緬甸軍事政權因為國際壓力日增，近日表示著手進行制訂新憲法，但是，大部份觀察家認為，這只是軍事政權又一次的作秀，對軍事政權的權力一點也不會動搖。
In Myanmar, a military regime’s familiar dance
By Seth Mydans International Herald Tribune
Published: October 8, 2006
This is a moment of bold gestures from the generals who rule Myanmar and from their critics in the United States, but the gestures only underscore the state of suspended animation that has engulfed that broken country.
In Myanmar this week, the generals are reconvening a seemingly endless convention that has been working, on and off, for 13 years to draw up a constitution. They are starting up the engines, they say, on their "road map to democracy."
In New York, the United States succeeded in September, after months of lobbying, in placing Myanmar’s human- rights record on the agenda of the United Nations Security Council. American diplomats call Myanmar a "threat to international peace and security."
The claims by Myanmar and America should not be taken literally. A consensus among experts on Myanmar’s years of stagnation and repression is that the isolated Southeast Asian nation is neither heading toward democracy nor threatening world peace.
"Things may be happening," said David Steinberg, a professor at Georgetown University who is a leading expert on Myanmar, "but I don’t think much is really happening."
Instead, the nation once known as Burma is staying pretty much where it has been since the military quashed a pro-democracy uprising by force in 1988 - one of the poorest and most repressed nations in Asia.
Its rulers feint and promise and hunker down. Its critics recite its transgressions and impose economic sanctions. Very little changes.
It has become a familiar dance of arrests, releases and re-arrests; of the opening and closing of diplomatic doors; and of broken promises to free the pro-democracy leader, Aung San Suu Kyi, from house arrest, where she has spent 11 of the past 17 years.
Myanmar’s official press reported this weekend that the first of 1,000 delegates had begun to gather from around the country for the opening of the convention Tuesday after an eight-month hiatus.
It is part of a process that would eventually put a civilian face on military rule, but not, according to experts, mean any change in power or lead necessarily to any relaxation of repressive measures or easing of human rights abuses.
The draft constitution, as presented online, contains several clauses that ensure continued control by the military, requiring the president to have 15 years of military service, allowing the military to declare a state of emergency and placing its budget outside civilian control.
One third of parliamentary seats would be reserved as a bloc for active members of the armed forces.
"The National Convention, as you know, is heavily scripted," Steinberg said. "The government will get whatever it wants, it will finish whenever it wants to and at some point in the future they’ll hold a referendum that they’ll win and an election which they’ll also win and the military will still be in control."
Or as some exiles from Myanmar like to say, "General elections means elections of generals."
The military has a grip on power that nothing seems to shake. It has controlled Myanmar since 1962, closing itself off from the outside world and killing thousands of people when it crushed the democracy uprising in 1988.
When it suffered an overwhelming loss to Aung San Suu Kyi’s party, the National League for Democracy, in elections in 1990, it ignored the results and stayed in control.
Instead, it organized the constitutional convention in 1993 as a gesture toward forming a civilian government. It was not long before delegates representing the National League for Democracy walked out of the convention, calling it a sham.
In response to this political manipulation and to abuses of human rights, the United States has led escalating international economic sanctions that have deepened Myanmar’s self-imposed isolation.
Washington halted new investments in 1997 and imposed bans on financial transactions and imports in 2003. Officials tied to the military junta have been denied visas to the United States.
Myanmar’s neighbors in Southeast Asia have taken an opposite tack, trying gently to influence the junta through a policy of friendly "noninterference," until their patience ran out last year.
Through it all, the generals have hardly moved.
"I don’t think practically it is easy for an outsider to cause Myanmar to change a political system," Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong of Singapore said last month. "In the case of Myanmar, they want to close themselves off from the world. So if you impose sanctions on them, they say ’Thank you very much, I am very happy to live by myself.’"
If and when change does come, Steinberg said, it is likely to come from within the military, which holds a monopoly on power and controls all institutions.
The hope in exerting international pressure, analysts said, is that it might accelerate any internal dynamic for change within the armed forces.
And so the inclusion of Myanmar on the agenda of the security council might be seen as what some countries call a "noise barrage," a public outcry that can force a reaction by those in power.
The move allows the United States and others to air their criticisms at the highest level, but it is unlikely that the council will take concrete action.
Myanmar has a powerful patron and shield in its neighbor China, which, with Russia and India, have provided the trade and assistance that have insulated it from international sanctions and criticisms.
America’s UN ambassador, John Bolton, has argued that drug trafficking, a flood of refugees, human-rights abuses and the spread of HIV have made Myanmar a threat to international peace.
He cited a UN report that 1,147 political prisoners were being held, that 240 villages of minorities had been destroyed in the past four years, that AIDS cases and drug trafficking were widespread, and that UN agencies were assisting 140,000 refugees along the border with Thailand.
A series of high-profile political arrests in the past two weeks has coincided with the opening of the national congress and with the American actions at the United Nations.
The Chinese ambassador to the United Nations, Wang Guangya, said that it was "preposterous" to claim that any of this posed a threat to international peace and security.
"To force the Security Council intervention is not only inappropriate but will further complicate the situation," he said.
The Myanmar foreign minister, Nyan Win, protested that his country was the one being threatened. The United Nations, he said, is no place for big and powerful countries to "gang up against a member state."
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