By Marc Hujer, Jürgen Kremb and Andreas Lorenz
The Burmese junta is led by General Than Shwe.
By Saturday, Sept. 15, the military leaders must have realized how serious the situation had become for them. Monks were marching along University Avenue in Yangon. There, in a house with a view of Inya Lake, opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi, 62, has been under house arrest for more than 11 years.
Suu Kyi, who is respectfully called Daw Suu or Lady Suu by her supporters, had returned to Burma from abroad in 1988 to care for her mother, who was terminally ill. But as the daughter of national hero Aung San, she was soon at the head of the protest movement and, in 1990, led the National League for Democracy in free elections.
The NLD won more than 80 percent of the vote. But the junta, which had ordered the massacre in the streets of Yangon on Sep. 18, 1988, declared the results invalid. The junta's current leader, Than Shwe, 74, hates Suu Kyi so much that no one is permitted to even mention her name in his presence.
As the demonstrators marched toward Suu Kyi's house two weeks ago, it set off a panic in the new jungle capital, Naypyidaw. Would the monks liberate the Nobel Prize winner? On Sunday, Than Shwe ordered his family to pack their bags, and early in the week they took a charter flight to Bangkok. That was when the regime began the "extreme action" it had earlier threatened.
The regime brought in its elite troops from the borders. When the troops arrived in Yangon on Tuesday, the government imposed a curfew on the city. Any remaining hopes that the soldiers would shy away from shooting at monks were quickly dashed. After initial warning shots over the heads of the demonstrators, government troops began shooting directly into the crowds by Wednesday. The dead and injured even included a foreign victim, Japanese photographer Kenji Nagai, who was literally executed by a soldier as he lay on the ground.
The regime launched a propaganda campaign against the protestors at the same time. In an attack on the NLD, the government-run New Light of Myanmar wrote: "Saboteurs from inside and outside the nation and some foreign radio stations, who are jealous of national peace and development, have been making instigative acts through lies to cause internal instability and civil commotion." The media were quickly filled with the regime's appeals to the Burmese, most of them cynical lies: "We favor stability," "We favor peace," "We oppose unrest and violence." The government-controlled press was, of course, quick to seek blame abroad for the unrest, writing that the BBC and the Voice of America are broadcasting "a sky-full of lies."
On Thursday afternoon, soldiers combed the Traders Hotel in downtown Yangon for foreign journalists who had sneaked into the country on tourist visas. Telephone lines to other countries were cut off and Internet connections shut down. As night fell over Yangon on Friday and the students ended their protests, the generals seemed to have won the first round.
Nevertheless, the junta is still a long way from winning the fight. "They are extremely hunkered down, delusional, paranoid and probably afraid at the moment about what could possibly happen," David Mathieson, an expert on Burma with the US-based group Human Rights Watch, told the New York Times.
The country's military leaders would presumably prefer to persist in their isolation. They denied an entry visa several times to Ibrahim Gambari, the United Nations special envoy to Burma, in the past, and this time around they were no more willing to let him into the country. It wasn't until Thursday night that they finally agreed to meet with the UN representative.
Since arriving in the country on Saturday, Gambari has been allowed to meet with Suu Kyi, with whom he had a one-hour talk on Sunday, and has also been given an appointment to meet with the junta's leader Than Shwe on Tuesday. Gambari had originally hoped to meet Than Shwe on Monday but the regime postponed the meeting, sending Gambari on a government-sponsored trip to the north of the country instead.
The junta's decision to let Gambari enter the country came in response to collective international outrage, at least among Western nations, over the junta's attempts to violently suppress the Saffron Revolution. German Chancellor Angela Merkel condemned the government's use of soldiers and British Prime Minister Gordon Brown called for tougher sanctions. The US imposed visa bans on Burmese leaders and froze foreign assets of senior junta members, as far as it could. But little more than a delicate clearing of the throat was heard from Burma's neighbor to the north, rising global power China.
"We hope that all parties in the Myanmar issue will maintain restraint and appropriately handle the problems that have currently arisen," Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Jiang Yu breathed into the microphone, as if Burma had just experienced a minor marital quarrel.
But Beijing's actions in New York were not nearly as soft-spoken. Last week the Chinese ambassador to the UN voted against a proposed Security Council resolution condemning Burma. "We are not supporting the Burmese military, but rather stability," said a foreign policy advisor to the Communist Party and Burma expert in Beijing, seeking to downplay the embarrassing vote.
China has benefited for many years from the leaden calm that has prevailed in Burma. When the West slapped economic sanctions on Yangon after the 1988 massacre, the Chinese jumped in to fill the void. Relations have blossomed ever since. More than a million immigrants from throughout the People's Republic have already settled, more or less legally, in Burma.
For the Chinese, Burma is a land of rich prizes, including oil and natural gas, natural resources and timber. China mines nickel, copper and coal in Burma. According to the nonprofit organization Earthrights International, at least 14 Chinese companies are building hydroelectric power plants in the country. Trade between the two nations approached $1.5 billion last year. Beijing's state-owned energy groups plan to exploit oil and gas fields off the Burmese coast and have already signed agreements with the junta. Another project in the works calls for the construction of 2,380 kilometers (1,480 miles) of oil and gas pipelines from Burma's western Rakhine State all the way to Kunming, the capital of China's southern Yunnan Province.
Economic ties are already so close that the Chinese yuan is treated as legal tender, in addition to the Burmese currency, the kyat, in the northern border regions. Sections of the old royal capital Mandalay, with their Chinese shops, apartment buildings and shopping centers, could already be mistaken for neighborhoods in a Chinese city. Close to one third of Mandalay's residents are believed to be Chinese.
China is also providing Burma's generals with weapons and materials. The Burmese have already purchased about $2 billion worth of helicopters, aircraft, artillery guns, warships and tanks from their northern neighbor.
But by generously supporting the Burmese junta, the Chinese risk provoking the anger of the international community. With the Olympics less than a year away, it is not in Beijing's interest to appear as the protector of an inhumane regime, one whose atrocities are all too reminiscent of the brutal suppression of its own student uprising on Tiananmen Square in 1989. "It's a problem for us," officials in Beijing quietly admit.
To head off a potential conflict, the Chinese government facilitated a secret meeting in June between US diplomats and representatives of the junta in Beijing, where the Americans hoped to convince the Burmese to release opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi. Chinese officials also invited opposition groups to take part in informal talks.
But by the end of last week, Chinese diplomats were not convinced that the monks' uprising could cause the junta to fall from power. If it does, Beijing said it "hopes for a smooth transition." If the generals are driven out after all, said the Communist Party's foreign policy advisor in Beijing, "we will have no trouble in coming to terms with the Lady."
Of course, this would come at a cost to the Chinese. "If the Lady comes to power, the international economic sanctions will be lifted," the advisor said. "And then we will no longer be without competition in Burma."
Translated from the German by Christopher Sultan
© DER SPIEGEL 40/2007
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