| A death sentence and the prolongation of misery |
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| Written by The Nation | |
| Friday, 06 June 2008 00:00 | |
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LETTERS TO THE EDITOR Adjectives and terms such as "truly unfortunate", "regrettable", "saddened and frustrated", pepper the comments of aid-agency officials and others, but reading between the lines, you realise that their blood is either boiling or cold as ice because they know full well the awful consequences of the Burmese junta's stone-walling. At the Asean security ministers' forum (Singapore, June 1) Burma's deputy defence minister, Major-General Aye Myint blandly explained that his country "warmly welcomed any assistance and aid which are provided with genuine goodwill from any country or organisation" [so far so good] with the proviso that "no strings were attached". Did he bother to elaborate in any way what he meant? There were no reports of it, nor were there any reports of questions from delegates to ascertain his meaning. There were, however, reports of strongly worded comments from a French MP, Pierre Lellouche, calling for a system of sanctions to stop regimes such as the one ruling Burma from allowing hundreds of thousands to die, and a promise to see to it that his government proposed a UN resolution to bring the junta before the International Criminal Court. Not surprisingly there were no such harsh words from the Asean delegates - just calls "to respect the sovereignty of Burma" from the Malaysian deputy prime minister, Najib Razak. So I ask: should the world have respected the sovereignty of the Third Reich when it was busily 'disposing' of millions of Europe's Jews? Or the "erasure" of between one and two million people in Cambodia as part of the Khmer Rouge's "social engineering programme"? Or Rwanda's,when a section of the population were happily hacking and bludgeoning to death a million of its population? The answer of course is an emphatic no! So why does Asean continue with this supine and spineless tack? Doesn't it realise that it is increasingly culpable in what are demonstrably crimes against humanity? What on earth is Asean for if it cannot apply a measure of ethics, morality and resolve in its dealings with the Burmese regime? Julian Pieniazek |
