SYDNEY: Myanmar’s generals have long demonstrated an extraordinary capacity to remember everything, and to learn nothing. Sometimes this serves them well. Much of the world, when it thinks of Myanmar at all, neither remembers nor learns.
So on Tuesday (Aug 1), we see an announcement by Myanmar’s ruling junta that it is to reduce the prison sentences of some key officials of the democratically elected government it overthrew in February 2021.
Aung San Suu Kyi, State Counsellor of the government elected in a landslide in November 2020, had six years shaved off her 33-year sentence. Myanmar’s deposed president, Win Myint, saw his sentence reduced by four years. Reductions in the sentences of other political prisoners are also likely in the offing.
The sentence reductions come one day after the military junta extended the state of emergency under which it claims to rule, by a further six months. This was the fourth such extension, and in breach of its own constitution that limits such extensions to two.
PARTIAL PARDON NOT SOMETHING TO BE CELEBRATED
Cynics, the ignorant, the gullible and various vested interests in military rule in Myanmar will loudly exclaim this news as a positive development signifying real change. It is not. Neither Aung San Suu Kyi, Win Myint, nor any of the other political prisoners being ill-treated in Myanmar’s awful jails should be there at all.
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