Myanmar remains much the same a year after Suu Kyi's release

Larry Jagan, Inter Press Service, Yangon

A year after Aung San Suu Kyi was freed from house arrest, Burma's (Myanmar's) generals still cling to power and have no intentions of starting serious political talks with the opposition leader.

Burma has changed little over the past year since Aung San Suu Kyi was freed from house arrest on May 6, 2002. The country's fragile dialog process remains deadlocked and in danger of collapsing.

Burma's top generals insist they are committed to economic and political change but do little to show their sincerity. The country's economic crisis worsens daily.

"Daw Suu may be free but the Burmese people are still imprisoned," said May Oo, a young party activist on duty outside the National League for Democracy (NLD) party's headquarters in Rangoon (Yangon).

The obvious euphoria throughout Rangoon that greeted Aung San Suu Kyi's release a year ago has given way to disappointment and frustration.

"We expected Aung San Suu Kyi to give us a lead and tell us how to end these decades of military repression," said a veteran Burmese politician who did not want to be identified.

But the opposition leader and her party have found it very difficult to provide the sort of political leadership many of Burma's ordinary citizens crave.

Aung San Suu Kyi was never going to be able to fulfill the public expectations her release created.

The Burmese regime told the international community on the day it released her that it marked a new page in Burma's political history.

The UN special envoy -- Razali Ismail -- who convinced the generals to free Aung San Suu Kyi and helped broker the talks between Burma's military leaders and the opposition leader while she was under house arrest, told the generals that the opposition leader's release had to be the start of serious political negotiations.

Twelve months later, the start of real political dialog remains a vain hope.

Since her release, Aung San Suu Kyi has repeatedly told the generals that she wants to cooperate with them. "We do not want to be the enemy," she recently said in an interview in Rangoon.

"We are in opposition to each other at the moment but we should work together for the sake of the country and we certainly bear no grudges against them," she said. We are not out for vengeance. We want to reach the kind of settlement which will be beneficial to everybody, including the members of the military."

The generals though have rebuffed Aung San Suu Kyi's overtures and remain as intransigent as ever. In the past year there has been less contact between Burma's top generals and the opposition leader than there was while she was under house arrest.

The release of political prisoners -- one of the few concrete results of the dialog process which started nearly three years ago -- has also slowed to a trickle. On Sunday, however, the military government said it had freed 21 political prisoners, including 12 members of the Aung San Suu Kyi's NLD party.

The UN human rights rapporteur for Burma, the professor Paulo Pinhiero, estimates that there are still more than 1,300 political activists in Burma's prisons.

The international community and the pro-democracy parties in Burma have all emphatically told the military regime that the immediate and unconditional release of all political prisoners is essential to the dialogue process.

"The release of political prisoners is important because it means a return to political normalcy," said Aung San Suu Kyi late last year. "Unless political organizations are free to go about their work unhindered and unintimidated by the authorities, we can never say that we have started a process towards change to democracy," she stressed.

In the past few weeks, this political stalemate has begun to deteriorate into a war of words conducted through press conferences and press releases.

Two weeks ago, Aung San Suu Kyi went on the offensive and told journalists that had gathered at a press briefing at the NLD headquarters that the military government just was not interested in dialogue or cooperating with the pro-democracy forces.

"I have come to the conclusion that the SPDC (State Peace Development Council, as the military government is called) is not interested in national reconciliation," she said.

More crucially, she again complained that the generals were not prepared to work in a partnership that could help bring both economic and political reform to the country. "It is more than time to proceed from the confidence-building stage to full cooperation, especially in the humanitarian area," she told journalists a fortnight ago.

"The SPDC has shown that it is not keen to cooperate with us in matters of humanitarian aid," she added.

The military government's spokesman, Col. Hla Min, insists that "the government actively welcomes meaningful and constructive suggestions from all its citizens in all areas of national development, particularly in education, health care and economic development."

For most people in Burma, the last 12 months have seen their living standards decline even further. "There is no way a professional person or worker can live on their monthly incomes," said a Burmese economist who closely monitors the situation. "People in jobs are finding they have to use their savings or find alternative sources of income to survive."

Diplomats in Rangoon estimate that inflation in Burma is running at over 60 percent per year. "We pay more than twice what we did a year ago for basic foodstuffs," said Tin Tin San, a Burmese housewife in one of Rangoon's marketplaces.

On top of that, the country is engulfed in a humanitarian crisis. The United Nations estimates that one child in three under the age of five is malnourished. An AIDS epidemic is raging out of control. Officially, the United Nations estimates that 4 percent of the population could have HIV or AIDS.

But independent researchers say it is much higher than this, and in some areas is the rate of infection exceeds one in 10.

Most aid and development workers in Burma believe the country faces a major humanitarian crisis unless there is substantial international assistance in the near future.

That will only happen if there is substantial progress in the dialogue process -- and there is very little sign the generals are about to start substantive talks with the opposition. The fear is that in another 12 months, little will have changed in Burma, except for the poverty and illnesses that will have increased substantially.