Toronto Star
Lawyers plan controversial Burmese visit
Critics say trip will only benefit Myanmar junta
December 31, 2006
Leslie Scrivener
Staff Reporter
Although Nobel Peace Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi has urged tourists not to visit her homeland, lawyers and judges from the Ontario Bar Association are planning a spring trip to Southeast Asia that includes nine days in Burma, renamed Myanmar by the military junta that took power in 1988.
The trip is not sanctioned by the military dictatorship, says Doug Grenkie, the Morrisburg lawyer who is organizing the March visit. He says the primary purpose is educational.
"We're just going as a group of tourists ... It's not official because we'd have to register with judicial officers in the capital and we'd have to get permission to have meetings with lawyers and they would send representatives to attend the meetings and monitor everything that is said."
Grenkie, who has arranged four social meetings with Burmese lawyers, says tourism puts money directly in the hands of craftspeople and those who work in the tourism industry.
But critics question the ethics of travelling to a country that has become notorious for flagrantly violating human rights.
Suu Kyi, 61, is under house arrest, as she has been for nearly 11 of the past 17 years. She is head of the National League for Democracy, which won a landslide victory in 1990 elections that the military refused to recognize.
Burmese people "want democracy," she said in a 1999 interview, "and many have died for it. To suggest that there's anything new that tourists can teach the people of Burma about their own situation is not simply patronizing, it's also racist."
The Ontario lawyers' itinerary includes visits to monasteries, shopping trips for Burmese lacquerware and rubies, tours of the temples in the ancient city of Bagan and a starlight cruise on the Ayeyarwaddy River. Several evenings are set aside for possible legal meetings.
The trip is troubling to Toronto lawyer Paul Copeland, who has been a Burma advocate for several years. In a letter to the Ontario Bar Association, Copeland wrote: "I still hope the OBA will call off the trip and honour the request of Aung San Suu Kyi and the National League for Democracy that tourists not come to Burma until the people there are free and have achieved democracy."
Canada 's former secretary of state for the Asia-Pacific region, David Kilgour, says the lawyers should not go.
"It's obscene a group of lawyers from any province should choose to go to Burma," says Kilgour. "The only people they'll be able to meet are people who been vetted and re-vetted to make sure they say nothing to them."
But, notes Dying Alive author Guy Horton, a British academic who spent five years documenting atrocities against Burmese ethnic minorities: "If this is a genuine fact-finding trip, it would probably be justified.
"However, the junta has almost completely destroyed free speech in Burma and anyone who does talk to this group of lawyers is likely to be very severely victimized afterward."
Horton says the Ontario visitors should make every effort to meet political opponents, including former prisoners and rights workers from the ethnic minorities targeted by the junta.
"Otherwise, the group runs the risk of just having the wool pulled over its eyes, withdrawing in bewilderment, or being gulled into believing that all is not as bad as it seems.
"The gullibility of Westerners, wilful or not, and the deception of the junta are past belief."
The Canadian Friends of Burma also argue against the lawyers' visit.
"The tourists' money will go directly to the military junta," says Tin Maung Htoo, a spokesperson for the Ottawa-based group.
"The military always says there are millions of foreign visitors coming to Burma, the country is peaceful, stable and beautiful, and no- body cares about the political situation. In a way, they are trying to say they are a legitimate government."
The bar association has asked Burma advocate Copeland to speak to its group of 60, which includes spouses, before the March 15 departure. Other OBA trips to non-democratic countries, including Syria and apartheid-era South Africa, have also been controversial.
"You learn about the problems that face lawyers and judges in those jurisdictions," says Grenkie, past-president of the OBA. "We don't particularly like the (Burmese) regime, yet there are lawyers practising there and people who need our support." |
