Burma and Ban Ki-moon: Is this the End Game by Kyi May Kaung.

written on Friday. Since then Mr. Ban's mission has failed. See news items. kmk

Burma and Ban Ki-moon: Is this the end game?
By Kyi May Kaung.

In a game of chess, Russian Grandmaster Gary Kasparov says that the end game is when there are very few of both white and black pieces left on the board, and therefore the options are limited. The king is hemmed in or checkmated. (Gary Kasparov, How Life Imitates Chess, 2007).
A chess king after all can only move one square at a time in any direction, and is pretty much behind this wall of other pieces, some of which are considerably more powerful (can move better and knock out opponents better) than the king. For instance, the bishop (representing the church or religion) and the queen (brilliantly powerful, able to move like a bishop as well as like a castle) have more power and maneuverability than a king or a head of state. Pawns, like the people of Burma, are pawns and only if they survive to march across the board can a chess player claim a new queen for a pawn. Clearly, in the Burmese case, the people of Burma are the pawns of the junta, some conscripted and literally forced to walk in front of the Burmese army as human mine sweepers. This has all been well documented over 20 years, through refugee testimonials put together by very reputable human rights groups.
The Burmese pro-democracy struggle against the military junta, the Orwellian “State Peace and Development Council,” has many analogies to the game of chess. The SPDC has brought about neither peace nor development. Previously, its name was even more sinister – SLORC or State Law and Order Restoration Council. But at least the old name was more accurate than the new one. SPDC is all about perpetuating its own power. “Law” is what it writes down as “laws” – but the Burmese people have never had any input into these so-called laws. Case in point, in the early 1960s, Ne Win recalled home the infamous Dr. Maung Maung, a legal scholar, from Cornell University, to single-handedly write the “laws of Burma” for him. Maung Maung was nothing but a stoolie scribe.
Ne Win, the granddaddy of all the present generals, was said to have often played chess. It’s not clear whether he played Burmese chess or western chess, which may be different in its rules or chess pieces. But it is known that generally he played with his guards or subordinates. After all, under a military dictator, the whole country is pretty much the general’s or generals’ subordinates. Subordinates can’t play to beat the general, however brilliant they are. If they win on the board, they might lose their lives. For one thing the power balance is stacked too steeply on one side.
In our Burmese pro-democracy movement, our own leader Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, is playing the role of both a chess king and a queen.
But sadly, because of this uneven or asymmetrical power balance, in which the junta has allowed itself underhand and back-stabbing “dirty moves” which are neither truly legal (not coming from the people) nor ethical, Daw Suu and the National League for Democracy have all been hemmed in both physically and metaphorically. Daw Suu’s and the NLD’s options and freedom of movement, physically and in the policy sphere, have been progressively circumscribed over the years. She has spent 14 of the last 20 years under some form of arrest and now she is in the infamous Insein Jail, that foreign correspondents sometimes mispronounce as “Insane.” Even during her brief periods of relative freedom, she was harassed in many different ways, including having her railway carriage disconnected, being stranded in the countryside for days without any toilet facilities or clean water, having an army officer point a gun at her and threaten her and having her motorcade attacked by junta thugs in the Depayin Massacre, which took place near Depayin in central Burma, on May 30, 2003. Her current round of arrest started then, as did her deputy U Tin Oo’s.
http://www.irrawaddy.org/article.php?art_id=12393
Aung San Suu Kyi and the National League for Democracy’s principal strategic advisor, U Win Tin, was 19 years in jail, sometimes in solitary confinement and in a dog cell, despite his advanced age and poor health. Recently freed, he has always very bravely and loudly spoken up for Daw Suu, Freedom and Democracy, but he recently told a reporter that he was evicted from his home while he was in prison years ago, and now cannot rent a place, as the landlords get nervous. He says he does not know how much more of this he can stand. In a recent photo he looked red-eyed and tired.
Other NLD supporters have died, some in prison. There are at any one time in Burma, over 2000 political prisoners. In Burma you can be imprisoned for a joke, for saying something like “Last night during a storm lightning hit the tallest tree.”
Since the Saffron Revolution of 2007, when Buddhist monks peacefully walked on the streets chanting the Loving Kindness or Metta Suttra, and the disaster of Cyclone Nargis hitting the Irrawaddy Delta in 2008, many monks and people who tried to help storm victims during the Cyclone, have been imprisoned, given very long jail terms and sent to prisons in remote towns in the Burmese gulag.
Over these 21 years since the mass pro-democracy demonstrations of 1988, we have seen the democratic opposition’s numbers depleted by death, attrition and imprisonment. Overseas, the various groups jockey for position and attack each other incessantly, except in perceived times of crisis such as the present. Then at least they have the good grace to pull together, one thinks.
On the other hand the junta has become increasingly sophisticated as well as brutal and nasty. It has added cyber warfare and computer hacking to its skill set.
In this latest move by the junta’s savvy Sr. General Than Shwe, said to have been trained in psychological warfare under Ne Win, and actually said to be able to speak English quite well and use the computer, despite his taciturn look; Aung San Suu Kyi has been charged with harboring an uninvited guest because a middle-aged American Mormon and depressed drifter named John Yettaw, swam to her house and was allowed to stay there by Suu Kyi and her two maids for 2 nights because he pleaded he was tired and had diabetes.
A well-regarded Burmese blog has an audio recording of the taxi driver who said he took Yettaw to Suu Kyi’s house, saying the guest went to the compound by way of the gate house – not swimming across Inya Lake, as the junta charges. His ex-wife told a reporter that he is a timid type and physically unable to swim that far. The Irrawaddy magazine, based in Chiangmai, Thailand, consulted with a scuba diving expert from PADI, who said that all the items that Yettaw is said to have left at Suu’s house, including two chadors and books, would have weighed him down and the home made flippers he used would not have worked very well. The PADI representative said that Yettaw would have had to have been a tri-athlete, to be able to pull that off.
http://www.irrawaddy.org/article.php?art_id=15764
Many people think of Sr. Gen. Than Shwe and the other generals as uneducated buffoons. But in practice, they are very savvy in how they deal or don’t deal with pressure from overseas groups and the foreign media. They know very well that if they make a few token “concessions” and lay low, the perpetually distracted international media will move on in a few days to some other issue.
Just see how news of the Iranian dissidents, dying for their freedom on the streets of their major cities, has been overshadowed by the media blitz over Michael Jackson’s death.
In 2008, Than Shwe played a successful cat and mouse game with the U.N. and the international media, denying access to aid groups during the Cyclone, and then allowing minimal access. Mr. Ban Ki-moon, U.N. Secretary General, was finally allowed in, but shown only show tents in a show camp, occupied by maybe show cyclone victims, a really perverted Potemkin village. In any case most of the aid delivered has probably disappeared. No way was the junta going to allow the USS Essex to dock in Rangoon to deliver supplies.
http://www.essex.navy.mil/default.aspx
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Essex_(LHD-2)
Financially, the junta is now flush with cash, receiving $1 to 1.4 billion from natural gas sales, mostly to Thailand.
http://newsgroups.derkeiler.com/pdf/Archive/Soc/soc.culture.burma/2008-05/msg00035.pdf
http://www.burmalibrary.org/docs4/Gas_Attack-Sean_Turnell.pdf
It has money to spend, which it has spent on the Sr. General’s daughter’s wedding, private accounts in places like Dubai, and on the repressive mechanism (it has had a regular army of 500,000 since the late 80s, some of them forcibly conscripted children or adult civilians of both genders), a new capital city called Naypyidaw or King’s Royal Abode (the wags call it Naypudaw or “Hellishly Hot Place”). Besides this unnecessarily large standing army, the junta also uses Hitlerite Brown Shirt type organizations called the USDA (Union Solidarity and Development Association) and the Swan Arr Shin (Possessors of Strength) which it used to beat up and terrorize citizens in 2003’s Depayin Massacre, during the 2007 Saffron Revolution and in 2008, to block aid from reaching the storm victims in the Irrawaddy Delta.
It has just emerged that N. Korea has helped build tunnels in Naypyidaw, replete with a watchtower “tree” above ground, air vents and booby trap holes lined with punji sticks. Punji sticks are sharpened bamboo spikes smeared with human excrement, a kind of poor man’s biological weapon, in use at least since World War II.
The existence of N. Korean built tunnels in Naypyidaw and in the Shan States in Burma has been reported by veteran Burma and Asia expert Bertil Lintner.
http://www.rfa.org/english/news/burma/burmatunnels-06182009131301.html
Recently (July 1), the North Korean ship, Kang Nam I, the first vessel monitored under U.N. sanctions aimed at punishing the regime for conducting an underground nuclear test in May, and allegedly carrying weapons to Burma, is now reported to have turned around and headed back north.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/07/01/north-korean-ship-may-hav_n_223697.html
Into this murky and complex soup, one U.N. Secretary General falls.
Mr. Ban seemed to head to Burma with high hopes and little else, says Larry Jagan in Mizzima, a Thailand and India-based Burmese dissident news organization.
http://www.mizzimamedia.com/english/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=2347:un-chief-heads-for-burma-with-high-hopes-and-little-else&catid=4:inside-burma&Itemid=3
Ban Ki-moon is in Burma now over the 4th of July weekend, but it is uncertain whether he will be able to see Suu Kyi and the NLD, though the NLD has said they have a scheduled appointment. It is even more uncertain whether the Sr. General will even give Mr. Ban the time of day. However, no one is placing much hope in Mr. Ban, even if he goes talking as he does now of national reconciliation and freeing all political prisoners, including Suu Kyi.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124647558411281981.html
As for the U.N. Special Envoy for Burma, Mr. Ibrihim Gambari, Burmese have even less hope in him. Allegedly, they call him kyauk yu pyan, “take gemstones (as gifts from the junta) and go home.” Apparently, the Burmese junta routinely gives Burmese gemstones such as rubies and sapphires to visiting dignitaries as gifts. In fact, a friend of a friend was shown these “gifts” received by a U.N. or World Bank official. If the “gifts” influenced the outcome of the visit or the behavior of the guest, then of course they are bribes.
We are now in the frustrating and unhappy position of not being able to do much about Burma, except perhaps continuing to raise a well-justified stink. Or super stink. The SPDC is said to have been surprised by the intensity and scope of the worldwide protests against Suu’s continued and illegal detention.
Free Aung San Suu Kyi, all the political prisoners and Burma!

Kyi May Kaung (Ph.D.) is based in the USA and most recently worked for the Burmese democratic government in exile as a senior researcher and analyst. Copyright Kyi May Kaung.