Myanmar (formerly Burma)

I am deeply saddened that the authorities have felt that they needed to resort to violence to quell protest in Myanmar. Sadly this is another instance in a long chapter of elites protecting themselves in the only way they have left - it would seem that the only authority that the Burmese military junta has left is rule by terror.

There is a problem with the way the world looks on, urging leaders to do something that is linked both to the way the media has changed and the problem that the world population doesn’t seem to have a proper understanding of the limitations of the UN. Turning to the first point, people across the globe are seeing striking images and news reports, many of which stem from mobile phones and blogs. Were we not living in an information age, this would have been suppressed and not become an international cause for concern. We perhaps would have known very little at all (and the BBC has devoted far less time to this than it has to whether Gordon Brown might call an early election, or indeed the football). Crucially, however, this has all happened thousands of miles from the western world.

The second point, regarding the limits of UN power is more important, particularly as it is becomming incresingy clear that the world’s population does not understand the UN mandtae, nor the way that inernational affairs are conducted. In part this stems from the UN’s shocking inability to mage situations it has been involved in, but also becuase of the way in which the UN was abused in the run-up to the Iraq War. The UN is powerless to intervene in matters that are purely internal - this is why the French were obliged to go into Rwanda and the Ivory Coast alone in the first instance - and Myanmar remains, for the moment a domestic crisis. There is no threat to other states, and while the UN can condemn the killing if civilians and the supression of peaceful protest (however hypocritical they may be in doing so given what some of their members have done in the past) until the problem escalates into an international concern (international meaning between states, not foreign) the UN remains powerless. Of course, individual states may still express their concerns about the situation and impose various coercive measures in the hope that that Myanmar government will relent.

I feel that this point needed making, as it would seem from news reports that the UN is grossly misunderstood to be more powerful than it in fact is.