From Asia Times:
While Myanmar’s military government cracks down on peaceful protesters, China, as one of the regime’s main benefactors, is being held in some quarters as tangentially co-responsible for the violence.
Although China’s ability directly to influence the regime is limited, Beijing does maintain considerable diplomatic sway in Yangon, and whether it supports new mooted international initiatives against Myanmar’s regime will likely determine their failure or success in affecting change. [Full Text]
Bernt Berger is a research fellow at the Institute for Peace Research and Security Policy, Hamburg (IFSH). Read also Maintained in China by Christopher Hitchens from Slate:
… Those who care or purport to care about human rights must start to discuss this problem in plain words. Is there an initiative to save the un-massacred remains of the people of Darfur? It will be met by a Chinese veto. Does anyone care about Robert Mugabe treating his desperate population as if it belonged to him personally? China is always ready to help him out. Are the North Koreans starved and isolated so that a demented playboy can posture with nuclear weapons? Beijing will give the demented playboy a guarantee. How long can Southeast Asia bear the shame and misery of the Burmese junta? As long as the embrace of China persists. The identity of Tibet is being obliterated by the deliberate importation of Chinese settlers. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, a man who claims even to know and determine the sex lives of his serfs (by the way, the very essence of totalitarianism), is armed and financed by China. It was this way when President Bill Clinton wanted the United Nations to take on Slobodan Milosevic and was stymied (by China, among others), and it was this way when President Bush asked the United Nations to live up to its resolutions on Saddam Hussein. And now I hear human rights activists bleating about Burma and our inaction and simultaneously complaining about the only time that any U.S. president had the nerve to break the hold of China (and Russia, and sometimes France) on the possibility of any international rescue. [Full Text]
