The US and international sanctions that are now being applied to the military government in Myanmar after the further detention of pro-democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi are designed eventually to bring the regime to its knees.
If Myanmar’s generals decide to tough it out, the thinking goes, they will be ruling a country which cannot function economically. To the anger that Burmese citizens already feel at their state will be added the frustration of economic privation. Gradually, the discontent will build until it affects even the edges of the regime, police officers and soldiers who themselves will become discontented at the mess into which the generals have led them. When there is simply not enough economic reward to be passed around to all the people who help to keep the regime in power, their support will fade. The exercise of power and privilege in a bankrupt country will in time become unattractive. Once the generals can no longer count on the fear and discipline which enforce the loyalty of the ordinary military personnel, their power will melt away. That is the logic behind the sanctions.
However, Myanmar, once the richest country in the region, is already bankrupt after decades of misrule by the generals. Moreover, it is a harsh truth that sanctions often do not work. Apartheid South Africa and rebel Rhodesia, and now Zimbabwe, survived pretty well under a sanctions regime.
It is not that other countries or multinationals will defy the will of the international community, as happened in South Africa. The problem in isolating Myanmar is that its borders have long been extremely porous, thanks to the activities of smugglers. These heavily armed criminals trade mainly in narcotics and lumber, but it will be no problem for them to expand their activities into anything else of which the Burmese regime finds itself short.
Unscrupulous merchants and bankers will be glad to facilitate the export of goods to a neighboring country, in the knowledge that these will then be taken over by the smugglers and spirited across the border to their real destinations. In truth it will be the ordinary Burmese who will suffer from a closure of economic relations to the outside world. The generals at whom the sanctions are aimed will be able to provide for themselves perfectly well. It happened with Saddam’s regime in Iraq and it will happen again with Myanmar.
This is not to say that it is wrong for the US and the rest of the world to cut off Myanmar’s international links. Some still believe that it was the original threat of sanctions that caused the release last year of Aung San Suu Kyi from her long house arrest. But the international community needs to do more if it is to avoid a repeat of the Iraq fiasco.
Arab News Opinion 18 July 2003
