Humanitarian and political catastrophe in Myanmar

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World news analyst Jesús Torquemada. Photo: EITB

Myanmar’s humanitarian catastrophe took place just one week before next Saturday’s constitutional referendum.

Through that referendum, soldiers who maintain dictatorship in Myanmar for more than forty years try to perpetuate their power even longer.

The new constitution does not establish really democratic changes and for that reason, Buddhist monks, who were involved in a riot last September, and political opposition, represented by the National League for Democracy, appealed to boycott the referendum.

The chief of the Military Junta, general Than Shwe, announced he will call election in 2010; but he has already announced that the opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi, who won 1990 election that were declared null and void by soldiers, should not be a presidential candidate.

Soldiers keep Aung San Suu Kyi under house arrest for eleven years. Aung San Suu Kyi, who won the Nobel Peace Prize, is very much respected by all Burmese and there is no doubt that she would win again if soldiers allowed her to participate in election.

Cyclone Nargis did not affect soldiers. It devastated Myanmar’s coast, where people live in huts made of palm tree leaves.

But soldiers “made” a new capital called Naypyidaw in the middle of the country, where foreigners are not allowed to enter, and they control the whole Myanmar from there. The mystery is if they are going to go ahead with the constitutional referendum in the emergency situation former Burma is leaving.