Don't coddle Rangoon

There is tough competition for the title, but perhaps no authoritarian regime in the world today is more brutal and benighted than the military dictatorship in Burma (Myanmar). Burma's plight is all the more tragic because, unlike many nations that have lived long under dictatorship, it has a ready alternative. Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, daughter of Burma's hero of post-colonial independence and herself a Nobel peace laureate, heads a political party that overwhelmingly won a general election in 1990.

Reflecting just how out of touch they are with those they rule, the generals allowed the vote to take place thinking that they would maintain control. When Burma's voters had other ideas, the generals refused to honor the results. Daw Aung San Suu Kyi has been under house arrest pretty much ever since.

This fall the dictatorship has turned the screws even tighter. Since September, according to Ambassador Betty King, the U.S. representative to the UN Economic and Social Council, nearly 1,000 opposition figures from Daw Aung San Suu Kyi's National League for Democracy and other parties have been detained.

Now the United Nations and the World Bank have floated the possibility of inducing the dictators to behave better by offering them "carrots" such as $1 billion or more in loans if they enter a dialog with Daw Aung San Suu Kyi. Shunned until now by private investors and most aid donors, the junta could use the cash (much of which would come, through the World Bank, from the U.S. government). The idea, according to an account last Thursday in the International Herald Tribune, is to call for "step-by-step compromises from both the government and the opposition."

That description tells you the pitfalls of the plan. What "compromises" should be induced from an opposition that is the legitimate government but has been severely repressed for most of the decade? How freely can a leader negotiate when she is forcibly isolated from family and advisers, threatened with exile, vilified in the official press and made to feel responsible for hundreds of supporters at risk in prison?

Under a legitimate and democratic government, Burma would not need much World Bank help; it is blessed with abundant natural resources and a literate, hardworking population of 46 million. Under the current rulers, any loans will further enrich the corrupt few. Long at the trough, they don't need any carrots from U.S. taxpayers.

-- The Washington Post