One of the more interesting assignments of my public service career was to chair from 1988-91 the tri-national Australian-Thai-Lao steering committee which negotiated the agreements for the construction of the first bridge over the Mekong River, from Nong Khai to Vientiane, and which oversighted the construction.
Some recollections from that assignment will be the subject of a later post, but one aspect deserves a mention now.
One of the strong wishes expressed by the Lao authorities when we got down to detailed discussion of the project was that the bridge should be wide enough and strong enough to carry a standard Thai railway locomotive, so that in the fullness of time an extension to the Thai railway system could be built through to Vientiane.
The sceptics in Canberra laughed; the bridge itself was going to be a failure, and there was no possibility that it would ever carry trains. Laos would never have a railway line.
The Lao request seemed reasonable enough to me, and we did build the bridge to the appropriate specificiation.
So it was with considerable satisfaction that I learned in March last year that the new service was to be inaugurated on 5 March 2009 (see They said it would never happen ...)
Against that background of scepticism it was with considerable interest that I read the article High-speed rail between Yunnan and Myanmar on the agenda in China Business News, 22 November 2010 (access the full report here). It begins:
Construction of a high-speed rail link between Yunnan province and neighboring Myanmar, part of a project to upgrade transport connections with Southeast Asian nations, will start in about two months, a top rail expert said.
The line, from Kunming, capital of Yunnan province, to Yangon, Myanmar’s largest city, will be 1,920 kilometers long, said Wang Mengshu, an academic of the Chinese Academy of Engineering. Trains will run at about 170-200 km/h once it is completed, he added.
Wang, who is also a professor at Beijing Jiaotong University, has been involved in Chinese high-speed rail projects from the outset.
Wang told China Daily that a high-speed rail connection between southwestern China and Cambodia is also under discussion. And an exploratory survey for another route that would link Yunnan and Vientiane, the capital of Laos, is under way.
The three new rail connections being developed, along with another linking China and Vietnam, will form a network that is likely to be completed within 10 years, Wang said.
“The project, which aims to boost cooperation between China and Southeast Asian nations, will greatly enhance the economic development of China’s western regions,” said Wang.
On this basis I would be prepared to wager a good bottle of red that Laos, one of the poorest countries in the world, and characterised by rugged terrain, will have high speed rail before Australia does. We have been talking about it for twenty five years and will still be talking about it in twenty five years’ time.
The Burmese people, despite four massacres in 48 years of harsh, inept military rule, retain their sense of humor. They refer to Sunday’s general election, the first in 20 years and the second in 50, as the “generals’ election”, for the result is preordained and will entrench military control.
One would like you to be able to share the optimists’ prognostications[1] that good will come out of the elections but history suggests that they are just another replay in a long-running traditional shadow-play, in which there is an intruder who may or may not be permitted a brief appearance after the curtain comes down.
I was Australian ambassador in Burma in 1974 when the military, having drawn up a new constitution, first civilianised themselves in order to rule through the façade of a Cabinet, a People’s Assembly (Pyithu Hluttaw), and a rash of subsidiary bodies, just as now. As a US historian, David Steinberg, has written, the ‘mufti was a camouflage for continued military rule’.
It survived recurring workers and students revolts, a plot by young officers in which dictator Ne Win chose to implicate his loyal army chief, Tin Oo, Ne Win himself finishing third in his own party poll, and other mirages of change.
Some army officers turned civilian ministers desired rational economic policies (and, like Tin Oo, over the last 20 years have been democratic leader Aung San Suu Ky’s devoted and courageous associates). But Ne Win’s credo, as he put it to me, that ‘all the Burman wants is enough rice in his belly and two longyi lengths a year’, prevailed, so health and education are starved. His successors are meaner men, obscenely rich, and made more secure by a $6 billion-dollar treasure chest from oil and gas.
‘Continued military rule’ is the Burmese junta’s aim, and it has been cunning in achieving it, abroad and at home. When it had to have an election as a safety valve in 1990, it had a contingency plan to negate the result. The election would be only for an assembly to draft a new constitution. When this was leaked to the Western press in May 1989, and Aung San Suu Kyi sought public discussion, she was quickly locked up and made incommunicado. Suu Kyi has been so most of the last 20 years, while an unrepresentative body discussed a constitution consolidating military control. Watching democracies could only wring their hands.
Now ASEAN countries can only do likewise. The junta, deaf to their appeals, does things its way. It has its constitution which is being endorsed by an election, and that is that. A Filipino comments that the constitution and elections are a studied affront, because their deficiencies are the mirror image, writ large, of the democratic shortcomings of all ASEAN countries.
Is there no point of pressure? As early as 1992 (and confirmed many times including by section 443 of the constitution) Burma’s leaders’ fear of international retribution was noted by Philippines Foreign Minister Raul Manglapus. Since then there have been giant bounds in international law, UN endorsement of States’ responsibility to protect and an International Criminal Court to prosecute crimes against humanity and war crimes, but action against Burma’s leaders looks no nearer.
However, they do have a case to answer. UN officials (led by the recommendations of UN special rapporteur on human rights in Burma, Tomas Ojea Quintana), with firsthand knowledge of Burma’s transgressions of human rights and rejection of 19 General Assembly resolutions, have felt strongly enough to back a commission of enquiry into whether crimes have been committed. That would seem fair enough. Australia’s ‘Doc’ Evatt always insisted that there should be an enquiry into the facts before UN action was considered.
What is holding things back? The main block is China. As the US magazine Foreign Policy has observed, China’s strong and unambiguous message to UN members and UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, who is up for re-election next year, has resembled the America of old. This may reflect China’s sense of changing power relations as much as the relative importance it gives to remaining the predominant influence on Burma.
American diplomacy has so far been a failure, despite the opportunities presented by a rogue state developing a provocative relationship with another, North Korea. The Obama administration leaked to The Washington Post that it would push for a UN commission of enquiry into Burma instead of quietly laying the groundwork by establishing a core group of supporters, which might have included Indonesia and Japan, who could argue that the UN should be given a chance and that this seemed to be the only option left to edge junta towards national reconciliation and dialogue. It is now being called a three-year project.
Aung San Suu Kyi, not coincidentally, is due for release next week. If offered (for the junta fears Lazarus rising) it would be in character for her to refuse unless all political prisoners are released. Nelson Mandela adopted that course, successfully. However, antipathy to South Africa’s apartheid fell into a unique category of internationalpressure.
Garry Woodard is a former ambassador to Burma and China
[1]AIIA policy commentary, Democracy and Discontent: The 2010 Elections in Myanmar
[1]AIIA policy commentary, Democracy and Discontent: The 2010 Elections in Myanmar
Today in The Age there is an opinion piece by Garry Woodard, former Australian Ambassador to Burma (and High Commissioner to Malaysia and Ambassador to China) on the meaning that might be drawn from the relatively light sentence that was imposed on Aung San Suu Kyi following her trial.
He traverses the sad sad story of Burma’s history over the last twenty years and ponders how different things might have been if this extraordinary woman (after 14 years of solitary confinement and house arrest Time magazine rates her the 25th most influential woman in the world) had been permitted to take office.
He infers from the relatively soft sentence that the Burmese leadership is uncertain but resolute on its chosen course, but he sees more fluidity in the current situation, more scope for international initiatives.
He concludes:
What if Kevin Rudd had acted, as his predecessors did on Cambodia and East Timor, to help find a regional solution based on principle to a regional problem? This is surely an appropriate role for an activist middle power. He could be working with two South-East Asian democracies, and neighbours, Indonesia and East Timor, whose policies are Australian Labor policies.
Indonesia is the most outspoken Asian country in demanding the release of Aung San Suu Kyi and political prisoners. Timorese President Jose Ramos Horta, a critic of Australian inaction on human rights issues in Burma, has joined the growing calls for UN Security Council action directed towards prosecutions in the International Criminal Court. This would not be bad company for Australia to be in.
Quite. Middle power diplomacy is about putting serious and sustained effort into a limited range of issues where we have a chance to make a real difference, not rushing all over the world being seen at every meeting.
By Garry Woodard, former Australian ambassador to China and Burma
Highly armed and opaque regimes linked with and significantly dependent on China currently are testing stability and diplomacy in East and South-east Asia. The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) has called a halt to multilateral diplomacy to put its nuclear genie back in the bottle. Its sabre rattling has created an immediate problem of crisis management. The burden of finding answers has shifted to the US, but China’s national interests are vitally engaged.At the same time, the political future of Burma (Myanmar), which might seem a sideshow by comparison, has reached a tilting-point, international concern focused by the show trial of democratic leader Aung San Suu Kyi in order to freeze her out of elections designed to entrench military power indefinitely.Burma is making itself vulnerable to some form of external intervention for the first time. China’s national interests are engaged.
Could the Kissingerian diplomatic tactic of ‘linkage’ help to resolve these apparently insoluble crises and strengthen rather than strain Sino-American cooperation? Could linkage provide a fillip for peace and security in Asia, and open up opportunities for Australia’s middle power diplomacy?
Burma and China: ‘lips and teeth’ or mainly teeth?
The Burmese military regime presents the following advantages to its main supporter and arms supplier for 20 years, China:
- It appears to and vigorously asserts that it provides stability, and that any alternative government not under army control could not
- It has enhanced the image of stability by concluding ceasefires with ethnic minorities, some adjacent to China, after clobbering them using Chinese weapons
- It makes a contribution to the Chinese economy, most significantly through the provision of energy resources, including an increasing supply of natural gas at prices which the Chinese themselves can more or less fix, and through a flourishing barter trade, in China’s favor
- It permits large-scale movement of people across the border from south-west China to the extent that Mandalay, the old capital, has become a Chinese city. This process has helped China to laminate a traditionally troublesome border region
- It gives China strategic access to the Indian Ocean, and permits it to construct the supporting infrastructure.Burma is an integral link in China’s apparent ‘string of pearls’ strategy, now reinforced by the Sri Lanka government’s gratitude for Chinese military aid in eliminating the Tamil Tigers
- It concedes to China at least as much influence as to any external power, in a country which is a fault line between civilizations and cultures.
Consistent with its overall approach of reifying the State, China plays a key role in supporting and protecting the junta, which expects the stasis to continue. China is in a position to offer advice, especially, in its capacity as a permanent member of the Security Council, on handling the UN Secretary General and his ineffectual envoys.
The above picture of Burmese-Chinese amity, within the traditional rhetoric of big brother, small brother (paukhpaw), and of mutual satisfaction with the status quo needs qualifying because of the following factors:
- The Burmese regime is no ideal partner. It is military and shallowly rooted in a precarious mix of patriotism, privilege and brute power. It has to rely on the gun, surveillance and fear, exploiting the Buddhist quietude of the people and their low expectations
- The regime is one of the two most corrupt governments in the world, along with Somalia, and is also in effect a narco-state, from which drugs and related HIV/AIDS pour into southern China
- The regime has neither the will nor the capacity to prioritise economic development and progress good governance. Economic hardship periodically precipitates revolt, through which the people show they want a return to a form of democratic government (such as they enjoyed for 15 years after independence, despite the leadership deficit after Aung San’s assassination)
- The claustrophobic leadership has never been as cohesive as its apologists claim, and the pressing need to pass the baton to a new generation makes the future uncertain. It is said that the leaders, who pay particular attention to astrologers, are unsettled by advice that the portents are not favorable for election year. Article 445 of Burma’s new constitution slips in a claim for immunity for the current leaders, like the one George Bush and Dick Cheney included in a Bill before they left Washington
- The Burmese are xenophobic and can always turn on their friends, and autocratic leaders can choose to exploit this to maintain their position
- The significant Chinese presence could be a flashpoint in a time of economic hardship, bearing in mind that the Burmese people say of recent experience that the Chinese have no eyes or ears.Could today’s China stand idly by if there were a mini-pogrom, as it did in 1967, although it responded by supporting the draining Wa insurgency, or as it did more contentiously in allowing hundreds of thousands of the hua ch’iao in Cambodia to be slaughtered? (The head of a Shanghai-based human rights think tank which enjoyed sufficient status to occupy the house and capacious grounds of a former hong chairman’s property which Mao had moved into after liberation told me in 1991 that he had circulated to the leadership a trenchant criticism of that policy)
- China cannot be happy about the Burmese military regime’s playing it off against rivals India and Russia.India has been following similar policies to China since 1991, and its policies are essentially economically and politically competitive with, though less effective, than China’s.Russia has a keen sense of the strategic significance of Burma’s geography, and its nuclear assistance program must be viewed with suspicion by China.
To sum up, Burma is of limited, but perhaps increasing, strategic and economic importance to China.China is happiest with a Burmese government which pays more than lip service to the tributary relationship.However; the appearance of intimacy carries obligations and international costs for China, and the actuality is that amongst foreign influences, China’s is only marginally the most acceptable, and tempered by traditional Burmese xenophobia and introversion.
China and the DPRK: bared teeth
Before considering the possibility that China might see it as in its interests to show itself open to change in the special relationship with Burma, it seems logical to examine whether the DPRK presents a like situation for China.
Both countries are basically failed states, and can therefore be unpredictable.The DPRK is a greater burden on China because it is an economic basket case. The DPRK is prepared to take greater risks, because it needs to enlarge its options, to gain greater security and access to food aid. Its leadership is based on the utmost cult of personality and employs nuclear brinkmanship.Both the DPRK and Burma aredestabilizing sub regional influences, but the former is more disruptive because of the nuclear factor. China has a long and porous border with both, but currently that with the DPRK is more of a ticking time bomb, as internal crisis in the DPRK and famine could bring a mass influx of refugees.
China has put considerable effort into multilateral diplomacy in regard to the DPRK through the six power forum.It wants to maintain its political influence, but the latest developments, the DPRK’s withdrawal from the six power talks and testing of a nuclear bomb and an array of missiles, show that its influence is slim, and that it has no special insights into the leadership succession struggle which may take a considerable time to work itself out. China also has no control over and few insights into political developments in Burma. This was shown at the time the leadership performed a partial lobotomy on itself by the purge of the number three leader Gen Khin Nyunt and the military/defence intelligence service. Could China increase its insight into and influence in either country by modifying its commitment to the status quo in both?
China wants the DPRK to halt its nuclear and missile programs, because these are now having counterproductive effects on stability in the economically important North East Asian zone, and carry disconcerting risks of impelling Japan and South Korea and Taiwan to go down the nuclear path. Implications for China are huge. It wants the US to provide a political and economic solution.The bilateral talks made significant progress in 2008 before the US negotiator, Christopher Hill, whom his right wing critics called Christopher Jong Il, was assigned to Iraq. This gives the US important cards it can play, and would make it possible for the US to create a linkage between Burma and the DPRK as regional problems, where China cannot avoid its responsibilities and could benefit from enlarging its options.
The US and Burma
The US and China basically take opposite tacks on Burma.The US leads the western group which applies smart sanctions. Their useful effects have been only at the margin. The Obama administration quickly announced the need for a policy review, and a middle ranking State Department official held talks with the junta. The review predictably proved to be hard going. It has been stopped in its tracks by the junta’s show trial, as Obama bluntly called it, of Aung San Suu Kyi.
While the treatment of Aung San Suu Kyi in her many long years of detention on progressively stricter conditions has appeared arbitrary to the outside world, the junta has claimed that (except for the brutal attack at Depayin in May 2003) it was acting in accordance with law.Under the law her six-year period of detention came to an end on 27 May.The junta played with the idea that it might legally extend the detention for a further period of six months but dropped it.One reason may have been that it wants to make it clear to its people now that Aung San Suu Kyi will play no part in any political consultations leading up to, and in, the 2010 elections.A justification had to be found to render her incommunicado for the term of the potentially political life.
Her trial has had the fingerprints of military intelligence all over it. It rested on ground that would strike a chord with the ordinary people, that Aung San Suu Kyi had harbored a foreigner overnight without reporting it.The foreigner and provocateur, Yettaw, like Van der Lubbe at the time of the Reichstag fire, showed some strange personal characteristics and embodied something reprehensible, the one a communist, the other an American Mormon. Also, the case would not stand up to close scrutiny. Was it possible for a foreigner to spend two days convalescing in the ground floor of Aung San Suu Kyi’s house without being detected by listening devices or seen by roaming guards and could he possibly have got a visa if this was, and was known to be, part of a pattern of conduct, a repeat performance?
Thus the trial itself has blown up in the junta’s face.Some traditional Asian backers have become more outspokenly critical, although at this stage none promises action.Opponents are under pressure to harden their opposition, and to take definitive action to secure Aung San Suu Kyi’s release.The first arena will have to be the United Nations Security Council. That puts China on the spot.
A number of proposals are in the air aimed at the same ultimate outcome, an enquiry into whether crimes against humanity and war crimes which might lead to Burmese leaders’ arraignment before the International Criminal Court had been committed. Even if Russia were to exercise its veto, an abstention by China would hold the door open for further consultation and cooperation. It would send shock waves through the junta in its reclusive jungle capital.As the Economist of 7 May noted, the mere emergence of the possibility of action by the International Criminal Court has brought changes, mostly favorable, in Sudan.
Adopting linkage
It is open to the US to link Burma and the DPRK in the second of the senses in which Kissinger employed ‘linkage’, recognition of the ‘reality that in an interdependent world the actions of a major power are inevitably really related and have consequences beyond the issue or region immediately concerned’.
China might not automatically oppose linkage, particularly if the US handles it discreetly, and avoids a head-on confrontation with China’s doctrinal positions of non-interference in other countries’ domestic affairs and opposition to resume change.
While the North-east Asia and Southeast Asia sub-regions tend to go their own way, concentrating on their immediate problems, institutions have been established which recognize their interdependence.China is at the core.Also all parties in the six party talks on Korea are involved in Burma, and in the past an ASEAN country Malaysia sought to mediate in Korea.
The Burmese and the North Koreans themselves, willingly or unwittingly, have enlarged the options for linkage diplomacy by deepening their own ties in recent years, after long estrangement caused by North Korean terrorism in Rangoon.In this burgeoning relationship there has been an element of cocking a snook at great powers, but of course particularly at the US, their most trenchant critic. These elements are present in the international crises which the DPRK and Burma have manufactured in recent weeks.
If the DPRK can ensure its survival by having nuclear weapons, the Burmese regime may well think along the same lines, and use DPRK assistance to develop a nuclear weapons program, out of the current Russian project to provide a nuclear research facility. There are somewhat stronger reports recently that this is already happening although they have not got beyond the non proven stage.Any such development should cause China great concern.
The ultimate solutions for these two hapless states lie beyond the ambit of our study.The immediate objective is to find small steps forward.Linkage may provide a way for the two major players, China and the US, to introduce desirable uncertainty into the minds of recalcitrant leadership and create fluidity.
