Thursday, July 31, 1997

THE GLOBE AND MAIL - Canada's National Newspaper

ALMOST a year to the day when "dead duck" was the expression with which an Asian diplomat dismissed Lloyd Axworthy's Burma initiatives, Canada's Foreign Affairs Minister has crowed loudly enough for people to take notice.

Mr. Axworthy, in Malaysia for a meeting of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations and increasingly displeased with the conduct of his Burmese counterparts, has called for economic sanctions against Burma's military regime. This is quite a migration from Mr. Axworthy's polite murmurings in 1996 about dialogue and a United Nations-sponsored contact group measures which everyone, not least of all Burma's ruling State Law and Order Restoration Council, ignored. Indeed, Mr. Axworthy had been doing a lot of polite murmuring on Asia, shamefully leading Canada to vote against a Danish and American-sponsored censure of China's human-rights and democracy record at the UN this spring.

How Mr. Axworthy has changed. Canada's plain-speaking new Burma policy now points in the same direction as that of the United States. The Americans threw an investment ban at Burma this spring. Britain, too, is allegedly spoiling for action on Burma.

Sanctions aren't always the best way to influence an oppressive regime.

Sometimes economic engagement is far better because business ties can embolden an independent-thinking middle class. Because of its unique circumstances, a flood of American activity in Cuba led by waves of Cuban-American visitors would be the best way to undermine the oppressive regime on that island.

But sanctions are the way to go in Burma. By all accounts, the regime has its fingers in all trade, investment, and foreign-exchange transactions.

Foreign businesses say they're partnered not with regular Burmese, but with SLORC members. The SLORC spends much of the money it collects on weapons. And the generals, busy turning the economy into a high-inflation, forced-labour basket case, refuse foreign advice on reforms.

Not only do the old generals resist ceding power to the elected government led by Aung San Suu Kyi, they coddle the heroin trade. These are not men like the at least partly enlightened authoritarians of Southeast Asia who are trying to get their countries off their knees. This is a comfortable cabal that hoards power, that until this day imprisons and kills its opponents, and that sees verbal criticism from afar as slight obstacle to getting away with as much as it can.

So it's a good thing that Mr. Axworthy has changed his mind about the impact of sweet-talking Burma. Now, he might reconsider his China policy as well. There, a combination of engagement in business, and clear censure on points of human rights and democracy, are in order. When the UN resolution condemning China's human-rights record comes up next spring, Mr. Axworthy should change his mind and vote for it.