IDENTIDADES 1 ENGLISH IDENTIDADES 9 ENGLISH | Page 40

take, we have the very similar case of
Burma (Myanmar). Until recently, this
country had an unshakable absolutist
militarized profile as anti-modern as
ours. The slightest opposition to the
generals and the army triggered the
most drastic repression. The popular
leaders were killed or illegally sent to
jail. The political police and the armed
forces acted with brutal impunity. The
government violence was so cruel that
hundreds of Buddhist monks, the moral
heart of the nation, lost their lives when
they took to the streets to protest the
brutal and prolonged political situation.
To make things worse, this China´s
satellite government —subsidized with
billions of dollars for its increasingly
poor economy— was on the brink of a
civil war. Different ethnic groups within
the nation began to carry out armed
actions in a desperate resistance to the
abuses and crimes of the Burmese army.
The latter had engaged in an ethnic
cleansing hardly reported by the
Western press. Nothing seemed to
indicate a slightest chance for making a
peaceful 180-degrees turn towards
national stability and normality.
However, such a possibility fructified
by nothing less than the initiative of the
same decrepit generals who were ruling
the country with absolute control.
What happened? Maybe a timely
rapture of ancient Asian wisdom amid a
situation of apparent internal control,
but facing a medium-term collapse
because of unstoppable forces that were
driving a delayed but inevitably
change? Or maybe a summarized
lesson, well assimilated, from the recent
end of Gaddafi's dictatorship in Libya,
which was very similar in its structure
for exercising absolute power over the
people?
As it may be, the radical turn worked in
Myanmar. The obtuse Burmese generals
took a critical step unexpected by
analysts and experts. One day they
granted full freedom to the main
national opposition leader, Aung San

Suu Kyi, who had been under house
arrest for years. In addition, the military
authorities took critical measures for a
real and gradual shift toward national
stability on a long road with an incipient
and rudimentary rule of law. These
measures were followed, without much
delay, by a general amnesty for all
political prisoners, freedoms of press
and association, multiparty system and
free elections.
Was this simple gesture of submission
just a sudden act of goodwill, imbued
with the surprising principle that
weapons (military) must yield to togas
(civilians)? It wasn´t so innocent. The
generals asked for specific guarantees
against being prosecuted or tried for
their crimes and their ill-gotten wealth.
Facing a moral dilemma between justice
for past abuses and the need to start
moving the nation away from a
suffocating circle of violence during so
many decades, the opposition forces
agreed.
They were willing to firmly keep the
promise of abstaining from justice in
return of achieving the necessary
stability for initiating radical changes.
They were not proud victors who
deemed as surrender the decisive initial
step taken by their evil enemies. They
proceeded with prudence and accepted
what was in fact before them. They
moved away from the purpose of
attempting a vindictive retaliation
against their rabid opponents from
yesterday. They also had their own
bomb to disarm, and they should do it
very carefully.
Achieving these first steps was
necessary to ensure peace and stability
in the long-suffering country. The
nation was emerging from a prolonged
illness and started the unstable path
towards the consolidation of a new State
under the rule of law.
Other backgrounds of the same
roadmap to peace.
In fact, the transfer of power by the

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