Main Story

What happened

Soldiers this week succeeded in crushing a massive, peaceful uprising in Myanmar, after firing tear gas and bullets into unarmed crowds of monks and civilians, arresting hundreds of people, and terrorizing the population. Shari Villarosa, acting U.S. ambassador in Myanmar, said the main city, Yangon, was under lockdown. “Military police are traveling around the city in the middle of the night, going into homes and picking up people,” she said. As they drove through the city, soldiers announced through blaring loudspeakers that they were hunting anyone who’d participated in the protests. “You must stay inside!” the soldiers shouted. “Don’t come out.”

The military junta that rules the country, also known as Burma, finally met with U.N. envoy Ibrahim Gambari to discuss the violent crackdown on pro-democracy demonstrations led by thousands of Buddhist monks. In one encouraging sign, the junta allowed Gambari to meet twice with Aung San Suu Kyi, the opposition leader and Nobel laureate who has been under house arrest for most of the past two decades. Hours after Gambari’s departure, though, the junta arrested hundreds more people. Myanmar has no free press, and it’s unclear how many people have been killed, wounded, or arrested. Some reports from Westerners in the country claim dozens of dead, others more than 1,000. The junta calls those reports “a skyful of lies.”

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

What the editorials said

So much for the “saffron revolution,” said the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. For a few heady days, it was uplifting to see the monks in their orange-red robes marching through the streets of Yangon. Yet “in spite of considerable world sympathy for the Buddhist monks,” the junta responded to the demands for democracy with violence. The military rulers have maintained power for 45 years through brutal suppression of any dissent, and evidently feel confident that they can continue “to ignore outside opinion.”

Unfortunately, the international community just doesn’t have that much influence over Myanmar, said the Chicago Tribune. The country is a “treasure trove of rich natural resources”—teak, jade, sapphires, rubies, natural gas, and oil. Cutting off trade could certainly hurt the junta, but Myanmar’s largest trading partner is China. That country’s repressive leaders not only won’t object to the Myanmar crackdown, but also might actually be “grateful to see another regime take up arms against its own people.”

What the columnists said

China has already squelched efforts to punish Myanmar, said Peter Navarro in the Orange County, Calif., Register. Last January, it vetoed a U.N. Security Council resolution that would have forced the junta to release Aung San Suu Kyi and other political prisoners. And just last week, it blocked a resolution to condemn the crackdown. Such Chinese protection of “the military butchers of Burma” is part of a clear “blood for oil” deal. China is planning to build a land-route oil pipeline across the country to ensure that its oil supplies can’t be disrupted by the U.S. Navy.

There’s one way to get China’s attention: Boycott the 2008 Olympics, said Fred Hiatt in The Washington Post. China sees the Summer Games in Beijing as its coming-out party as a world power. A U.S. threat to boycott the games, “delivered privately, if that would be most effective, with no loss of face,” might persuade the Chinese to exert their extensive influence in Myanmar to make the junta listen to reason.

The U.S., and the rest of the free world, has more than one reason to boycott the Beijing Games, said Christopher Hitchens in Slate.com. China is the principal protector of most of the globe’s “gangster regimes,” including Cuba, Zimbabwe, North Korea, Sudan, and Burma. They all know they can count on China to veto any U.N. resolution imposing consequences for their brutal repression and murder of their own people. “How long can Southeast Asia bear the shame and misery of the Burmese junta? As long as the embrace of China persists.”

What next?

Japan, Myanmar’s biggest aid donor, says it will cut its aid to the country to protest the killing of a Japanese photographer during the demonstrations. Videos posted on the Internet showed a Burmese soldier shooting journalist Kenji Nagai at point-blank range. Foreign Minister Masahiko Komura said Japan would continue only vital medical aid, such as polio vaccinations. “There have been calls to freeze aid entirely,” Komura said, “but ordinary people in that country are already suffering.”