The crisis that is Burma

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Iran, Lebanon and North Korea may top the list of daunting challenges facing the international community, but the U.N. Security Council should make room on its agenda for one additional problem that warrants immediate attention: Burma.

Although Burma may appear to lack some of the urgency of other global hotspots, the ugly record of Burma's ruling military junta, the State Peace and Development Council (SPDC), and the toxic mix of traditional and non-traditional security challenges it has created embody the complexity of the security challenges of the 21st century.

Burma represents a key test of international cooperation, and how the U.N. responds to the challenge is a critical question for the international community.

The rap sheet on Burma's ruling generals is long: grave human rights violations, failure to make progress toward national reconciliation and unwillingness to implement the recommendations of the U.N. secretary-general.

Despite the regime's many promises to institute democratic reforms, political repression in recent years has only gotten worse. Nobel Peace Prize laureate Aung San Suu Kyi remains under house arrest, despite the juntas multiple promises to release her, and hundreds of opposition party leaders are still in jail.

The military junta has also stepped up its attacks and repression of civilians, and in particular its violent oppression of the Karen ethnic minority. The systematic destruction of villages, killings, and rapes has forced tens of thousands of people to flee their homes into the jungle. With over half a million total IDPs, these refugee flows are creating a significant destabilizing pressure on Burma's borders, and its border with Thailand in particular.

Indeed, with well over a hundred thousand refugees living at the border in camps, the spillover effect of the humanitarian crisis engineered by the SPDC has created deep and systemic instability across the region. In recent years Burma's neighbors have come to recognize the nature of the threat posed by the SPDC. As the regime's depredations have worsened, ASEAN in turn has started to back away from its earlier stance of engagement with Burma.

The problems created by the SPDC for the region (and indeed the globe), however, are not just those related to the refugees or human rights violations. Because the regime has effectively destroyed Burma's ability to provide such basic services as health care to its people, for example, Burma now functions as a disease vector for Southeast Asia, including malaria, TB and HIV/AIDS -- epidemics whose ill-effects place Burma's neighbors at grave risk. Yunnan province in southern China, for instance, has witnessed a spike in HIV rates, attributed in large part to spillover from Burma.

Burma also remains one of the world's top producers of heroin and amphetamines. Having effectively destroyed Burma's economic well-being -- a further source of instability in the region drug production and narcotrafficking are central to the survival of the regime, which preys on its neighbors and indeed the entire global community.

Given these developments, U.N. Security Council members must recognize that Burma is what a 21st century security threat looks like, and build on the council's recent history of taking action on nontraditional threats to peace and security: In Sierra Leone, the U.N. took action when the country's democratically elected government was overthrown. It acted in Cambodia when fighting among factions created instability, in Yemen and Haiti when there were gross human rights violations; in Rwanda when refugee outflows threatened regional stability, and in Afghanistan to counter the international threat from drug trafficking.