Burma and Beijing

The scenes of Buddhist monks and peaceful demonstrators being beaten and murdered on the streets of Rangoon are distressing for all those who believe in free expression and democracy. Thanks to the technological revolution, we have been able to see the horror of the Burmese junta's repression on our television screens. Tyrants are no longer free to harass their people and stifle dissent without its being transmitted around the world by citizen reporters with cell-phone cameras, though some of the worst violence in Burma, in monasteries where saffron dressed holy men devoted to a life of peace have been torn from their beds and incarcerated, have been kept out of sight.

Outrage against barbarity of the Burmese military dictators has been given voice by Laura Bush, who, in a rare intervention in foreign affairs by any First Lady, has called for the junta to hand over power to the democratically elected leader of Burma, Aung San Suu Kyi. In 1990 Aung San Suu Kyi won 392 of 489 seats in the People's Assembly, but the military has kept her under house arrest for all except a few days of the last 18 years. Mrs. Bush's voice could be clearly heard at the United Nations last week when she made a braodcast into Burma. President Bush also spent the largest part of his speech to the General Assembly to announce measures and sanctions aimed at encouraging democracy in Burma.

That the Bush doctrine — that freedom is the God-given desire of all people and that America's interests include the spread of freedom and democracy — have found a champion in Mrs. Bush may not be surprising. What has been surprising is how slow the left has been to rise to the issue of Burma. At the Clinton Global Initiative at the Sheraton Hotel in New York last week, it took Rupert Murdoch, who has been much criticized for his reluctance to draw attention to China's democratic deficit because of his business interests there, to raise the violence in Burma.

As the Clinton panel on how multi-religious and multi-ethic populations can better get along together was winding up, and former president of Ireland Mary Robinson asked for thoughts on the 60th anniversary of the U.N. charter of human rights — a document, incidentally, forced through the General Assembly line by line by an erstwhile First Lady, Eleanor Roosevelt — it fell to Mr. Murdoch to mention Burma. "We haven't mentioned the horror in Myanamar," he said. "Human rights are just being steamrolled. What should be done? There is talk enough."

The U.N., whose third secretary general, U Thant, was Burmese, has rushed an emissary to Rangoon, though he is unlikely to achieve more than reinforce what we know already: that an international organization in which Communist China has a veto is going to prove powerless in the face of determined and violent tyrants. Mr. Bush's clampdown on trade with the Burmese regime and the travel ban on its members will take some time to work. The military took control of Burma in 1962, and martial law has obtained there since 1989.

China is Burma's main trading partner and has equipped the junta with the arms essential for its decades of repression. The trick will be to make President Hu see that China's interests lie in lifting the oppression of Burma, which means putting the Olympic Games next year in question. No doubt Mr. Hu and his communist camarilla fear that the stirrings in Burma will prove contagious. They fear a reprise of the pro-democracy demonstrations at Tiananmen Square occurring while the eyes of the world will be on them. So the logic is for the administration to think in these terms now — and let the Chinese communists know that it is doing so.