The world looks on

  • The Guardian,
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Yesterday, what everyone feared would happen in Burma, started happening. Police sent in to disperse thousands of demonstrators in the administrative capital Rangoon opened fire on the protesters. Reuters quoted hospital and monastery sources as saying two monks and a civilian died of gunshot wounds, as thousands of Buddhist monks and civilians defied warning shots, tear gas and baton charges. If the pattern of 1988 is to be repeated, these deaths could prove a grim foretaste of things to come. Then, it took weeks of similar nationwide protests before the insurrection was quelled by the massacre of 3,000 people.

Once again, most of the world looks on at the actions of a brutish military dictatorship who show no compunction about spilling blood. But not all the bystanders are impotent. China is the junta's chief backer. Beijing has supplied the Burmese military with fighter aircraft, tanks, naval patrol boats, armoured personnel carriers, field artillery pieces ,small arms and ammunition - more than $2bn worth. It has trained them and given them a signal intelligence capability. China's interest-free loans have staved off economic collapse, constructed new roads, railways, ports and dams. In return for Burma's ample supplies of crude oil and natural gas, and in return too for access to the Indian Ocean, China has provided the junta with the diplomatic equivalent of missile defence.

In January, China voted against a resolution in the UN security council empowering the secretary general to negotiate with the regime. It undermined three Asian efforts to secure the release of Aung San Suu Kyi, the National League for Democracy leader. Only rarely has China departed from its default position that the issues Burma faces are internal, sovereign matters. In 2004 Chinese premier Wen Jiabao expressed the hope that the junta would speed up "political settlements of existing disputes so as to enhance stability and peaceful development". China, in short, is the junta's best insurance policy, and any hope that Beijing's recent welcome change of stance on Darfur and North Korea might be repeated in Burma, remains untested.

Western efforts to stop the bloodshed are limited. One of the consequences of the Bush era, in which regime change is an explicit aim of foreign policy, is that the US and Britain have become tainted messengers of democratic values. Efforts to undermine hostile regimes - either militarily or covertly through funding - can create real difficulties for opposition movements in those countries. It it is now all too easy for despots to brand their domestic opponents as foreign lackeys. It is an argument that echoes from Iran to Zimbabwe.

Britain's own investment relationship with Burma is far from clear. There was a revealing exchange between the Foreign Office and Burma Campaign UK on the junta's claim that the UK is its second largest investor. While the Foreign Office dismissed the figure as bogus, Burma Campaign UK said that Britain had allowed foreign companies to use subsidiaries in the dependent territories to invest in Burma. They are right to argue that David Miliband should now close this loophole.

None of this helps the brave monks and citizens of Rangoon, Mandalay and Sittwe. About 300 of them were carted off in unmarked police trucks yesterday to an uncertain fate. If the junta manages to avoid a Tiananmen Square-style massacre happening in public, it will have few qualms about what happens to its detainees in the secrecy of its jails. Regime survival is first and foremost in the panicked minds of Burma's generals. They have been taken aback by this uprising and the defiance of nine days of protest. Last night the monks pledged to carry on despite the deaths and injuries they have endured. They hope to force the military to the negotiating table. They will struggle to do so, when the reality is that they are on their own.

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