<nettime> Two Burmese won 1999 JOHN HUMPHREY FREEDOM AWARD

[Nadi@hotvoice.com]

SPEECH BY JOHN RALSTON SAUL
1999 JOHN HUMPHREY FREEDOM AWARD CEREMONIES
MONTREAL, DECEMBER 10, 1999

It seems for me, that every time I speak about Burma "it's been 20 years now" I
have to be cautious. I come, as many of us do here, from a country in which
human rights and freedom of speech mean something that is clearly defined.
There are some flaws. Some things are missing. There are a couple of mistakes
and weaknesses, but it is mainly well defined. Let's for a moment turn
ourselves towards people that live in a different situation, in which human
rights and freedom of speech are not as well defined, living in some kind of
anarchy. Let's turn to them with modesty and restraint.  Individuals like Min
Ko Naing and Dr. Cynthia Maung do not need our sympathy, our emotions, our
love, our lessons or the certainties and opinions that emerge from our comfort.
They need our respect. We need to give them our admiration.  We need to be
ready to put ourselves beside them, even in our comfort situation, and as Mr.
Allmand, president of ICHRDD, said, to defend, even if it is just a little,
their rights, which do not exist at this moment. It is somehow important to
show our inability to understand their personal strength, mainly because we
have not lived their situation, though some persons here may have lived them.
People from Canada, the United States or Europe generally never experience that
reality.

We cannot imagine the lives they are living. Many of us have seen that kind of
situation, by visiting countries just as I've visited Kosovo recently, just as
when I visited Burma ten years ago, looking at Burma during the eighties. But
visiting a country is not living a situation. It isn't experimenting
imprisonment, being an 'outcast' as is one of our recipients tonight.  So
when I talk about Burma, I always do it with certain reservations, mainly
because the particular situation is so appalling.

Above all, I am very careful always to put forward easy, clear, certain answers
to the obvious problems of Burma. I have a tendency to force myself to speak
with a certain pessimism about Burma. If you don't speak with a certain
pessimism, you are pretending that it is going to be easier or that it can be
done in a classical Canadian way, as opposed to the very difficult and complex
way which Dr. Cynthia knows far better than we do and Aung San Suu Kyi knows
far better than we do, sitting in a form of prison for years.

I'll give you a small example of why I am careful. Twenty years ago, I
into working for a change in Burma. 

People say that it is hard to get public attention for the situation in Burma
because we have so little relations, we sell and buy so little, people know so
little. I can only suggest that every time we say the word 'heroin',
'overdose', 'addiction', 'organized crime', 'crime-related' or 'death
of youth in the street' we simply add three words: 'Burmese military
rulers'. It will then become far easier to concentrate on the situation in
Burma as being absolutely central to the situation in our streets in the West.
If Burmese military rulers is too long, we could use the word SLORC (State Law
and Order Restoration Council), which I persist in using as being an accurate
description somehow, verbally, the sound of it seems right. Just as Burma is
more accurate, SLORC sounds right for what we are dealing with. 

I would suggest also that when people talk or argue about the possible benefits
of investing in Burma--building a pipeline for example from Burma to Thailand
and talking about the positive trickle down effects (there are none but which
people talk about and the slave labour which there was), I think it would be
interesting to do a bit of inclusive economics calculations. Even if there were
a trickle down effect, or a benefit from the pipeline (which there was not),
how much was it and how much is the cost--direct and indirect--of the heroin in
our streets coming directly from Burma with some involvement from the military
junta in that country? How do they stack up against each other?  Well, we know
very well.

At the most optimistic, the trickle down would be a few million. At the most
modest, the heroin effect is billions and billions of dollars. 

There is an increasing number of respectable and responsible people in the
Western world who are saying we have got to be more rational and productive in
terms of Burma because we have been working at this for awhile (a few years in
other words; sort of a decade). What we are doing doesn't work, so we must try
something else. I would call this personally a western frenetic approach
towards public policy, the administrative approach, the management approach.
It is very short term. We have got to have results in the quarter, in the year,
in the five years. If you don't have results, then you are failing and
therefore you've got to do something else. It is a very, very management view
of reality and of course reality has nothing to do with management,
particularly in a situation such as Burma. It isn't about quarterly reports.
It isn't about showing progress in the short term. 

The choices of people like Dr. Cynthia and Min Ko Naing demonstrate to us that
it isn't about short term results. It's about being ready to engage for the
long term. Their approach and the approach of people like them, Aung San Suu
Kyi, show that there is another view, another approach which is not only
possible but is probably the only approach possible if you live inside a
society like the Burmese society today. There is an astonishing combination in
their lives, it seems to me, between courageous impatience i.e. willing to take
risks with their lives, combined with stubborn patience, ready to take the time
necessary to get real change. 

On top of that they have a memory, a positive memory, a real memory of what has
come before. I didn't experience or visit the first two decades of the Burma
of Ne Win from 1962 on, but I read a lot about them. I knew the Burma of his
last real decade, the eighties. That's when I was there on a regular basis.
That's what I wrote about. So that's three decades--not 10 years, not two
years, three decades--and then 1988 happened and the violence and the deaths
and suddenly Burma disappeared and it was as if we were beginning afresh.  We
no longer had a memory of those three decades and instead we had another place
called Myanmar so that you couldn't push a button on a computer and have the
history of the receding decades come up. I am joking slightly but only
slightly. A new situation, apparently, with new dictators, a new name SLORC and
then suddenly 10 years later another new name, the SPDC (State Peace
Development Council). Apparently a new situation again but of course the SPDC
is the SLORC and the SLORC is the military group which came out of and is part
of Ne Win. This is still the 1962 regime of Ne Win. Soldiers grow old but they
replace each other even in situations like this. We are looking at an extremely
long-lived rogue regime, which alters itself by slight degrees every five, 10,
15 years. But it's the same regime, with the same philosophy, and the same
approach. Nothing fundamental has changed since 1962. 

Now, I hear phrases today from people who don't want to remember that it goes
back to 1962, saying things like our influence over Burma is weak because we
don't trade enough with them. If only we traded more, then we would have more
influence over them. Well, there are many other people who have traded with
Burma since 1962 who have invested in Burma in the 70s, in the 80s, over the
last 10 years and today. Do any of them have any influence over the regime? Is
there any indication over the last decades that by investing in Burma you would
get any influence over this regime? There isn't a single example of it. Japan,
Thailand, nobody has gained any influence by putting money into the country
through economic investment. 

Secondly, I hear people trotting out the classic Western argument that if we
invested then there would be a trickle down effect that would create a middle
class. A middle class would lead to liberalization and liberalization would
lead towards democracy. You've all heard that sort of argument but that
approach has also been tried several times over the last 30 years. Most
recently it was tried just before 1988 and of course it was tried in a small
way through the pipeline to which I made reference and it was very clear. We
were promised by the people building the pipeline that it would have an effect.
I quote from their spokesperson, 'We believe our presence in the region is a
force for progress for economic and social development.' Allright, the
pipeline is more or less built. Has there been progress? Has there been
economic development? Has there been a trickle down? No! There hasn't! We just
have to remember that it didn't work. It didn't turn out the way they said it
would turn out. 

There is a third phrase I hear increasingly, which is : normalize relations and
then we'll sort of draw them out into a conversation. And as a result of that
the military were allowed into ASEAN (Association of South-East Asian Nations)
and they've been in ASEAN for a little while now and what has changed? Have
they been drawn out? Has ASEAN gained influence over them? Has something
changed for the better? No! Nothing has changed! It is still exactly the same
as it was in 1962, 1963, and I won't go through the years since then one by
one… Nothing has changed through this approach. 

My own sense of this regime, and I have said this in various ways before, is
that it is a very peculiar regime. If you don't focus on the peculiarity of
it, it is very difficult to deal with it. It is an extremely mediocre regime.
These are mediocre people. They don't even have the glorious ambitions of your
classic dictators. They are not in it for the money, except for small amounts
of money. This is a very rich country, Burma. They could be making hundreds and
hundreds of millions of dollars, billions of dollars, but they're not.
They're making five million dollars, 10 million dollars. It's very mediocre.
And they're not in it for the glory. It's very unglorious, their regime.
It's very small potatoes--except for the deaths of individuals. It's a regime
of mediocre people clinging to the minimum sort of power for small amounts of
money. 

These are people who are willing to destroy their own country in order to hang
on. And this is rarer than we believe, dictators who are willing to open fire
on their own citizens in order to hang on. I mean most unpleasant dictators are
willing to kill a few people, a few of their own citizens, but very few of them
are actually willing to kill thousands of their own citizens.  It's a
relatively rare phenomenon. It is what I call a rogue regime, not a real
government at all. It has no legitimacy, not by any standards. It doesn't have
a legitimacy that would come from Asian standards.  It is completely at
variance with Asian ethical standards. It doesn't even have the legitimacy of
being true to the realpolitik of international politics or of Asian
realpolitik. It isn't even a real regime by the standards of dictatorships. It
isn't even a real dictatorship. This idea of a rogue, marginal, peculiar
régime isn't new. After all, we treated South Africa as if it were a rogue
regime and brought it down in the end by doing that. In the end, we treated the
Duvaliers in Haiti--far too late in the day but nevertheless--as a rogue
regime. 

So, having given this rather pessimistic view, what does it mean. Well, Aung
San Suu Kyi is ready to negotiate with the military without any preconditions.
In other words, she is ready to engage in a strategic risk, which I think is a
very reasonable position. She is not ready to talk about nuts and bolts. She is
willing to talk about the big picture with them--if they are willing to do
that. And equally, I think that the proposition made by the United Nations
special representative De Soto in 1998, that he would coordinate one billion
dollars of assistance in exchange for some positive initiatives from the
military is also I think a very reasonable strategy.  If you could actually get
that kind of agreement, a big agreement, then things would move in a relatively
big way. And in spite of offering enough money for all of them to go to
Switzerland for the rest of their lives, wherever they want to go, there is no
response. Nothing is happening. Because that isn't the essence of why they are
there. The corruption of this regime is so profound that it is impossible to
imagine how one can construct a step by step rational management process
towards normalization.


You know, John Humphrey said about the Universal Declaration of Human Rights,
"There has never been a more revolutionary development in the theory and
practice of international law and organization than the recognition that human
rights are matters of international concern.  Revolutionary, strategic. Soon we
are going to have an International Criminal Court, active and capable of
dealing with issues and people who resemble in many ways those who are in power
in Burma. It would be perhaps possible to apply the rules of that court to some
of those people. To apply the court to these people would be a strategic
approach. To offer them a billion dollars in return for some sort of movement
would be a strategic approach. 

I believe what we have to do is to avoid at all costs the temptation of Western
countries, avoid the comfortable trap of the Western approach, believing that
all situations are manageable in detail. Sometimes tactics are really aimed all
of them to go to Switzerland for the rest of their lives, wherever they want to
go, there is no response. Nothing is happening. Because that isn't the essence
of why they are there. The corruption of this regime is so profound that it is
impossible to imagine how one can construct a step by step rational management
process towards normalization.


You know, John Humphrey said about the Universal Declaration of Human Rights,
"There has never been a more revolutionary development in the theory and
practice of international law and organization than the recognition that human
rights are matters of international concern.  Revolutionary, strategic. Soon we
are going to have an International Criminal Court, active and capable of
dealing with issues and people who resemble in many ways those who are in power
in Burma. It would be perhaps possible to apply the rules of that court to some
of those people. To apply the court to these people would be a strategic
approach. To offer them a billion dollars in return for some sort of movement
would be a strategic approach. 

I believe what we have to do is to avoid at all costs the temptation of Western
countries, avoid the comfortable trap of the Western approach, believing that
all situations are manageable in detail. Sometimes tactics are really aimed at
the people engaging in the tactics not at the situation. Sometimes tactics,
while reassuring, will actually undermine the very strategy they are designed
to serve. I have always sensed that progress in Burma would come from a
strategic long-term and extremely tough approach. 

I feel this is the message, the real message of people like Dr. Cynthia Maung
and Min Ko Naing. We must engage ourselves, but we must also accept that there
are juntas here and there that resist other nation's logic and international
laws. There aren't many in Asia, but there are some. And in these particular
cases, we must play in a different way, aware that we play on a long term and
in a risky situation. That's why I guess that the jury has recognized the
engagement of Dr. Cynthia Maung and Min Ko Naing, by presenting them with the
John Humphrey Freedom Award.   

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