The Asian Human Rights Commission (AHRC) has closely followed the trial of democracy party leader Daw Aung San Suu Kyi and three other persons in Burma, and has earlier pointed to the defects that marred the process from its inception in May 2009 (AHRC-UAC-060-2009). It shares the heavy frustration and disappointment felt worldwide over the sentences handed down on August 11.
It was clear from the start that this was not a legal trial. Nor was it intended as one. It was a political trial, and the outcome was predetermined, even if the details only emerged with the verdict and subsequent revisionary order. The intention of the charge and sentence is to ensure that Aung San Suu Kyi is not free to move about in the run up to and during the holding of some kind of election in 2010. Everybody knew this beforehand and the result in this respect was a surprise to no one.
Although the result of the trial was a foregone conclusion, world leaders feigned shock at the result and pledged new resolve to do something about the situation in Burma. Such outrage has been voiced on a number of occasions in recent times, such as after the crackdown on the September 2007 protests, and after the rebuffing of offers to assist cyclone victims in the first days after the tragedy of May 2008. Courts have since sentenced hundreds, possibly thousands of people who were involved in the protests–and some who assisted cyclone victims–to lengthy periods of imprisonment. The trial process in most of those cases, dozens of which the AHRC has studied and documented in detail, has been much the same as that in the case of Aung San Suu Kyi; but very few of those cases have obtained outside attention, let alone indignation, even though diplomatic missions and international agencies in Rangoon are aware of them.
Some of the global community’s intense outrage at the verdict now needs to be redirected back onto the global community itself. Moral anger can serve a useful purpose where it generates meaningful resolve and leads to action to produce results, but where it is all that there is, again and again, it can have the opposite effect, sapping and demoralizing the very people whom it should bolster. That is the problem now for Burma. People who once had high expectations in the work of the United Nations and the global community have for the most part given up on them. The idea that international agencies and high-profile individuals from abroad could contribute something towards change in the country has gone from being an objective to a pipedream. This unfortunate circumstance is largely of the international community’s own doing. Time after time an impression has been created that expressions of moral outrage would be backed by firm action, only to have them come to naught.
On the conviction of Daw Aung San Suu Kyi and her co-accused, the Asian Human Rights Commission expresses its solidarity with the people of Burma and its determination to continue work as best as it can to explore and expose the abuses of human rights there not simply as manifestations of a long-standing dictatorship but also in terms of their deep institutional features. One purpose of this work is to better inform outside agencies and individuals about what is going on in Burma so as to enable more effective responses and to encourage more intelligent strategies. It is hoped that the international community will with this trial have gotten some sense both of the role that the entire infrastructure of state plays in protecting the army’s hold on power, and of the role that the rest of the world needs to play in addressing that hold, rather than merely making statements of condemnation every time that the regime affronts global sensibilities and violates international law. If not, the only place left that the global community should direct its outrage is against itself, at its own failure to do anything, as if expecting that outrage alone will achieve results, which in the case of Burma it most obviously does not.
