Untitled Document

BURMA AND THE UNITED NATIONS: UNSEAT THE REGIME!

by Roland Watson
October 2001
www.dictatorwatch.org

If you have a club of people who share the same interests, you probably welcome others who have these interests as well. Men or women, black or white, young or old, straight or gay, it makes no difference. You do not discriminate. However, there are exceptions. You would not want to welcome individuals who are unethical. For example, you would not want to welcome murderers and rapists, particularly if they have committed murder in the recent past, such as last week, or yesterday, or even earlier today. You have no obligation to admit them to your group.

The United Nations is a club, and it should not admit the dictatorships of the world. It should not support such regimes. They do not represent their nations' populations, and they therefore have no right to serve as legal representatives to multinational organizations, such as the UN, or to receive the legitimacy that this confers.

Rather, they should be expelled from the UN (and other such groupings), like South Africa was in 1978, and their seats left open until a democratic party or coalition of such parties is elected. However, in those cases where valid elections have been held, the winners of the elections - in Burma's case, the NLD and other ethnic groups which were aligned with it in opposition to SLORC - should be invited to send a mission.

This is the only just course. Expel the leaders of SLORC/SPDC from the UN, and instead request a mission from the NLD and its allies.

We await comments on this from the UN - Kofi Annan, you just won the Nobel Peace Prize, after all - and also President Bush and Colin Powell, and the representatives of other democratic states, including those in the EU and also Australia, New Zealand and Japan. We expect that they will grasp the logic of our argument - really, it's a simple case - and redirect their policies and encourage the UN to expel such dictatorial states.

We would also note that if such comments are not forthcoming, the silence will be deafening.