Burmese Junta Stages Pro-Government Love Fest

By Rick Moran

A banner (above) at a pro-junta rally in Rangoon stated: "BBC lying, VOA deceiving and RFA (Radio Free Asia) setting up hostilities. Beware, don't be bought by those slickers." (Agence France-Presse/Getty Images) - Photo courtesy of the Washington Times.

Sometimes, irony is just not adequate to describe an event. A picture, being worth a thousands words or so, exceeds any attempt on my part to describe the situation in Burma.

Those happy people you see above were ordered to turn out for a pro-government rally yesterday:

After three weeks of provincial pro-government "rallies" stage-managed affairs at which attendance is compulsory the junta brought its roadshow to a sports ground in Rangoon, the main city and former capital.

Tens of thousands of people from government organizations, private factories and nearby suburbs sat through drizzle to voice choreographed support for the junta's "road map to democracy" and a constitution-drafting national convention.

"The delegates just read out everything written by the authorities," one attendee said. "It was the usual stuff support the national convention and condemn the so-called 'destructive elements.'"

In junta-speak, "destructive elements" means anybody wanting to bring an end to 45 years of military rule and economic stagnation in a country that ranked as one of Asia's brightest prospects shortly after independence from Britain in 1948.

"Junta-speak," indeed. The military tends to do much more talking with bullets and billy clubs than any other way we've been able to detect.

And one wonders what the penalty would have been for not attending the rally. I'm sure the military let people use their own imaginations of the consequences given the government's horrific response to those who don't do as their told.

And their sham program to bring "democracy" to the country means subsituting the willing lackeys of the military to run for office since they are locking up or murdering anyone else who might have an independent thought once and a while.

One wonders who the military is trying to fool with these rallies. Certainly no one outside of Burma since everyone knows the character of this regime.

And if it's directed toward their own people, one would have to be brain dead to buy into their nonsense - unless one is directly benefitting from the repression of their friends and neighbors by slavishly cooperting with the government in their single minded determination to eradicate any semblance of a democracy movement.

The military may be stupid. But they've got the guns. And as they proved all too well a few weeks ago, they are more than willing to use those weapons without mercy to keep their iron fisted control.