The Hong Kong-based regional rights group started the blog alarmed at a lack of public discussion about the appointing of new members to the National Human Rights Commission (NHRC) of Thailand this year.

"Right now there seems to be no talk at all about who the new commissioners will be or how they will be selected once the senate is up and running," Basil Fernando, director of the AHRC, said.

Basil Fernando

"If people in Thailand don't keep their eyes on this, then one day soon without knowing it they will end up with a bogus and politically-managed commission comprising of people who couldn't care less about human rights, like what now exists in Sri Lanka," he warned.

Thailand's senate, which is half-elected and half-appointed, has the task of revising the law on the NHRC through which new members will be selected.

According to the 2007 constitution, candidates should have "apparent knowledge and experience in the protection of the rights and liberties of the people".

"We need to get as many ideas as possible about who fits these criteria," Fernando explained.

"We hope that this blog will be a place for people to get talking about who can do this important job, and that it will promote talk elsewhere too," he said.

The AHRC plans to incorporate suggested candidates into the blog and come up with a list of seven possible new commissioners to put forward to the selection panel. It will also publish interviews with existing commissioners and other concerned persons.

"Although a national rights institution is no substitute for proper courts and criminal investigators, with good people on board it can certainly contribute to building a culture of human rights," Fernando observed.

"The current commission in Thailand has a number of good persons who have tried their best to defend human rights there in extremely difficult times," he said.

"We sincerely hope that through this blog campaign we can get some ideas going on suitable replacements and look forward to a good debate," Fernando added.

The blog is titled "Who should be the rights commission?" and it can be read at: http://nhrcthai.wordpress.com.

It will be predominantly in Thai but also in English, and updated regularly.

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About AHRC: The Asian Human Rights Commission is a regional non-governmental organisation monitoring and lobbying human rights issues in Asia. The Hong Kong-based group was founded in 1984.

Tourist brochures portray Burma as a mystical land full of unseen wonders and tall tales about amazing imaginary creatures, from giant serpents to magical birds. But it was a different sort of fantasy that the government spun stories about in Geneva this week: a far more modern, albeit no less implausible entity.

In response to the U.N. Human Rights Council's scrutiny of its violent crackdown on protests during August and September, the Burmese government suddenly claimed to have already set up an investigating body into alleged killings, abductions and disappearances at the time.

The body, under the home affairs minister, had begun its work at the end of October, the country's ambassador said, and so there would be no need for any international inquiry of the sort proposed by the special human rights expert on the country.

This was news to informed observers. No such body has ever been reported in the state media, or heard about in other quarters. Nor does it seem that anyone representing it has met with persons from outside the regime.

It seems reasonable to ask if the inquiry body really exists at all. Yet, this question did not once come up in the Human Rights Council. Although the ambassador described nothing of what the body has done or will do, nor anything of its powers, many delegates seemed to take it seriously. How come?

There are, very broadly, two types of governments represented at the Human Rights Council. Those who don't really believe in such stories, but pretend they do, and those who try to believe because they don't know what else to think or do.

Delegates of the first type generally come from other countries where phantom inquiries also are set up to mute international censure and perhaps offset public opinion. They play along because they will at some time need others to do the same for them.

This type includes Burma's neighbors, India and Thailand, whose governments routinely use committees to obfuscate and deny, rather than reveal and admit; and Sri Lanka, which is on a par with Burma when it comes to making up stories that are nothing but complete and utter fiction.

Delegates of the second type belong to countries where inquiries are actually set up for the purpose of inquiring. Most of them know that Burma's regime is recalcitrant and unreliable at best. But still they may be unable or unwilling to accept that something does not exist at all when told that it does. Others may realize this, but not knowing what else to do, go along with the story at least initially, giving the storyteller enough time to come up with something else.

In a new study, the Asian Legal Resource Centre examines how this sort of denial and uncertainty has characterized the global response to human rights abuse in Burma. The report argues that there is a tendency to attribute too much rationality to the country's political and legal behavior.

"When people encounter others who may not behave according to their norms," Basil Fernando writes in the foreword, "They seek to come up with easy explanations that fit with their personal experiences."

It is sometimes less troublesome to believe, or pretend to believe, in something unreal than it is to try to deny it. By pretending that an investigating body exists, everyone can just carry on as before. Uncomfortable questions about what to do if there is not one can be put off until later. More difficult questions about the nature of the state, authority and law can be put off indefinitely.

"Correct diagnosis is the first requirement for effective intervention," Fernando says. Unfortunately, although Burma has for some time been in need of effective intervention, correct diagnosis remains elusive, due to persistent bewilderment about the country abroad.

As long as the Human Rights Council and other global bodies behave as if the government's flights of fancy are credible, its tiny allowances commendable, Burma's regime will go on telling tall tales as usual. For correct diagnosis, the council must stop deluding itself.

Source: Burma's tall tales in Geneva

Video: Closing remarks of the Special Rapporteur on Myanmar, Human Rights Council, 11 December 2007 (or HTML here)

The lead article in last Sunday's South China Morning Post breathlessly reported that some of those involved in recent protests throughout Burma had received training from the National Endowment for Democracy, a group funded by the United States government. Its editorial tut-tutted that Americans are yet again meddling where they shouldn't be.

In a letter to the editor, Basil Fernando, director of the Asian Human Rights Commission, observed that hundreds of groups from around the world have been working openly along the Thai-Burma border for some two decades now, many engaged in this sort of training, which he likened to teaching grandma how to peel onions.

Anyone presuming to instruct people from Burma on how to defy military dictatorship, or planning to write about others doing so, should first take the time to learn a little history. Resistance to coercive rulers there goes back a long way.

In pre-colonial times, peasant rebellion and mass withdrawal were common. Buddhist monastic estates were places of refuge when times were tough, and if things got really bad people moved away completely.

Under the British Empire, many of these practices persisted, and indirect protest increasingly gave way to open conflict. "The people of this country have not, as was by some expected, welcomed us as deliverers from tyranny," a senior bureaucrat lamented in 1886.

The colonial army was by then mired in warfare with a loose village-based insurgency that continued for years after the last indigenous king was exiled. And then as now, religion was important in motivating the discontent. "Wherever there was an appearance of organized resistance," another civil servant later wrote, "Buddhist monks were among the chiefs."

Ordinary people's defiance of authority -- as distinct from that of politicians' parties or warlords' armies -- has evolved to the present day. The tactics of dissent vividly demonstrated throughout the streets and towns of Burma this August and September have been refined through countless small and mostly undocumented acts of resistance.

Among them, a few were some years ago depicted in a series of comic books published in Thailand (illustration above). In one, a group of villagers with insufficient rice to supply government purchasers indicate their inability to contribute by feeding the officials a sumptuous meal, but without rice -- something unthinkable in Burma. In another, no one in a village affected by civil war wants to be chief because it means having to suffer the army's abuses. They hit upon the idea of rotating the post daily. And when incompetent administrators at a new dam in the country's heartland flood nearby crops, farmers descend on it and literally begin smashing it to pieces before the astonished officials rush to intervene.

Many such stories have been heard in the aftermath of the recent protests, although they too have attracted little outside notice.

Among those, some of the most remarkable are of pitched battles to defend monasteries and their occupants from marauding security forces. After soldiers looted the Ngwekyaryan monastery and detained over a hundred of its monks on the night of Sept. 26, outraged Rangoon residents the following day surrounded security vehicles that returned for more. Finding themselves under verbal and physical attack, the soldiers and riot police fell back [News: DVB].

That night, military units twice attempted to enter a monastery in another part of the city -- once by road and once via a neighboring creek. Both times crowds armed with sticks, knives, slingshots and catapults broke a nighttime curfew to repel them. The following night they came back in greater force and successfully entered only after firing shots [News: Yoma 3].

Similar events were played out across the country [i.e. Mogok, Pakokku]. "We've prepared drums and pots to bang so that when people in the neighborhood hear they will take up whatever weapons they have available to repel this mob -- this army government -- from the monastery and monks," a Mandalay resident said in a radio interview.

Meanwhile, contrary to the image portrayed in the state media, despite considerable danger the religious boycott of the military regime is still being enforced.

At Thayetdaw monastery in the former capital, a pile of government-donated rice sacks lay untouched for a week. On Oct. 15, in a crude attempt to force the monks to eat the rice, soldiers stopped them from going out for their morning alms round. An officer came to bribe the abbot with a new electricity generator, which was also rebuffed [News: Yoma 3; VOA].

Elsewhere, authorities in Magwe cancelled an annual alms-giving ceremony, apparently fearful that no monks would turn up [see update]. In parts of the delta, lists of participants in government-organized gangs have been distributed and monks are refusing to attend their houses to offer prayers or accept benefaction.

Civilians in many parts of the country also have continued to fight back. In Taunggok, locals have stopped frequenting shops and stalls owned by members of government bodies and their subordinates. Posters, signboards and graffiti keep springing up here and there. Small marches are continuing, and at some rallies organized to denounce the uprising, participants who have been forced to attend have shouted pro-democracy slogans rather than those of the government. On Oct. 16 two former schoolteachers who chastised those participating in one such event were arrested.

None of this has anything to do with some outsiders pretending that they can teach people in Burma a thing or two about resistance. Their defiance is born of necessity, of shared outrage at wanton injustice and of needless degradation. Its methods extend back thousands of years, not since the arrival of a few foreign experts on the country's borders.

As for writers obsessed with finding the effects of U.S. imperialism everywhere, they might be disappointed to learn that people in Burma can think and plan for themselves. For the rest of us, this gives cause for optimism, even in the worst of times.

Source: Teaching grandma how to peel onions

See also: Burma's uprising: People power, not political puppetry, by Cynthia Boaz (Truth Out)

Further reading: The making of modern Burma, by Thant Myint-U

The moral economy of the peasant, James C. Scott

"From Avoidance to Confrontation: Peasant Protest in Precolonial and Colonial Southeast Asia", by Michael Adas, in Comparative Studies in Society and History, Vol. 23, No. 2 (Apr., 1981), pp. 217-247.