/ 26 August 2009

US senator slams Burma sanctions

US Senator Jim Webb called sanctions against the military regime counterproductive'' and asked the opposition to consider taking part in elections.

United States Senator Jim Webb, back from a rare trip to Burma, called sanctions against the military regime ”overwhelmingly counterproductive” and asked the opposition to consider taking part in upcoming elections.

Webb, who became the first US official to meet the junta’s reclusive leader Than Shwe, voiced concern that Western isolation of Burma pushed it into the arms of China, ”furthering a dangerous strategic imbalance in the region”.

The US and European Union have imposed sanctions on Burma, due to its refusal to recognise the last elections in 1990 and prolonged detention of the victor, democracy icon Aung San Suu Kyi.

”While the political motivations behind this approach are laudable, the result has been overwhelmingly counterproductive,” Webb wrote on Wednesday in The New York Times.

”The ruling regime has become more entrenched and at the same time more isolated. The Burmese people have lost access to the outside world,” he said.

Webb said he opposed lifting sanctions due to US economic interests or ”if such a decision were seen as a capitulation of our long-held position that Burma should abandon its repressive military system in favour of democratic rule.

”But it would be just as bad for us to fold our arms, turn our heads and pretend that by failing to do anything about the situation in Burma we are somehow helping to solve it,” he said.

Webb said the US could offer to help Burma carry out elections next year.

Aung San Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy has denounced the vote — the first since the 1990 polls — as a sham, particularly as the Nobel laureate remains under house arrest.

But Webb said the opposition party ”might consider the advantages of participation as part of a longer-term political strategy”.

”There is room for engagement” with Burma, Webb wrote. ”Many Asian countries — China among them — do not even allow opposition parties.”

Webb, a Vietnam veteran and author who heads the Senate Foreign Relations subcommittee on Asia, won the freedom of a troubled American who had been jailed in Burma for swimming to Aung San Suu Kyi’s home.

Webb has faced the fury of some Burma democracy activists, who accuse him of giving a propaganda coup to the junta. — AFP

 

AFP