What next in Myanmar?

The military junta of Myanmar released opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi on Monday, leaving the world guessing the reasons behind their move. The release caught many world leaders and Myanmarese watchers by surprise.

Some world leaders have praised the junta, which is called SLORC, and are promising policy changes toward Myanmar. But others are being cautious because it is not very clear whether there are conditions on the release.

The junta seems to have worked out the best way possible to keep the world guessing about what has been happening behind the scenes.

U.S. Congressmen Bill Richardson, the first foreigner to visit Suu Kyi at her home, welcomed her release as a "first step" toward further leniency by the junta.

He expressed surprise as well, because when he was in Myanmar two weeks ago "every expectation was that Suu Kyi would be detained indefinitely". Richardson believes that U.S. and international pressure has helped persuade the Myanmarese authorities to free her.

The accuracy of his conclusion remains to be seen.

What the generals of Yangon have done is to open up Myanmar's door a crack. There is no overt indication that these leaders are ready to open an energetic and constructive dialog with people outside of their own premises. It remains clear that the generals see whatever happens to Suu Kyi as their nation's internal problem, into which no outsider is expected to poke a nose.

While people elsewhere are guessing what kind of freedom Suu Kyi is now enjoying -- unconditional or not, and for how long -- the Myanmarese rulers continue to hold thousands of other political prisoners in custody, after brutally murdering scores of others.

The junta has not yet sent enough concrete signals that it has really started to respect human rights.

Suu Kyi's unexpected release, after spending six years under house arrest, may be based on the thinking that to keep her under house arrest would make her the real national hero and the world's most courageous fighter for human rights. The tarnishing of the junta's image in the eyes of the world due to Suu Kyi living like a jailbird may have begun to instill a sense of unease.

The junta may have realized that Myanmar was beginning to look like the world's largest prison commanded by Stalinist-style officers at a time when the country is badly in need of economic cooperation with other nations. The junta seems to have learned well enough from the failures of Cuba's Fidel Castro and Albania's Enver Hoxa, whose rules have left the their people facing unbearable economic hardships.

Whatever the reasons behind her release, there is no reason to expect the junta to honor the constitutional rights of the Myanmarese people very much, or even very soon, because it has denied them consistently since 1990, when the military refused to honor the result of the general election and silenced Suu Kyi's National League for Democracy, which had just won a landslide victory.

The junta, as authoritarian regimes do elsewhere, claims that it is limiting democratic rights for the sake of the nation's future. The current military-backed regime in Algeria is following the same logic with the help of a European country.

Algiers has pushed FIS, the party which won the election, into urban guerrilla warfare, while the Myanmarese junta has made Suu Kyi the undisputable conscience of the Myanmarese people.

Because of this the Yangon junta might be forced one day to relinquish its power to the people -- not because of persuasion, or the so-called constructive approach by outsiders, but because the Myanmarese themselves want democracy to reign in their nation.