Plebiscite of Myanmar Military Junta

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_ By Aquilino Nene Pimentel
(Aquilino Nene Pimentel is a leader of the Senate of the Philippines)

Marcos at the height of his dictatorship also did a number of so-called constitutional referenda. His palace clowns and those who reaped benefits from his authoritarian rule sung paeans to him as the God’s gift to the Filipino people from 1972.

His rhetoric was: we will either have rice or freedom. As a developing country, we cannot have both.

We all saw how wrong the Marcos methods were. At the end of his day in power (1986) when we ousted him, he had all the rice but the people neither had freedom.

We had lost both.

From experience, we know that availability of rice grows with freedom. That happens also to be Amartya Sen’s (a Nobel Prize winner in economics) thesis. One of the, anyway.

I pray with the peoples of Burma that they will see through the so-called constitutional referendum/plebiscite ploy of the Junta. A people deprived of their right to freely participate and freely speak and freely act on national interests can’t attain those interests.

I hope that the US can lead the way to sanction the Junta, and the EU too, instead of just hanging a 50-ft poster or something at a Brussels building calling for the freedom of Aung San Syu Kyi – which is a good thing. But hardly enough to prod the junta to act favorably on the peoples’ demands.