After decades of military rule, democracy champion Aung San Suu Kyi says there are finally signs of political change in Myanmar, but its long-suffering people are still far from real freedom.

In an exclusive interview, the Nobel Peace Prize winner told AFP that the new government appears genuine in its desire for democratic reform, and said an Arab-style uprising is not the answer to the country’s problems.

“There have been changes, but I don’t think we’re all free or completely free yet. There’s still quite a way to go, but I think there have been positive developments,” the opposition leader said at her party offices in Yangon.

“I’ve always said I’m a cautious optimist and I remain a cautious optimist. I do believe that the president would like to bring about positive changes but how far he’ll be able to achieve what he wants to achieve is a question that we still need to examine.”

After almost half a century of iron-fisted military rule, the junta in March handed power to a new government led by President Thein Sein, one of a clutch of former generals who shed their uniforms to contest last year’s election.

The November vote, won by the military’s political proxies, was marred by widespread complaints of cheating and the exclusion of Suu Kyi, who was released from seven straight years of house arrest shortly afterwards.

In recent weeks, however, the new administration has shown signs of reaching out to critics including Suu Kyi and her National League for Democracy (NLD) party, which won a 1990 election but was never allowed to take office.

In a scene few could have imagined until recently, Suu Kyi last month met Thein Sein at his official residence in the capital Naypyidaw, posing for photos under a picture of her late father, the independence hero Aung San.

Although details of the discussion were not revealed, Suu Kyi said the pair managed to find areas of agreement, adding: “We do have many, many things in common in regards to what we would like to see for the country.”

The dissident — who has won international acclaim for her peaceful resistance in the face of oppression, and has been compared to India’s independence hero Mahatma Gandhi for her adherence to non-violence — said she did not want a popular revolt in Myanmar of the kind seen in Libya.

“What has to be done is a revolution of the spirit. Until attitudes change, until their (the authorities’) perceptions of the problems which they have to handle change, there will not be real change,” she said.

“Everybody knows that Libya’s troubles are going to drag on for a long time. Even if they manage to clear out everybody from the old regime and establish a new government there are going to be so many problems — the bitterness that will remain, the wounds that will remain unhealed for so long,” she said.

The softly spoken and charismatic dissident, now 66, showed no signs that age and long periods of detention at the hands of the junta have dimmed her sharp intellect and indomitable spirit.

“A real revolution takes a long time to be completed. The kind of changes that we want take time to come about. And I would rather that we managed to achieve change through peaceful means, through negotiation.”

Pro-democracy uprisings in Myanmar — also known as Burma — in 1988 and 2007 were brutally crushed by the junta which showed no sign of softening its hardline stance in response.

Protests otherwise remain rare in the authoritarian state, which has more than 2,000 political prisoners.

Suu Kyi’s party boycotted last year’s election, the first in two decades, partly because of rules that would have forced it to expel members who are in prison.

As a result it was delisted as a political party by the regime, which in June warned the NLD to halt what it described as illegal activities.

Today, however, despite fears it might be forced to shut down, the party continues to meet and issue statements under the close watch of plainclothes police, who photograph visitors to its ramshackle offices in Yangon.

And in a further sign that the authorities are seeking to engage with the opposition, a top adviser to the president told AFP that the controversial law that prevents prisoners from being political party members could be revised.

“This act was promulgated by the previous government, the military government. This parliament is considering to review that act,” Ko Ko Hlaing said.

Suu Kyi said it was too soon to say whether her party would seek to re-register and contest the next election, due in 2015.

But the democracy icon, who has always been modest about her own political ambitions, gave a clear hint that she was ready to lead the country if it is the people’s desire.

“I don’t think of my political role in terms of becoming president as such, but I believe that things like this have to be decided by the people and not by individual politicians or even by their parties,” she said.

Asked whether this meant she was ready to become president if the people wanted it, she replied: “Well if you’re not prepared to do this, if necessary, then you shouldn’t engage in politics to begin with.”

For the first time since her release, Suu Kyi was allowed by the authorities to travel outside of Yangon last month on a political excursion, during which she drew large crowds of supporters — a reminder of her enduring popularity.

In a further sign of opening up, the new government has invited a steady procession of foreign dignitaries since last year’s election for talks with officials and the opposition.
It also allowed a small group of foreign journalists to visit Myanmar and its fledgling parliament last week, including an AFP reporter.

Despite the tentative signs of change, many remain sceptical about the regime’s intentions in the absence of more concrete reforms such as the release of political prisoners.

A visiting UN envoy last month called on Myanmar to urgently investigate human rights abuses, saying serious concerns remained despite signs of an improvement under the new government.

Tomas Ojea Quintana voiced concern about the situation in ethnic conflict zones, including attacks against civilians, extrajudicial killings, rape, arbitrary arrest, the recruitment of child soldiers and forced labour.

After an earlier visit to the country last year, the envoy angered Myanmar’s ruling generals by suggesting that human rights violations in the country may amount to crimes against humanity and could warrant a UN inquiry.

Suu Kyi said a UN fact-finding probe along the lines of the Truth and Reconciliation Process in South Africa after the abolition of apartheid in the 1990s could help to bring reconciliation to her traumatised nation.

“I think for the sake of future harmony and forgiveness there is a necessity to establish facts,” she added. “It’s not a tribunal. It has nothing to do with revenge.”

YANGON – Myanmar democracy icon Aung San Suu Kyi, who spent years as a prisoner in her own home with no telephone or Internet access, says now she is free she is too busy to use Facebook and Twitter.

“I just haven’t had the time,” the Nobel Peace Prize winner told AFP in an interview at her party offices in Yangon.

“If I were to tweet and so on it would take up so much of my time. I have to confess we are a bit snowed under because paying off a debt of work that has accumulated over seven years is not done in a hurry,” she said.

Soon after her release in November, Suu Kyi had expressed a desire to use social networking sites. But she said that for now, her party would make do with websites set up by its supporters overseas.

Internet connections are notoriously slow in Myanmar, whose rulers also have a history of blocking critical websites and jailing online dissidents.

Social networking sites were used by anti-government demonstrators to thwart censorship during pro-democracy revolts in Tunisia and Egypt.

And during a failed monk-led uprising in Myanmar in 2007, citizens used the web to leak extensive accounts and video to the outside world, prompting the regime to block Internet access.

Suu Kyi said that an Arab-style uprising was not the answer to Myanmar’s problems, and welcomed tentative signs of political change under the new nominally civilian government.

Her party won a 1990 election but was never allowed to take office.

It boycotted an election held last year, the first in two decades, and as a result it was delisted as a political party by the regime.

Recently, however, the regime has adopted a more conciliatory stance towards its opponents, including Suu Kyi, who met President Thein Sein last month.

Internet users in army-dominated Myanmar during the week said they were able to see previously blocked media websites, including the Burmese-language version of the BBC, but doubts remained about whether the move would last.

The country’s Internet legislation has long been among the world’s most repressive, according to the Paris-based Reporters Without Borders.

Confirmation that construction will continue on the Myitsone dam on the Irrawaddy River spotlights the vast dam-building capability of Chinese engineers, who are involved in building at least 251 dams in 68 countries across the world, according to the NGO International Rivers.

In July, the Burma Rivers Network, which opposes the Myitsone dam, released a 945-page environmental impact study opposing the dam that was done by the China Power Investment Corp. itself, the Chinese state-owned entity that is building the structure. Finished in late 2009, the assessment has never been made public, the NGO said. It was conducted by a team of 80 Burmese and Chinese scientists

Nonetheless, Burma’s Minister of Electric Power-1, Zaw Min, told reporters at a press briefing in the capital of Naypyidaw that the Myitsone project will be finished within eight years “and I will answer ‘No’ to the question of the environmental groups who asked, ‘Will the project be stopped? We hired a third party for the impact assessments and we paid US $1.25 million for this. As we have done well with the impact assessment, I will say that we will never stop the project before finishing.”

The dam has been under preparation since 2005. Located 1.5 kilometers below where the Mali and N’Mai Rivers join to form the Irrawaddy in Kachin state, it is expected to produce 3,600 to 6,000 megawatts of power. It is the largest of seven dams the Chinese have proposed on the Irrawaddy and is expected to inundate more than 750 sq km, according to the International Rivers NGO, which seeks to protect rivers and defend the rights of those who live on their banks.

Large dams lose favor

Large dams have increasingly lost favor across the globe everywhere but in China, many of whose leaders are engineers. The biggest, the Three Gorges Dam on the Yangtze River in China, has privately been acknowledged as an environmental and social disaster by top officials in the Communist Party. In May, party officials warned of impending disaster if preventive measures aren’t taken to attempt to ameliorate problems including ecological deterioration, erosion and landslides on steep hills around the dam, algae blooms downstream, deteriorating aquatic life and silting of the dam itself. Hundreds of thousands more people may have to be moved away from the area around the dam, in addition to the 1.3 million who have already been displaced by the dam, officials said privately. However, the dam produces electricity equivalent to that produced by 500 coal-fired generation plants.

The World Bank, traditionally the world’s biggest source of funds for dam construction, has pulled back on funding although it hasn’t stopped altogether, to the dismay of environmentalists. According to an analysis by the bank’s Internal Evaluation Group, it is now funding dams at about half the level of the 1970s and 1980s.

“At first, large dams were simply regarded as engineering structures—that is, in terms of their usefulness for generating electric power and improving the management of water,” the internal analysis found. “In the 1960s, cost/benefit analysis became accepted as the standard criterion for the justification of large dams, and the World Bank pioneered the modeling of river basins and new methods of economic analysis of multipurpose projects in developing countries.

However, social and environmental impacts emerged as fundamental concerns. The bank has responded by adopting guidelines to integrate social and environmental concerns into the analysis of proposed projects and to seek to avoid or mitigate the adverse consequences of large dams, according to the report.

Those guidelines apparently are not regarded as essential by Chinese officials. The country, according to a report by David Biello, an associate editor at Scientific American, “is engaged in a frenzy of building that has left it with more dams — 26,000 at last count —than any other nation in the world.” In its continuing search for energy – especially energy that doesn’t produce greenhouse gases — to power its rapidly expanding economy, the government plans to almost double its hydropower capacity to 380,000 MW by 2020.

Across Southeast Asia, China is playing an integral role in funding and building dams on the Mekong River, the Irrawaddy and many other rivers. Southeast Asian dams include the Kamchay Dam in Cambodia and the Tasang Dam, also in Burma. Major development projects have already been completed on the Mekong, with more underway including two dams, completed at Manwan in 1993 and Dachaoshan in 2003. At least four more are in planning.

The Chinese government is building or planning to build as many as 12 large dams on the Jinsha River, whose headwaters are on the highlands of the Tibetan Plateau and which passes through Yunan and Sichuan Provinces before becoming the Yangtze.

More than 300,000 people will be displaced, numerous cultural sites will be inundated and river ecosystems irretrievably altered, Biello writes.

Because China’s dams are upstream from the countries of Southeast Asia, according to International Rivers, when they affect the seasonal fluctuations in water volume, the downstream countries feel the effect of reduced flows and fish stocks most acutely. It is feared that in addition to reducing the river volumes, the dams will prevent nutrient-rich sediment from flowing, which would cause serious harm to agriculture and fishing downstream.

“Among the areas in greatest danger is the Tonle Sap river-and-lake system in Cambodia, which is the largest freshwater lake in South East Asia. Because this area is home to more than 400 species of fish, as well as many species of mammals and reptiles, it is a veritable hotspot of biodiversity that was designated as a UNESCO biosphere in 1997,” the NGO argues.

The World Bank continues to argue that not all dams are bad dams. A review of 50 projects by the bank’s internal evaluation group said they “have made major contributions to economic development. They have created an installed power generation capacity of 39,000 MW and they replace the equivalent of 51 million tons of fuel in electric energy production annually. They control floods and provide water for urban populations and for industrial development. They have extended irrigated areas by about 1.8 million hectares and improved irrigation for another 1.8 million hectares, substantially increasing cropping intensity and yields of major food crops.”

Irrigation from the Tarvela and Mangla dams in Pakistan, for instance, has made it possible to grow the equivalent of two wheat crops a year on 800,000 hectares of land, adding direct benefits of as much as US$260 million annually to the region.

That is hardly comfort to the people of Burma. The Myitsone dam is expected to create a reservoir the size of New York City in what is now pristine rainforest and displace 10,000 people, mostly from the Kachin ethnic group, critics argue. The dam will also submerge historical churches, temples, and cultural heritage sites that are central to Kachin identity and history, they argue.

“There are a few bad things, such as there will be no place for the biodiversity and the people will be displaced because of the reservoirs, etc,” said Zaw Min, the electric power minister. But we have to compare this with the national benefits which we will get from the project. After we reduce those bad things, the project will definitely affect positively the 50-60 million people of the country.”