Burmese Military Junta Gaining Upper Hand

You gotta hand it to those sinister beasts whose fangs are sunk deep into Burma, the SLORC, that horrible military junta ruling Burma. (Or “Myanmar,” as these tyrants would have it, in a faux-“anti-Imperialist” gesture.) The UN’s envoy is already calling for the lifting of sanctions. Why? Because they FINALLY let the long-suffering Aung San Suu Kyi, leader of the Burmese democracy 

movement and a beacon of hope for the Burmese people, out of house arrest and allowed her party to run for a tiny fraction of the seats in “parliament.” Thus she is virtually totally powerless.  They still won’t let her assume the presidency, which she won fair and square in elections over 20 years ago.

Aung San Suu Kyi is being used as a stooge and a beard for the junta. In desperate economic straits, the junta needed to con the international community, and found in Aung San Suu Kyi the perfect foil. With her face fronting for Burma, the junta can still rule the country, pretend to have instituted democracy, and break the sanctions regime.

Now the regime is setting up the Burmese people for disillusionment with Aung San Suu Kyi when she can’t magically deliver reforms she has no power to institute.

Furthermore, she just caved in to the junta’s demand that to assume the meaningless parliamentary seats her party won, they have to take an oath swearing to “defend the Constitution,” the document written by the military that “legalizes” their continuing unchallengeable rule and that Aung San Suu Kyi is committed to rewriting. So as soon as they tries to tamper with it, they’ll said she “violated her oath of office” and can remove her or, better still, leave her in place but remove her party members from parliament. 

4/30/12 noon NPR reporter Anthony Kuhn on the  dispute  over the oath of office required by  the Burmese military junta of Aung San Suu Kyi’s parliamentarians, to “defend the Constitution.” The Constitution needs to be amended, and she intended to do so. So she caved on the oath, and Kuhn sniffs that it is petty “bickering over the wording of the oath.”

No, she’s being set up. As soon as she tries to reform the Constitution, she’ll be guilty of “violating her oath of office,” Kuhn.