Arrests Speak Louder

Burma's ruling generals feint at dialogue while continuing to lock up the innocent.

TWO YEARS ago, a slight, 34-year-old Burmese woman with a heart ailment sued her local mayor for forcing her and her neighbors to help repair municipal roads for no pay. To everyone's shock, in a repressive nation notorious for forced labor, she won her case, under a national law banning compulsory labor, though the law had never been invoked or enforced. But, as Richard C. Paddock of the Los Angeles Times recounted in an article last year, Su Su Nway paid a price: She was soon sentenced to jail for "insulting and disrupting a government official on duty."

Yesterday, Su Su Nway, having served nine months and been released, was arrested again, along with two associates, for seeking to post anti-government leaflets. Democracy activists also disclosed that two monks who led anti-government protests in September were arrested 10 days ago, and their fates are unknown. One of them, a leader of the All-Burma Monks Alliance who operates under the pseudonym U Gambira, wrote an article that was published on the facing page just before his arrest, when he was on the run from authorities. "It matters little if my life or the lives of colleagues should be sacrificed on this journey," he wrote in that essay. "Others will fill our sandals, and more will join and follow."

What's most striking about the latest arrests is that they occurred just as the regime had admitted into the country, for the first time in four years, the U.N. special rapporteur on human rights, Paulo Sergio Pinheiro, whose goals include discovering how many peaceful protesters have been killed or jailed since the latest crackdown began two months ago. The granting of his visa, and a slight relaxation of the house arrest of democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi, has been cited by some ostensible experts as evidence that the regime wants dialogue and that the outside world should just back off and give it room. The latest arrests provide a chilling but eloquent refutation of that theory.

On the contrary, the regime's latest actions mock and challenge the United Nations in a way that Secretary General Ban Ki-moon can hardly ignore. Nor, one would think, can countries such as China and Russia, which claim to believe that the United Nations should take the lead in such international affairs. Su Su Nway had been ardently supported by the U.N. International Labor Organization; the timing of her arrest is a deliberate insult to Mr. Pinheiro. The regime is likely to engage in dialogue only if it feels it has no viable alternative, and that will happen only if the rest of the world shows seriousness. An arms embargo enforced by the U.N. Security Council; a unified approach by China, India and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations; banking sanctions on junta members and relatives enforced by the United States and Europe -- these are measures the regime could understand.

"They want to send me to prison because they are afraid of me," Su Su Nway said shortly before her earlier confinement. "I have no responsibility, no power and no position. They plot against a common girl, a disease sufferer, and sue her because they are afraid. If they are afraid like that, our side is winning." The world should join her winning side.