New dawn in Burma?

When the inevitable year-end roundup of the year’s most important news developments unreels less than a month from now, it will no doubt include the images of two women hugging each other, holding hands, kissing each other’s cheek, having dinner together. The Caucasian woman has her hair bundled up in an uncharacteristic ponytail, a far cry from the stern, formidable authority she normally projects on her globe-trotting assignations. Letting her hair down (or up in this case) attested to the instant sense of casualness and warmth she seemed to have generated with the 66-year-old wisp of an Asian woman she was meeting for the first time. There they were, Hillary Rodham Clinton, the first American secretary of state in half a century to be allowed to set foot on Burma, and the Burmese icon of democracy, Aung San Suu Kyi, welcoming her and taking her hand on a stroll through her home and garden that, until recently, had served as her prison.

The images beaming out of Burma these days are startling—and hopeful. Clinton’s historic visit to the country its military junta had renamed Myanmar was but the splashiest, most significant development in a series of political tremors that have been rippling out of Burma’s capital Naypyidaw since November 2010, when a nominally civilian government assumed power and began surprising observers with small but striking steps toward political reform.

It has released Suu Kyi, first of all, after keeping her under house arrest for 15 of the last 21 years. Scores of political prisoners were also released, restrictions on media and freedom of expression were relaxed (pictures of Suu Kyi are now openly sold on the streets of Yangon, the country’s commercial capital, where before it spelled danger for anyone peddling or buying them), and opposition political parties have been allowed to re-register for planned parliamentary elections, in which Suu Kyi and her once-banned National League of Democracy party have announced they will participate.

Burma’s new government under Thein Sein has also taken steps to reintegrate itself with the outside world, inviting consultants from the International Monetary Fund and World Bank to take a look at its ramshackle economy and propose reforms. For many decades an international pariah, Burma had relied on China for trade, investments and geo-political patronage. But Sein’s administration showed a surprising willingness to buck its giant neighbor when it suspended the construction of a hydroelectric dam project, bitterly opposed by many Burmese, that would have funneled 90 percent of its power output to China. And, before Clinton’s visit, a flurry of once-unthinkable meetings between Burmese and US officials took place, culminating in the diplomatic coup of two of the world’s most recognizable women leaders pledging to work together to bring democracy to a nation long synonymous with political repression, economic backwardness and virulent xenophobia.

Is a new dawn breaking for Burma? Observers say much remains to be done if these reforms are to take root. Not all political prisoners have been set free—many of them members of ethnic minorities that have been in bloody conflict with the central government for years. Torture and censorship are still in place (“Everything from poetry to films is censored, filtering criticism not only of the government but most bad news, including reports of natural disasters and sometimes even defeats of the national football team,” reports the BBC), and Burma remains officially in close relations with North Korea, whose nuclear ambitions and even more secretive, irrational pronouncements have rattled the region. Underscoring its isolation, Burma is so technologically backward that as of September 2009, according to Internet World Stats, its Internet users numbered less than 200,000 out of a population of 50.5 million.

Still, for the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, the US and the rest of the world, this moment appears to be the most opportune time in decades to engage Burma and encourage it to step out of its reclusive, repressive shell. Its long-suffering people would benefit from more international aid, an increase in tourism, and the gradual lifting of international sanctions as fresh reforms and greater freedoms are nudged out of the civilian (but still military-backed) government.

“I believe there are elements within the government who are genuine in their desire to bring about reforms,” Suu Kyi has said. “And it is worthwhile to take the risk, to accept that there is a possible opening.”

The world should take its cue from her.