Myanmar Does Not Belong In ASEAN

There goes Myanmar once again, hugging the headlines not with any conceivable achievement nor gain, but for yet another unfortunate incident, with the re-arrest of Burmese freedom fighter Aung San Suu Kyi, two months before her house arrest was about to end, as promised by the military junta over there.

We do not condone intervention. But sometimes, enough’s enough. Some boundaries have been crossed.

This most recent talk about Myanmar involves a swimming incident where an American Vietnam War veteran who swam across the Inya Lake to reach her house where she was placed under house detention, for almost 19 years now. And it was about to end, just two months away, now she’s being fully detained in a prison cell. I was asking about why would Ms. Suu Kyi allow some old grungy American person to jeopardize her eventual freedom? And why would the military government there thinks she would do such a foolhardy thing?

I think ASEAN should step in now and do something palpable and patent about Myanmar. Despite that political intervention into each member’s internal affairs is highly restricted as a matter of hard policy, yet I think such application of a policy long established had become so stoic and inflexible, allowing for an irrational political stance such as the ASEAN nonchalance over Myanmar, where even when the military there were already killing their own people, such as the orange-clad Buddhist monks during the so-called “Orange Revolution” last year.

And ASEAN keeps mum, deciding that it doesn’t want to antagonize and isolate Gen. Than Swe’s often bizarre administration. My bad, such foolishness and inanity, I don’t know what it is there for if it could not lift any finger against the notorious junta in Yangon. The European Union had just toughened its sanction against Myanmar and U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had just strongly demanded the release of Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi. And what does ASEAN do, it says it does not want to isolate Myanmar.

Seemingly, the decision could be principled enough since a raucous Myanmar, especially with a patently murderous military junta reigning over there, could affect the overall peace and security situation in the Southeast Asia region, not good for political image outside while ASEAN is angling for EU-style economic integration in a decade or two.

But at least, ASEAN got to do something. ASEAN does not need Myanmar if it continues at this path of repression. When you anything about Myanmar, you’d thought you are transported back to a past and backward generation, where people work in slave camps without fees and eating porridge all the time and where human lives do not seem to have value at all.

EU had to make Poland and Turkey begged on their knees just to be included in the one-market system. But in this side of the world, it’s the other way around, ASEAN had to turn a blind eye so as just to keep Myanmar on its ranks. Now that’s entirely unheard of.

ASEAN should issue some final ultimatum to Myanmar, despotism has no room in ASEAN.