The European Council on Foreign Relations

From Warsaw to Rangoon to Minsk?

Date: 17th January 2012  |  Author: Konstanty Gebert,

Categories: China, Rule of law, democracy and human rights, Middle East and North Africa, Wider Europe,
Tags: None

All dictatorships start in the same way: with promises of a radiant future that make up for the sinister present of misery, fear, gags and blood. And they usually all end alike: the dictator is eventually killed, like Gaddafi, is judged like Mubarak, or flees like Ben Ali. There is, however, a rare type of dictatorship that is harder to predict - the ones that dismantle themselves: Spain after Franco, Chile after Pinochet, Poland under Jaruzelski. Will Burma after Than Shwe be added to that list?

Until recently the very question was absurd: just five years ago the generals, in power for half a century, again drowned protests in blood. It seemed they are unable to stop spilling it for, if they were to stop, they would then hang for it. And yet they then set free first Aung San Suu Kyi, and then hundreds of other key political prisoners. They signed, after 63 years of war, a cease-fire with the Karen rebels. The censor-in-chief suggests he should lose his job. The next elections might possibly be free. This is no longer window-dressing: this is a breakthrough.

During the bloody repression of 2007 I managed to get both Lech Walesa and General Jaruzelski to sign a common appeal to the Burmese junta to stop the killings (the first document they ever signed together). The appeal went the way appeals tend to go, and remained ineffective. But I was told that the flabbergasted Burmese were not so much amazed by the appeal's contents, but by the appended notes on the signatories: “Former leader of Communist junta, now retired”; “Former opposition leader, first president of free Poland, now retired”. So it actually can be done? Retirement rather than hanging?

True: the Burmese generals have made their about-face not out of love for freedom, but because the dictatorship can continue only at the price of getting ever deeper into the embrace of China. It is also true they could still panic – after some armed clash or strident demands for punishing the guilty – and reconsider. And it is especially true that after the euphoria there will be disappointment, for removing the dictatorship does not by itself repair anything: it is only the necessary precondition for real repairs and reparations to be made.

This doesn’t matter. What matters is that Rangoon, which was supposed to become Pyongyang, starts to resemble Warsaw, half a planet away. And if so, it might be possible to entertain the hope that Minsk one day will resemble Rangoon rather than say, Cairo.

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