Unity Lacking On Diplomatic Approach to Burma's Junta

Monks in Mandalay, Burma's second-largest city, have returned to collecting alms each morning. But in Rangoon, also the scene of protests led by monks last month, few of them are visible. (By Jill Drew -- The Washington Post)

"The government is just playing games," said Bertil Lintner, an author and prominent expert on Burma.

He said it is naive to think that Burma's top military ruler, Senior Gen. Than Shwe, would step aside as a result of a dialogue. Lintner said he believes the government is eating up time, as it has many times before, hoping world attention fades.

One Burmese adviser to last month's protesters, interviewed on condition of anonymity in the back of a darkened coffee shop in Rangoon this week, said he believed that only continued global attention would move the junta into dialogue. He acknowledged that a transition to democracy in Burma would raise difficult problems but said that anything is better than the current state of affairs.

"We are daily faced with depression," he said, describing the many dysfunctional aspects of Burma's economy, most of which is controlled by the military government. "The hard part is to shape a democracy in such a situation. We are a spiritually collapsed, physically poor, economically darkened country."

Still, he welcomes the challenge of a transition to democracy, he said, and thinks other Burmese do, too, especially students. "Most students have been kept out of politics for the past 40 years," he said. "I was afraid they didn't know our political careers, how our generation protested the government. But in September we learned we have many youths willing to sacrifice for the cause."

Debbie Stothard, coordinator of Altsean-Burma, a human rights advocacy group, said she hopes it does not come to that. "We would prefer to avoid another round of bloodshed," she said. "If people came out, it would be a repeat of September. These people cannot defend themselves. Their courage should be matched by the political will of the international community."

She quoted opposition leader Suu Kyi, a Nobel Peace laureate, who in 1994 cited a Burmese saying to describe government stall tactics: "It's very, very difficult to wake somebody up who is pretending to be asleep."