Bad Junta

The ruling Burmese junta showed once again how uncooperative it is by expelling the top U.N. resident ambassador to the country on Friday. According to Reuters:

U.N. officials said on Friday that Charles Petrie had been summoned to the former Burma's new capital, Naypyitaw, for an official dressing down for a statement he released on the Oct. 24 United Nations Day. After the meeting, Petrie and his colleagues were given a letter saying the military government would not be renewing his credentials, which expire "pretty much now," a Yangon-based diplomat said.

The military government continues to prove how rigid and backwards it is by attempting to restrict information from entering or leaving the country. Perhaps with internet access shut down and Petrie expelled, the junta leadership believes that it can continue to silence the opposition, at least internationally, and that the silence will eventually lead to an international forgetfulness. It's an interesting card trick: take it off the table, and it ceases to exist.

Unfortunately, with the modern attention span and the schizophrenic news cycle, silence can lead to forgetfulness. But what the medieval junta fails to understand is that this time is much different than 1988. It is virtually impossible in today's information climate to keep all of the nearly 50 million Burmese silent.

The torture, kidnapping, murder and intimidation works to a point, but the modestly defiant demonstration by Buddhist monks on Thursday, just one month after the violent repression of widespread protests, shows that the population is determined to keep the issue of Burmese democracy alive.

Here is a previous post on Burma.
And here is another.