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Wired News: "To Save Burma"



THE VALIANT Aung San Suu Kyi, leader of Burma's democratic opposition, has been
released, supposedly "unconditionally" -- she had rejected conditional release -- from nearly
six years of house arrest. Evidently the military thugs who run what they call Myanmar feel
they can afford a limited departure from China's example of opening the economy without
sharing any political power at all.
     But as anyone who knows her could have told, Mrs. Aung San Suu Kyi obviously has her
own ideas. The junta's plan is to promote a new constitution, reserving a prime role in politics
for the military; one provision would deny high office to someone married to a foreigner -- a
description that fits her. Speaking after her release, however, she invoked the model of
reconciliation embodied by post-apartheid South Africa. It seems, in short, she does not
seek vengeance on the generals who kept her from assuming the power she won in free
elections, but she insists that they accept a new order where the slogan "power to the
people" has a truly democratic content.
     In recent years, the generals achieved some economic progress and even a measure of
regional political acceptance. They did this by offering favorable terms to selected private
investors and making certain political gestures. But the military regime's lingering pariah
status -- symbolized by Aung San Suu Kyi's detention -- has inhibited many Western
investors and denied Burma access to the international banks. The country also remains
outside the principal regional political club, ASEAN. Its human rights record has been
appalling -- a fact that underlines the burden on the generals to promptly release the
hundreds of remaining political prisoners and otherwise to relax their stifling controls.
    Mrs. Aung San Suu Kyi possesses to an unchallenged degree what her erstwhile captors
utterly lack -- the legitimacy that can be bestowed only by genuine popular choice. The best
thing the junta can do for the country they have misruled and looted for many years is to allow
the people of Burma to speak.
      Copyright 1995 The Washington Post