Myanmar might get more aid

UNITED NATIONS — International sanctions and Laura Bush's personal intervention did not make Myanmar's generals ease their political oppression. Neither did quiet diplomacy, nor the devastation of a cyclone.

So the United Nations is attempting a new approach: It is trying to entice the generals with fresh promises of development money.

According to senior U.N. officials, special envoy Ibrahim Gambari has proposed that nations offer Myanmar financial incentives to free more than 2,000 political prisoners, including Nobel laureate Aung San Suu Kyi, and to open the country to democratic change.

In the months ahead, the U.N. leadership will press the Obama administration to relax U.S. policy on Myanmar and to open the door to a return of international financial institutions, including the World Bank. The bank left in 1987 because Myanmar, also known as Burma, did not implement economic and political reforms.

"It cannot be business as usual. We need new thinking on how to engage with Myanmar in a way that will bring tangible results," Gambari said in an interview, adding that the United Nations cannot rely simply on "the power of persuasion with too little in the (diplomatic) toolbox."

But critics characterize the strategy as a desperate attempt to salvage a diplomatic process that has so deteriorated that Suu Kyi and Senior Gen. Than Shwe, Myanmar's military ruler, declined to meet with Gambari during his last trip there, in August. Gambari, critics say, is simply grasping to show progress in moving a regime that has no intention of embracing democratic reform.

The United States and Britain have resisted financial perks, arguing that Myanmar should not be rewarded for bad behavior. They are not "under any illusions that sanctions would solve Myanmar's problems," said Jared Genser, Suu Kyi's Washington-based attorney and president of the advocacy group Freedom Now. But "if you flood them with development assistance, it will only go to the junta's favored few," Genser said.

Gambari outlined his strategy in a confidential paper he presented last month to U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon. In it, according to senior U.N. officials who have seen the document, Gambari endorses building on the relations Myanmar established with the outside world after Cyclone Nargis struck the country in May. He also calls for an increase in development assistance to Myanmar and proposes that wealthy countries expand the nation's access to foreign investment, the officials added.