Burma will hold general elections on November 7, the military junta announced today. The president of the Oslo Center, Kjell Magne Bondevik, says that the elections will not be free and fair. “There will not be a democratic election. The generals have designed a constitution and a set of election laws to ensure that they will retain absolute power. The election will be a farce and a mere trifle in Burma’s history”, Bondevik says.

The new constitution will ensure that 25 percent of the seats in parliament are reserved for the generals themselves. At the same time it must be more than 75 percent majority to change the constitution. Thus, the generals remain in full control after an election. At the same the new election laws ensure that the opposition will not be able to participate in the elections. Convicted offenders cannot take part, ruling out many activists and more than 2,000 political prisoners in Burma. Members of religious groups cannot participate, which excludes the monks who led protests in 2007. In addition the electoral commission is handpicked by the junta itself, which makes it obvious that the generals do not take any chances of losing power.

“In the free elections in 1990, Aung San Suu Kyi won an overwhelming victory. The generals would not risk the same happening again. So they take all precautions in order to continue to keep people in their brutal iron grip. In reality, nothing will change”, Bondevik says.

Three party dialogue
Since the mid-1990s, the international community, through UN General Assembly, has pushed for a three party dialogue between the military, the democracy movement and leaders of ethnic minority groups. Release of political prisoners – many of them ethnic leaders – must be part of such a process.

“The international community must ensure that all parties can take their rightful place at the table, and that the junta will choose negotiation instead of even more oppression and human suffering. Such three party dialogue is the only path to genuine democratic development in Burma”, Bondevik says.

“Real democratic development will take time, and will depend on political will. Now, we must focus on the aftermath of this fall’s election. Until the next election, we must support a democratic development in cooperation with the democracy movement and ethnic groups”, he said.

A tragedy unfolding
While the junta is preparing for the election, a tragedy is unfolding. Over the last months documentation about the suffering of civilians in Eastern Burma has come out from a variety of credible sources.

“What we see is a pattern of targeted assaults on civilians in order to undermine popular support to the opposition and armed insurgency groups. Sexual violence, torture and murder, systematic destruction of crops and arable land as well as other natural resources is part of the strategy. It has led to human suffering on a massive scale, to the destruction of 3000 villages and the displacement of as many as 500 000 people”, says Bondevik.

http://www.oslocenter.no/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=252&Itemid=1&lang=en

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Comment:-

Though applauding Mr Bondevik’s general sentiments, he perpetuates two myths.

The first is that “convicted offenders” cannot participate in the elections, which would rule out “many activists” as well as the more than 2,000 prisoners of conscience. As Ms Cho Cho Kyaw Nyein of the Democratic Party waggishly put it in an interview with the Wall Street Journal in March this year:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703909804575123453869695656.html?mod=WSJ_World_MIDDLENewsIntl

if true, that would cover about one quarter of the entire population! In fact, only persons serving a current prison sentence are excluded, not everyone ever convicted of a criminal offence. That also  leaves the position of Ms Suu Kyi uncertain as she is not currently in prison, but subject to restrictive residence under an administrative order, while her sentence by a Court has been suspended. Whether this makes her eligible to stand in the elections as a candidate would be for the Election Commission to decide, but as she has made it crystal clear that she has no intention of standing in these elections even if free to do so, the point is entirely academic. The regime would find other reasons to exclude her, primarily I suspect on grounds of disloyalty to the State because of her support for sanctions which they would argue is tantamount to “high treason”. They would require a full recantation first.

The second is that the exclusion of monks who led the protests in 2007 is somehow a devilish design of the generals. In fact, the issue of participation by monks in the political process is under discussion in many predominantly Buddhist countries in Asia. For example, the 1997 Thai Constitution, generally seen as the most democratic of all Thai Constitutions, has an identical disenfranchisement of religious orders, as does the more recent 2007 Constitution. In Cambodia, monks are entitled to vote, but many do not do so for religious and cultural reasons, not least in those Buddhist centres with conservative hierarchies who frown on the practice. In Burma, every Constitution since independence has included the same provision. Even the British were persuaded  against their democratic inclinations and better judgement by local politicians and religious leaders to exclude monks in the Government of Burma Act 1935:

http://www.burmalibrary.org/docs08/1935_Constitution(en).pdf

which provided in Schedule IV for property qualifications which was a subtle way of disenfranchising monks because they owned no property – a British solution to a tricky problem.

Derek Tonkin