The world has been horrified by graphic images in the media of the latest crackdown by Myanmar's military junta. But the bullets and clubs unleashed on Buddhist monks have worked. The monks have retreated, and an eerie normalcy has returned to Yangon.
That crackdown continues under cover of darkness. When the sun sets in Myanmar, fear rises. Everyone listens half awake for the dreaded knock on the door. Any night, the military's agents can come for you, take you away, and make sure you are never heard from again.
In recent nights, the junta's henchmen have burst into monasteries, lined up sleepy monks and smashed their shaved heads against the walls, spattering them with blood. Scores of others, perhaps hundreds, have been carted off for interrogation, torture or execution. The nighttime assault on a UN employee and her family made international news, but hundreds of less well connected Burmese have been similarly abused.
For 45 years, Myanmar's people have been subjected to the junta's reign of terror. My father was born in Rangoon (now Yangon) long before the 1962 coup that brought the current regime to power. Afterwards, many of my relatives, prosperous Indian merchants who had been settled in Myanmar for generations, abandoned homes and businesses to save their skins as chaos enveloped the city, which was later renamed Yangon.
A relative who now lives in Bangkok, but who returned part-time to Yangon in response to overtures from Myanmar's cash-starved rulers, recalled those days: "We lived through hell. We never knew when we woke up each morning what would happen. People were being denounced left and right. They could just come and take you away and take everything away from you."
Those who couldn't leave Myanmar, or didn't want to, have lived with this fear ever since.
The US and Europe have issued strong statements condemning the crackdown and calling upon Myanmar's neighbors, especially India and China, to exert their influence on the regime. The response from both has been muted (as it has from Thailand, which also has strong economic ties with Myanmar).
China balks at interfering in the "internal affairs" of a neighbor from whom it gets precious natural gas and potential access to the sea. India, which "normalized" bilateral relations a few years ago, is reluctant to alienate Myanmar's military, with which it has worked closely to counter rebels in India's northeast who had been using the common border to tactical advantage. To this end, India has provided aid, including tanks and training, to Myanmar's military.
But the main reason for India's good relations with Myanmar's ruling thugs is the country's vast and still largely unexploited energy reserves, which India desperately needs to fuel its economic boom. India has invested US$150 million in a gas exploration deal off the Arakan coast of Myanmar, and India's state-owned Oil and Natural Gas Corp and Gas Authority of India have taken a 30 percent stake in two offshore gas fields in direct competition with PetroChina, which has also been given a stake.
India and China are simply doing what the US and European countries have done for so long: trump rhetoric about democracy and human rights with policies that serve their strategic and energy security interests. US relations with Pakistan and Saudi Arabia are two examples, and the US' Chevron and France's Total, two of the world's oil giants, continue to do a brisk business in Myanmar, thanks to loopholes in the sanctions.
But the rise of India and China means that the time-tested posture of Western democracies toward emerging states to "do as we say, not as we do" will become less tenable. If the EU and the US want democratic India to act according to its stated moral values and not its vital national interests when these appear to conflict, they had better be prepared to do the same.
Feeling the heat, including threats from some US senators to link the US' nuclear deal with India to its actions in Myanmar, India has announced that it is asking for the release of Burmese democratic opposition leader and Nobel Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi from house arrest. But the credibility of all democratic regimes, not just India's, is at stake in what unfolds in Myanmar.
Mira Kamdar is a fellow at the Asia Society.
Copyright: Project Syndicate/Asia Society
China has not been a top-tier issue for much of the second Trump administration. Instead, Trump has focused considerable energy on Ukraine, Israel, Iran, and defending America’s borders. At home, Trump has been busy passing an overhaul to America’s tax system, deporting unlawful immigrants, and targeting his political enemies. More recently, he has been consumed by the fallout of a political scandal involving his past relationship with a disgraced sex offender. When the administration has focused on China, there has not been a consistent throughline in its approach or its public statements. This lack of overarching narrative likely reflects a combination
Father’s Day, as celebrated around the world, has its roots in the early 20th century US. In 1910, the state of Washington marked the world’s first official Father’s Day. Later, in 1972, then-US president Richard Nixon signed a proclamation establishing the third Sunday of June as a national holiday honoring fathers. Many countries have since followed suit, adopting the same date. In Taiwan, the celebration takes a different form — both in timing and meaning. Taiwan’s Father’s Day falls on Aug. 8, a date chosen not for historical events, but for the beauty of language. In Mandarin, “eight eight” is pronounced
US President Donald Trump’s alleged request that Taiwanese President William Lai (賴清德) not stop in New York while traveling to three of Taiwan’s diplomatic allies, after his administration also rescheduled a visit to Washington by the minister of national defense, sets an unwise precedent and risks locking the US into a trajectory of either direct conflict with the People’s Republic of China (PRC) or capitulation to it over Taiwan. Taiwanese authorities have said that no plans to request a stopover in the US had been submitted to Washington, but Trump shared a direct call with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平)
It is difficult to think of an issue that has monopolized political commentary as intensely as the recall movement and the autopsy of the July 26 failures. These commentaries have come from diverse sources within Taiwan and abroad, from local Taiwanese members of the public and academics, foreign academics resident in Taiwan, and overseas Taiwanese working in US universities. There is a lack of consensus that Taiwan’s democracy is either dying in ashes or has become a phoenix rising from the ashes, nurtured into existence by civic groups and rational voters. There are narratives of extreme polarization and an alarming
RSS