U.N. enters Myanmar upheaval

Published 10:01 pm Saturday, September 29, 2007

NEW DELHI — A U.N. special envoy arrived in Myanmar on Saturday for talks with the country’s military rulers, whose ruthless crackdown on anti-government protesters has sparked international outrage.

The streets of Myanmar’s main city, Yangon, were virtually empty of demonstrators for the first time in nearly two weeks and devoid of the gunfire and chaos that marked three days of violent suppression by soldiers and police. Security forces continued to patrol and seal off parts of the city, including the monasteries whose monks spearheaded the protests.

After landing in Yangon on Saturday afternoon, U.N. envoy Ibrahim Gambari went to Naypyidaw, where the generals who rule Myanmar (also known as Burma) live in relative isolation from the people.

Details of Gambari’s schedule were not available, nor was it clear whether he would be allowed to visit Aung San Suu Kyi, the Nobel Peace Prize winner and pro-democracy leader who has lived under house arrest for most of the last 18 years.

“I expect to meet all the people that I need to meet,” Gambari said before departing for Myanmar. He did not elaborate.

In Washington, D. C., Gordon Johndroe, a spokesman for the National Security Council at the White House, urged Myanmar’s leaders to give Gambari “access to all those he wishes to meet with, including religious leaders as well as Aung San Suu Kyi.”

Gambari’s mission to Myanmar reflects the growing international concern and anger arising from the generals’ brutal clampdown on protesters, in which the government acknowledges that 10 people have been killed. Diplomats and dissident groups estimate the true death toll to be many times that figure, possibility as high as 200.

The demonstrations began last month in response to steep hikes in fuel prices but soon became a vehicle for popular anger over 45 years of autocratic military rule. Last week, as many as 100,000 people marched in central Yangon, including a large number of monks, who are of great moral stature in the deeply Buddhist society.

The uneasy quiet on Yangon’s streets Saturday, however, suggested that the armed crackdown that began Wednesday might have succeeded in containing the biggest challenge to the military’s rule in nearly 20 years.

Internet connections remained cut off, constricting the flow of photographs and video that had helped galvanize world opinion against the junta.

“The strategy is to neutralize the demonstrators, and they seem to have done that very effectively,” said Tim Huxley, executive director of the International Institute for Strategic Studies-Asia.

Human rights organizations and Burmese activist groups in exile have called on leading nations to pressure the junta to eschew using force against its opponents. The U.S. has imposed new sanctions on Myanmar, and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations issued a statement expressing its “revulsion” at the bloody crackdown.

But international condemnation, and efforts such as Gambari’s visit, will probably have little effect, Huxley said.

“External leverage is extremely limited,” he said. “There’s been a variety of external pressure over the years … and none of them have had significant effect.”