U.N. Mulls Reengaging Burma With More Aid

International sanctions and Laura Bush‘s personal intervention did not make Burma’s generals ease their political oppression. Neither did quiet diplomacy, nor the devastation of a cyclone.

So the United Nations is attempting a new approach: It is trying to entice the generals with fresh promises of development money. 

By Colum Lynch and Michael Abramowitz
Washington Post Staff Writers
Sunday, December 28, 2008; Page A16

According to senior U.N. officials, special envoy Ibrahim Gambari has proposed that nations offer Burma financial incentives to free more than 2,000 political prisoners, including Nobel laureate Aung San Suu Kyi, and to open the country to democratic change.

In the months ahead, the U.N. leadership will press the Obama administration to relax U.S. policy on Burma and to open the door to a return of international financial institutions, including the World Bank. The bank left in 1987 because Burma, which is officially known as Myanmar, did not implement economic and political reforms.

“It cannot be business as usual. We need new thinking on how to engage with Myanmar in a way that will bring tangible results,” Gambari said in an interview, adding that the United Nations cannot rely simply on “the power of persuasion with too little in the [diplomatic] toolbox.”

But critics characterize the strategy as a desperate attempt to salvage a diplomatic process that has so deteriorated that Suu Kyi and Senior Gen. Than Shwe, Burma’s military ruler, declined to meet with Gambari during his last trip there, in August. Gambari, critics say, is simply grasping to show progress in moving a regime that has no intention of embracing democratic reform.

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