About Chellaney

Professor, strategic thinker, author and commentator

U.S.-India Nuclear Deal: Correct the Sequence

Posted on June 22, 2008 by Chellaney

Put The Ball In Their Court

To help build bipartisan Indian support, let the US present a final deal

Brahma Chellaney

The Times of India, June 19, 2008

The blame game on the nuclear deal has begun in earnest. “It is now an Indian problem”, says Henry Kissinger. “India needs to make some tough choices”, chips in US Commerce Secretary Carlos Gutierrez. Instead of putting the onus on India, why doesn’t the US do its part and present New Delhi a final deal it cannot rebuff? After all, the deal has yet to be ratified by the US Congress or considered by the Nuclear Suppliers’ Group, a cartel the US helped establish in response to India’s 1974 test.

Before India plays its last card, shouldn’t America secure an NSG rule-change and congressional ratification? That card involves taking the safeguards accord to the International Atomic Energy Agency’s governing board for approval. That is a small step, given that the text of the accord has already been finalized and “frozen”. The Americans can now easily take this text to the NSG and their Congress for the necessary approvals so that New Delhi knows the final terms of the deal before it forfeits that last card. Given the distinct possibility of the deal attracting more grating conditions as it traverses the next stages, shouldn’t India know the deal’s closing terms before it approaches the IAEA board? Can India tie its hands before the final deal is clear?

Even a quick look at the original July 18, 2005, agreement-in-principle will show that India’s obligations were merely reciprocal to America’s actions. That accord first lays out America’s obligations, with the President committed to seek “agreement from Congress to adjust U.S. laws and policies, and … work with friends and allies to adjust international regimes to enable full civil nuclear energy cooperation and trade with India”. It then defines India’s part as occurring in return: “The Prime Minister conveyed that for his part, India would reciprocally agree that it would be ready to assume the same responsibilities and practices and acquire the same benefits and advantages as other leading countries with advanced nuclear technology, such as the US”.

Along the way, however, the sequence was reversed, to India’s disadvantage. The original terms also got changed. Today, there is not even the pretence that the deal offers “full civil nuclear energy cooperation”, or that India is set to “acquire the same benefits and advantages” as the US. What is on offer is restricted cooperation tied to conditions that require India, among others, to brook a permanent test ban; to grant an open-ended right to the US to suspend fuel supplies forthwith simply by issuing a one-year termination notice; to forego reprocessing of spent fuel until it has, in the indeterminate future, won a separate, congressionally vetted agreement; and to agree to route not just spent fuel of US-origin but all “foreign nuclear material” through a costly new dedicated reprocessing facility, for which no components are to be allowed to be imported because of a wider continual ban.

The Next Steps in Strategic Partnership (NSSP) initiative was designed to help ease US technology controls against India in three separate areas — high technology, civilian space and commercial nuclear power. These three areas became known as the “trinity”. Yet, instead of a broad deal covering all the “trinity” issues, the US offered a deal in just one area where its commercial interests were dominant — the revival of its moribund nuclear-power industry. An enduring strategic partnership with the US will clearly aid Indian interests. But can such a partnership emerge without the US delivering on the other “trinity” areas — high-technology and civilian space cooperation?

While the nuclear deal has required complex actions — a change in US law, a so-called 123 agreement and a proposed NSG waiver — the opening of civilian space and high-technology cooperation with India merely demanded US executive action. By elastically interpreting existing US law and applying to India the same standards it does to another non-NPT state, Israel, Washington could have opened the doors to civilian space and high-technology cooperation. Instead, the US Congress has audaciously cross-linked civil nuclear cooperation to the continuance of US export controls against New Delhi in another “trinity” area, with the Hyde Act stipulating that US missile sanctions law (which prohibits dual-use space exports) will still apply to India even after it “unilaterally adheres” to the US-led Missile Technology Control Regime as part of the current deal.

That the deal could be subject to even more conditions is a real concern. First, the US has declined to share with India its revised “pre-decisional” proposal to the NSG. Its first proposal, submitted before the Hyde Act’s passage, sought to make the test ban on India a multilateral reality. Its latest proposal is said to add new conditions that mesh with the Hyde Act’s constraints. Second, congressional ratification could follow the 1985 example, when the attachment of three extraneous conditions held up the US-China nuclear deal for 13 years. The Hyde Act indeed states that it will be open to Congress to “pass a joint resolution of approval with conditions” by giving up “the expedited procedures” that permit a simple up-or-down vote.

Before seeking to force India’s hand, the US ought to present a final deal. A deal that comes with “clean” NSG and congressional approvals and with transparent, just terms will win bipartisan Indian support. The ball should now be in America’s court because India has already delivered on issues ranging from a civil-military separation plan to a safeguards accord.

The writer is professor, Centre for Policy Research.

Barack Obama’s legacy weighs down U.S.-India nuclear deal

Posted on June 17, 2008 by Chellaney

Obama’s India-Nuclear Legacy

Whether Obama becomes U.S. president or not, his two 2006 congressional amendments have helped constrain India’s fuel access and room for manoeuvre under the nuclear deal, now in abeyance.

Brahma Chellaney

Asian Age, June 18, 2008

Barack Obama’s epochal political breakthrough in becoming the first black presidential candidate in history of either of the two main U.S. political parties is a tribute to his stump skills and the popular hopes he inspires. In contrast to his aging opponent John McCain, whose conservatism is anchored in the past, the 46-year-old Obama is the candidate for change, offering a distinctly different vision centred on charting a better future.

That is Obama’s real strength. In the Democratic Party primary contest against Hillary Clinton, Obama’s victory underscored a couple of political axioms: Sunny beats sullen, and buoyancy defeats whining.

A first-term U.S. Senator, Obama has come up rapidly. But even as a rookie Senator, Obama left a distinct imprint in congressional deliberations. Take the vaunted U.S.-Indian nuclear deal. The deal, yet to pass several major steps, is currently in limbo. But if it ever takes effect, Obama’s contribution would have been no small in the constraints the U.S. Congress has imposed on civil nuclear cooperation with India.

When the full Senate considered the deal, Obama criticized what he called the “blank cheque” offered to India through the official waiver legislation introduced by the Bush administration in March 2006. Obama’s intervention is recorded in Congressional Record of November 16, 2006:

“Mr. President, I rise today to express my support for the U.S.-India Peaceful Atomic Energy Cooperation Act. As I have said before, I believe strengthening the relationship between our two nations is an important strategic goal and this legislation helps us take a dramatic step in this direction.

“However, like many of my colleagues, I have concerns with potential non-proliferation consequences of this agreement. Much to my disappointment, the administration has done very little to address these concerns, instead, sending draft legislation to the Congress that was essentially a blank cheque.

“The managers of the bill, Senators Lugar and Biden, have done a tremendous job taking the administration’s proposal and shaping it into meaningful, bipartisan legislation. The bill now before the Senate helps move us closer to India while addressing some key non-proliferation issues.

“However, I remain concerned about the issue of nuclear testing. A decision by the Indian government to conduct such a test could trigger an arms race in South Asia that would be extremely dangerous and destabilizing.

“The good news is that the joint statement between President Bush and Prime Minister Singh of July 18, 2005, declared that India’s unilateral moratorium on nuclear testing will continue. I take Prime Minister Singh at his word, but also believe in following President Reagan’s mantra of ‘trust but verify’.”

Obama was not content that the official bill actually attached a legally binding rider to the deal tantamount to dragging India through the backdoor into the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) — a pact the Senate had itself rejected in 1999. While the CTBT grants its parties the right to withdraw by invoking supreme national interest, the official bill put India under a permanent test ban by mandating re-imposition of civil nuclear sanctions in the event of a test — an American action that would leave India’s safeguarded power reactors high and dry in a deal-driven paradigm.

To help further toughen the legislation, Obama introduced two amendments that profoundly reshaped the terms on which India is now being offered the deal.

1. The first amendment was an innovative insertion that imposed fetters on uranium-poor India’s access to fuel, restricting such imports to “reasonable reactor operating requirements.” Obama’s amendment not only undercut the stated raison d’être of the original deal — “full civil nuclear energy cooperation and trade with India” — but also busted Dr. Manmohan Singh’s March 7, 2006, assurance to Parliament that New Delhi would secure the right to build lifetime fuel stocks to guard against supply disruption. Furthermore, it shattered the claim in India’s Separation Plan that, “The U.S. will support an Indian effort to develop a strategic reserve of nuclear fuel to guard against any disruption of supply over the lifetime of India’s reactors.”

Obama’s Senate Amendment 5169, passed by a voice vote, stated: “It is the policy of the United States that any nuclear power reactor fuel reserve provided to the Government of India for use in safeguarded civilian nuclear facilities should be commensurate with reasonable reactor operating requirements.” The House of Representatives had proposed no such restriction. Obama’s amendment, which became Section 114 of the Senate bill, found its way into the final legislation as Section 103 (b) (10) of the Hyde Act.

The amendment’s avowed purpose was to “clarify U.S. policy in order to deter nuclear testing.” That meshed with what Obama stated on the Senate floor. Consider the following exchange in the Senate:

Obama: On a related note, is it the chairman’s interpretation of the legislation that, in the event of a future nuclear test by the Government of India, nuclear power reactor fuel and equipment sales, and nuclear technology cooperation would terminate; other elements of the U.S. -India nuclear agreement would likely terminate; and the U.S. would have the right to demand the return of nuclear supplies?

Lugar: Yes, under our bill, the only requirement which is waived is that in Section 123.a(2) of the Atomic Energy Act of 1954 — for full-scope safeguards. India’s 123 Agreement would still have to meet the requirement of Section 123.a(4), which requires that in the event of a test by India of a nuclear-explosive device, the U.S. shall have the right to request the return of supplies as you have stipulated.

Obama: I offered an amendment that the managers have already accepted pertaining to the supply of nuclear power reactor fuel in safeguarded civilian nuclear facilities. To further clarify this issue, is it the managers’ understanding that provision of fuel to the Government of India should be sized in a way to maintain a deterrent to Indian nuclear testing, while also providing protections against short-term fluctuations in the supply of nuclear fuel? In other words, is it your understanding that providing a fuel reserve to India is not intended to facilitate resumption in nuclear testing?

Lugar: Yes, that is our understanding.

Obama: Does the chairman believe that, as this agreement moves forward to the Nuclear Suppliers’ Group (NSG), the U.S. should work to ensure that other nations provide nuclear power reactor fuel in a similar fashion?

Lugar: Yes, I hope that would be the case.

The “deterrent against Indian testing” Obama sought by keeping India on a tight fuel-access leash is a goal enthusiastically embraced by the full Congress in passing the Hyde Act. According to the Act’s accompanying explanatory statement, the fuel reserve provided to New Delhi should not be “of a size that would enable India to break its commitments, or end its moratorium on nuclear testing, and [still] maintain its civil nuclear energy production despite unilateral or international sanctions.” It also records that U.S. officials, contradicting Dr. Singh’s lifetime-fuel claim in Parliament, had testified that America “does not intend to help India build a stockpile of nuclear fuel for the purpose of riding out any sanctions that might be imposed in response to Indian actions such as conducting another nuclear test.”

Without defining what constitutes a “reasonable” fuel requirement, the Act circumscribes India’s fuel access to “some fresh fuel stored, so as to minimize down time when reactor cores are removed.” In other words, the stockpiling of fuel may be permitted to cover only the next refuelling — a far cry from the lifetime stocks Dr. Singh had pledged.

To further crimp India’s fuel access, the Obama-authored stipulation allowing imports for only reasonable operating needs is coupled with the requirements of Hyde Act’s Section 104 (g) (2) (H) and Section 104 (g) (2) (J) that the President annually estimate the amount of uranium mined in India during the previous year and let Congress know whether the imported uranium had affected India’s rate of production of unsafeguarded fissile material.

Obama’s desire that any exemption for India from the rules of the 45-nation NSG similarly restrict Indian access to foreign fuel will be easy to realize, given that Washington has considerable leverage over the handful of international firms that monopolize the global reactor fuel business. To help maintain a tab on India’s nuclear activities, the Senate bill’s Section 108 (a) stipulated that Congress be kept fully informed on India’s: (i) material non-compliance with any obligation; (ii) new nuclear facility construction; (iii) fissile-material production; and (iv) changes in the operational status of nuclear installations. That provision became the Hyde Act’s Section 104 (g) (1)).

2. Obama helped insert another amendment to ensure that America did not facilitate civil nuclear exports to India by other states, if U.S. exports to New Delhi were terminated under American law. This effectively nullified Dr. Singh’s commitment to Parliament that if fuel shipments were suspended, “the U.S. and India would jointly convene a group of friendly supplier countries … to pursue such measures as would restore fuel supply to India.”

Obama’s amendment became Section 102 (6) in the Senate bill and was incorporated in the Hyde Act as Section 102 (13). Ominously, mirroring Obama’s criterion on “short-term fluctuations”, Congress has recorded that any “assurance of supply arrangements that the U.S. is party to will be concerned only with disruption of supply of fuel due to market failures or similar reasons, and not due to Indian actions that are inconsistent with the July 18, 2005, commitments, such as a nuclear-explosive test.”

To ensure that no firm in another NSG country exported to India on less-stringent terms, the Hyde Act’s Section 104 (g) (2) (C) is identical to the Senate bill’s Section 108 (b) (3) in mandating that the President’s cyclic “Implementation and Compliance Report” to Congress provide a description of any significant commerce between India and other countries that either was inconsistent with NSG guidelines or would not meet standards applicable to U.S.-origin material. The intent behind this provision is to use the threat of sanctions to block a proposed export by, say, a French or Russian firm on less-rigorous terms.

The point here is that Obama’s call for an effective “deterrent” against Indian testing is fully reflected in the final legislation, which aims to ensure that India would have little room for manoeuvre if the U.S. suspended or terminated cooperation. Also, as he desired, the legislation covers U.S. policy and actions in the NSG. It is thus no surprise that Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice assured Congress barely four months ago that any NSG exemption for India will be “completely consistent with the obligations of the Hyde Act.”

Yet, despite this background and his broken promises to Parliament, Dr. Singh, with remarkable insouciance, still pitches for the deal, only to be held back by wiser counsel from Sonia Gandhi. And although a permanent test ban is built into the deal, a despairing Dr. Singh last week chose an unusual setting — a lengthy, prepared speech to less than a dozen service probationers — to make a curious policy pronouncement: “if the CTBT came into being, we will not sign it.” That inexplicably reversed India’s stance that it won’t come in the way of the CTBT’s entry into force.

Whether Obama becomes President or not, his legacy helps constrict India’s access and options under the deal. Indeed, that legacy exposes the myths still driving residual Indian interest in the deal, which Dr. Singh grudgingly acknowledged for the first time “has run into some difficulties.” These myths include the following:

■ the deal offers a magic-carpet ride to resolve India’s self-made uranium crunch by opening the path to unfettered access to foreign fuel;

■ unlike the conditions-laden U.S. waiver, the NSG will grant India a relatively “clean” exemption;

■ once the deal with the U.S. takes effect, New Delhi would gain access to civil nuclear items and materials from France and Russia on more-favourable political terms.

■ soaring oil prices justify greater emphasis on nuclear power.

There is little link between oil and nuclear energy, because oil is primarily used for transportation and the nuclear choice is for electricity generation.

Indeed, such myths show that if the now-stuck deal traverses to the next stages, India will be in for more nasty surprises.

But it is already clear that this deal cannot become a reality while George W. Bush is still President. Time has run out.

For example, to win congressional ratification, the cooperation agreement has to be submitted to Congress — along with a detailed presidential determination on India’s compliance with various preconditions — “for a period of 60 days of continuous session” before a joint resolution for approval can be taken up for consideration by the two legislative chambers. And despite the provision for a simple up-or-down vote — a practice that does not permit any amendment — the Hyde Act states that it will open to Congress to “pass a joint resolution of approval with conditions” by giving up the available “expedited procedures.”

The blunt fact is that it will be an Obama or McCain administration — and a new government in New Delhi — that will have the final say on the deal. The cheerleaders of the deal who have been shouting themselves hoarse thus need to hold their fire.

An Obama triumph — good for America and good for the world — will help add momentum to the U.S.-India relationship by freeing it of the albatross that the deal now represents.

Sikkim in India-China Relations

Posted on June 6, 2008 by Chellaney

Defending against martial arts

After Arunachal Pradesh, China is testing Indian defences in Sikkim

Brahma Chellaney

Hindustan Times, June 6, 2008

After Arunachal Pradesh, Sikkim has become a symbol of China’s hardening stance on territorial disputes with India. The only portion of the 4,057-kilometre Himalayan frontier with India that Beijing accepts as settled is the small 206-kilometre Sikkim-Tibet border, defined by the 1890 Anglo-Sikkim Convention. Yet, that has not prevented China from seeking to drag Sikkim into its boundary disputes with India. Consider the following developments:

One, Chinese forces last November destroyed some makeshift Indian army bunkers near Doka La, at the Sikkim-Bhutan-Tibet trijunction. Two, China now has laid claim to the “Finger Area”, a 2.1-square-kilometre tract that protrudes like a finger over the Sora Funnel valley, at Sikkim’s northernmost tip. Three, it has coupled a threat to destroy the Finger Area’s stone demarcations with a surge in cross-border forays. And four, it has objected to India’s move to beef up defences in the vulnerable Siliguri Corridor — the chicken neck that connects mainland India with the northeast.

Leverage, not soundness or legitimacy, has always defined China’s claims. Take the 1914 McMahon Line, which set the border between the then-independent Tibet and the northeastern stretch of the British Indian Empire extending into Burma. Beijing has accepted the McMahon Line with Burma but not with India, finding it more profitable to rail against that colonial-era line. While playing the Tibet card against India by laying claim to Arunachal on the basis of its putative historical ties to Tibet, China has employed its non-recognition of the McMahon Line to deter New Delhi from utilizing the Tibet card against it.

Before Sikkim merged with the Indian Union in 1975, Beijing had publicly accepted the 19th-century border line between Sikkim and Tibet. That is how Beijing got saddled with contradictory positions: rejection of the McMahon Line with India as a colonial imposition but acceptance of the Anglo-Sikkim Convention of older colonial vintage, even though the convention had been imposed on the Manchu Qing dynasty when it was unravelling. But given its revisionist craving against a status-quoist India, China is not the one to allow any contradiction to tame its primordial territorial urge.

India’s lamb-like approach has only been grist to the Chinese leverage-building mill. From Nehru’s grudging acceptance of Chinese suzerainty on Tibet to Vajpayee’s blithe recognition of Chinese sovereignty over Tibet, India has incrementally shed its main card — Tibet — and thereby allowed the aggressor state to shift the spotlight from its annexation of Tibet and Aksai Chin to its claim on Arunachal and assertiveness on Sikkim. Not surprisingly, India has failed to persuade China to agree even to a mutually defined line of control.

Take Sikkim. It is New Delhi that turned Sikkim into a bilateral issue, arming Beijing with leverage. Although Beijing had declined to accept Sikkim’s change of status from an Indian protectorate to an Indian state, no PM until Vajpayee attempted to raise that issue with China. The Sino-Indian disputes involve large chunks of territory, while Sikkim is not only a tiny state, but also Beijing has neither laid claim to it nor disputed its boundary. So China’s insistence on ploughing a lonely furrow on Sikkim was of little consequence.

If Beijing’s depiction of Sikkim as independent was germane to any issue, it was to its own oft-thrown bait of a “package settlement” with India. Sikkim, and the trans-Karakoram tract in occupied Kashmir that Pakistan ceded to China in 1963, do not fall in any of the three Chinese-identified sectors with India — eastern, middle and western. It was to probe whether the “package settlement” idea was a diversionary ruse or a plausible proposal that Indian negotiators, from the time the ongoing border talks began way back in 1981, quietly sought clarity on China’s Sikkim stance. The steadfast Chinese refusal to enter into a discussion either on the specifics of a possible package or on the gaps, as on Sikkim, showed that the ostensible offer was little more than rhetorical bait.

India’s China policy, however, was steered into uncharted waters in June 2003, when Vajpayee visited Beijing, two months after he had reversed course on Pakistan. Desperate in the twilight of his political career to fashion a legacy as a peacemaker, Vajpayee kowtowed in Beijing. He shifted India’s long-standing position on Tibet from it being an “autonomous” region within China to it being “part of the territory” of China. He linked his Tibet concession with supposed Chinese flexibility on Sikkim. Having turned Sikkim from a non-issue into a bilateral issue, he claimed credit for beginning “the process by which Sikkim will cease to be an issue in India-China relations”.

Five years later, China is seeking to ensure Sikkim will not cease to be a bilateral issue. After all, it has got what it wanted, including the Vajpayee-initiated reopening of the ancient Tibet-Sikkim trade route. It even got Vajpayee to accept a new border-talks framework focused on the illusive “package settlement”, allowing it to renege on its commitment to present maps showing its version of the frontline. That the border talks today have run aground is no accident: the new mechanism was intended to take India round and round the mulberry bush.

India’s diplomatic naïveté can be astonishing. During Premier Wen Jiabao’s 2005 visit, one of his officials handed a new Chinese map showing Sikkim in the same colour as India. Promptly, then Foreign Secretary Shyam Saran displayed that map before the media to triumphantly claim that Beijing had “recognized” Sikkim as part of India. He was followed by Manmohan Singh, who told the Lok Sabha on April 20, 2005: “During my meeting with Premier Wen, he stated that China regarded Sikkim as an ‘inalienable part of India’, and that Sikkim was no longer an issue in India-China relations”.

But has Beijing itself made any such statement to date unequivocally recognizing Sikkim as part of India? The answer is no. The clever practitioner of diplomacy that it is, Beijing has broken the Sikkim issue into umpteen parts, doling out two morsels to get New Delhi to open trade through the strategic Nathula Pass — a one and only reference to the “Sikkim state of the Republic of India”, found in a trade-related paragraph in a 2005 joint statement; and its cessation of cartographic aggression without any formal statement recognizing Sikkim’s present status, thus leaving open the option to resume the cartographic mischief at a later date if circumstances warrant. Also, the trade-related reference to the Sikkim state of India is as empty as the 1954 Panchsheel Agreement’s reference to specific mountain passes and posts, which Nehru misconstrued as Chinese recognition of the Indo-Tibetan frontier despite Beijing saying it had signed a border-trade accord and not a border accord.

Contrast this wily approach with the callow way India has forfeited its bargaining chips. The more India has stripped itself of leverage, the more emboldened and hardline China has become. The government conceded in the Lok Sabha on April 22 that Chinese forces have stepped up “regular cross-border activities” in the past “three years”. More than three dozen Chinese forays into Sikkim alone have been reported so far this year.

Today, as China aggressively probes Indian defences in Sikkim and keeps New Delhi under psychological pressure, India ought to realize its own contribution to encouraging such assertiveness. The newly opened army memorial near Nathula to the 267 martyrs who laid down their lives defending Sikkim against attacking Chinese forces in 1958, 1962 and 1967 is also a cenotaph to India’s reluctance to learn from the past.

Map courtesy The Economist, May 1999

U.S. Policy on Burma

Posted on June 6, 2008 by Chellaney

El celo de la primera dama

LA VANGUARDIA, May 31, 2008

Por Brahma Chellaney, profesor de estudios estratégicos del Centro de Investigación Política de Nueva Delhi:

Un desastre natural suele ser ocasión propicia para apartar a un lado las diferencias políticas y mostrar compasión. No obstante, la Birmania devastada por el ciclón, gobernada por elites militares ultranacionalistas y rapaces, temerosas de sanciones de parte de Occidente, se ha visto presionada para franquear sus áreas devastadas a la ayuda humanitaria o bien enfrentarse a una intervención armada de signo asimismo humanitario.

La politización de la ayuda ha oscurecido el papel de una protagonista cuyos esfuerzos han contribuido a ejercer mayores presiones sobre los generales birmanos. En cuanto el ciclón Nargis,con vientos de hasta 190 kilómetros por hora, devastó el delta del Irawadi, la esposa del presidente Bush, Laura, lanzó públicamente improperios contra los aislados gobernantes birmanos. En una comparecencia sin precedentes en la sala de prensa de la Casa Blanca – dominio tradicional del presidente y del secretario de Estado- Laura Bush peroró sobre política exterior y acusó a la junta birmana del elevado número de víctimas del ciclón. Y en diciembre, Laura Bush dijo en Nueva Delhi que “India, uno de los principales socios comerciales de Birmania, ya no vende armas a la junta”, para sorpresa de la audiencia.

A decir verdad, siendo China un suministrador de armas de confianza desde hace 20 años y pudiendo abastecerse de armas a través de Singapur y Rusia, la junta apenas precisa de armamento indio. India, en cualquier caso, tampoco llevará la contraria a la primera dama estadounidense, imbuida de furor moral y religioso.

Por otra parte, no es difícil optar por la prédica ética contra Birmania, uno de los países del mundo más endebles y en situación más crítica. Sancionar a Birmania de vez en cuando se había convertido en un pasatiempo tan dilecto al presidente Bush que sólo 24 horas antes del ciclón anunció otra tanda de sanciones. Ninguna instancia mundial, sin embargo, ha llegado a sugerir medidas penales (moderadas) contra China por su permanente represión brutal en Tíbet, pues las sanciones acarrearían pérdida de empleos y otros inconvenientes económicos a Occidente.

De hecho, incitado por su esposa, Bush ha firmado más medidas para sancionar a Birmania en los últimos cinco años que contra cualquier otro país. La cruzada de Laura Bush contra la junta militar que se considera a sí misma defensora de la unidad e identidad cultural birmana, predominantemente budista, obedece a la inspiración encarnada en algunas iglesias cristianas que cuentan con notables minorías étnicas, aparte de una reunión mantenida al parecer en aquel país con una víctima cristiana de una violación. En cambio, tanto Laura Bush como su marido encontraron la senda despejada en relación con una intervención militar en la política de países vecinos de Birmania, como Bangladesh y Tailandia.

Aunque la junta militar birmana accedió al poder en 1962, las primeras sanciones estadounidenses de importancia no llegaron hasta 1997. No obstante, el punto de mira sobre Birmania se fijó con mayor precisión y fuerza bajo el mandato de Bush.

Actualmente, Birmania se halla atrapada entre las sanciones lideradas por Estados Unidos y la creciente influencia de China. Azuzado por el diablo que le pisa los talones, el país se inclina hacia el profundo mar azul de la benevolencia china.

Al tratar a Birmania como un títere en el marco de un juego geopolítico más amplio e intentar llevar al país ante el Consejo de Seguridad de las Naciones Unidas, la Casa Blanca no hace más que aumentar la necesidad de protección política de la junta procedente de una China dotada de poder de veto, con la consiguiente obligación de agradecer tal protección a Pekín. Muestra de ello ha sido la firma de un contrato gasista de 30 años de vigencia.

Las iniciativas estadounidenses no sólo han obligado a Birmania a desplazarse del no alineamiento al alineamiento, sino que han motivado una dependencia mayor de la política estadounidense respecto de Pekín en lo concerniente a Birmania.

Como en el caso de Corea del Norte, Bush externaliza alegremente en China una parte de su política con relación a Birmania. Sin embargo, la política estadounidense acusa también el peso del celo misionero de Laura Bush sobre Birmania. Lejos de mejorar la situación de los derechos humanos en el país, este miope activismo ha contribuido a reforzar a la junta. La amenaza de una invasión por causas humanitarias de Birmania hiede a recurso desesperado y apunta a un deseo de valerse de la herramienta humanitaria para provocar un cambio político.

Ahora resulta que una mujer no electa ni titular de responsabilidad alguna secuestra la política de Estados Unidos para promover paradójicamente elecciones libres y responsabilidad pública en Birmania. Y el doblemente electo y renacido cristiano Bush da fe de hallarse bajo la influencia de su esposa, como se constata mediante la expresión “Laura y yo” en su último anuncio de sanciones contra Birmania.

Pero, como dice la Biblia, “no hay peor ciego que el que no quiere ver”.

Hush! Hush! Not A Word

Posted on June 5, 2008 by Chellaney

Strategic Imperative/Brahma Chellaney

Hush-Hush is Bush Word on Nuclear Deal

Brahma Chellaney

Covert magazine, June 1-15, 2008

The more the Indo-US deal has progressed, the more the conditions it has attracted and the greater the consequent imperative to keep key elements under wraps. Nearly three years after it was unveiled as a “historic” breakthrough in US-Indian relations, the deal’s future remains uncertain. Even if Prime Minister Manmohan Singh were to rupture his party’s relationship with the Left by taking the deal to the governing board of the International Atomic Energy Agency, can he ensure that the deal will take effect without attracting more odious conditions at the subsequent stages involving the 45-nation Nuclear Suppliers’ Group and the US Congress? The deal has already divided India. And the possibility that the deal will get the final clearances without the attachment of further grating conditions seems remote. A showdown with the Left will break the present government without guaranteeing a final deal on largely palatable terms.

In any event, a deal of such strategic import that will lock India in perpetual, legally irrevocable commitments with the IAEA and arm the US with leverage ought not to be turned into a partisan issue domestically. Just as the Bush administration ensured congressional passage of the Hyde Act with bipartisan support, even if it meant loading the legislation with conditions unrelated to civil nuclear cooperation, Dr. Singh needs to build what he had promised long ago — a broad national consensus in support of the deal. To press ahead without such consensus would be a betrayal of national trust. In fact, that act would be doubly ironical: not only has the Indian Parliament been shut out from closely scrutinizing the deal, the US Congress will get a second chance to examine the deal when it comes in its final form, with the approval contingent on bipartisan support.

In that light, the Bush administration’s latest gag order on its written responses to congressional questions is an attempt to keep the Indian public in the dark on the deal’s larger and long-term implications. With New Delhi revealing little from the beginning, the Indian public had depended on US disclosures to understand the meaning of the various twists and turns in a continuing saga. But in recent months, new information has been hard to come by, with US officials becoming tight-lipped and the administration asking Congress to keep under wraps information that ought to be in the public domain.

Why all this secrecy about information the executive branch has shared with the legislature? Even though the deal is between the world’s largest and most-powerful democracies, hush-hush is the word on both sides. Take New Delhi’s own posture. It has refused to explain to Parliament and the public why it has willingly accepted an array of conditions under the bilateral 123 Agreement — conditions that range from India’s grant of an open-ended right to the supplier to suspend supplies forthwith simply by issuing a one-year termination notice, to the absence of any dispute-settlement mechanism such as an international arbitral tribunal that finds mention in the Japan-US 123 Agreement.

Even the men roped in by the government have not been very forthcoming on why they now support the deal. Take A.P.J. Abdul Kalam and Brajesh Mishra. Mishra has gone from being a critic to a proponent without explaining his volte face. All he says is that he was officially briefed and now “hopes” and “believes” the deal is no longer detrimental to Indian interests. But why doesn’t he share with the public any new facts or information he has received? Kalam’s coming out in support of the deal raises even more troubling questions. In 1999, as defence adviser, he came out publicly in support of India’s signature on the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. Now he lends support to a deal that drags India through the backdoor into the CTBT. He has declared, “If at any time there was a fear that national security would be compromised … we can at any time withdraw (from the deal)”. That suggests he hasn’t studied the deal: the 123 Agreement, for instance, makes explicitly clear that once it enters into force, India cannot free itself of its obligation to maintain international inspections in perpetuity on its entire civil nuclear programme.

Can pompous personal opinions help sideline or suppress hard facts? Given that India still does not have minimum deterrence against China, how justifiable is New Delhi’s focus on deal-making rather than on deterrent-building? And will playing hush-hush rescue a misbegotten deal?

Brahma Chellaney is Professor of Strategic Studies at the Centre for Policy Research, New Delhi.

Eastward movement of global power and influence

Posted on May 31, 2008 by Chellaney

The Orient Express

Brahma Chellaney
May 29, 2008 India Today

Rivals: How The Power Struggle Between China, India And Japan Will Shape Our Next Decade by Bill Emmott Allen Lane Price: Rs 795, Pages: 328 The Second World: Empires And Influence In The New Global Order by Parag Khanna Allen Lane Price: Rs 695, Pages: 496 The eastward movement of power and influence, once concentrated in the West, is now the subject of an increasing number of books that are coming out by the dozen. These two volumes belong to this genre. While Bill Emmott’s focus is on the three largest Asian powers, Parag Khanna looks at the global geopolitical marketplace and determines the likely winners and losers. Emmott’s diffidence to put forward a central thesis is more than made up for by Khanna’s boldness in sketching out the next generation of global geopolitics. They symbolise different styles and generations. The changing global equations are reflected in new realities. These include the waning relevance of the international structures the US helped establish after its World War II triumph; the rise of Asia as the world’s main creditor and economic locomotive; and greater international divisiveness, including on core global challenges. While the world is not yet multipolar, it is no longer unipolar, as it had been from the time of the Soviet Union’s collapse till the end of the 1990s—a period during which America failed to fashion a new liberal world order under its direction. What we have today is a world still in transition. The ongoing power shifts are linked to Asia’s phenomenal economic rise, the speed and scale of which has no parallel in world history. The seat of ancient civilisations and home to the majority of the world’s population, Asia is bouncing back after a relatively short period of decline in history. Its share of the world’s economy had totalled 60 per cent in 1820, at the advent of the industrial revolution, declining sharply over the next 125 years. Today, Asia already accounts for 40 per cent of global production—a figure that could rise to 60 per cent by 2050, when three of the world’s four largest economies (China, India, the US and Japan) would be Asian. Asia’s rise, while promoting greater international equity, need not necessarily mean the decline of the West. There is little evidence to suggest Asia is rising at the expense of the West. The spread of prosperity will signify more stakeholders in peace and stability. The EU’s attraction, for example, lies in its readiness to share the European pie with new member-states it admits into its fold. Shared interests entail shared responsibilities. That, in turn, promotes a greater distribution of power. But like some other authors, Khanna and Emmott have rushed to conclude that the spread of prosperity to more countries implies the diminution of the power of the US. American pre-eminence, Emmott writes, “will soon be over (if it is not already), and for reasons more fundamental and enduring than America’s post-Iraq weakness”. Khanna is more blunt: the moment of US supremacy is over, replaced by the imperative to “renew American competitiveness”. According to Khanna, “America’s imperial overstretch is occurring in lockstep with its declining economic dependence, undermining the very foundation of its global leadership”. America’s vulnerabilities can no longer be hidden. Today, the US is the world’s leading debtor and top importer of both manufactured goods and oil, and runs by far the largest current account deficit. A shift towards multipolarity is unstoppable, with the emergence of major new players. But for the next several decades, the US will easily remain the world’s most powerful state militarily and will also be the leader in scientific innovations. In 2050, the US is likely to still be influential enough to do almost anything, but not powerful enough to do everything by itself. Emmott’s China-India-Japan theme has seemingly been inspired by this reviewer’s 2006 book, Asian Juggernaut: The Rise of China, India and Japan, the first study of that strategic triangle. But Emmott’s book, contrary to its title, focuses not on the “power struggle” between these “rivals” and how that will “shape our next decade”, but on their supposed strengths and their determination to regain their historical power. More journalistic than scholarly, the book makes desultory recommendations— half of them addressed to the US—that have little to do with its title. Khanna’s easy-to-read, insightful book offers a rich tour of the emerging geopolitical landscape stretching from Asia and the Middle East to Eastern Europe and South America. He sees the US, EU and China as the only great powers and clubs dozens of other countries, including India, Russia and Japan, as the new “Second World”, comprising swing-states that will determine which superpower gains the upper hand. The geopolitics of the 21st century, he writes, will centre on the “new Big Three”—not Russia, a petrostate facing depopulation and run by the “Kremlin-Gazprom oligarchy”; not the Islamic world; and not India, which he sees as lacking both clear, long-term goals and strategic appetite. History testifies that without establishing primacy in its own neighbourhood, no country has sustained itself as a great power. But India continues to be tormented even by smaller neighbours. So Khanna’s scepticism on India may be right. Khanna’s projected big picture appears less plausible: the Big Three will make the rules for all, and the other states will be left merely to “choose their suitors in this post-American world”. He forgets that his Big Three have interests that won’t be easy to reconcile, posing a hurdle to their rule-setting. While China wants a multipolar world and a unipolar Asia, the US wants a multipolar Asia but a unipolar world. Despite having travelled to some 40 “Second-World” countries to research the book, Khanna speciously concludes that these states are destined to play second fiddle to the “Big Three”. He couldn’t be more wrong. (c) India Today, 2007

An Unelected Laura Bush Holds America’s Burma Policy Hostage

Posted on May 24, 2008 by Chellaney

Missionary Diplomacy

Laura Bush’s Burma crusade, driven by a moral and religious calling, has increasingly pushed that strategically located country into China’s strategic lap while undercutting Indian interests.

Brahma Chellaney

Asian Age, May 24, 2008

A natural calamity is usually an occasion to set aside political differences and show compassion. But after a powerful cyclone tore into Burma’s Irrawaddy Delta on the night of May 2-3, that isolated country — ruled by ultra-nationalistic but rapacious military elites deeply distrustful of the sanctions-enforcing West — came under mounting international pressure to open up its devastated areas to foreign aid workers and supplies or face an armed humanitarian intervention.

Such threats have helped lay a tentative framework for an ASEAN-led aid operation, a middle option that is supposed to end an impasse over the Burmese regime’s refusal to allow the entry of foreign relief teams other than from the Asian states it considers friendly, including India, China, ASEAN members and Japan. But even as the United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has toured the cyclone-wracked areas, the World Food Programme has brought in helicopters, and aid teams from India and other neighbouring nations continue their work, the junta still faces intense pressure from the sanctions-applying states to throw open Burma’s borders to Western relief workers.

The murky politics of international assistance has helped obscure the role of a key actor whose growing activism in recent years has helped turn up the heat on the Burmese generals. The increasingly outspoken Laura Bush, the first lady of the US, has emerged as the main driver of America’s Burma policy.

No sooner had Cyclone Nargis, packing winds up to 190 kilometres per hour, battered the Irrawaddy Delta than President George W. Bush’s wife stepped out in public to toss insults at Burma’s military rulers. In an unprecedented spectacle, the first lady showed up at the White House briefing room — normally the preserve of the president and secretary of state — and held forth on foreign policy, blaming the junta for the high death toll. The next day, as announced by Laura Bush, President Bush presided at a ceremony awarding the Congressional Gold Medal to the detained leader of Burma’s democracy movement, Aung San Suu Kyi.

In the twilight of her husband’s presidency, the 61-year-old Laura Bush — a former librarian — has left no one in doubt on who directs Burma policy in Washington. In a prepared statement that she read out at the White House briefing room on May 5 before taking questions from reporters, she thanked “the European Union, Canada and Australia for joining the United States in imposing” sanctions, and went on to “appeal to China, India and Burma’s fellow ASEAN members to use their influence to encourage a democratic transition.”

Last December, Laura Bush caught New Delhi by surprise by announcing that, “India, one of Burma’s closest trading partners, has stopped selling arms to the junta.” To date, New Delhi has made no such announcement.

With China serving as a reliable weapon supplier for the past two decades and access to arms also available via Singapore and Russia, the junta has little need for India’s low-grade, mostly second-hand, arms. But New Delhi has dared not say a word in contradiction to Mrs. Bush’s statement during a December 10, 2007, video teleconference on International Human Rights Day. Who can refute a first lady whose fury on Burma flows from a moral and religious calling?

It is easy to play the morality game against Burma, ranked as one of the world’s critically weak states.

Slapping Burma with new sanctions every so often has become such a favourite Bush pastime that just one day before the cyclone struck, the president announced yet another round of punitive actions. But no one in the world has suggested any penal measure, however mild, against China for its continuing brutal repression in Tibet because sanctions would bring job losses and other economic pain to the West.

In fact, egged on by his wife, Bush has signed more executive orders in the past five years to penalize Burma than any other country.

Mrs. Bush’s crusade against the Burmese military, which sees itself as the upholder of a predominantly Buddhist Burma’s unity and cultural identity, has been inspired by three separate elements: (i) information from some of the Christian churches that have sizable ethnic-minority adherents in that country; (ii) a meeting she reputedly had with a Christian Karen rape victim; and (iii) the briefings she received from Elsie Walker Kilborne, a cousin of President Bush. By contrast, she and her husband have had little problem with the military’s intervention in politics in Burma-neighbouring Bangladesh and Thailand.

Such is Laura Bush’s activism that last September it was she, not the president, who telephoned Ban ki-moon and called for the UN to be more active on Burma. Earlier, in 2006, she moderated a roundtable discussion at the UN that sought to draw attention to the junta’s political repression. She has condemned the regime not just in official statements and congressional testimony, but also in two opinion articles published last year in the Wall Street Journal.

In an October 2007 article, titled “Stop the Terror in Burma,” she put forth her demand clearly: “Gen. Than Shwe and his deputies are a friendless regime. They should step aside to make way for a unified Burma governed by legitimate leaders. The rest of the armed forces should not fear this transition — there is room for a professional military in a democratic Burma. In fact, one of Burma’s military heroes was also a beloved champion of Burmese freedom: General Aung San, the late father of Aung San Suu Kyi.” She added: “The regime’s position grows weaker by the day. The generals’ choice is clear: The time for a free Burma is now.” In an earlier June 19, 2007, op-ed, she said: “The Burmese regime poses an increasing threat to the security of all nations.”

In May 2007, Mrs. Bush enlisted 16 women Senators to join her in sending a signed letter to Ban Ki-Moon calling for the U.N. to pressure the Burmese regime to release Suu Kyi. And since last year, she has repeatedly met with the UN’s special envoy for Burma, Ibrahim Gambari.

After her phone call to the UN secretary-general created a public stir, she said: “I think that this is sort of one of those myths that I was baking cookies and then they fell off the cookie sheet and I called Ban Ki-moon.” That comment harked back to Hillary Clinton’s famous remark during her husband’s presidency that she was not one to stay home and bake cookies.

This week, as the junta still refuses to accept aid from four US naval ships that have been waiting in the Bay of Bengal with 1,000 Marines, 14 helicopters, and 15,000 water containers and purifying kits on board, Laura Bush went on the Voice of America — a US Congress-funded broadcaster with a Burmese language service — to tell the regime that it has nothing to fear and that “there would be absolutely no strings attached with this aid.”

The unpalatable fact is that her angry denunciations right after Cyclone Nargis had struck only contributed to the junta’s resistance to allowing Western relief workers to enter, deepening the aid crisis. As the Los Angeles Times reported on May 10, 2008, quoting several critics, “the administration’s harsh comments were poorly timed and risked reinforcing the government’s suspicions of the outside world and undermining the humanitarian effort.”

Although the Burmese military seized power in 1962, the first substantive U.S. sanctions, tellingly, did not come until 1997, when a ban on further American investments to “develop Burma’s resources” was reluctantly clamped by President Bill Clinton. But it was only under Bush that Burma emerged as a major target of U.S. sanctions.

Escalating sanctions have compelled a country whose nationalism has traditionally bordered on xenophobia to increasingly rely on China, even as its rulers still suspect Chinese intentions. Today, Burma finds itself trapped between U.S.-led sanctions and growing Chinese leverage over its affairs.

But with the devil close on its heels, Burma — which Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has labelled an “outpost of tyranny” — has moved toward the deep blue sea of Chinese “benevolence.”

For a resource-hungry China, Burma has proven such a treasure trove that some northern Burmese provinces today stand stripped of their high-quality tropical hardwoods and precious gemstones. Beijing also has used Burma as a dumping ground for cheap Chinese products, besides running large trade surpluses with that impoverished country.

Aided by Western disengagement from Burma, Chinese entrepreneurs, traders, money lenders, craftsmen and others have flocked to that country, now home to between one to two million Chinese economic migrants. With their higher living standards setting them apart from the natives, these migrants constitute Burma’s new economic class.

While unintentionally aiding Chinese interests, the US-led penal campaign has cost New Delhi dear, reflected in China’s setting up of listening posts and other moves in Burma that open a security flank against India. In the Bush years, India has been losing out even on commercial contracts.

By treating Burma as a pawn in a larger geopolitical game and seeking to drag it before the United Nations Security Council, the White House only increases the junta’s need for political protection from a veto-armed China, with the consequent Burmese imperative to reward Beijing for such defence.

One reward to China for stepping in twice last year to shield Burma in the Security Council has been a 30-year contract to take gas by pipeline from two offshore fields owned by an Indo-Korean consortium. The junta first withdrew the status of India’s GAIL company as the “preferential buyer” of gas from the A-1 and A-3 blocks in the Bay of Bengal and then signed a production-sharing contract with China’s state-run CNPC firm.

The U.S. penal measures and moves have not only forced Burma to shift from its traditional policy of nonalignment to alignment, but also driven U.S. policy to become dependent on Beijing for any movement on Burma.

This is apparent both from the way the US has pleaded with China this month to use all its influence to press the junta to open up the cyclone-battered areas to outside relief efforts, and from the secret mid-2007 US meeting with Burmese ministers that was held at America’s initiative in Beijing.

The Beijing meeting, held without prior US consultations with India, Japan and ASEAN states, came six months after China had torpedoed a Security Council draft resolution tabled by the US and Britain that called on the Burmese regime to halt military attacks on ethnic minorities, release iconic opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi and other political prisoners, and begin a democratic transition. By taking China’s help to set up a meeting between its deputy assistant secretary of state and senior Burmese government representatives, the US only helped validate Beijing’s rationale for maintaining close contact with the junta.

Like on North Korea, Bush is blithely outsourcing to China parts of the US policy on Burma. But on Burma, US policy is also weighed down by Laura Bush’s missionary zeal.

Far from improving human rights in Burma, the blinkered activism has helped strengthen the military’s political grip. Recent threats of a humanitarian invasion of Burma indeed reeked of desperation, suggesting a callous willingness to employ food aid in a disaster situation to try and effect political change.

Today, an unelected, unaccountable woman holds US policy hostage to paradoxically promote free elections and public accountability in Burma. And her twice-elected, twice-born Christian husband — whom she persuaded to quit drinking at age 40 — attests to being under his wife’s sway through the “Laura and I” reference in his latest Burma-sanctions announcement. But as the Bible says, “There is none so blind as he who will not see.”

© Asian Age, 2008.

(Photograph at top shows Laura Bush meeting Karen and other minority-ethnic representatives from Burma at the White House, along with a U.S. congressman and an American adviser to the Karen National Union. Photograph released by the White House.)

Laura Bush’s activism on Burma

Posted on May 23, 2008 by Chellaney

A first lady’s diplomatic mission

Laura Bush’s crusade against Burma’s ruling junta only helps to push it closer to China

By BRAHMA CHELLANEY

Japan Times, May 22, 2008

A natural calamity is usually an occasion to set aside political differences and show compassion. But Burma, ruled by ultranationalistic but rapacious military elites distrustful of the sanctions-enforcing West, came under mounting international pressure to open up its cyclone-wracked areas to foreign aid workers and supplies or face an armed humanitarian intervention.

Such threats helped lay the framework for an ASEAN-led aid operation, a middle option that ended an impasse over the Burmese regime’s refusal to allow the entry of foreign relief teams other than from the neighboring states it considers friendly, including India, China, Southeast Asian nations and Japan.

The politics of international assistance, however, has obscured the role of a key actor whose growing activism in recent years has helped turn up the heat on the Burmese generals.

No sooner had Cyclone Nargis, packing winds up to 190 km per hour, devastated Burma’s Irrawaddy Delta than U.S. President George W. Bush’s wife, Laura Bush, stepped out in public to toss insults at that isolated country’s military rulers. In an unprecedented spectacle, the first lady showed up at the White House briefing room — normally the preserve of the president and secretary of state — and held forth on foreign policy, blaming the Burmese junta for the high death toll.

In a prepared statement that she read out on May 5 before taking questions from reporters, she thanked "the European Union, Canada and Australia for joining the United States in imposing" sanctions, and went on to "appeal to China, India and Burma’s fellow ASEAN members to use their influence to encourage a democratic transition."

Last December, Laura Bush caught New Delhi by surprise by announcing that "India, one of Burma’s closest trading partners, has stopped selling arms to the junta." To date, New Delhi has made no such announcement.

With China serving as a reliable weapon supplier for the past two decades and access to arms also available via Singapore and Russia, the junta has little need for India’s low-grade, mostly secondhand, arms. But New Delhi has dared not say a word in contradiction. Who can refute a first lady whose fury on Burma flows from a moral and religious calling?

It is easy to play the morality game against Burma, ranked as one of the world’s critically weak states.

Slapping Burma with new sanctions every so often has become such a favorite Bush pastime that just one day before the cyclone struck, the president announced yet another round of punitive actions. But no one in the world has suggested any penal measure, however mild, against China for its continuing brutal repression in Tibet because sanctions would bring job losses and other economic pain to the West.

In fact, egged on by his wife, Bush has signed more executive orders in the past five years to penalize Burma than any other country.

Laura Bush’s crusade against the Burmese military, which sees itself as the upholder of a predominantly Buddhist Burma’s unity and cultural identity, has been inspired by information from some of the Christian churches that have sizable ethnic-minority adherents in that country and by a meeting she reputedly had with a Christian Karen rape victim. By contrast, she and her husband have had little problem with the military’s intervention in politics in Burma’s neighbors Bangladesh and Thailand.

Although the Burmese military seized power in 1962, the first substantive U.S. sanctions did not come until 1997, when a ban on further American investments to "develop Burma’s resources" was reluctantly clamped by President Bill Clinton. But it was only under Bush that Burma emerged as a major target of U.S. sanctions.

But with the devil close on its heels, Burma has moved toward the deep blue sea of Chinese "benevolence."

Aided by Western disengagement from Burma, Chinese entrepreneurs, traders, money lenders, craftsmen and others have flocked to that country, now home to between 1 to 2 million Chinese economic migrants. With their higher living standards setting them apart from the natives, these migrants constitute Burma’s new economic class.

While unintentionally aiding Chinese interests, the U.S.-led penal campaign has cost New Delhi dear, reflected in China’s setting up of listening posts and other moves in Burma that open a security flank against India. In the Bush years, India has been losing out even on commercial contracts.

By treating Burma as a pawn in a larger geopolitical game and seeking to drag it before the U.N. Security Council, the White House only increases the junta’s need for political protection from a veto-armed China, with the consequent Burmese imperative to reward Beijing for such defense.

One reward to China for stepping in twice last year to shield Burma in the Security Council has been a 30-year contract to take gas by pipeline from two offshore fields owned by an Indo-Korean consortium. The junta first withdrew the status of India’s GAIL company as the "preferential buyer" of gas from the A-1 and A-3 blocks in the Bay of Bengal and then signed a production-sharing contract with China’s state-run CNPC firm.

This is apparent both from the way the U.S. has pleaded with China this month to use all its influence to press the junta to open up the cyclone-battered areas to outside relief efforts, and from the secret mid-2007 U.S. meeting with Burmese ministers that was held at America’s initiative in Beijing.

The Beijing meeting, held without prior U.S. consultations with Japan, India and ASEAN states, came six months after China had torpedoed a Security Council draft resolution tabled by the U.S. and Britain that called on the Burmese regime to halt military attacks on ethnic minorities, release Aung San Suu Kyi and other political prisoners, and begin a democratic transition. By taking China’s help to set up a meeting between its deputy assistant secretary of state and senior Burmese government representatives, the U.S. only helped validate Beijing’s rationale for maintaining close contact with the junta.

As with North Korea, Bush is blithely outsourcing to China parts of the U.S. policy on Burma. But on Burma, U.S. policy is also weighed down by Laura Bush’s missionary zeal.

Far from improving human rights in Burma, the blinkered activism has helped strengthen the military’s political grip. Threats of a humanitarian invasion of Burma indeed reek of desperation, suggesting a callous willingness to employ food aid in a disaster situation to try and effect political change.

Today, an unelected, unaccountable woman holds U.S. policy hostage to paradoxically promote free elections and public accountability in Burma. And the twice-elected, twice born-again Christian Bush attests to being under his wife’s sway through the "Laura and I" reference in his latest Burma-sanctions announcement. As the Bible says, "There is none so blind as he who will not see."

Brahma Chellaney, a professor of strategic studies at the privately funded Center for Policy Research in New Delhi, is the author, most recently, of the best-selling "Asian Juggernaut: The Rise of China, India and Japan."

The Japan Times: Thursday, May 22, 2008

Don’t hold Burma to a higher international standard than other autocracies

Posted on May 14, 2008 by Chellaney

A forward-looking approach on Burma

Brahma Chellaney

May 14, 2008

When the imperative is for a more balanced and forward-looking international approach toward impoverished, cyclone-battered Burma, the danger of a self-perpetuating cycle of sanctions has been underlined by new, ill-timed penal actions.

The politicisation of international assistance at a time when Burma’s food bowl, the Irrawaddy Delta, has been devastated by a major cyclone has brought the plight of ordinary Burmese to the fore. This month began with U.S. President George W. Bush announcing yet more sanctions against Burma. Less than 36 hours later, Cyclone Nargis had left a vast trail of death and destruction. Tragedy has come to symbolise Burma in a year marking its 60th anniversary as an independent nation.

Such is the politics of food aid that Western governments and outside relief agencies have insisted on the right to deliver assistance directly to the homeless and hungry. But the regime, fearful that such delivery could be intended to incite a popular uprising at a time when it has put a new Constitution to vote, has blocked the large-scale entry of foreign aid workers. Calls for forcible humanitarian intervention by French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner and others have made the junta’s hackles rise.

The regime postponed the constitutional referendum in the cyclone-racked areas until May 24, but held the balloting on schedule elsewhere last Saturday. With the military ensconced in power for 46 years, there are few takers for the junta’s seven-step “roadmap to democracy.” Widening sanctions, in fact, make it less likely that the seeds of democracy will sprout in a stunted economy. Punitive pressure without constructive engagement in a critically weak country, where the military is now the only functioning institution, is counterproductive.

Crucial factor

Distance from Burma has been a crucial factor in determining major players’ approach toward that country. The greater a state’s geographical distance from Burma, the more gung-ho it tends to be. And the shorter a state’s distance from Burma, the greater its caution. At one end of the spectrum is the U.S., which has followed an uncompromisingly penal approach toward Burma under Mr. Bush. At the other end are Asian states, emphasising a softer approach. The European Union used to be somewhere in the middle, but since 2007 has stepped up its own penal campaign.

The West, with little financial stake left in a country marginal to its foreign-policy interests, can afford to pursue an approach emphasising high-minded principles over strategic considerations, and isolation over engagement. About 95 per cent of Burma’s trade last year was with other Asian countries. By contrast, Burma’s neighbours cannot escape the effects of an unstable Burma. The imperatives of proximity dictate different policy logic. The current situation underscores eight international imperatives.

The need for a course correction. It is vital to carve out greater international space in Burma, rather than shut whatever space that might be left. When an approach bristles with sticks and offers few carrots, results are hard to come by. The sanctions path has only strengthened the hand of the military, with Burma now coming full circle: Its ageing junta head, Than Shwe, has amassed powers to run a virtual one-man dictatorship in Ne Win-style.

An approach predicated on the primacy of sanctions may have been sustainable had Burma been a threat to regional or international security. But Burma does not export terror, subversion or revolutionary ideology. Its focus is inward. If sanctions continue to undermine its economy and impede its regional integration, a dysfunctional Burma could pose a serious transnational security threat.

Target the junta, not the people. The weight of the sanctions has fallen squarely on ordinary Burmese. By targeting vital sectors of the Burmese economy — from tourism to textiles — the sanctions have lowered living conditions without helping improve human rights. An unaffected military has ensured continuing revenue inflows for itself by boosting gas exports to Thailand and signing a lucrative, 30-year gas deal with China.

What objective is served when disengagement blocks the flow of liberal ideas as well as investment and technology?

Recognise that a “colour revolution” is just not possible in Burma. Despite the temptation to portray the monk-led protests of last September as a “saffron revolution” in the making, Burma is unlikely to experience a tumultuous political transformation of the type symbolised by Kyrgyzstan’s “tulip revolution,” Ukraine’s “orange revolution” and Georgia’s “rose revolution.” No colour revolution has occurred in a country bereft of institutions except the military. Burma, with its deep-seated institutional decay, is closer to Sudan and Ethiopia than to the successful democratic-transition cases.

Help build civil society in Burma. It is a growing civil society that usually sounds the death knell of a dictatorship. But years of sanctions have left Burma without an entrepreneurial class or civil society but saddled with an all-powerful military as the sole surviving institution — to the extent that Aung San Suu Kyi’s party says the military will have an important role to play in any transitional government.

The “roadmap to democracy,” however flawed, offers an opening to incrementally prise open the Burmese system. After being in power since 1962, the military has become too fat to return to the barracks. In fact, it won’t fit in the barracks. It has taken the junta more than 14 years just to draft a new Constitution.

With the military determined to hold on to its special prerogatives, the demilitarisation of the Burmese polity can at best be an incremental process. But if that process is not to stretch interminably, it is important for the international community and the U.N. to utilise the new opening, however constricted, to get involved in capacity-building programmes that can help increase public awareness and participation and create a civilian institutional framework for a democratic transition. Although the military is the problem, it has to be part of the solution, or else there will be no transition.

Shift the focus from negative conditionalities to positive conditionalities. To help create incentives for a phased democratic transition, Burma’s rulers should be given a set of benchmarks, with the meeting of each benchmark bringing positive rewards. With sanctions to continue until the junta collapses or caves in, there are at present no incentives, only disincentives.

Indeed, recent penal steps against Burma run counter to the junta’s gestures and concessions — such as facilitating U.N. special envoy Ibrahim Gambari’s three visits in six months; permitting him to meet with Ms Suu Kyi; allowing Paulo Sérgio Pinheiro, a special rapporteur to the U.N. Human Rights Council, to come and investigate the September 2007 violence; and implementing the “roadmap.” Mr. Gambari had sought a time-bound transition plan, but after the junta unveiled just that, Burma has been slapped with more sanctions, undermining the U.N.’s role.

In that light, the latest U.S., EU, Canadian and Australian sanctions suggest a lamentable lack of an incentives-based strategic approach.

Insist on ethnic reconciliation and accommodation. The struggle in Burma has been portrayed simplistically as a battle between Ms Suu Kyi and Gen. Than Shwe; a fight between good and evil; and a clash between the forces of freedom and repression. A complex Burma is actually the scene of four different struggles.

Four different struggles

One conflict rages within the majority Burman community between the mainly Burman military and democracy-seeking urban Burmans. Another struggle is between the military and the non-Burman nationalities, which make up a third of the population. While the Burmans live in the valleys and plains of central Burma (and dominate the cities), the ethnic minorities largely inhabit the rugged areas around the periphery. An inter-religious conflict also rages in Burma.

Then there is a larger unresolved struggle over the state’s political meaning and direction — whether Burma ought to be a true federation that grants wide-ranging local autonomy, or a unitary state. That mirrors the struggle, for example, in Sri Lanka, where the majority ethnic community has sought to give the state a distinct Sinhala imprint, triggering an unending civil war.

Avert a looming humanitarian catastrophe in Burma. The widening sanctions have sought to throttle industries on which the livelihood of millions of Burmese depends. Import bans, investment prohibitions, tourism restrictions and measures forcing foreign companies to disengage have contributed to serious unemployment and poverty.

As far back as 2003, then U.S. Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Matthew Daley had warned in congressional testimony that many female garment workers made jobless by sanctions were being driven into prostitution. Yet, in its 2004 report to Congress, the State Department boasted that U.S. actions had shut down more than 100 garment factories in the previous year alone, with “an estimated loss of around 50,000 to 60,000 jobs.”

Foreign investment and trade boost local employment and wages and exert a liberalising influence on a regime. A weaker Burma will only fall prey to and spawn a range of transnational security threats.

Both carrots and sticks need to be wielded, but not in a way that the sticks get blunted through overuse and the carrots remain distant. Without a more balanced and progressive approach permitting engagement, democratisation is unlikely to progress. International principles need to be anchored in forward-looking pragmatism. There is no logic to Burma being held to a higher international standard.

URL: http://www.thehindu.com/2008/05/14/stories/2008051453141000.htm

Preventing Burma From Becoming A Failed State

Posted on May 11, 2008 by Chellaney

Stabilize A Faltering Burma

Brahma Chellaney

Asian Age, May 10, 2008

Cyclone-wracked Burma stands out as one of the world’s critically weak states that could become a transnational security problem without international stabilization efforts. Yet the tide of Western criticism its junta is facing over the cyclone-related relief operations and constitutional referendum rules out an early lifting of the sanctions against Burma. The referendum and national elections in 2010 are part of the junta’s purported seven-step “roadmap to democracy,” whose implementation within a timeframe, paradoxically, had been demanded by United Nations special envoy Ibrahim Gambari.

Burma is a significant state in size, strategic importance and natural resources. It forms the strategic nucleus between India, China and Southeast Asia. Burma is where Asia’s main regions converge — South, Southeast and East Asia. But Burma is also a corrupt, dysfunctional state, although its state machinery, run by a predatory military elite monopolizing power, appears strong enough to wage political repression at home.

Both the annual Failed States Index (FSI) by the Washington-based group, The Fund for Peace, and the Brookings Institution’s new Index of State Weakness in the Developing World list Burma among their top 20 failing states. The Berlin-based Transparency International ranks Burma as the world’s most corrupt state, along with Somalia.

Since the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks in the United States, it has been increasingly recognized that threats to international peace and security now emanate more and more from the world’s weakest states. Tellingly, two of the world’s critically weak states, North Korea and Pakistan, are members of the nuclear club. It has become routine for the major players to reiterate their commitment to pull critically sick nations back from the precipice of state failure.

It is that argument — to stabilize a failing state — that the Bush administration has used to pour some $11 billion in aid since 9/11 into terror-exporting Pakistan, ranked No. 33 in the Brookings’ Index of State Weakness in the Developing World. The White House now is considering throwing its weight behind Senator Joseph Biden’s call for a $2.5 billion package of additional non-military aid to Pakistan.

Can a different logic or argument be applied to Burma? Or should the stabilization of a failing state only begin when that country actually starts posing — like Pakistan — a threat to international security?

International responses to separate cases of failing states need not be cut from the same cloth because every nation’s situation tends to be different from the others. Still, the undeniable fact is that Burma represents a case of grave state corrosion, with international sanctions having had the effect, however unintended, to lower the living standards of ordinary Burmese.

Another question relates to the extent to which sanctions should be employed. Should punitive actions preclude engagement? Without the Bush administration engaging Pyongyang, to give just one example, would it have been possible to achieve the progress, however tentative it might seem at this stage, on the North Korean nuclear programme? It is nobody’s case that Burma is worse than North Korea.

Foreign trade, investment and tourism exert a liberalizing influence on a regime. External investment helps build private enterprises, boosts employment and wages, and aids civil-society development. But the US-led sanctions against Burma have sought to throttle investment and tourism flows and choke its exports, including textiles, precious gemstones and high-quality tropical hardwoods.

The military has been in power in Burma for 46 long years. But the Western penal approach toward Burma began shaping up only in the 1990s. In fact, it was not until this decade that Burma became a major target of US sanctions, reflected in the congressional passage of the 2003 Burma Freedom and Democracy Act and the enforcement of several subsequent punitive executive orders dating up to May 1, 2008.

Some U.S. measures put in place against the junta before 2003 included a ban on new investment and an American veto on any proposed loan or assistance by international financial institutions. That ban on new U.S. investments was imposed in 1997 — the same year ASEAN admitted Burma as a member. The Clinton administration could take that decision in 1997 because at that time the US had minimal trade with Burma and a total investment of only $225 million.

Indeed, until the advent of the Bush administration, Burma was not among the key targets of sanctions, with the broadest U.S. sanctions being directed at countries identified as supporting terrorism: Cuba, Iran, Libya, North Korea, Syria and Sudan. But Bush, prodded by his wife, has made Burma key US target.

Laura Bush’s Burma activism — manifest from the unprecedented manner the first lady came to the White House briefing room this week and addressed a news conference on the cyclonic disaster in another country — is tied to the Christian fundamentalist beliefs that have long coloured her and her husband’s thinking. Her ire against a predominantly Buddhist Burma and its military, which sees itself as the upholder of the country’s unity and cultural identity, reputedly has sprung from information from some of the Christian churches that have a sizable number of ethnic-minority adherents in that country and from a meeting with a Karen rape victim.

Laura Bush’s first-ever visit to the White House briefing room was not to announce an aid package for Burma but to hurl insults at its rulers and accuse them of callousness in going ahead with the referendum. Actually, the junta has delayed the vote until May 24 in the cyclone-battered areas, where a third of the population lives. As one American newspaper columnist wrote, when a country has been “laid low by a massive natural disaster, the diplomatic thing to do is to respond with a show of compassion. Not kick ’em when they’re down.”

While the European Union has also slapped sanctions on Burma, especially after the brutal way the September 2007 monk-led protests were suppressed, the blunt fact is that no nation thus far has emulated the extent to which United States has gone in imposing penal actions. In fact, U.S. sanctions against Burma have followed a now-familiar pattern in American policy — first imposing an array of unilateral sanctions against a pariah regime, then discovering that the sanctions aren’t working and, therefore, turning to allies and partners to join in the penal campaign, and finally threatening sanctions against firms from third countries if those nations refuse to toe the U.S. line.

Interestingly, the history of Western sanctions against Burma underscores the manner the penal approach got shaped not by a cause — bringing an end to the military rule — but by the political travails of an iconic personality, Aung San Suu Kyi, the daughter of Burma’s founding father, Aung San, the Japanese-trained commander of the Burmese Independence Army.

Suu Kyi has had close ties with India since her student days. Because her mother, Khin Kyi, became Burma’s ambassador to India in 1960, Suu Kyi studied at a high school and college in New Delhi. Then, in the mid-1980s, Suu Kyi and her British husband, Michael Aris, a scholar in Tibetan and Himalayan studies, were fellows at the Indian Institute of Advanced Studies at Simla.

Burma’s present problems can be traced back to the politically cataclysmic events of 1962, when the military under General Ne Win ousted an elected government and thereafter sought to introduce autarky by cutting off the country from the rest of the world. Yet the West, not unhappy that the military had ousted a founding leader of the non-alignment movement, Prime Minister U Nu, imposed no sanctions on Burma.

More than a quarter-century later, even a bloodbath that left several thousand student-led demonstrators dead or injured in Rangoon did not invite Western sanctions. For the democratic opposition, August 8, 1998 — the day of the bloodbath — symbolized the launch of the Burmese democracy movement. Its 20th anniversary thus will be commemorated on the same day the Beijing Olympics kick off with an opening ceremony that some world leaders are threatening to boycott over China’s brutal repression in Tibet.

When the bloodbath happened, the then UK-based Suu Kyi was in Rangoon to take care of her stroke-stricken mother. Within days, she was addressing her first public meeting. Having been accidentally thrown into the vortex of national politics, Suu Kyi then went on to inspire and mould the Western punitive approach toward Burma.

The junta’s detention of her from July 1989 onward and its refusal to honour the people’s verdict in the May 1990 national elections brought Suu Kyi to the centre of world attention. She received several international awards in quick succession — the Rafto Human Rights Prize in October 1990; the European Parliament’s Sakharov Human Rights Prize in July 1991; and the Nobel Peace Prize in October 1991.

A major trigger in galvanizing international opinion was clearly the junta’s brazen refusal to cede power despite the May 1990 national elections, which gave the detained Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy (NLD) party 59 percent of the votes but 82 percent of the seats in Parliament. By keeping her in detention for nearly 13 of the past 19 years, the junta has itself contributed to building Suu Kyi as an international symbol of the Burmese struggle for political freedoms.

The personality-shaped nature of the sanctions approach can also be explained by the fact that before Suu Kyi, there was no unifying figure to challenge the military’s domination in all spheres of the state and to lead a national movement for the restoration of democracy. The Nobel Prize greatly increased her international profile and domestic clout. Western aid cut-offs and other penal actions thus began only in the period after the junta refused to honour the results of the 1990 elections.

How a personality can help shape the sanctions approach was further underlined by the way Suu Kyi’s personal rapport with U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright helped spur President Bill Clinton to reluctantly impose a ban in 1997 on new American investments to develop Burma’s resources. That ban was slapped even though international pressure, and the Clinton administration’s own intervention, had made the junta to release Suu Kyi in July 1995 after six years in house detention.

Even Laura Bush cited Suu Kyi this week to justify her Burma activism, announcing that President Bush would soon sign legislation conferring Congress’s highest civilian honour on her, just months after he had personally presented the same prize — the Congressional Gold Medal — to the Dalai Lama.

Not only has the sanctions approach been personality-driven, but also a personality hue has been put on the internal struggle in Burma. That struggle has been portrayed, simplistically, as a battle between Suu Kyi and the junta’s reclusive chairman, General Than Shwe, a fight between good and evil, and a tussle between the forces of freedom and repression. While such a portrayal is useful to draw international attention to a remote country that is peripheral to the interests of all except its neighbours, it helps obscure the complex and multifaceted realities on the ground.

Despite Suu Kyi’s central role in shining an international spotlight for 19 years on the military’s repressive rule, the grim reality is that years of tightening sanctions against Burma haven’t helped loosen the military’s grip on polity and society. If anything, the sanctions have only worsened the plight of ordinary Burmese.

Far from the people gaining political freedoms, an again-detained Suu Kyi’s personal freedom has remained an outstanding issue. While ordinary Burmese have been its main losers, the sanctions-centred approach has proven a strategic boon for China, creating much-desired space for it to expand its interests in and leverage over Burma.

In the period since the West began implementing boycotts, trade bans, aid cut-offs and other sanctions, it has seen its influence in Burma erode. Even as it has become fashionable to talk about better-targeted sanctions, the sanctions instrument, in reality, has become blunter. Sanctions were intended to help the citizens of Burma, yet today it is the ordinary people who bear the brunt of the sanctions.

Because Burma is poor, vulnerable and isolated, it only reinforces its attraction as a sanctions target. Still, Burma has proven an exceedingly difficult case on what the outside world can do, underscoring the limits of securing results through punitive pressures alone.

Building democracy in Burma is vital not only to end repression and empower the masses, but also to facilitate ethnic conciliation and integration in a much divided society that has been at war with itself since its 1948 independence. There is need for greater unity and coordination among the major democracies on adopting a pragmatic Burma strategy. A good idea would to build a concert of democracies working together on Burma, serving as a bridge between the U.S., European and Asian positions and fashioning greater coordination in policy actions.

Without a structured and more-progressive international approach, Burma will stay on the present deplorable path, with the military continuing to call the shots. As American analyst Stanley A. Weiss wrote after recently visiting Rangoon, sanctions against Burma “may feel right, but they have helped produce the wrong results. Encouraging Western investment, trade and tourism may feel wrong, but maybe — just maybe — could produce better results. That might be politically incorrect, but at least it wouldn’t be politically futile.”

In an era of a supposed global village, why deny the citizens of Burma the right to enjoy the benefits of globalization and free trade? A more dysfunctional Burma is not in the interest of anyone.

Stagecraft and Statecraft

Author Archives: Chellaney

About Chellaney

U.S.-India Nuclear Deal: Correct the Sequence

Barack Obama’s legacy weighs down U.S.-India nuclear deal

Sikkim in India-China Relations

U.S. Policy on Burma

El celo de la primera dama

LA VANGUARDIA, May 31, 2008

Por Brahma Chellaney, profesor de estudios estratégicos del Centro de Investigación Política de Nueva Delhi:

Hush! Hush! Not A Word

Eastward movement of global power and influence

An Unelected Laura Bush Holds America’s Burma Policy Hostage

Laura Bush’s activism on Burma

Don’t hold Burma to a higher international standard than other autocracies

Preventing Burma From Becoming A Failed State