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18.10.07
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The Myanmar Test
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Comment by Georgy Bovt
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What Russia Failed to Say
If you took a survey, asking people across Russia where Myanmar is, what’s going on there and what they think about these events, the results will show that the average Russian does not know much about it. I think that most respondents will have difficulty stating even the geographical location of the country, although a significant number of them might be able to say something about mass upheavals because there have been reports about it in the news.
What is going on in Myanmar is a bloody suppression of protest demonstrations. Government troops have shot at unarmed civilians and the death toll may have reached a few hundred. But there is no exact information: the regime is doing everything in its power to block the country’s access to the outside world by filtering the Internet and choking cellular signals. But still, the information does make its way out, mainly through these mobile forms of communication, which makes today's events different from those in 1988, when several thousand people were killed there during the suppression of mass demonstrations, and the world found out about it only after a long delay. The situation today is very different. The information has broken free.
There is another difference between the events of 1988 and today. At that time, the protests were led and organized mostly by students; today the protests are led by Buddhist monks. It is hard to overestimate the role of the monks in Burmese society. They are the source of moral legitimacy of any public and political structure or institution, and to lose the monks’ support means to lose such legitimacy in the eyes of the society. This, in its turn, means that any such structure or institution is doomed, which is why today we can predict with certainty that the military regime in Myanmar will soon be gone.
Today the situation in Myanmar, a country that had been abandoned to the periphery of world politics, has become a major international problem. It is the subject of intensive discussion at the UN General Assembly; it has captured the attention of the leading powers of the world. Leaders of the United States, France and the UK, among others have already responded to these events by criticizing the military regime and urging the world community to take various measures against it.
The reaction of the world's leading powers to these events is characterized by the fact that Myanmar has little to offer the outside world. It does not have any large-scale supplies of oil or gas or any other attractive deposits of natural resources. The G8 countries have little or no economic interests in Myanmar.
China is somewhat of an exception; traditionally, it has seen its southern neighbor as one of the few areas where it can play an active political and economic role, which is why China’s reluctance to join the choir of international critics of the Yangon regime is quite understandable. On the other hand, as the Olympic Games in Beijing approach, China – under Western pressure - has already agreed to terminate its relationships with Sudan and the Congo due to human rights violations in those countries.
Today Russia does not really care about Western public opinion, and sometimes this is a good thing. However, the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs declaration that the mass shootings of peaceful civilians in Myanmar is “the country’s internal affair,” is not appropriate.
Myanmar is not part of the post-Soviet space; it is far from being a zone of vital interest for Russia, the relationship between Russia and Myanmar has no additional extraneous geopolitical circumstances.
In the absence of any ulterior motives, it is possible to view Myanmar as a test for Russian foreign policy. The shooting of a peaceful demonstration in Myanmar really is a shooting of a peaceful demonstration, not one organized by some hidden enemies of Russia like the “sponsors of the Orange Revolution," George Soros or the CIA. And this is exactly why Russia could have afforded a much more humane reaction - especially since even the UN Charter clearly states that such events cannot, as a matter of principle, be considered as “internal affairs” of any country. By speaking out at this time with a harsh criticism of the Yangon regime, by joining economic sanctions or even by initiating such sanctions, Moscow would not have risked anything in the material or economic sense. Instead, it would have multiplied its moral authority in the international arena. And it would have not earned such reactions as a recent article in The Washington Post, in which the Chinese and Russian supreme authorities were listed together as accomplices of a bloody regime.
As any great power should do in such situations, Russia's reaction should be made on humanistic principles; it should demonstrate special attention to humanitarian issues and to human rights. Because a truly great power can afford to step out onto the international arena to pursue some general principles beyond momentary interests as a reaction to changing external circumstances. In the case of the Myanmar events, I think that the Russian diplomacy has completely failed the “humanitarian test.”
Georgy Bovt is a Moscow-based political analyst. |
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