Time for Burmese junta to repent

_{^{By Sai Wansai, 8 May 2008}}

 
Better still, if the junta would waive visas, as requested by the UN, for relief workers assembled in nearby Bangkok so they can begin their journey to Burma.
 
The junta knows that the lives of an estimated 3.5 million people in this delta area are at  stake and with its lingering inaction, their chances of survival become dimmer as time goes by.
 
Already, NASA’s satellite images show that the cyclone pounded delta area resembles a “water world”, which is totally flooded.  To date, the region suffered more than 22,000 death, some 41,000 missing and a million or so homeless.  And with the passing days, the death toll has to be corrected upwards. The US envoy in Rangoon is now already toying with the figure of 100,000 deaths, which is quite possible, given the magnitude of devastation.
 
Meanwhile, Gordon D. Johndroe, a White House spokesman said, “Maybe it’s time to bury their pride and finally help their people out for the first time in decades.”
 
Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd begged the junta to allow in large scale humanitarian relief.
 
"Forget politics. Forget the military dictatorship. Let's just get aid and assistance through to people who are suffering and dying as we speak, through a lack of support on the ground," Rudd told reporters in Perth
 
President George W. Bush also asked the military to relax its tight grip and allow aid agencies, governments and the U.S. Navy to help.
 
Against repeated pleas from such quarters, the junta has let in only little aid and has restricted movement in the delta, according to aid agencies. It has not granted visas to aid workers, even though supplies and means of transportation are at ready from nearby countries like Thailand.
 
The frustration to get things moving are so great that French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner, who founded the aid group Doctors Without Borders, told reporters in Paris, “We are seeing at the United Nations if we can’t implement the responsibility to protect, given that food, boats and relief teams are there, and obtain a United Nations’ resolution which authorises the delivery and imposes this on the Burmese government.”

The concept of R2P or “responsibility to protect” was recognised by the United Nations in 2005. Accordingly, if a government failed in its responsibility to protect, either willing or unwillingly, humanitarian intervention could follow, even if this means intervention that violates national sovereignty.

Derek Mitchell, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, summed up that this military regime is extremely paranoid, isolated and xenophobic and the prospect of having all kinds of people from all over the world doing work they cannot really control or even monitor is troubling to them.
 
Regardless of such criticism, the junta should set first priority of helping the suffering and affected people and abandon the forth-coming constitutional referendum nation-wide, which is due to be held in two days. Such an act of good faith would certainly be rewarded and could even pave the way for a smooth transition, where harmonious living, free from hatred, between soldiers and citizens, would become the order of the day.

_{The author is the General Secretary of the exiled Shan Democratic Union - Editor}

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