Asia-Pacific, Global, Global Geopolitics, Headlines, Human Rights

Looking Beyond Burma’s 2010 Elections

Kanya D'Almeida

UNITED NATIONS, Oct 24 2010 (IPS) - While scores of international observers wait on tenterhooks for the first election in Burma in two decades – and one of only three multiparty elections in 60 years – a report by the U.N. Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights there suggests that the world need not wait for Nov. 7 to judge the outcome.

“The election process has been deeply flawed and disappointing,” Tomas Quintana said this week.

Early in September, Burma’s military Elections Commissioner announced that voting will not be held in some 3,300 villages in the Shan state, effectively disenfranchising 1.5 million voters.

Over 2,000 prisoners of conscience, including Nobel Peace Prize laureate and opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi, continue to languish in prison despite repeated calls from U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon and others for their release.

The leading opposition party, the National League for Democracy (NLD), was not even allowed to contest elections and already more than 20 extrajudicial killings have taken place.

In response to Quintana’s report to the Third Committee of the General Assembly earlier this week, the delegate from Britain stated that the “election result is a foregone conclusion”, adding that the international community must now look beyond the elections and towards options such as the Commission of Inquiry (CoI), a suggestion put forth on multiple occasions by the Special Rapporteur.

“A number of member states have expressed support for a CoI,” Quintana said. “Others have said that such an accountability measure will be counterproductive and that continued engagement would be preferred. This is a false dichotomy. An investigation of this kind would not preclude international engagement with the new government.”

Despite Quintana’s balanced report, public debate among U.N. member states continues to be dictated not by legal precedent but rather by regional ties, economic motivations and political alliances.

According to the most recent figures released by Burma’s Central Statistical Office, Thailand currently receives 52 percent of Burma’s exports, India receives 17 percent and China receives nine percent. China is also Burma’s largest import source, supplying as much as 32 percent of total imports.

Thus it came as no surprise that the most outspoken critics of Quintana’s report were the delegates of Thailand, China, India and Burma itself, all of whom denounced the report as one-sided and “biased” and warned that a CoI would only be “destructive” to the post-election climate.

With economic incentives driving superpowers’ decisions, the chances of a CoI mandated by the General Assembly or the Security Council are slim, despite the backing of the European Union, Norway and Canada.

Some human rights advocates have been adamant that such self-serving motivations are highly short-sighted. According to Debbie Stothard, the executive director of ALTSEAN, the Alternative Asean Network on Burma, “The reality is that any country that wishes to have sustainable trade relations with Burma has to realise that the international crimes there are generating instability which is not conducive to trade.”

While the U.N. balks at the CoI, several experts, including Professor Tyler Giannini, director of Harvard Law School’s International Human Rights Clinic (IHRC), are keen to deter what they see as an imminent catastrophe unfurling in Burma.

Addressing a press gathering in early October, Giannini laid out, in strictly legal terms, the case for a CoI into possible war crimes and crimes against humanity in Burma.

“We decided to look specifically at only U.N. documents,” Giannini said, referring to the IHRC’s publication ‘Crimes in Burma’. “The conclusion was that U.N. institutions have consistently acknowledged abuses and used legal terms associated with international crimes, including that violations have been ‘widespread’, ‘systematic’ or ‘part of a state policy’.”

“Based on previous precedent,” Giannini concluded, “the U.N.’s next step should be to set up a CoI and that follows directly from comparisons to Darfur and to Rwanda and to former Yugoslavia.”

Giannini’s allusions to genocide are in line with the opinions of countless other human rights experts. “What we’ve seen unfolding in Burma over the past few decades has been a slow burning genocide for several communities,” Stothard told IPS.

“We’ve seen what happened in Cambodia,” she added. “Southeast Asia has already hosted one terrible tragedy. The longer the regional and international community refuses to deal with Burma the longer they condemn our region to yet another similar situation.”

The Special Rapporteur expressed similar fears about Burma’s future, post-elections.

“It will take a long time for Myanmar to have meaningful democratic institutions,” Quintana told IPS. “This country has been under military government for 40 years. It is militarised at every level.”

But while conversations continue in press rooms and conference halls, the situation on the ground in Burma becomes more and more intolerable for those living there.

Wa Ku Shee, a representative of the Women’s League of Burma, could not hold back her tears during her presentation to the United Nations Burma Fund in early October.

Haltingly, she described the plight of a mother with two infants fleeing her village from soldiers. When her daughter was shot, she was forced to leave her dying in the forest in the hopes of carrying her son to safety. Before she reached the hospital, her son was shot in the thigh, and eventually bled to death in her arms.

“The situation of the civilians in the middle of this armed conflict is extreme,” Quintana told IPS. “It is not enough to say we need free and fair elections. We need to include justice for past violations in order to deter future violations and this is a serious challenge.”