Report: US must avoid legitimizing Myanmar elections as it engages junta

Report: US must avoid legitimizing Myanmar vote

WASHINGTON — The Obama administration’s new engagement strategy with Myanmar risks allowing the country’s military leaders to use direct talks to justify already flawed elections expected this year, a bipartisan report warns.

The report Wednesday from the Asia Society, a leading think tank, supports U.S. efforts to press the generals who have ruled Myanmar for decades to hold credible elections and to give more rights to minorities and activists.

But the United States, the report said, must be wary of appearing to legitimize elections, Myanmar’s first in two decades, that opponents say are meant to strengthen the military’s power.

“The United States must tread carefully through this minefield,” the report said. “It is quite possible that the leadership’s primary objective in engaging with the United States is to demonstrate to its own population that the United States endorses” the junta’s “road map to democracy” and a constitution that enshrines the military’s leading role in politics.

The report was co-chaired by retired Army Gen. Wesley Clark, a 2004 Democratic presidential candidate, and by Henrietta Fore, former Republican President George W. Bush’s head of the U.S. Agency for International Development. Its release comes about half a year into Obama’s efforts to reverse the long-standing U.S. policy of isolation and instead engage Myanmar’s top generals.

So far, the new direction has done little to spur democracy. Just this week, detained opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi’s party, which swept the 1990 vote but was barred from taking power, announced it will boycott the elections. Her party now faces dissolution under the junta’s new, much-criticized election laws. Myanmar’s government has not yet set a date for this year’s polls.

The Obama administration has called for patience as it pursues talks. In the meantime, U.S. officials say they will not remove sanctions currently in place against Myanmar, also called Burma, until political prisoners are released, democracy begins to take hold and the government treats its people better.

The report warns that the United States can devote only limited time and money to Myanmar because of other global problems. Those include wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, an often rocky relationship with emerging economic and military powerhouse China, and nuclear standoffs with Iran and North Korea.

The report also urged the Obama administration to appoint a special envoy to coordinate U.S. policy on Myanmar, which Congress recommended in a 2008 law. Nine senior U.S. senators have sent a letter to Obama also calling for the envoy’s appointment and for the administration to slap the junta with additional banking sanctions.

The United States should not directly monitor the elections, the report recommends, “as this could be seen as conferring legitimacy on a seriously flawed election process.”