With foreign press banned from entering the country, and an internet blackout in place, the details of the recent uprising in Burma are uncertain. But after ten days of ever-braver defiance, Burma’s “incipient popular revolt” – sparked by a sharp rise in fuel and food prices last month – appears to be in retreat, said The Independent. Back in August, fears that the ruling military junta would exercise its authority in a similar fashion to 1988 (when 3,000 students and monks were killed) kept people away, but the ranks of demonstrating monks and their supporters grew rapidly, ending in three days of violence last week, when a brutal crackdown killed up to 200. Since then Burma has once again been sealed off, with telephone lines cut and internet and mobile-phone signals blocked.
The junta’s crackdown has handed China a “foreign policy dilemma”, said Rosemary Righter in The Times. China has influence that it is now under “intense international pressure to use”, yet for all their lip-service to democracy, China’s leaders “have not the remotest interest in an outcome that might encourage China’s own democracy activists“. Instead, China continues to insist that it does not intervene in Burma’s internal affairs – a load of “hogwash”, given that Burma is practically a Chinese province. China sells Burma cheap military hardware, plunders its natural resources and invests heavily in its infrastructure. China is sufficiently aware of the disgust the regime inspires to hedge its bets, meeting with exile opposition groups and even half-heartedly supporting the release of Burma’s “great figurehead of freedom”, Aung San Suu Kyi, but so long as India and Russia “play softball with the junta“, Beijing has no need for more drastic action. It is time for these countries to stop covering China’s back.
But they won’t because they are all greedy for Burma’s natural resources, said Aung Zaw in The Guardian. Sadly, that’s the way the world works, said Minette Marrin in The Sunday Telegraph. Political and economic forces are what bring change – whether in Burma, Iraq or North Korea. Foreign powers have limited effect. But there is no other way, said Aung Zaw. The international community must take a stand and let Burma’s allies know that their support for the regime has its price.