SCMP-Junta fosters 'marriage of con

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Subject: SCMP-Junta fosters 'marriage of convenience'

South China Morning Post
Wednesday, August 18, 1999

Junta fosters 'marriage of convenience'
BURMA by WILLIAM BARNES in Bangkok

There will be no quick or easy political settlement in Burma as long as the
military regime uses the excuse of ethnic rebels to justify its size, a
senior Thai army officer said yesterday.
The ruling generals have repeatedly claimed that only their strong, muscular
presence holds an ethnically diverse country together.

"The army needs a visible non-Burman enemy. It deflects attention from the
democratic claims of the opposition, keeps the public on edge and distracts
potential dissidents in the military," the officer said.

When the ruling generals made serious and effective efforts to solve the
minorities' demands for autonomy, it would signal that they were also
serious about handing some sort of democracy to the majority Burman
population.

"But we don't see that happening soon. From their point of view, the current
situation is probably okay," the officer said.

The junta in Rangoon had obtained ceasefire deals from 17 ethnic minorities
during the past decade.

These appeared to outsiders as awkward and fragile arrangements that allowed
the rebels to keep their guns and engage in legal and illegal business, but
prevented them from making political moves, he said.

"The two sides hold each other up," he said. "The army says 'we protect you
from these terrible people'. The rebels say 'we need our guns to defend
ourselves from this terrible army'."

The Karen National Union and the Shan State Army were exceptions in engaging
in open conflict with the regime partly because they had insisted on some
overt autonomy, he said.

A flood of amphetamines flowing across the northern Thai border from Burma
in recent years had forced the Thai security services to examine in detail
the Burmese army's record against ethnic rebels.

Over the past decade, the number of men and women serving the Burmese armed
forces may have grown to more than 400,000, according to one estimate. A
military traditionally based on lightly equipped infantry units has also
acquired a variety of new and secondhand weaponry.

"We have really tried to understand why the Burmese can't get more on top of
the ethnic rebels," the Thai official said. "We think it is partly that they
do not want to - at least not yet."

The conclusion of the officer - who said his views were his own and not that
of the Thai military - was that there was a complex, possibly temporary,
symbiotic relationship between the generals and the rebels.

The Burmese army claims that if it tried to force the issue now, then the
ceasefires would collapse like dominoes and the development and slow
absorption of the border regions would stop.

Rangoon has said that when a new constitution is promulgated to - in part -
formally set out arrangements to deal with minorities, the armed groups will
be expected to lay down their arms. Few analysts think this is going to
happen soon.

Several observers have pointed out that the current arrangement also enables
drug, gem and logging profits from the armed ethnic areas to flow into the
cash-strapped Burmese economy.

"The military is convinced that ethnic conflicts will not be solved by
democracy," said Professor Suchit Bungbonkarn, head of the Institute of
Strategic and International Studies in Bangkok.

"The opposition is equally convinced that only by introducing democracy will
you solve the problem. There is no meeting of minds here."

The excuse obviously exists to defer democracy until the "ethnic question"
has been dealt with.