Myanmar: Reconciliation — Progress in the Process?

Summary

Two significant, electric developments occurred in 2002 in Myanmar, a country in which political change in the past decade had seemed glacial. The implications and effects of these turns of events, however, remained indeterminate at the year's end. These two events were the release from house-arrest of one important figure and the effective imposition of such arrest on another, and his later death from natural causes. Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, leader of the opposition National League for Democracy (NLD), was freed, and former General (also former President and Chairman of the Burma Socialist Programme Party until 1988) Ne Win and his influential daughter Sanda Win were placed under effective house-arrest. General Ne Win died on 5 December 2002. In a sense his death was an anti-climax. Both developments may have been interrelated. Both should have been causes for optimism. However, at the year's close, frustration and pessimism seemed more prevalent reactions. Although internal events predominated during this period, foreign relations, especially with Thailand, became significant too, and were not divorced from domestic concerns.

The Release of Aung San Suu Kyi

More excitement concerning Myanmar whirled through international circles in 2002 compared with the May 1990 elections in that country and the subsequent year in which Aung San Suu Kyi received the Nobel Peace Prize. At that time, and since 1989, she had been under house-arrest, and was only released in 1995. On 6 May 2002, the military junta, known since 1997 as the State Peace and Development Council (SPDC), released Aung San Suu Kyi after nineteen months of modified, de facto house-arrest, her second, with the promise that she could travel internally and engage politically in rebuilding the opposition National League for Democracy (NLD), with which she has been associated and which the military had methodically castrated through the arrest of many of its key members and the closure of numerous local offices.