National Perspective : In Myanmar, the Numbers Don’t Add Up to Much

It’s been a typical week in Myanmar. The military junta that has ruled the country for more than a decade busied itself rounding up dissidents. On Monday, it accused Nobel Peace Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi of “mental atrophy.”

Myanmar is an uncomputerized country that is nonetheless more spooked by numbers than America is by the millennium bug. At the moment, the junta is particularly scared that there might be an outbreak of popular unrest next week on the “four nines”: Sept. 9, or 9/9/99.

As it happens, the student demonstrations that shook Myanmar to its very foundations erupted 11 years ago on the “four eights,” 8/8/88. The military regime suppressed those protests, killing many hundreds of students. As a result, opposition forces--led by Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy--won nationwide elections that the junta refused to honor. It’s no wonder the junta is anxiously watching its numerology charts again.

What might happen in ‘00, at the stroke of midnight of the new year? Maybe the rest of the world will stop; probably it won’t. But Myanmar certainly won’t grind to a halt, because it doesn’t have enough computer chips to matter. It hasn’t been moving anywhere anyway. Its economy is stuck. It’s barely beyond the 1950s.

One of the reasons for the Myanmar regime’s economic plight is that it is the target of U.S. sanctions. In 1997, President Clinton banned new American investment in Myanmar. Since 1988, the United States already had been successfully blocking international lending to the country.

The Clinton administration sanctions against Myanmar are one of the targets of an intensive campaign by the American business community. An umbrella organization called USAEngage, which represents American corporations and trade groups, has been trying to convince Washington that American foreign policy should stop relying upon sanctions--in Myanmar or anywhere else--as a tool of American foreign policy.

Sanctions aren’t effective, these opponents argue, in part because they are too easily undercut. If American firms are barred from doing business with a particular country, other countries will fill the vacuum.

The problem with this argument is that it’s far too broad and extreme. In some instances, sanctions do have an impact. South Africa’s apartheid government was one such case; although American sanctions seemed once not to be working, they eventually helped prompt the white leadership to change course.

Present-day Myanmar is an even better example. This July, in an unclassified cable signed by Priscilla Clapp, the chief of mission of the American Embassy in Yangon, U.S. diplomats in Myanmar reviewed the evidence and concluded that “without doubt sanctions have affected the economy of Burma,” as Myanmar was formerly known.

The 1997 sanctions had “a strong deterrent effect,” the cable said. Not only did new investment stop, but two large American companies, Texaco and Arco, decided to pull out of Myanmar. Moreover, the cable said, some non-American companies refrained from doing business with Myanmar because they were unwilling to risk offending the U.S. government or American consumers.

Do economic sanctions harm the American economy? Groups such as USAEngage often argue that they do. But a Congressional Budget Office study last March concluded that “those costs are likely to be tiny when the sanctions are imposed on small developing countries--the most common target.”

The CBO study found that, not surprisingly, the costs to the United States of unilateral American economic sanctions depend on the country the U.S. is trying to penalize. When the targets are the big industrial economies of Western Europe and Japan, which are major U.S. trading partners, they can impose severe costs by retaliating against American products.

In the case of big emerging economies such as China, the costs are in the middle range, the study found. And in the case of small countries such as Myanmar, the costs of sanctions to the American economy are small.

China is the country that, more than any other, triggered the American business community’s general revolt against sanctions. The Clinton administration backed away from its threats to take away China’s most-favored-nation trade status in 1994 after it became all too clear that European and Japanese companies were lining up to get the contracts Americans would lose.

But the arguments against sanctions that were so heatedly bruited about in that landmark China debate don’t even apply to Myanmar. Americans aren’t losing a huge amount of business there. The Europeans aren’t rushing in.

Nor can anyone possibly imagine that the United States is imposing its own values on an unwilling Myanmar. Remember: The people of Myanmar already made their values quite clear. The nation had a democratic election, and the military junta has been unwilling to abide by it.

Where is Myanmar headed? Here’s a numerological prediction: If the junta sticks to its present course, then for a decade or more--say by 1/1/11--Myanmar’s economy will remain in suspended animation and will look the way it did on, say, 5/5/55. And that wasn’t Pleasantville.