Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

I blame Mandelson and the EU for propping up Burma’s wicked regime

The EU has not helped Aung San Suu Kyi’s cause

The EU has not helped Aung San Suu Kyi’s cause

It has been a long-held view of mine that most of the evil in the world today can be traced back, somehow, to Peter Mandelson. People tell me that this is irrational and warped. And yet, as the Burmese soldiers sprayed those protesting monks with tear gas and bunged them in the back of paddy wagons to be taken God knows where and for God knows how long, the EU Trade Commissioner’s spectral form once again swam towards me from inside my television set.

We are all worked up and worried about Burma, quite rightly, because of its appalling record on human rights. It is not simply the continued house arrest of the resilient and personable Nobel Peace Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi, whose National League for Democracy won a landslide in the 1990 general election — a result which the military junta declined to accept. Opposition politicians are indeed routinely smacked about, arrested, tortured or simply disappeared, and have been ever since General Ne Win’s coup in 1962, which set the country on the path to glorious state socialist rebirth. (With a neatly Orwellian sense of irony, the present government — under Senior General Than Shwe — now calls itself the State Peace and Development Council; of course, there is not much peace in the country and still less in the way of development.) But beyond the harassment and persecution of opposition figures, there’s the other stuff, familiar to anyone with even a fleeting recollection of Stalinism: the forced slave labour. The uprooting of anywhere up to one million Burmese people and their transportation to distant parts of Southeast Asia’s biggest mainland country, far away from their homes. There is the persecution of the Christian and Muslim minorities, the continual war against the country’s ethnic minorities (particularly the Karen) and the extraordinary expenditure on Burma’s armed services — reckoned to be, at the latest count, something like half the country’s total budget.

It is the human rights business, the total and utter lack of democracy, which commands our attention and opprobrium and which the articulate opposition groups make much play of when addressing the West.

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