It is known that despots imitate each other. Here is a glaring example. The ethnic apartheid junta in Ethiopia released the leader of a major opposition party, Birtukan Mideksa, shortly after it conducted a fake election in May 2010. Similarly, the military junta in Myanmar (Burma) has decided to release Aung San Suu Kyi, the popular leader of the country’s opposition party, after conducting and winning a fake election last week.
The following is a report by The Telegraph
Aung San Suu Kyi release: the lady goes free but nothing changes
By Ian MacKinnon
On the face of it, Burma will have experienced a tumultuous seven days.
The woman known simply as The Lady to her fellow Burmese will taste freedom. Her worldwide following will cautiously rejoice.
But the more significant event has already happened. Last Sunday’s nationwide election provided the junta with a civilian face for the first time since it seized power in 1962.
It was an outcome that Aung San Suu Kyi, who has been relegated to the sidelines since her National League for Democracy (NLD) dominated the last elections in 1990, was powerless to prevent. Now the generals, many of whom have exchanged their uniforms for lounge suits, are confident they can curtail Mrs Suu Kyi despite her enduring appeal as the rallying point for Burma’s opposition.
When Mrs Suu Kyi’s NLD contested the 1990 poll it was the only serious opposition and it won by a landslide. Now the opposition in Burma has been fractured by Sunday’s elections. A splinter group of the NLD broke away to form the National Democratic Force (NDF) after Mrs Suu Kyi and her party decided to boycott the “sham” poll.
The NDF has so far only garnered a handful of seats out of the 164 it contested, but the divisions in the opposition ranks may dilute the voices raised against the pro-military government.
The Burmese people have been so cowed by years of repression that culminated in the brutal crackdown on the 2007 monk-led “Saffron Revolution” that they would not take to the streets again even if Mrs Suu Kyi issued the call.
Similarly, her impact abroad will be limited by her continued refusal to travel outside her country. The former Oxford housewife fears that she would be permanently exiled if she did.
In common with the jailed Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo, this year’s Nobel Peace Prize winner, she was conspicuously absent from a gathering of Nobel laureates in the Japanese city of Hiroshima yesterday.