Senator Jim Webb (D-VA) is chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee’s Asia subcommittee. Webb, whose “hold” on the nomination of now-confirmed Assistant Secretary of State for East Asia and Pacific Affairs Kurt Campbell was so strong a North Korean nuclear detonation could not break it (multiple pleading calls from Secretary of State Clinton finally did), conducted a tour of Asia in the days after the congressional August recess began. Webb gained headlines for his foray into Burma or, as that country’s military junta and Webb call it, Myanmar, where he met with jailed Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Aung San Suu Kyi, and the country’s supremo leader, the ever-reclusive General Than Shwe. Webb was allowed to meet with Suu Kyi. who has spent 14 of the last 20 years jailed in her home by a regime that is in a bitter fight with North Korean for the Most Repressive in the World title. She is kept virtually incommunicado by the regime. Webb has taken an interest in Burma, spending the first 15 minutes of the Campbell confirmation hearing quizzing him on upcoming “elections” in Burma planned for next year and the role of sanctions in penalizing this brutal regime. Webb believes elections are a potential opening for Burma’s democracy movement and that sanctions are ineffective. Webb also scored a couple of sorts when a jailed American, John Yattaw, was allowed to leave the country on Webb’s plane. Yattaw, who reportedly suffers from stress disorders and believes voices told him to protect Suu Kyi, swam over to her lakefront home to protect her. Suu Kyi was then convicted of sheltering Yattaw and will remain in jail for at least another 18 months. Believing that Burma could be coaxed out of its self imposed shell through economic and political engagement, Webb also stated in a follow up press conference (one of at least three) that it was his “clear impression from her [Suu Kyi] that she is not opposed to lifting some sanctions,” and that “there would be some areas she would be willing to look at.” This statement shocked and outraged member’s of Burma’s democracy movement as it would have represented a major change in position and Suu Kyi is barred from meeting with anyone except her doctor and a lawyer. Suu Kyi’s attorney, Nyan Win, was dispatched to get a straight answer and rocketed out this reply: “She [Suu Kyi] replied that she had not discussed the issue (sanctions) with anyone recently.” So what-up with Webb? Did she or didn’t she? He has been strangely quiet ever since. One Burma watcher said it was the first time in two decades that he could remember Suu Kyi was forced to issue a statement clarifying what she said — or in this case, didn’t say. Quite the slapdown. And those “elections” Webb has so much faith in. They would take place under a “constitution” that was adopted in May 2008 — just days after a cyclone that killed thousands of Burmese — and permanently enshrines military rule. Oh…and according to Burmese junta figures, despite the country being devastated by the worst cyclone in its history, turnout for the constitutional referendum was 98 percent with a whopping 93 percent in favor of the constitution. A figure even Soviet bureaucrats would be proud of.
