN envoy met with nine Burmese groups, all of which are supporters and proxies of Burma’s military regime,” the US Campaign for Burma said in a statement.

The campaign group said that Gambari met with representatives of the Union of Myanmar Federation of Chambers of Commerce and Industry, which is the major funder of the regime’s Swan Ah Shin militia. The group was notorious in cracking down on peaceful demonstrators in the monk-led protests of September 2007.

The envoy also met representatives of the Union Solidarity and Development Association, a junta-backed civic group that violently attacked Suu Kyi’s motorcade and killed several dozen of her supporters in 2003.

As it appears that the UN is moving towards a capitulation to the will of the junta, lending it a legitimacy that it has no claim to, Suu Kyi’s willful silence—after being gagged for decades—is perhaps the strongest protest she can mount against an injustice that must not be permitted to continue.

From:http://www.irrawaddy.org/opinion_story.php?art_id=13984