Burma -- what next?

Well no surprise the military found Aung San Suu Kyi guilty. However there were two things that subsequently followed that did surprise me:

1) 5 minutes after the verdict was read out Burma's Home minister entered the court room and commuted the 3 year sentence to 18 months and indicated that Suu Kyi would be able to serve this from her home in Rangoon. (In other words an effective return to the status quo that has persisted for the past 20 years).

2) The UK government condemned the decision within minutes of it being announced on the wire with a statement which was in all likelihood drawn up in anticipation of a stiffer sentence.

The fact that the Burmese government intervened so publicly (in front of the invited foreign press and diplomats) to commute the sentence clearly was a piece of political theatre, but an act nevertheless that at least perhaps demonstrates some inkling of a willingness to compromise.

Certainly the act was sufficient to divide international opinion. While the UK, EU and the US united to condemn the verdict, which will shut Suu Kyi out of the country's scheduled election next year, it was received far less unfavourably by Burma's Asian neighbours, most notably in the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), China and India. Indeed in Southeast Asia while there was 'disappointment' at the verdict there was praise for the decision to commute the sentence.

Yes the trial was a farce, and yes the verdict conveniently allows the Junta to remove Suu Kyi from participation in the 2010 elections. However in my humble opinion the West is missing a possible shift in the Junta's approach by dismissing the commutation of the sentence. To date the Junta has not balked from simply ignoring the international community, most visibly in the immediate aftermath of Cyclone Nargis last year, when it initially refused to allow Western aid agencies into the country. Clearly the Junta would have preferred to have imprisoned Suu Kyi for the maximum five years and to have dispatched her to a prison in the far North of the country away from her Rangoon support base and far from the eyes of the Western media. That is what we feared might have happened this morning. That they Junta did not do this IS significant.

So what next -- well there are already calls for further sanctions but herein lies a problem. While there is much more that Britain and the EU can do in particular, the fact remains that there is a 2600 mile hole in the already not particularly tight sanctions 'net' -- Burma's respective borders with China and Thailand. Without their participation in any sanctions regime the impact of Western punitive action is going to be militated against. And what is very clear is that neither China nor Thailand are going to join that regime. Similarly attempts to impose a global arms embargo or indict the Junta before the ICC will face the likely veto of either China or Russia on the UN Security Council.

So where next... well I don't profess to have the answers but clearly what is needed is first and foremost a concerted international approach and to achieve that will require some new thinking.