Published November 24, 2005

One significant though insufficiently noticed aspect of U.S. President George W. Bush’s weeklong visit to Asia was his consistent effort to focus attention on Myanmar, and to pressure Asian allies, notably Japan, to be more forthright in their criticisms of the military junta’s shortcomings.

In the keynote speech for his Asian tour, in Kyoto on Nov. 16, it went largely unreported that Bush took the opportunity to place the Myanmarese tragedy more clearly on the international agenda in one passionate paragraph:

“We see that lack of freedom in Myanmar — a nation that should be one of the most prosperous and successful in Asia but is instead one of the region’s poorest. Fifteen years ago, the Myanmarese people cast their ballots — and they chose democracy. The government responded by jailing the leader of the prodemocracy majority. The result is that a country rich in human talent and natural resources is a place where millions struggle simply to stay alive.

“Abuses by the Myanmarese military are widespread, and include rape, and torture, and execution, and forced relocation. Forced labor, trafficking in persons, and use of child soldiers, and religious discrimination are all too common. The people of Myanmar live in the darkness of tyranny — but the light of freedom shines in their hearts. They want their liberty — and one day, they will have it.”

This was no isolated outburst. At roughly the same time as Bush spoke in Kyoto, U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, at an APEC foreign ministers meeting in Pusan, South Korea, was describing the Myanmarese military junta as “one of the worst regimes in the world. . . . I don’t think we get the kind of international condemnation of what’s going on in Myanmar that we really need.”

Rice expressed understanding of those nations that felt the need to engage Myanmar, but she hoped that such engagement “also takes the form of being serious about the really quite appalling human-rights situation in Myanmar. And not just for prodemocracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi.

“We are talking about systematic efforts to silence any critics of the regime and to put human rights organizations completely out of business. Myanmar is a very bad case. . . . too often it kind of falls off the radar screen of people who don’t concern themselves every day with human rights and democracy issues.”

Bush returned to his Myanmarese theme when he met Malaysian Prime Minister Abdullah Badawi in Pusan on Nov. 17, and when, together with Rice, he met the seven ASEAN heads of government attending the APEC summit the next day. Evidently Bush stressed Myanmar’s failure to implement promised reforms, while one ASEAN reaction was to reiterate their continuing commitment to engagement with Myanmar.

The Bush-Rice duet on Myanmar is significant for several reasons:

* First, it suggests that the Myanmarese tragedy is at least firmly fixed on the radar screens of at least the uppermost levels of the Bush administration. On Oct. 31, Bush gave nearly an hour of his time to Ms. Charm Tong, a Myanmarese activist who lives in Thailand, and who is particularly concerned with the ways in which the Myanmarese military have used rape systematically as a weapon of war, especially among her own Shan people and Myanmar’s other persecuted ethnic minorities. “The military wants our people to feel shamed and demoralized,” she told Bush, “when, in fact, it is the troops who should be ashamed.”

* Second, the list of Myanmarese injustices contained in Bush’s Kyoto speech strongly suggest that if not Bush himself, then certainly whoever wrote the speech had carefully read the report issued Sept. 20, commissioned by former Czech President Vaclav Havel and South African
Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu, detailing the ways in which Myanmar today represents a threat to the region’s peace and calling upon the U.N. Security Council to intervene.

One devastating argument deployed by that report was to show that the Security Council had intervened in seven nations in the last decade over threats to the peace — that the various conditions that brought about those interventions aree all present, and indeed much worse, in the case of Myanmar.

Clearly, the Bush-Rice duet suggests that the Havel-Tutu report is having an impact on U.S. foreign policy and that, despite Washington’s many preoccupations, Myanmar is belatedly becoming one of the administration’s priority concerns.

* Third, Americans have indicated that they want Myanmar placed on the Security Council agenda but have refrained from moving overtly on this while U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan conducts a high-level U.N. review of Myanmar and tries to arrange a visit there to see the top generals and Suu Kyi, currently under house arrest. Annan’s two special envoys to Myanmar have both been denied visas to visit Myanmar for the last two years.

That Annan can persuade the generals to let him see Suu Kyi is doubtful. Their refusal should clear the way for a Security Council debate.

* Fourth, the Bush administration is restrained by its uncertainty of securing the nine of 15 votes required to place an item on the Security Council agenda. It is thought to be only sure of eight.

Amazingly, numerous reports from the United Nations in New York have indicated that assumed close allies of the U.S., Japan and the Philippines, would both vote with China and Russia in opposing any U.S. resolution to place Myanmar on the Security Council agenda.

How two democracies could vote with the authoritarian states to prevent anything being done about Myanmar is unconscionable. The joint Koizumi-Bush press conference in Kyoto was remarkable for the insistent way in which Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi emphasized the desirability of an ever closer U.S.-Japan alliance as a bedrock of international relations. Given his stress on Myanmar, Bush presumably insisted to Koizumi in private where, relative to Myanmar, such closeness must lead.

Harvey Stockwin has covered Asia for 50 years.