ASEAN membership

It is unfortunate that the period following the admission of Myanmar into the Association of Southeast Asian Nations coincided with a host, not to say a plague, of distractions. Had the member states of the regional grouping been without distraction, they might just have begun to see that ASEAN's policy of constructive engagement had opened the door to a regime unable to behave itself.

It was fortunate for the State Law and Order Restoration Council, which claims to represent Myanmar, that its elevation to full membership of the alliance was obscured in the news by an unlikely alliance. The stars of the show were our own economic bunglers, Hun Sen, the second and only copremier of Cambodia; Pol Pot, whose personal Year Zero appears to have started; and George Soros, the international financial devil whose stunning gains caused Malaysia's prime minister to have stunning tantrums.

With each of these players doing their bit in their own little way, the continuing bad behavior of the generals who rule Burma and the collapse of the economy they have plundered since 1962 were consigned to the back burner. But this is not to say that SLORC is not happy to have become the ninth member of the regional club. Far from it. Rather than use membership as the pretext to make SLORC behave itself, SLORC is using ASEAN to justify its own warped behavior.

Lt. Gen. Khin Nyunt, Secretary 1 of SLORC, believes Myanmar should raise its profile in ASEAN and host meetings to correct what he claims to be false impressions of the country. The remarks of Lt. Gen. Khin Nyunt and the regimes behavior show that ASEAN's policy of constructive engagement has been a very good thing indeed, but only for a benighted and thoroughly brutal dictatorship. ASEAN said it would apply pressure once Myanmar was in the fold, but it appears to have been distracted, and lamentably so.

-- The Bangkok Post