Business as usual with the Burmese generals

Elliot Wilson explains why international condemnation of Burma’s brutal military leaders is so ineffectual: because many other countries are eager to do deals with them

The satirist P.J. O’Rourke once noted that the more references to democracy a country has in its official title, the greater the chance it is run by a grubby totalitarian regime. Hence the People’s Republic of China and the Kim dynasty’s heroically misleading ‘Democratic People’s Republic’ of North Korea.

Burma — or Myanmar, as its leaders prefer — has its equivalent in the State Peace and Development Council (SPDC). This is essentially a rebadged version of the less fluffy-sounding State Law and Order Restoration Council, a name that was dropped in 1997 perhaps due to its unappealingly Dungeons-and-Dragons-esque acronym: SLORC. For Burma’s brutal military junta, which has ruled with mediaeval barbarism since 1988, the ‘Peace’ portion of the title signals the army’s self-proclaimed right to maintain internal stability by keeping a malnourished populace crushed underfoot and holding the revered opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi under indefinite house arrest.