Myanmar upholds national culture
I refer to Peace, development need to be empowered: Su Kyi in your issue of Dec. 3, 1994.
The name and the subject arouses so much rhetoric and emotional "righteousness" worldwide that I welcome the opportunity to present the facts and reality in a calmer atmosphere.
Firstly, Daw Su Kyi was "restricted" to her house on July 20, 1989 according to the previously enacted, and still valid, legal provision in Myanmar. For what she instigated or tried to do during that period there are sterner laws dating to the British Colonial and U Nu's democratic period. (All these laws are valid to date. Similar laws inherited from the British also remain in Singapore, India or Malaysia).
My government then acted on the most lenient law possible in memory of her father, the architect of our freedom. The present Myanmar leaders consider her to be their "younger sister." That legal action did not contravene in any way the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Because the action taken was not for her beliefs nor for her speeches for democracy and human rights.
But to be fair and factual, any nation would react legally to public statements exhorting mass demonstrations (without permission) and soldiers to mutiny: especially when a nation is wracked by unstable conditions.
Daw Su Kyi's address (by Mrs. Aquino) mentioned: "some governments argue that democracy is a western concept alien to indigenous values." The fact is: no Asian government, including Myanmar, has ever said that. The position of the Asian Group of nations is: what is applicable and good for our countries is, or will be, incorporated into our Constitutions. Some others, like excessive individual rights, have to be scrutinized properly in light of national traditions and culture.
The objective being, I emphasize, to really establish viable democracy--without free Nation-States breaking into pieces and tragedy. Are we still blind to what is happening in some parts of the world? Who remains then to really solve the extensive dimensions of human tragedy?
At a recent ADB conference in Manila, Harvard professor Robert Barro said: "Empirical studies of 100 countries from 1960 to 1990 found that while growing prosperity in an authoritarian nation could lead to more freedom (and democracy as in Thailand and Korea), poverty in a democratic country......could lead to the loss of democracy: and democracy that develops from economic growth was the kind that lasts, in contrast to one that is artificially imposed."
With due respect to idealists who wish a fast pace, all objective studies, past and present, point to the same conclusion. Building strong foundations to establish a viable democratic system is quite different from today's fashionable "instant" culture. That in a nutshell is what the vast majority of patient Asians are emphasizing to some of the impatient Asians and Westerners.
U NYI NYI THAN
Ambassador
Myanmar Embassy
Jakarta