Chris Martin Pledges Support to Campaign to free Suu Kyi

SINGAPORE, Aug. 22: The capacity crowd at the Impact Arena outside the Thai capital sang along enthusiastically, the lights from their mobile phone screens dancing in the darkened hall.

On stage, the Grammy award-winning hip-hop group Black Eyed Peas unfurled banners showing the face of detained Myanmar Nobel Peace laureate Ms Aung San Suu Kyi and called for her release as they sang their hit Where is the Love.

With their concert last month the group joined an international effort often compared to the movement to free Mr Nelson Mandela, who spent 27 years as a political prisoner in South Africa.

Ms Aung San Suu Kyi has been imprisoned for most of the time since 1990 by Myanmar’s ruling military junta which refused to recognise the landslide election victory of her National League for Democracy (NLD) that year. Now millions of dollars are sunk each year into the international movement to free her.

The money is spent on and by a range of groups from exiled Myanmar dissidents, journalists, political activists and intellectuals, to international organisations working on human rights and refugee relief, training and capacity building, political lobbying and promotion of democracy.

Among the slew of celebrities urging her release are rockers Bono of U2, Chris Martin of Coldplay, and Bob Geldof. The rock group REM dedicated a performance to her on her 60th birthday in June last year. Many media organisations have also adopted the cause, from outright activism in the case of MTV, to alternative journalism providing a voice to what is going in Myanmar and in the Burmese diaspora ~ like Irrawaddy based in Thailand, and Mizzima News in India.

The Norway-based Democratic Voice of Burma TV is planning to beam a recording of the Black Eyed Peas’ Bangkok concert into Myanmar. With over one million satellite dishes in Myanmar, the assumption is many thousands of people will see it.

But after all this time, how much effect has the campaign had? The answer, say Myanmar political watchers, ranges from zero to a little. But even if it is ignored by the governing State Peace and Development Council (SPDC), the campaign keeps Myanmar and the iconic Aung San Suu Kyi on the radar screen of key governments in the region as well as globally. Says Bangkok-based Myanmar analyst Larry Jagan: “There is no doubt that the opposition movement has kept her in the public eye. The United States and UK positions would not be so hard if it wasn’t for public opinion.”

In the region, the campaign has maintained pressure on the regional grouping of Asean.

Malaysian Foreign Minister Syed Hamid Albar wrote recently: “The move to include Myanmar in the agenda of the United Nations Security Council has been publicly supported by the Asean Inter-Parliamentary Myanmar Caucus (AIPMC). “The AIPMC’s unflagging campaign has had an impact, making it difficult for Asean governments to ignore the views of their democratically elected legislators.

“We cannot deny the importance and relevance of these voices in Asean’s decision-making process on Myanmar.”

The minister also wrote that Myanmar’s leadership was “seen to have failed to prove to Asean or the international community that it is serious and committed to national reconciliation and democratisation.”

Speaking to The Straits Times over the phone, Washington-based Jeremy Woodrum of the US Campaign for Burma - which is funded by individual donors - sees these developments as encouraging times. “When we started seven years ago there were only vague perceptions of Burma,” he said. “Since then we have been able to wake up the advocacy community and policymakers and the UN.

“We have prevented money from getting into the hands of the regime by stopping (corporate) deals, just as was done with the apartheid regime in South Africa.”

For now, things are looking hopeful as “international positions seem to be coming together”. “Until two years ago Burma was seen as a human rights issue, now it is viewed through the lens of other problems as well - like HIV, drugs and bird flu.”

The Freedom Campaign compares the movement to free Aung San Suu Kyi, to the efforts to bring down the Berlin Wall. “Just as musicians decades ago performed concerts near the Berlin Wall to encourage respect for human rights in the then-Soviet eastern bloc, modern satellite technology today allows musicians playing around the world to share their support directly with people living under repressive governments”, the Freedom Campaign said in a statement on the eve of the Black Eyed Peas concert in Bangkok.

Those closer to Myanmar in South-East Asia take a practical approach, and opinions are mixed. But all believe the movement, while having no direct effect on the regime’s decisions, has some indirect influence on people and governments that the junta must interact with at some level in the future.

Maung Maung, Thailand-based general secretary of the National Council of the Union of Burma, a political umbrella organisation, said in a recent interview: “International pressure that used to be 10,000 miles away - in America, in the EU - is now in the region.

“We have the Malaysians pressing the regime, we have the Indonesians pressing the regime, even the Thais are speaking out. So we have achieved a lot in 2005 on international affairs,” he said.

But independent Myanmar analyst Aung Naing Oo, also based in Thailand, noted that less money has been given to the movement for democracy in Myanmar by the US government than, say, was given to Iraqi dissident Ahmed Chalabi.

Chalabi alone, before he was discredited, received at least US$27 million from the US government in just four years until 2002.

“The opposition movement hasn’t had that kind of money. Of the US$12 to 20 million from the US Congress every year, a lot goes to refugees and humanitarian aid,” Aung Naing Oo said. “So while the international community’s pressure has been very important, it is not forcing the military to come to the middle, or to reform. “The Burmese military has a very thick skin when it comes to international criticism,” he added.

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