The World

Amidst the rash of commemorations celebrating the twentieth anniversay of the fall of the Berlin Wall last year, it was easy to feel that 1989 was a year in which freedom advanced everywhere. The Soviet empire collapsed. Two years later the Soviet Union itself disintegrated. A few months after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Nelson Mandela was released. The end of the cold war unfroze deadlocked political situations all over the world.

But political freedom did not advance everywhere in 1989. Most obviously that was the year that the Chinese government sent the tanks into Tiananmen Square. And 1989 was also the year that Aung San Suu Kyi was placed under house arrest in Burma. Who would have believed that twenty-one years later, this heroic woman would still be a political prisoner? At least, twenty one years after Tiananmen, China has changed unrecognisably. But Burma is still frozen in time and in tyranny. The depressing sense that nothing at all has changed is re-enforced by the latest news that the Burmese military junta has banned Suu Kyi from participating in national elections later this year.

So is there any hope of change? Optimists will seize on the fact that Burma is, at least, attempting to hold national elections, the first since the elections of 1990 – the results of which were ignored, when it became clear that Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy had won. But this latest poll will not mean much, without the participation of the NLD and its banned leader.

The outside world has tried many different approaches. The West has pushed for the isolation of the Burmese government, following the wishes of the democratic opposition. Burma’s Asian neighbours have gone for a policy of engagement, even admitting Burma to the South-East-Asian club, Asean. But nothing seems to have worked. Burma remains an anomalous, backward dictatorship inside Asean – more repressive, poorer and more isolated, even than Cambodia or Vietnam. Now because of the country’s strategic position and mineral resources, Burma is being wooed by China and – more discreetly – by India.

At some point, surely, the Burmese military regime will have to crack. But what will it take?