Barun Roy: A lament for Suu Kyi

ASIA FILE

With economics rather than politics driving foreign policy, the Myanmar pro-democracy movement is really on its own.

Once again, we are witnessing a cat-and-mouse game in Myanmar between world opinion and its military junta. Once again, the mouse "" the junta "" is enjoying the way the game is playing out, without an outcome. And once again, we know how much the political will of nations has succumbed to pure economic self-interest.

It's over a month that Myanmarese, monks and laity alike, have been out in the streets of Yangon in the latest round of demonstrations against the ruling military junta, protesting a draconian 100 per cent rise in fuel prices and calling for national reconciliation and democracy. It's for the better part of 18 years that Aung San Suu Kyi, leader of Myanmar's pro-democracy movement, has been kept in house arrest in a naked suppression of her political and human rights. It's over 30 years that Myanmar has remained the private preserve of a handful of generals, who negated Suu Kyi's landslide election win in 1989 and banished civil rights and liberties. Yet, there has been no credible effort, not even from Myanmar's immediate neighbours and fellow members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, not to speak of the world's largest self-righteous democracy, India, to form an axis of good against an acknowledged evil. All we have had so far are angry statements and platitudes.

Don't even pretend to be surprised. No nation is in a mood for political confrontations anymore, except perhaps in parts of Africa for all the wrong reasons. Who wants to lose markets and investments? Why rock the boat when the sailing is smooth? It's economic outcome that determines foreign policy nowadays, a vast change of attitude "" paradigm shift, in common economic parlance "" from a mainly political to a mainly economic worldview that's behind the spectacular economic success of many nations. China's certainly, and southeast Asia's beyond any doubt. India, too, while still racked at home by petty political wars, has found that only through economic pragmatism can it develop quickly and connect with the world.

Is it good? Oh yes, to a very large extent. Letting politics drive economics is a sure way to court disaster. But it's just as true that the supremacy of economic pragmatism has led nations into a conscience trap from which it's no longer easy to escape. Nations have lost the moral courage to take decisive stands in public. The politics of conviction will never again dictate foreign policy the way it used to before. The US could get away with Iraq simply because a world so utterly dependent on the American economy is in no position to come in its way. China could get away with Tienanmen Square because the world had just begun to discover an enormous unexplored market it didn't want to lose. When factories and sweatshops in one country sustain prosperity in another, who wants to quibble about rights and wrongs? When Myanmar spells potential opportunities for foreign businesses and investments, why care if Suu Kyi is held in her lakeside Yangon home or in the infamous Insein prison?

I don't think it's possible anymore to create another non-aligned grouping of nations. The days of Nehru, Nasser, Tito and Sukarno are gone, forever. Global realities have so changed and economies have become so meshed with one another that one wonders if reactions and responses would be the same if the Bangladesh War were to happen now, or the Vietnam War for that matter. If the US has to get out of Iraq after all, it will be because of its own internal economic pressures, not because of any resolution in the Indian, or any, parliament, however strongly worded.

So, where does this leave Suu Kyi and her beleaguered pro-democracy movement? To themselves, basically. The United Nations has threatened sanctions, may even impose some, but sanctions are easily broken, as we know from Iraq. India feels worried, but what does it mean? This is what it means, as explained by Pranab Mukherjee himself, the typical Indian foreign minister with a typically Indian solution. Form a committee to enquire into the riots, he has advised Myanmar's rulers.

Callousness couldn't be colder, but New Delhi can do little. India's neglect of Myanmar over the years has driven the country inevitably to forge closer links "" economic, physical, as well as emotional "" with southeast Asia and China. It is these countries that have the clout and they are not interested to exercise it yet.

The change Suu Kyi is seeking, therefore, has to come from within the country itself, from its people. It's only when the ground swells and begins to shake under their feet that the military dictators could be expected to see the reality. Dictators never last. They never have in history. Unfortunately, it's the people who will end up paying the greater price. But that's how it is.