NEWS - Junta fosters 'marriage of c

[Rangoonp@xxxxxxx]

Subject: NEWS - Junta fosters 'marriage of convenience'

South China Morning Post
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.

NOTE: The Ethnic Problem exists only because of the Junta and its
preemptive attacks on them.