John Ralston Saul on Burma

Transcript of Speech from Canadian Friends of Burma Conference, Ottawa, Canada

On foreign policy issues I am a very careful person; in fact, a moderate. I don't believe that you can accomplish anything you want just because you believe in it. And I do believe that there are severe limitations if you come from a small to medium sized country and when you take principled stands internationally, you may indeed pay for it somewhere, unless you are very careful. On the other hand, there are certain subjects and certain moments when not only is there no reason to be moderate, there's nothing to be gained by being moderate. In fact, it's embarrassing to be moderate.

On the question of Burma, many of us are very frustrated. It's true that we sometimes win small battles getting Petro-Canada to pull out, for example. Getting other companies to pull out. But in our heart of hearts most of us feel that we're not getting where we want to get on Burma.

Thank God that Aung San Suu Kyi is there with that astonishing courage and that ability to stand on her own and an unusual genius for politics; and that the members of her party, many of them the elected members of the legal government of Burma, are willing to go on risking lives even though many have been imprisoned, tortured and killed. Nevertheless, those of us on the outside who support the cause of legality in Burma have not found the levers which could make a real difference on the international front. And the international front remains a key to the situation. If not, why would the SLORC be obsessed by membership in ASEAN and foreign investment? Why would they have befriended the world's leading drug dealers?

I think we are blocked by two fundamental misunderstandings. First, we in the West feel, quite properly, that an Asian government can't be made to conform to Western standards and Western ideals. This is a leftover from the period of the empires; a reversal of the old superiority complex. However, it now takes the form of hypocritical humility on ethical questions. We feel that we can't impose the standards of Western civilization on an Asian country. A perfectly reasonable conclusion. However, our attitudes on economics and war remain unchanged. The combination of this regional view of ethics with an international view of economics and violence is that we are intellectually and emotionally blocked from taking strong stands on certain issues in Asia.

And whenever we do try to take a stand, ASEAN along with other organizations and governments in Asia say how dare you Westerners stand up and tell us how to act in Asia? We in the West don't seem to be able to deal with that. The second blockage is that we continue to act as if we believe that the SLORC can be brought to reason, to use an old cliche. There's an official international phrase 'constructive engagement' with the SLORC. We're all supposed to be engaged in a constructive engagement in order to bring the SLORC back onto the main path of civilized behaviour.

I want to begin by dealing with these two blockages. First of all, there is no constructive engagement. The SLORC is not a body which is open to any form of negotiation in good faith. They are not even open to self-interested compromise. Nothing, absolutely nothing, will be accomplished through attempting constructive engagement we've been at it formally now since 1990. Nothing has happened. Things are getting worse, not better. And, in truth, we've been at it since 1962. Nothing has happened. Nothing is going to happen. There is no constructive engagement. There never will be with these people, and in the process, they have been left alone to destroy Burma.

More precisely, you cannot engage in constructive engagement regarding Burma with a group of rogue soldiers who are not the government of Burma. It is a fundamental error to accept the illusion that the SLORC is the government of Burma. They are not the government of Burma They don't govern, except by force of arms. They don't have the title of government of Burma by any standards Not by the western ethical standards which we're afraid to speak of in Asia. But much more important, they don't exist as the government of Burma by Asian standards Not by Asian ethical standards or historical or spiritual or political or even economic. It is very important for us to understand that, when we're dealing with the SLORC, we are dealing with a group which fails, by Asia's standards, to qualify as a government. We have to be clear enough about this in our own minds to find the strength to say to the other governments in Asia 'By your own standards, this is a rogue government. Not a government at all.'

What I'm talking about is not some sort of cliched Hollywoodian battle between democracy and dictatorship. In any case, this isn't about the West versus the East. There are many traditions of government. Democracy is just one of them. It's not for us to impose our vision or our democracy, good or bad that is may be, on other places. When you look around the world, you find there are many traditions of legitimate government. So we involve what we might call benign dictatorships. There are various sorts of benign monarchies which don't meet the particularities of democracy, but in many ways resemble democracy. There are many forms of what we in the west would call dictatorship which actually have within them a social contract and have always had within them the idea of the social contract Curiously enough these ideas of the social contract are not very different from ours. When you break that social contract, whether you're a dictatorship or not, whether in the West or the East, you are no longer a legitimate government.

The point is that all of these governmental traditions or models contain the idea of legitimacy, which is tied to the idea of a social contract, which is both particular to the place and yet not unrelated to the universal idea of a social contract. And when that particular social contract is broken, legitimacy is lost. At that point the government is no longer a government. In practical and historic terms, rogue governments usually then collapse; sometimes rapidly; sometimes in a few months or years.

The point is that they cannot survive without the social contract and the legitimacy, because without them they are mere bandits involved in a hostage-taking. They then hold power only by opening fire. Almost every civilization has described in precise detail this idea of legitimacy and of delegitimization. The Chinese called it the mandate of heaven and the loss of that mandate was the loss of power.

So I am not talking about measuring every government in the world and deciding whether or not they meet some rules which we in the west have set. Most governments are within reach of meeting some of their own rules. And we are all at fault to some extent. We are all far from meeting our own standards. Some governments are more at fault than others. But there are a few exceptions out there, a handful of exceptions, which meet none of the standards of legitimate government by any standards of any civilization anywhere. They don't meet their own standards, or those of their own region or continent.

Let me be even more pedantic. What are Asian standards basic Asian standards? Confucius. The Confucian idea of government and society plays a role throughout Asia. Singapore - a supporter of engagement with the SLORC's principal supporters - is still in part a Confucian state. The Confucian ideal of government is one of Jen, which is to say a government which so cares for the basic needs of men that it does not have to use coercion in order to maintain social order.

One of the key Confucian ideas is the correspondence of name and reality. words mean something, words have content. They're not simply words. The correspondence of name and reality. The name 'king' in traditional terms means the content of one who is morally worthy and politically effective because his words and deeds are all kingly. When a ruler fails to be a kingly ruler, he is no longer a king and people have the right to resist him, to rebel against him and, if necessary, even to kill him. In other words, what Confucius is saying is that tyrannicide is not regicide. What we are dealing with in Burma are tyrants

Then there is the question of the mandate of heaven. The ruler rules through the mandate of heaven. What is the mandate of heaven? Well, Mencius. the second great Confucian thinker, said very clearly that the mandate of heaven is essentially an expression of the people's satisfaction. Heaven hears as the people hear Heaven sees as the people see.

Taoism - not just in Japan, it had and has a role in various parts of Asia - focuses on nature and idealizes nature. There's absolutely no justification in Taoism for what is now taking place, for example, in the teak forests of Burma. The Thai teak merchants are clearing out the teak forests of Burma, having already cleared out their own. In the Ch'ing period, bronze vessels played an important role. They were a sign of riches. They were used in court. These vessels regularly had inscribed on them, as an exhortation to the nobles and the officers of the Crown, 'Cherish the people."

Animism. Animism is extremely important in Burma. It still plays a key role. In Burma, you'll often find the animist shrines in a circle around the Buddhist temples. The basic cultural concept of animism is peace, social justice and respect for natural phenomena.

The great Thai thinker, Sulak Sivaraksa, is a good source for a contemporary understanding of Asian ethics. His books attack what Thai society is becoming. He constantly goes back to look at the sources of Buddhism. He explains that Buddhism is neither anti-social nor restricted to personal salvation. There is a common misunderstanding in the West among some people who have a little bit too much money and not enough to do. They think Buddhism is a way to cross your knees and separate yourself from society - a way not to be part of the whole. That isn't what Buddhism is about at all. It is not anti-social. It is not just about personal salvation.

The SLORC and the Ne Win dictatorship which preceded it have always used Buddhism as if Buddhism were anti-politics. Embrace Buddhism, they say, and let us run the country. But Buddhism was never, never meant to be like that.

Sulak Sivaraksa:

"Any attempt to understand Buddhism apart from its social dimension is fundamentally a mistake. For Buddhism to survive according to Scriptures, it must be supported by a just ruler, a king who turns the wheel of State in the name of justice, a universal monarch who rules for the well-being of all."

What are the five precepts of Buddhism?

1. I vow to abstain from taking life. Think about the SLORC, this famous Buddhist region. I vow to abstain from taking life. There aren't many regimes which actually send regiments into the street to open fire with machine guns. It's actually relatively rare, much rarer than one would think.

2 I vow to abstain from stealing By serving only themselves, they have literally brought the country financially to its knees and filled personal foreign bank accounts.

3. I vow to abstain from sexual misconduct. Prostitution and child prostitution are very important questions in Burma today. Talk to people in Thailand about young girls being sent out of Burma and then going home with AIDS. Talk about the exploding AIDS problem in the poorest villages of Burma as a result of prostitution. You know that AIDS is at its worst on a per capita basis in northern Thailand, which is where the young Burmese women come out, make a little bit of money in prostitution, then go home and spread AIDS. It is estimated that there are already 400,000 people infected with AIDS in northern Burma. This is almost entirely the result of the prostitution brought on by poverty. It's the SLORC which is the master of poverty in Burma. They are responsible for that happening.

4. I vow to abstain from false speech. Well, that's obviously not even worth commenting on. And then, finally, perhaps the most interesting from the

Western point of view:

5. I vow to abstain from intoxicants that cloud the mind and to encourage others not to cloud their minds.

I'm going to come back to the question of heroin exports in a moment. Burma is capable of supplying the total heroin demand of the rest of the world. Since 1962 production has continually grown so that it generally supplies somewhere between 50 and 80 per cent with the direct collusion of the SLORC, who get a percentage of the money that's made by the drug armies. Since the creation of the SLORC in 1988, drug production has more than doubled.

We're always told in Asia that local governments are doing their best to control the drugs, but it's too bad for us if Westerners are so degenerate that we want to become addicts. And they're right. We have a problem. But what about the 500,000 new addicts in China, most of them young? China is the SLORC's ally and increasingly the main transit country for Burmese heroin. What about the new 200,000 addicts in Vietnam? And what about Malaysia, the leading advocate of normalizing relations with the SLORC? Prime Minister Mahathir is particularly touchy about Western interference. He presents himself as a great advocate of the Asian Way. Why would he want to normalize relations with SLORC? Regional experts say it's because Malaysia now has $230 million invested in Burma. But what is the value of that investment when set off against 1,000 new Malaysian drug addicts per month? 14% of Malay youth use hard drugs.

Surely if Prime Minister Mahathir were an advocate of the Asian way, he would be leading a holy Muslim crusade against the SLORC. The leaders of ASEAN constantly justify their Burma stand on the basis of 'non-interference' in the internal affairs of another country. But Burma, through its drug business, is consciously and actively interfering in the internal affairs of Malaysia, Thailand and many others.

Let me repeat the Buddhist precept: to abstain from intoxicants that cloud the mind and to encourage others not to cloud their minds. The SLORC maintains an active campaign to protect its position as the leading clouder of minds in the world.

Finally, on this matter of Asian standards, let me turn to the most important ethical source for Burmese society after the Buddha - that is, to Aung San, the father of the country. Aung San was guided by many things. One quotation in particular was very important to him. It came from a court poet of the 18th century. Let-We Thendara. "Without gathering in The hearts of the people The strength of the people The sword edge Will shatter The spear will bend."

And yet, Ne Win and the SLORC always claim to be the inheritors of Aung San. What do all of these ethical, religious, social standards mean? What do they mean for Canada and Canadian diplomacy? Or indeed Western diplomacy? Well, first of all, they mean that the Burmese government does not meet any of the basic Asian standards; that when ASEAN talks of Asian ways, they're not talking about Asian ways at all. More often than not they're just talking about the unfettered market place in the East. In other words, they are advancing a deformed version of a Western idea.

If they don't meet their own standards, we should be attacking them on that basis, without any Western guilt. Beyond the question of local standards we have the right and obligation to ask ourselves: What effect does the SLORC have on us?

After all, diplomacy has two parts What do you think about other people? And what is the effect of those people on you? Are they your enemy? Are they attacking you? Are they sending armies in? If someone sends an army in, they're your enemy. They've attacked you.

Well, the SLORC is attacking us. The SLORC is aggressing us through the export of heroin Let me just go through the drug question very briefly. I've been trying to make people, get people to focus on the drug question as a central, philosophical, moral, ethical and political question for a long time And I'm not alone in that. But because we treat drugs as a television drama third-page exciting police story - we're never able to concentrate on it as a mainstream question. There are five, six or seven countries that produce opium and heroin. They run in a line along that northern edge of Asia, of South Asia. We have had more or less success in dealing with each of these countries Northern Pakistan, for example. But no matter what kind of success we have, whether we eliminate opium/heroin production in one or all of those countries, it is of no importance so long as Burma goes on producing. I repeat, Burma can supply 100 per cent of the world heroin market. And so, as that ideal, unfettered free market evolves, Burma's share ranges between 50 and 80 per cent.

The Burmese government has been involved in the drug business since 1962. I'm not going to run through the long history of opium war lords who have lived as de facto autonomous governors of the Shan States on behalf of Rangoon from Lo Hsing Han to Kuhn Sa.

What they know and what we know and what our police know is that all the drug policies of the West have failed miserably. Never has there been a year when our police have managed to seize more than 10 per cent of the heroin which is moving across borders. We spend billions of dollars on drug prevention programs - police-led prevention programs - all of which fail absolutely. Ten per cent is nothing.

Every picture you see in the papers of a big drug bust is essentially propaganda. It takes five or ten years to make that sort of drug bust and the filature, the organization which has been destroyed, is replaced within 24 hours. There is absolutely no way that you can stop the movement of heroin, once it becomes heroin inside Burma

There are only two ways you can stop it. At the beginning of the process or at the end. The end is inside Canada, the United States, Europe and increasingly inside the various consuming countries in Asia To tackle the problem at the end of the process means tackling the social problems which encourage consumption. We refuse to do this. To tackle it at the front end seams getting at the drug production in the poppy fields before it becomes heroin. Before the poppy heads are scraped. anywhere in between these two stages is a waste of time A handful of white powder is worth a fortune It can be concealed and transported in thousands of ways. It is unstoppable. It's like water flowing As Sun Tzu said of intelligent strategy, it passes by the lowest valley. If you block one valley, it simply goes to another. Backs of trucks, bottoms of animals, people intestines. There are thousands and thousands of ways.

If you do not address the question of opium and heroin in the hills in the Shan States in Burma, you're not addressing the question. You're pretending to address the question You're just wasting your tine, twiddling your fingers in regularly declared drug wars. In January, 1996, the Burmese government did a deal with Kuhn Sa, the principal man responsible for the export of heroin. They allowed hin to surrender to them. He is no longer referred to by one of those insulting SLORC titles in which their enemies are compared to animals, insects or defecation. The SLORC now refer to him by the honorific U. He's still in the drug business Now he lives and works comfortable in Rangoon.

As Khin Nyunt, the most powerful man in the SLORC, puts it:

"The regime will look after Khun Sa on humanitarian grounds for the sake of the national spirit. Khun Sa and his army are our own blood brothers "

The SLORC boasts of the peace treaties it has signed with various rebel armies in the Shan States. In reality these deals have been aimed in large part at the regularization of the drug business.

Now, the reason I'm going on about this is that American governments declare wars on drugs every six months or so These are never won or lost. They are just redeclared. Nothing happens. By their own language, Washington has said that this is a war. and indeed, when you look at the effects of heroin in the streets, it is a war. It's a very destructive war.

Yet no policy takes into account the central reality of the heroin business - one of the SLORC's major revenue sources is drug money paid to them by the drug war lords Recently the American government has taken a bit of a stand They have cut back on trade However, there were exceptions. One of the things they would be prepared to sell were counter narcotics equipment. They would give counter narcotics assistance. Well, the last time they gave counter narcotics assistance to the SLORC, it was in the form of helicopters. Their purpose was to spray and destroy poppy fields. Instead, they were used to destroy minorities, which is of course what we all knew they would be used for

We are just pretending - the United States, Canada, Europe, Japan, Australia. We're all pretending that we're in a drug war, when in reality we're perfectly happy to go along with a theoretical government, the SLORC, being allowed to export drugs to us without being treated as an enemy. Remember that the United States has a law called the Trading with the Enemy Act, which they used to great effect against Vietnam. That's why Vietnam now has a market economy They brought them to their knees They have used it to reasonable effect against Cuba They used it against Cambodia. Interestingly enough, however, they have never declared the Trading with the Enemy Act against Burma. And yet, Burma is actually - unlike all of those other countries - attacking the United States in its own streets. They are engaged in a very successful and vicious invasion of the United States. An invasion which is aimed at the civilian population.

This isn't my invention. Look at the Far Eastern Economic Review of 21 November 1996. Robert Gelbard, U.S. assistant Secretary of State for international narcotics and law enforcement affairs, was given a page to lay out his views. He describes in detail the relationship between all the drug lords and the SLORC. He concludes: From a hard headed drug-control point of view, I have to conclude that SLORC has been part of the problem, not the solution " This is the American government speaking

On November 26, 1996, President Clinton spoke at Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok near the end of his speech he turned to drugs. He dipped and weaved, hinting at what he knows, but never drawing clear conclusion. "Burma has long been the world's number one producer of opium and heroin.... The role of drugs in Burma's economic and political life and the regimes refusal to honour its own pledge to move to multiparty democracy are really two sides of the same coin, for both represent the absence of the rule of law."

Why couldn't he simply say what he meant? What his officials are saying? Because clarity would require action. The real question is: Why doesn't the American government want to take the basic essential action; that is, the application of the Trading with the Enemy Act?

What are we to conclude? that Washington prefers doing a bit of trade to dealing with the catastrophe in its own streets? Are we to slip into bus station fiction and conclude that the influence of those who make money out of drugs in the United States is so strong that the American government won't take action? I don't know. I find it incomprehensible that they won't take action.

Let me now come back to this idea of constructive engagement. A very simple question. How many members of the legal government of Burma, the legal government party of Burma, will need to be imprisoned, tortured and killed before we actually accept the idea that there is no constructive engagement?

We know that anybody who speaks out in Burma eventually suffers, is eventually tortured, arrested, murdered, beaten up. We know that. It's very interesting - when one is thinking about constructive engagement - to have a look at what the Burmese Press Scrutiny Board (that sounds like something out of George Orwell's Newspeak) believes about freedom of speech.

Take, for example, one of the writers in prison adopted by Canadian PEN. Ma Thida is a doctor writer. She was arrested, aged 27, in August 1993, and sentenced to 23 years of solitary confinement. In other words, sentenced to death.

What sort of language causes writers to be, in effect, executed? Well, the Press Scrutiny Board is on the lookout for"defamation, criticism of the government, spreading information injurious to the State, distributing false news (again, that is straight out of George Orwell), fabricating anti-government reports, exchanging information." Exchanging information is a crime that puts you in prison, in solitary confinement, for 20 years. "Meeting with opposition groups &quot

What is constructive engagement then? The SLORC declares abroad that they're working their way towards multiparty democracy at home, they're putting people in prison for meeting with opposition groups. This is known public policy "Giving one-sided opposite views to foreign reporters." You see why it's difficult to write fiction these days. You can't make this kind of stuff up. "Selling commentary to foreign news organizations." In other words, being a journalist "Meeting with foreign diplomats." In June 1996, they passed a new law which banned "all acts seen to disturb public order" In other words, you can go to prison for five to 20 years for disturbing public order. What constitutes disturbing public order? Criticizing the government, of course.

Constructive engagement. We're engaged in constructive engagement On the economic front the underlying idea is that, through economic liberalization, democracy will come. This goes back to the old George Bush statement that free markets and free men will rule the world. If you have free markets you get free men. In terms of Western philosophy and political history, this is a total nonsense It didn't happen that way at all. In fact, you got free men before the arrival of the Industrial Revolution and they gradually regulated the markets.

As for Burma we know what provoked the return to a free market. After the massacres, the world cut off aid. Until then the Ne Win regime had essentially lived from two sources of income: heroin and aid. There was also the ruby market and the teak market, but they weren't very big. Nor was the amount of aid money lost a large amount. But then this regime has brought Burma down from a very great height to a very low level. As. a result, the economy is very small they don't need very much money to pay the army, fill their bank accounts and buy their weapons

All they had to do was replace the approximately 30 per cent of their income which came from international aid. They did it quite simply by opening up the market place. In other words, we - principally we in the developed world - cut off the money with one hand and then gave it back with our other hand. It was we who cut off the aid, and we who sent the money back in via investment I repeat, we're the same people who cut it off and who sent it back in It was a little game of passe-passe. A quick card hand worthy of a country fair charlatan.

The Thais have played a key role in all of this. They're just next door. I mentioned earlier the teak market. By the late '80s, they had cut down most of the cuttable teak trees in Thailand. abruptly the Thai government declared a moratorium on cutting teak. In a glorious conversion they went over to the green movement. The next week, they signed a whole series of agreements to go in and massacre the teak forests of Burma.

The dirty clothes campaign, which Friends of Burma has just started, is another very clear example of what happens with the kind of trade liberalization that we're getting The spokeswoman for Sears Canada, Penny Kitsen, recently defended the dirty clothes garment trade as follows: "There's the human rights issue, but if we back away, we could be risking the workers' future employment income "

This is the standard argument Western corporations wish to defend the workers' right to a 60-hour work week at eight cents an hour. I have seen the sort of factories in which< many people work in Burma. I've seen the factories - or rather the tin shacks - in the middle of the summer, when it is a hundred and something degrees inside, no windows, doors closed. And there are the children, working away. Little children. I've seen that. That's not what you could call economic progress. That's not what you might call future employment income. That's what you call exploitation of little children. It's what we in the west did away with in the 19th century.

To collaborate, to go along with that now is to pretend that we didn't decide one hundred years ago that this was illegal, immoral, impossible, unacceptable in the West. To turn around now and have garments produced in other countries, in conditions which we refuse for ourselves, is the depths of hypocrisy, whether it is done by our corporations or our government.

As you know, one of the major economic projects that's been undertaken since the economic liberalization is a 670 kilometer pipeline which Total and Unocal are building It represents an investment of $1.2 billion again, it's worth quoting the spokeswoman, Carol Scott: We believe our presence in the region is a force for progress for economic and social development.

But we've already heard this kind of argument. These soldiers have liberalized the economy in Burma once or twice before. We know that what we're really dealing with is drugs, child prostitution, AIDS, the exploitation of cheap labour and forced labour. That's what we' re dealing with We are not dealing with economic and social development. Is it this American-French pipeline project which held President Clinton back from a clear statement and clear action?

It is interesting to notice that, increasingly, western corporations are hiring won as their spokesperson It sounds gentler and better when it comes from a woman I can't help but feel terrible, as a man, when I hear a woman being used in that way. She may indeed have children and be married. And, after all, she was a child. The use of propaganda in the West is increasingly sophisticated.

Whatever you do,-if you've got bad news, especially economic news, don't send a man out there with it Send out a woman, a young woman, if possible a nice-looking young woman with a gentle air about her. Then people may accept your position.

What is the reality of Burmese development? Part of it is forced labour. Their foreign minister, Ohn Gyaw, explained in August that most Burmese are Buddhists and believe that "whatever we do in this life without recuperation" wil result in merit in the next. "It is not forced labour. It is voluntary labour"

It is hardly worth pointing out that this is a travesty of the Buddhist ideal. Yet the press releases of constructive engagement continue as if all are normal. And, while it is comforting in the West to blame ASEAN and China, the reality is that the largest investor in Burma is Britain, the third largest is France, the fifth the United States. What's more, they are investing directly in the SLORC.

Foreigners need local partners most of the available local firms are SLORC controlled 70% of foreign investors are thus business partners with the SLORC; many of them through a holding company controlled by the defense department. In other words, foreign investment is not about economic and social development. It is about investing in and propping up the SLORC. Remember, 45% of Burma's official budget is taken up by defense. And that is without factoring in the major equipment purchases from China Remember, since 1988, the Burmese army has grown from 186,000 to 300,000 men, without including the Intelligence battalions, which have also grown in importance

What would be a sensible approach for Canada and other Western countries? In fairness, it must be said that the Canadian government has been grasping for a way to wield a stronger foreign policy in Burma. There is obviously a desire to do something, but they haven't found out how to do it and it isn't clear that there has been a real decision to go all the way

I believe that this is not a case where highly sophisticated, detailed policies will have any effect believe that this is one of those cases, one of those rogue cases, where what's required is enormous clarity, blinding clarity. Burma does not have a government by Asian or Western standards. It is a tyranny by Asian and Western standards.

The SLORC is at war, actively at war, with the West, through its export of drugs. The SLORC has hijacked Burma. It holds power by violence, by drug money and by foreign investment Violence, drug money and foreign investment. Without those three, it's not in power.

What we're dealing with is not a government. What we're dealing with is thugs, criminals and drug dealers. Nothing more than that Not people whom you should have in your office if you are a publicly elected figure, elected by the Canadian people. Not people with whom it is possible to have a constructive engagement.

Canada's response on many ethical issues in Asia has been that trade comes first and that we are a small country; that we don't have much influence. But we actually do have a great deal more influence than we say we do. Our economy is not small. We are not minor traders. That our trade with Burma is small is not the point. The point is it is going in the wrong direction. It is growing.

The truth is that our indirect role can be what we choose to make it. Our real influence comes from our role in the world in a whole series of organizations - dozens of them In these we have a reputation, we have a role, we play a role, we have cards to play And so we do actually have influence on the way those organizations, and therefore the world, will treat Burma.

But the primary question isn't what influence do we have or even what effect could our policies have. To believe that foreign policy is only about the effect of your policies sounds very sophisticated, but it is false sophistication. In fact, it's incredibly naive because it reduces foreign policy to low level utilitarianism, to believing that foreign policy is all about measurable interests

In fact, that isn't the way it works. History is clear about that The primary question is not, how much influence do we have, or what effect can we have? The primary question we're not clear about that, we're nowhere - the primary question is, what do we stand for? What are our standards and what are our interests? That's where you begin building policy. In particular, that is where you begin building policy, when faced by these unusual cases of rogue governments. What happens is that a few countries, very few countries with a good reputation, usually small to medium sized countries, take a clear, strong stand. This creates an astonishingly solid pole of attraction. A wall of clarity. an unavoidable reflection of reality.

Other countries, that are scuttling about, trying to make a bit of money while mouthing motherhood principles, are obliged to consider themselves in light of this reality. That is the role Canada can play in Burma. Create a situation in which others are measured against you.

When asked about her house arrest, Aung San Suu Kyi said:

"I think to be free is to be able to do what you think is right " This is a woman on her own apparently we are not as strong as Aung San Suu Kyi. We can't even believe that to be free is to be able to do what we think is right. That is a very depressing thought.

Even if our policy has little effect, it's extremely important that our foreign policies reflect our reality. That's why we belong to appropriate military alliances as opposed to belonging to fascist military alliances. Our military alliances have to reflect that reality, even though foreign policy is extremely complex and filled with room for compromise.

I'm not making idealistic statements I'm not being romantic. I haven't got a romantic bone in my body. If we don't reflect our reality in our foreign policy, we destroy our reputation bit by bit. It's all very well to say that Canadians are caring people and then add on the rest of the paragraph about how wonderful we are. If we don't reflect that in our foreign policy, we're not those things. and when a small to medium sized country traps itself into policies which do not reflect its reality, it starts itself on a spiral which gets increasingly out of control and takes it more and more into contradiction with what it is that it thinks it stands for. So when the day of crisis comes and that country actually needs to use its reputation, it doesn't have one anymore. It may not have noticed, but others have. those others are your potential allies. They'll say, oh no, you don't stand for those things at all because look what you did on this occasion or that. Don't come and talk to us about principle now. You haven't demonstrated any principles for years.

Smaller countries actually need reputations more than big countries. Big countries have armies Small countries need their reputations. That's their capital. That's how they live in the international political arena.

So with a clear strategy, I believe that others will actually come to us. In fact, we already have real allies we already know that Scandinavia is ready to go down that road. They were in the same kind of, 'we want to do the right thing but we're not quite sure how far to go' situation, until their honorary Consul, James Leander Nichols, was murdered in prison in June 199 -- by the SLORC.

We know that they're already trying to take actions in Europe. If we began to act with great clarity, that would be two groups on two sides of the Atlantic. I am sure that we could quickly strike an alliance for an absolutely clear position.

We also know that the United States is closer to taking a clear action than it has ever been. And now, they have a president in his second term. He's not under any pressure It's early in the term. He'd probably like to make some good gestures. The next two years are the time when the good forces will be able to do something in the United States actually, I think that if we took a very clear position, we could have an enormous influence on the United States It would be very embarrassing for them if we took a clear stand on the SLORC, highlighting it as the source of the heroin coming into the West.

Just from a purely practical point of view, take a look at the list which is in the Dirty Clothes, Dirty System booklet: the list of the 13 leading investors in Burma. Seven are members of ASEAN. Four are members of the EEC Both of the North American countries, Canada and the United States, are there. And five are members of the G-7 Five of the seven G-7 are among the 13 leading investors in Burma! group which is perfectly influence able, if we have a clear position. These are our allies All that is missing to make them move is clarity.

So let me just run through what I think we can do. These are not sophisticated actions in the managerial sense. They are not sub-clauses for clever meetings.

First of all, we must be clear that there is no government in Burma and that there is no possibility of constructive engagement. If we don't decide about this, we will continue to float from one ineffective action to another. Aid will be replaced by investment, investment by something else.

Stop treating the SLORC as if it were the government of Burma That's not an airy-fairy statement If the Canadian government decides that the SLORC is no longer the government of Burma, it will have a serious impact on everything that the Canadian government can do with Buena. Suddenly, they will no longer get the benefit of the doubt or the respect which is due to governments Suddenly, they will be what they are - no more than rogue criminals.

We have to move from there to a total blockage in trade frankly, it is not that difficult to accomplish in Canada or in the United States. The mechanisms which cut off investments and trade are easy to put in place. There's no point in asking for less in this particular case. The same is true of Europe, where Britain and France are playing a particularly hypocritical game

This sort of boycott would be far easier than it was when dealing with South Africa. South Africa was a major economy in the West. Burma is not, except for its sale of heroin.

If we do that, then we can begin seriously pursuing Burma in all of the international institutions where they are still getting money - some of it indirectly, from the World Bank or the Asian Development Bank, just to name a few. Once we take a firm stand in international institutions, along with the Scandinavians and perhaps the Americans, it will be almost impossible for those institutions to go on giving money to Burma.

Next there is the drug question. This is the key to stopping the SLORC. We have to pursue them actively over the question of their involvement as active participants in heroin exports to the West, and indeed to ASEAN and China We would have to sit down and investigate precisely what that would mean. For example, nothing prevents us from indicting the members of the SLORC in our courts as drug dealers. I don't know whether we can take them to the international court, but we could certainly deal with that to some extent inside Canada and we can certainly push th United States in that direction. They love indicting foreigners. We can certainly embarrass the United States into doing the same.

The more we go out there and say that the SLORC is the principal supplier of heroin to Americans, the more the American government is going to have to act on this front. And the way they can act is through the Trading with the Enemy Act.

We have to start talking seriously to the Swiss about bank accounts. You'll note, if you go down the list of the countries who are for normalization, or more or less normalization of relations with Burma, that the Swiss are one of the few Western governments to be in favour of it. We have to go to the G-7 and get the G-7 to come to terms with the SLORC as the source of heroin. Rnd then we have to turn to ASEAN, which has been pushed by local and international business interests into gradually normalizing Asian relations with the SLORC.

We have to go to ASEAN and say that on the basis of the fact that the SLORC is not a government, even by Asian standards, and that we do not consider it to be a government, we consider it to be a criminal activity. And that the normalization of ASEAN's relationships with Burma is unacceptable to us.

You have to realize that, from the point of view of ASEAN, there's an advantage - as there is for everyone else there's an advantage and a disadvantage to every action. One of the good things about globalization is what's often thought to be a bad thing. Everything is interdependent. If we take a strong stand in North America and Europe, it will be very difficult for corporations in the ASEAN countries to deal with Burma without there being sore very strong down side elsewhere

The question is: how much is Burma worth to ASEAN, in pure financial terns, if normalization is going to damage their alliances, their friendships, their cooperation with the West? It's not worth as much as all that if the G-7 says no. They'll ask themselves: how much are we making out of this? Not enough to have the G-7 against us.

Finally, rogue juntas fall because they fail. That's the principal reason. If you take a tough stand and you follow through on the tough stand, you will create dissension inside the rogue government. As in all long-lived single party States, the party contains all sorts. If the SLORC is allowed to manoeuver its way toward international respectability, or even half respectability, the junta will hold. If it is blocked abroad, it will fail economically at home. Suddenly you will discover that there are moderates in the Burmese army who will respond to the need for real change. Not everybody in the Burmese army is like the leadership of the SLORC. There are some fairly decent, mid-level officers who involved in all of this. They will respond to a need for change when the need for change becomes apparent inside. These are the sorts of people who would be happy to see the legal government of Burma, the government of Aung San Suu Kyi, in power in Burma. I'm sure that many members of the Burmese army are actually for Aung San Suu Kyi. Many of them But because we in the West and in ASEAN are propping up the SLORC, those moderates are not getting a chance to play their role as the supporters of a future legal government.

We're all so sophisticated that we think there are complex, manageable approaches to every problem. In some cases, there aren't. Some cases need simplicity. You need to be tough. You need to be direct. This is one of those cases. That's the only way that we'll be able to unleash the various forces that can bring down the SLORC.