On the eve of a European gathering on the Burma issue in Brussels next week, many pro-democracy activists are casting doubt on the meeting and its main focus, an “independent” report which proposes a lifting of EU sanctions and engagement with the military regime.
Burma Day 2005, which is scheduled to be held on April 5, was organized by the European Commission, or EC, which handles EU’s aid program. But critics say the meeting will not be looking at EU humanitarian aid to Burma, as it was originally touted, but mainly discussing an EC-commissioned report titled: “Supporting Burma/Myanmar’s national reconciliation process: Challenges and opportunities.”
The report, which will be tabled at the meeting, suggests that the EU’s current approach towards Burma, which includes sanctions on travel to Europe by Burmese leaders and a ban on arms sales, has failed. It proposes further engagement with the generals in Rangoon. This is what upsets pro-democracy groups, who say the report is slanted towards the regime.
“Burma’s problems are totally self-inflicted: the corrupt and incompetent Burmese military regime has run the country’s political, economic and social institutions into the ground,” Maureen Aung-Thwin, director of New York-based Open Society Institute (Burma Project), told The Irrawaddy. “No amount of railing against sanctions at invitation-only seminars, or purportedly ‘independent’ reports that paint over the government’s fatal flaws, will ever change the reality in Burma,” she added.
By turning down requests by non-government groups, or NGOs, critical of the junta to participate in the session, the conference also effectively bars alternative views on the report. The report was written by Robert Taylor, an academic researcher on Burma, and Morten Pedersen, an analyst from the International Crisis Group.
After several NGOs wrote a letter of complaint to the EC, Harn Yawnghwe, director of the Brussels-based Euro-Burma office, was invited as a more critical panelist among about a dozen participants in Burma Day 2005. One NGO leader described this as a “token” move to appease critics.
Backing the NGOs’ complaints, Rangoon endorsed those taking part in the meeting as “globular scholars.” The regime’s mouthpiece, The New Light of Myanmar, had already introduced the panelists in a September 27, 2004, commentary thus: “All the decent eminent scholars of the world are against the acts of the US and its allies of the West imposing [abhorrent] sanctions on Myanmar [Burma].”
A possible shift in the EU’s stance on Burma was signaled at an EU-Asean meeting in Jakarta in early March, when EU External Relations Commissioner Benita Ferrero-Waldner indicated the European grouping might resume talks with Rangoon. The proposal was repeated on Wednesday by her spokesperson Emma Udwin, but she also said the EU was maintaining its demand for opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi to be released from house arrest.