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Myanmar: A pariah nation with lots of friends
Associated Press - December 13, 2010
Yangon, Myanmar - Aung San Suu Kyi has long proclaimed her love for India. Myanmar's pro-democracy icon went to college in New Delhi, her mother was the ambassador there and she spent some of her happiest times with her late husband and two sons in the Himalayan foothills of northern India.
But India's government, she says, has been a disappointment.
"It saddens me," she said of New Delhi's ties to the army generals who run her country, also known as Burma. "It saddens my heart that the peoples of India and Burma, who went through the battles of independence as comrades to fight and get out from under the British empire, that the old ties have given way to the new ties of commercialism."
Things have changed since Suu Kyi rose to prominence in the late 1980s, and India joined the clamorous international outcry against the military crackdown on the democracy movement.
Today, security and commerce are New Delhi's foremost concerns in Myanmar – echoing how realpolitik governs Yangon's relations with a string of powerful regional allies.
Myanmar's repressive government is cut off from much of the international community by travel restrictions on the elite and trade sanctions from many western countries. But the nation wedged between India, China and Thailand also has enormous energy reserves, thousands of miles of coastline and long borders that make it strategically important. As a result: in its own neighborhood, the pariah is pretty popular.
"Thailand, China, Singapore, India, Malaysia, South Korea, Indonesia," said Maung Zarni, an exiled dissident and research fellow at the London School of Economics, listing Yangon's regional allies. "All treat Burma as nothing more than a resource brothel and a strategic location for their national interests."
It is India, though, that Suu Kyi has singled out – in her own quiet way – for criticism. "I would like to have thought India would be standing behind us," she told the Indian Express newspaper in late November.
New Delhi is neither the largest investor in Myanmar, nor has the deepest ties to the junta – China is widely thought to hold both positions. But India's political system – it is the world's largest democracy – and its one-time support for the pro-democracy movement has sparked a backlash.
"India has not only abandoned its supposed democratic values but also discarded any pretensions to ethics," Zarni said.
For years, New Delhi had been a champion of Myanmar's pro-democracy movement. Dozens of dissidents fled to India, and a number of anti-junta media organizations set up offices there.
But the policy began to change in the early 1990s, as a bloody insurgency took hold in Indian-controlled Kashmir. The outbreak of violence forced India to shift soldiers from its troubled northeast, where it had long fought a series of small ethnic militant groups. Many of those groups had bases across the little-guarded 1,000-mile (1,600-kilometer) border with Myanmar.
At the same time India's long-dormant economy began to blossom, leaving the energy-hungry nation searching for new supplies.
Finally, there was the rise of China – which India increasingly sees as its major economic and political rival – which had allied itself closely to the junta.
For India, all that made reaching out to Myanmar impossible to resist. Deals were made for trade, for natural gas, for Myanmar to expel the Indian militants.
"It's the way of the world," Suu Kyi said in a November interview with The Associated Press, days after she was released from house arrest. For India, the decision did not come lightly.
Shyam Saran was India's ambassador in Yangon in 1999 when Suu Kyi's husband, the British scholar Michael Aris, died of cancer in England. The couple had been unable to see one another in the months before his death. She feared that if she left Myanmar, she would not be allowed to return.
Saran, who later became India's foreign secretary, paid a condolence call on her in Yangon after Aris died. She greeted him graciously, then became overcome by grief as she described how Aris and their two sons had been unable to get visas to see her in Yangon.
"Here was an individual of extraordinary fortitude and strength of character," Saran wrote in the Indian Express after Suu Kyi's November release, admitting that he felt some guilt after that meeting because of his government's policy shift.
Still, he knew India had made the right decision: "Our overriding national interest necessitated working together with the military government."
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