Burma presses on with voting

BANGKOK — Burma’s military junta pressed ahead today with a referendum designed to entrench its grip on power in spite of devastating damage from last week’s cyclone.

Foreign relief efforts remain stymied amid concern on the part of the junta that outsiders may provide assistance to opponents of the referendum.

“The Burmese government is blocking international aid efforts in part to keep foreigners out until the voting is over,” said Elaine Pearson, deputy Asia director of New York-based Human Rights Watch.

“But those without clean water, food or medical care can’t wait any longer for help. They need it now. It’s time to pull the plug on the referendum and open up to aid workers and their supplies,” she said yesterday.

Burma has instead ordered its 500,000-strong army to secure the country for today’s vote on a new constitution and has monopolized the country’s media to explain why citizens should vote “yes.”

The new constitution would effectively allow the junta to retain its dictatorial role, which began after a 1962 army coup. The junta began calling the country Myanmar in 1989, but the change has never been recognized by the United States.

Increasingly harsh demands by the U.S., United Nations, nongovernmental aid agencies, and others to allow foreign relief workers into Burma have been ignored, despite a spiraling death toll after Cyclone Nargis. The storm killed tens of thousands of people, and left an estimated 1 million survivors struggling with little help.

Burma’s junta apparently fears U.S. and other foreign aid groups will include subversive agents who could secretly give satellite telephones, weapons, cash and other help to Burmese dissidents and pro-democracy activists — a perception frequently expressed in government-controlled media about Americans and others even before the cyclone, which lashed the sea-level south coast on May 2-3.

Nations perceived as enemies, especially the U.S. and most European powers, were told to deliver cash and boxes of aid to the stricken commercial port of Rangoon — but no foreigners would be allowed to oversee distribution.

The government Tuesday said it would hold the referendum in parts of the country not affected by Cyclone Nargis. It postponed the vote by two weeks in the areas hardest hit by the storm.

The new, severe, 194-page draft constitution has taken the regime about 10 years to write and offer for public scrutiny.

“The previous constitutions had some defects regarding the rights of national [minority] races, and that provoked armed insurrection and destabilization,” the regime said yesterday, referring to ethnic guerrillas fighting for autonomy or independence along Burma’s borders during the past 50 years.

The constitution’s opening clauses call for the military to be able to “participate in the national leadership role of the state.”

Twenty-five percent of the seats in the new parliament’s upper and lower houses would be filled by military appointees, chosen by the armed forces’ commander in chief. Other seats can be filled by elected officials, but military officers would be allowed as candidates and have an advantage over civilians, thus increasing the overall number of military personnel running the country.

Similarly, one-quarter of all state and regional parliaments would also be handpicked by the commander in chief. Ministers for defense, interior, border affairs and their deputies are reserved for military officers.

Nobel Peace Prize laureate Aung San Suu Kyi would be blocked from ever governing Burma, despite her National League for Democracy Party winning a landslide election victory in 1990. She has been under house arrest in Rangoon, also known as Yangon, for 12 of the past 18 years.

The new constitution says she cannot be president because her late husband, academic Michael Aris, was British, and their two sons currently hold British citizenship — though Mrs. Suu Kyi remains a Burmese citizen.