Bloodthirsty Liberal

What were we just saying about the moral bankruptcy of communist regimes?

Human-rights groups urged China to halt its investment in a Myanmar gas project over fears of abuses and unrest.

The 609-mile Shwe gas pipeline project runs from Myanmar’s Arakan state to China’s Yunnan province. State-owned China National Petroleum Corp. holds a 50.9 stake in the project in partnership with the Myanmar Oil and Gas Enterprise.

…

Voice of America reports that more than 100 groups and political parties across 20 countries participated in the Shwe Gas Movement petition Wednesday to China’s President Hu Jintao, presented to Chinese embassies in Asia, Australia and Europe.

“There are already reports of human-rights violations in Arakan state connected to the project’s exploration phase, including arrests and beatings of fishermen, and abuses will escalate as the project progresses,” the petition states.

Based on previous experiences in Myanmar, the petition points out, partnerships with the MOGE on infrastructure development projects “invariably” lead to forced displacement, forced labor and loss of livelihoods.

And China asks: “what’s your point?”

I see theirs: if they’ve invested in Sudan and Iran, among other benighted spots, why not put a little money in Burma? Money’s money, and oil’s oil.

I’m not the only one with legendary (though under-appreciated) powers of prediction—or contempt for the United Nations.

The UN also possesses both:

Ban Ki-Moon Leaves Burma Disappointed

Before it began, United Nations officials had described U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon’s visit to Burma as a diplomatically risky mission that could end in failure. After it ended, following two days in Burma and two rare and lengthy meetings with General Than Shwe, the reclusive leader of the country’s military government, Ban had come away with nothing concrete to show for his venture. His requests to meet imprisoned Nobel Peace Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi were rejected. His pleas for the government to release its 2,000-plus political prisoners were ignored. “I believe the government of Myanmar failed to take a unique opportunity to show its commitment to a new era of openness,” Ban told reporters at Bangkok’s international airport Saturday night.

Any idiot coulda told him that. In fact, this idiot did.

I don’t have to tell you how good we are—that’s why you keep coming back for more (those few of you who do).

But did you know we were this good?

BTL 12 days ago:

Myanmar’s junta has rejected an appeal to free pro-democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi, whose most recent period of detention will expire May 27, her party spokesman said Tuesday.

The Nobel Peace Prize laureate has spent more than 13 of the last 19 years — including the past six — under house arrest in Yangon despite international pressure for her release.

…

Nyan Win said he is still hopeful Suu Kyi will be freed later this month when her six-year detention expires, although there were no indications that she would be released.

She won’t be—bank on it.

The news today:

Burmese pro-democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi is to face trial for breaching the conditions of her detention under house arrest, her lawyers have said.

Ms Suu Kyi will stand trial on 18 May, lawyer Hla Myo Myint told reporters.

She was taken to a prison from her home in Rangoon, where she has spent most of the past 19 years, to hear the charges.

Okay, so maybe it doesn’t take a Nostradamus to see that coming, but where was the rest of the media? It’s not like I’m a Suu Kyi specialist; I was just likening the hopelessness of Darfur to another case where all our best wishes and get-well cards have no impact.

Maybe world scorn and disapproval helped end apartheid, but Nelson Mandela still languished in prison for 27 years, almost one-third of his blessedly long life. Based on current trends, this brave lady is going to surpass that record.

If she lives that long.

Earlier this month, the government rejected an appeal for the 63-year-old to be freed, despite NLD claims that she was suffering from low blood pressure and dehydration.

The freeing of Mandela and the end of apartheid were absolute moral necessities, and welcomed the world over. But one can’t say South Africa has lived up to the dreams everyone had at its “liberation” (AIDS, crime, poverty, corruption). Daw Aung San Suu Kyi’s freedom would be just as welcomed—ditto for Myanmar’s return to Burma—but we can’t delude ourselves into thinking everything would be fine there afterwards.

Well, I suppose we could. What harm would it do?

I may tease, taunt, ridicule, and mock Mia Farrow’s hunger strike for Darfur (an eating binge would have been safer and more sustainable in her case), but at least I’ll let her speak for herself:

What I like: she calls out President Obama for being nowhere on this story. It’s as if all Darfurians are half-brothers to him, embarrassing reminders of where he comes from.

What I don’t like: she has no answers. None. Her pleas are filled with “maybes”, and “I-don’t-knows”. She starts down one avenue of hope—maybe countries friendlier to Sudan than we are could send aid workers—then expresses doubt that China even has any aid workers. I don’t know either, honey, but I expected the (gaunt, wizened) face of Save Darfur to know. Anyway, China’s just there for the oil. I promise you they don’t give a damn about any starving Darfurians.

It’s not like I enjoy any of this—I take my schaden without much freude. I just wish people who actually expended any energy on this thought smarter about it.

Or directed it somewhere else, perhaps just as hopeless, but just as worthy of the empty gesture:

Myanmar’s junta has rejected an appeal to free pro-democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi, whose most recent period of detention will expire May 27, her party spokesman said Tuesday.

The Nobel Peace Prize laureate has spent more than 13 of the last 19 years — including the past six — under house arrest in Yangon despite international pressure for her release.

…

Nyan Win said he is still hopeful Suu Kyi will be freed later this month when her six-year detention expires, although there were no indications that she would be released.

She won’t be—bank on it.

There is one hunger strike I actually approve of:

For nearly two weeks, Roxana Saberi has been refusing food. The jailed Iranian-American journalist, who was sentenced by Iran’s Revolutionary Court to 8 years in Tehran’s Evin prison on charges of spying for the U.S., continues to proclaim her innocence while both President Barack Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton continue to call for her release. So far, the case’s presiding judge has not been moved, calling the fast a ploy for propaganda purposes.

Stay hungry, Roxie. Stay hungry.

Not long ago, I lamented (well, ridiculed) the world’s Attention Deficit Disorder when it comes to great injustices perpetrated on defenseless innocent civilians—specifically Burma.

Well, maybe I spoke too soon. The United Nations hasn’t forgotten Burma; rather it is demonstrating its care and concern by… ignoring it:

UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon has expressed frustration at the lack of democratic reform in Burma and says now is not the time for another visit.
In a letter to Mr Ban, 112 ex-leaders of various countries urged him to go there to push for the release of Burma’s political prisoners.

He said he would go when there were “reasonable expectations” a visit would be “productive and meaningful”.

…

The letter, sent on Wednesday, was signed by ex-leaders including ex-US presidents George Bush and Jimmy Carter, and former UK prime ministers Tony Blair and Margaret Thatcher.

Oh, Jimmy Carter said he should go. Well, that’s completely different. BTW, I’m sad to say I don’t think Margaret Thatcher is mentally competent to sign anything, if you’ll forgive me for saying so.

But what did these 112 ex-leaders think this stunt would accomplish—and have you wondered why they’re ex? Some little Korean guy is going to show up on the junta’s swampy shores and tell them what to do?

“We urge you to make it clear that all political prisoners in Burma must be released by the end of this year, regardless of whether you travel to Burma.

“If the Burmese junta continues to defy the United Nations by refusing to make these releases by the end of the year, we urge you to encourage the Security Council to take further concrete action to implement its call for the release of all political prisoners.”

I can’t say I know this Ban guy, but I like him better than that putz, Kofi Annan. Still, Ban should have said something like: “Don’t waste my time. Don’t insult my intelligence. You want to free Burmese political prisoners, I suggest you start with the 82 Airborne and add ground troops as necessary.”

God, what a bunch of wankers!

Didja hear the one about the Burmese yukmeister? If you didn’t, you’ll have to wait 59 years to hear it.

A court inside Myanmar’s notorious Insein prison sentenced a comedian who has criticized the government’s cyclone response to 14 more years Thursday, bringing his total prison term to 59 years, his lawyer said.

Comedian and activist Zarganar was given a 45-year prison sentence last week after he was convicted on charges related to interviews he gave to foreign media outlets.

In the interviews, he said the government was too slow in responding to a May cyclone that killed more than 84,000 people.

Stop, you’re killing me! Or, well, him:

Zarganar’s lawyer, Khin Htay Kywe, said he was convicted Thursday for causing public alarm, a reference to his interviews with foreign media, and for communicating with exiled dissidents, among other charges.

Zarganar, whose birth name is Maung Thura, was among at least 100 people to receive sentences of two to 65 years since early November. Many of the trials were held in closed sessions, sometimes without defense lawyers or family present.

He has been imprisoned several times before, including a three-week stint for providing aid to those who demonstrated last year.

Show of hands of anyone who’s spared a moment of thought for Myanmar in the last week…. Month…? Six months…?

Do I have to remind you? Little, jungley country wedged in between Thailand and some other place I can’t think of right now? Lots of skinny, bald Buddhist monks in saffron robes? Repressive military regime which keeps frail ladies under house arrest?

Hello? Ring a bell?

I really should start charging for political advice. I told the monks not to start what the junta would most assuredly finish. I told the junta not to worry about a few weeks of bad press—the attention of the world and its news media would soon fly away and alight in some other diseased corner of the world. (Check the archives.)

And I’m not even very smart.

But I read a fair bit and remember a little bit of what I read.

Darfur has Mia Farrow; the African continent has Brad and Angelina—but who weeps for Burma? Save your tears.

Earlier today, I rubbed your noses in the fact that the world tends to look upon horror, misery, and devastation—and shrugs.

Y-a-a-a-wn…:

Courts in Myanmar have sentenced a blogger, a poet and several dissidents to several years in jail for anti-regime activities, a court official told CNN Tuesday.

The verdicts were announced Monday and Tuesday, the court official said.

Blogger Nay Phone Latt was sentenced to more than 20 years in jail for his illegal Internet activities, the court official said.

…

In the second case, poet Saw Wai received a two-year jail sentence for a poem he wrote for Valentine’s Day that contained a veiled jab at the junta’s leading figure, Senior Gen. Than Shwe.

The first words of each line in the eight-line poem, “February the Fourteenth” spelled out the message: “Senior General Than Shwe is crazy with power.”

On Tuesday, the government handed down prison sentences to about a dozen members of a pro-democracy group known as the ‘88 Generation Students.

Irrawaddy said the members were each sentenced to 65 years in jail, but CNN could not independently confirm the figure.

Bloggers? Poets? Students?

All I can say, Aggie, is that if Obama’s shock troops come knocking on my door, I’m going to give you up faster than you can say Burma Shave.

Who was the commenter here who said he liked the UN on paper, but found it maybe a bit lacking in practice (while still defending it)? I responded somewhat crudely that I wouldn’t cleanse certain parts of my person with the “UN on paper”, and invited the reader to peruse our UN archives to get some idea why.

Or just read Claudia Rossett’s latest post on UN connivance and appeasement:

In this case, the change-seekers are the members of Burma’s brutally repressive junta, led by Than Shwe. And the change they’ve been seeking — and getting — is hard-cash foreign exchange, skimmed out of the massive United Nations relief operation for victims of the cyclone that hit Burma in May.

How has Burma’s junta been managing this racket? In brief, by requiring the UN to change hard-currency into Burmese currency, the kyat, at lousy, below-market rates — with the Burmese regime pocketing as much as 25% of every dollar exchanged.

…

So, while the UN has been collecting hundreds of millions in emergency funding for Burma’s cyclone victims, how much of that money has the UN been forking over to the Burmese junta in hard cash?

…

So, what’s just happened here? Burma is hit by a terrible cyclone, with vast devastation, including an estimated 140,000 or so people dead. The reason the Burmese are so especially vulnerable is that the country is kept miserably poor under the boot of one of the world’s worst governments — the same regime that last fall slaughtered peacefully protesting monks. To help the cyclone victims, the UN raises hundreds of millions in aid from generous donors. UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon makes a personal visit to Burma, where he says, “The whole world is trying to help Myanmar.” He sits down to talk with high-ranking officials, including the head of the junta, Than Shwe. From that meeting, Ban emerges to say, as reported by the UN public information office, that “substantive progress was made on all critical issues at hand regarding humanitarian assistance to Myanmar… .”

And now we learn — thanks not to the UN, or the MSM, but to the internet-based Inner-City Press — that in this coming-together and talking-to-dictators relief operation, the Burmese junta, dignified by a personal visit and happy words from the UN Secretary-General, buoyed up by a tide of relief money and goods from abroad, has been pocketing one heck of a lot of change. As with Oil-for-Food in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, Cash-for-Kim in North Korea, aid to Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwe, funds to Gaza under Hamas … it’s an approach that helps keep Burma under the jackboot, while the world, standing as one, coming together, don’t-bother-us-with-realities, sings kumbayah.

How do you feel about the UN now? Before you answer, that’s only one story—we got a lot more where that came from.

Charles Krauthammer notes what gets things done in this world, and what does not:

On the day the Colombian military freed Ingrid Betancourt and 14 other long-held hostages, the Italian Parliament passed yet another resolution demanding her release. Europe had long ago adopted this French-Colombian politician as a cause celebre. France had made her an honorary citizen of Paris, passed numerous resolutions and held many vigils.

Unfortunately, karma does not easily cross the Atlantic. Betancourt languished for six years in cruel captivity until freed in a brilliant operation conducted by the Colombian military, intelligence agencies and special forces — an operation so well executed that the captors were overpowered without a shot being fired.

This in foreign policy establishment circles is called “hard power.” In the Bush years, hard power is terribly out of fashion, seen as a mere obsession of cowboys and neocons. Both in Europe and America, the sophisticates worship at the altar of “soft power” — the use of diplomatic and moral resources to achieve one’s ends.

…

Solemn condemnations have been issued from every forum of soft-power fecklessness — the European Union, the United Nations, the G-8 foreign ministers — demanding that Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe stop butchering his opponents and step down. Before that, the cause du jour was Burma, where a vicious dictatorship allowed thousands of cyclone victims to die by denying them independently delivered foreign aid lest it weaken the junta’s grip on power.

And then there is Darfur, a perennial for which myriad diplomats and foreign policy experts have devoted uncountable hours at the finest five-star hotels to deplore the genocide and urgently urge relief.

What is done to free these people? Nothing. Everyone knows it will take the hardest of hard power to remove the oppressors in Zimbabwe, Burma, Sudan and other godforsaken places where the bad guys have the guns and use them. Indeed, as the Zimbabwean opposition leader suggested (before quickly retracting) from his hideout in the Dutch embassy — Europe specializes in providing haven for those fleeing the evil that Europe does nothing about — the only solution is foreign intervention.

And who’s going to intervene? The only country that could is the country that in the past two decades led coalitions that liberated Kuwait, Bosnia, Kosovo and Afghanistan. Having sacrificed much blood and treasure in its latest endeavor — the liberation of 25 million Iraqis from the most barbarous tyranny of all, and its replacement with what is beginning to emerge as the Arab world’s first democracy — and having earned near-universal condemnation for its pains, America has absolutely no appetite for such missions.

And so the innocent languish, as did Betancourt, until some local power, inexplicably under the sway of the Bush notion of hard power, gets it done — often with the support of the American military. “Behind the rescue in a jungle clearing stood years of clandestine American work,” explained The Post. “It included the deployment of elite U.S. Special Forces . . . a vast intelligence-gathering operation . . . and training programs for Colombian troops.”

Upon her liberation, Betancourt offered profuse thanks to God and the Virgin Mary, to her supporters and the media, to France and Colombia and just about everybody else. As of this writing, none to the United States.

It was hard for me to cut it down even to this size.

We’ll cut Betancourt some slack. I doubt her companions either in FARC or in France had a kind word to say about the good ol’ US of A.

But regular readers here will notice a familiar theme. Darfur, Burma, Zimbabwe—you don’t like it, but what are you going to do about it? Hold an interpretive dance event (in Mark Steyn’s words) to raise awareness?

Soft power doesn’t even begin to describe the impotence of this approach. Call it flaccid power.

As long as we’re killing terrorists, it might be useful to know who they are. Or might not, I don’t really care.

Those who are skeptical of the growing ties between drug trafficking organizations and terrorist groups-which I think will be the real war we will be fighting for many years, given the resources obtainable by drug trafficking organizations-should read the latest UN Office of Drugs and Crime report.

Among the many interesting findings is that the two areas of greatest increase in illicit production of drugs in the world are in the hands of designated terrorist groups: the Taliban in Afghanistan and the FARC in Colombia.

A third party involved in the expansion of drug production is Burma, a rogue criminal state. This bodes ill for the rest of the world.

As Antonio Maria Costa, director of the agency, told the AP:

“The explosion of narcotics in those areas is explained by their presence (the terrorist groups) and the protection they offer,” Costa told The Associated Press in an interview Wednesday.

“I believe that slowly these people, although politically motivated at the beginning, are becoming a kind of organized crime,” he said. “Money tends to stick to fingers, and a big lump of money becomes very problematic.”

Osama bin Laden has morphed into Pablo Escobar. Brilliant. I’m sure Allah and Mohammed are very proud. The Religion of Peace has become the Religion of Pushing.