World leaders pressure UN on Burmese prisoners
Updated
More than 100 former government leaders including Australia's John Howard, have petitioned the UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, to try to secure the release of Burma's pro-independence leader Aung San Suu Kyi and other political prisoners. The letter includes the signatures of former US presidents George Bush senior and Jimmy Carter, former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev and former Asian leaders like Junichiro Koizumi and Corazon Aquino.
They're urging Mr Ban to personally travel to Rangoon before the end of the year to secure the release of over two-thousand political prisoners. Last month, over 100 Burmese monks, journalists, lawyers and relief workers were each given long sentences in prison.
Presenter: Sen Lam
Speaker: Jared Genser, US-based human rights lawyer and founder of "Freedom Now", New York.
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JARED GENSER: Well, I think what we're really looking to do here is to raise the profile of the situation in Burma which has been languishing for many, many years. It's been 18 years since the 1990 elections when the National League for Democracy and its allies won more than 80% of the seats in the parliament and since then the military junta that runs the country has maintained its grip on power and in the last year since the Saffron Revolution in 2007 when the junta gunned down dozens of unarmed protestors in the streets we've seen the number of political prisoners in the country go from 1,200 to almost 2,200, in fact, in the opposite direction that the UN Security Council and the Secretary-General himself have said they wanted to see the country move.
SEN LAM: And, Jared, Burma's junta has shown in the past that it's oblivious to world opinion, so this current campaign, really, the best you can hope for is to keep the issue of political detainees alive in the international arena?
JARED GENSER: Well, you know, I don't think they're entirely impervious to public opinion. I mean, there's no doubt that one of the things that has emboldened them substantially over time has been the fact that international opinion is frankly divided, with the West taking an approach that has tended to be more focused on sanctions and China and Russia and some other countries, particularly in Africa, taking an approach, you know, where they want to, you know, to engage with the junta and end up in discussions. You know, frankly, no approach with the junta has worked and I think that really what we're calling for now is the personal engagement of the UN Secretary-General and it's less about pressure and it's more about him personally raising the profile of the need for national reconciliation in Burma and, you know, using his political capital to try to get a deal done and to end this long frozen stalemate.
SEN LAM: We can understand why you would want a high-profile visit from someone like the Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon but why the deadline of the end of the year? That's not a lot of time?
JARED GENSER: No, it's true. And the reality is, you know, frankly, I don't have any huge expectation that he will make that trip. The deadline actually is put in place for two reasons. One, in late 2007 the Security Council itself called for the early release of political prisoners and second, as is also mentioned in the letter, the the Secretary-General himself, when getting funding for his budget and indeed for a special envoy for Burma for the year 2008, set, as their specific goal for 2008, the release of all political prisoners by the end of the year. So the letter is framed as saying, you know, the UN has said this was its goal for the year and we urge you to press for this to happen by the end of the year but also makes clear, even if he doesn't go to Burma that, regardless, he should make the release of political prisoners a top priority and if nothing happens then he should take this issue back to the Security Council.
SEN LAM: Some people might suggest that it might be even more productive to get current world leaders to come on board and I'm thinking even of perhaps democracies in Asia like India?
JARED GENSER: Sure. Well, look, I mean there's no doubt that current world leaders, you know, are the ones who are going to need to apply the pressure onto the governments to get it done. That said, not surprisingly, given the substantial politics involved for each country bilaterally, multilaterally and otherwise, it would be a much more complicated endeavour to try to do a letter of that sort from numerous governments and so what we really were trying to do here is to show in this case, you know, it was 112 world leaders from more than 50 countries around the world, many world leaders, as you mentioned in your opening piece, from Asia and to show that there is global concern that the world has not forgotten about Burma and the stalemate in that country and people are noticing that, you know in the last month that, you know, literally hundreds of additional political prisoners have been given very lengthy prison sentences for very minor offences and the situation is only getting worse and so we really want to make sure that people don't forget about that key fact.
