The feeble voice of protest on the streets of Rangoon and other cities in Burma must now be silent. Buddhist holy men of an uncertain number have been slaughtered like beasts by the generals and their soldiers. Others and their lay followers have been detained, tortured, and executed. Most others have gone into hiding, or perhaps drifted across the border into Thailand.

Their voice of protest was feeble because they had no defence against the batons and the bullets of the soldiers except their frail bodies. The monks and their cheerleaders must have known this before they set out in force to protest the 500% hike in fuel prices. That they proceeded to march peacefully is a great sign of their compassion which they preached and to which their lives were devoted.

You can use any number of value-laden words to condemn the military crack-down on the civil unrest led by the monks. It is brutal, senseless, inhuman, bloody, barbaric, bizarre, and much more. They all fit the bill. Unfortunately, mere words of condemnation do not hurt in the least the mighty generals with the soldiers and their guns.

One can understand the logic of the generals of course. This is unlike the protests led by the students in 1998. In a country where something like 85% of the citizens are Buddhists, the monks who live an ascetic life of total abstinence and absolute withdrawal in search of wisdom, understanding and Nirvana are regarded as nothing less than saintly. They have far more moral authority than the generals in the hearts of the people.

Fallen out of fashion

The generals also lived through the turbulent history of Indochina. They saw how the monks in South Vietnam burned themselves in protest against the puppet corrupt regime of the Christian President Goh Ding Diem of South Vietnam in the 60s, and brought down the government overnight. Monks or no monks, the revolt last week had to be put down.

The generals had come to power through a coup de tat in 1962, a year after U Thant from Burma became the first Asian Secretary General of the United Nations. Military coups to wrench power from civilian governments were a vogue during that period, when both chess players in the global Cold War were more interested in allies all over the world, irrespective of the legitimacy or the track record of those allies at home.

With the changing times, totalitarian military government has slowly fallen out of fashion. The last one to fall in our part of the world was the Suharto regime in the 1997 Reformasi in Indonesia. Regrettably, the Thai military had to seize power again last year, after their withdrawal from the political arena in Thailand following massive bloody protests in 1992.

In the second half of the 20th century, the banana republics in South America, the diamond republics of Africa, and the bamboo republics of Southeast Asia have all been failures. They were without exception characterised by massive corruption by the military elite, and ruthless kidnapping, torture, and disappearance of innocent citizens as well as dissidents. While the generals and their cronies stash away billions in their secret Swiss bank accounts, their people starve.

Today, Burma is the last remaining military dictatorship in Asia, a rare historical dinosaur awaiting its turn for extinction.

We know the military rulers of Burma have lost all semblance of moral legitimacy of the sovereignty of a modern nation state. The social contract, not of the Umno-MCA-MIC kind, but that which is given theoretical coherence by Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau, stipulates that the state derives its right to exercise power over its citizens by ensuring personal security and pursuit of happiness of those who subject themselves to the state. In Burma, the state has turned around and turned to state terrorism, depriving citizens not only their basic rights, but also the conditions needed for their survival.

For the moment though, the military government is still struggling to hold on to power in the last throes of their existence. Personal survival of the generals is still the most primordial iron-rule of logic in matters of state.

The crisis in Burma does reveal the hypocrisy beneath all that talk of justice and human rights in international politics. In any case, the term "international community" is an oxymoron anyway. National self-interest still overrides any consideration of universal ideals of the ultimate value of the human individual and the vision of a global equal brotherhood of man.

China and India probably have the greatest influence over the generals in Rangoon. Their argument on the basis of non-interference in the sovereignty of another nation-state is paper thin. They may be the emerging economic giants of the world, but they do not merit the sort of universal respect you accord to world powers. They are far from being world powers, no matter how much they can get rich by exporting to the West and building up their domestic market.

Up to the Burmese people

Meanwhile, the Burma crisis has dealt a mortal blow to the international credibility of Asean. The leading lights of Asean have proven to be totally sterile, having fallen flat on their face in their ambiguous and doubtful business of "positive engagement". What is so "positive" about such a policy?

My sense of outrage may be natural, but it is perhaps a little unfair nevertheless. International relations are always very complex and they do defy simple solutions. Our circle of concern is always larger than our sphere of influence.

If the generals choose to isolate their country from the rest of the world, then there is very little that the international community can do to influence them by way of economic sanctions or other means. It is a similar scenario in North Korea.

Only the Burmese themselves, despite their lack of adequate means, seem to have the moral standing and historical legitimacy, to depose of the generals. Much as we like to apply universal moral principles to individual countries, every country does have its own unique historical destiny.

Grudgingly, one has to admit that the military in Burma is one of the most important and stable institutions in that unfortunate country. Any peaceful solution to the current crisis will have to include at least the possibility of negotiation with the military. Any external military interference will immediately plunge that country into violent civil strife, as is the case in Iraq. The current attempt of the UN secretary General in working towards a negotiation between the generals and Au San Suu Kyi has to be tried first - even if the prospect of any meaningful outcome seems improbable.

Be that as it may, our moral outrage against the generals needs no justification. We share with those courageous and wise monks in Burma their ultimate concern for the common good of humanity, irrespective of national borders, creeds, or race. We must let the generals know our outrage, through our own government, especially those in Asean, as well as in China and India.

History is filled with the collective guilt of bystanders armed with the wisdom after the event. Hegel might have thought that the Absolute Spirit of God moves through the tortuous course of world history. It is an event such as the massacre of monks on the streets and the dungeons of Rangoon, like other massacres in flash-points all over the world that stirs in the bystander the vague sense of surreptitious unease about the Absolute Spirit.

Cardinal Newman, as quoted by Graham Greene in the introduction to his travel book The Lawless Roads , has this to say about the bystanders' unease:

"To consider the world in its length and breadth, its various history, the many races of man, their starts, their fortunes, their mutual alienation, their conflicts; and then their ways, their habits, governments, forms of worship; their enterprise, their aimless courses, their random achievements and requirements, the impotent conclusion of long-standing facts, the tokens, so faint and broken, of a superintending design, the blind evolution of what turn out to be great powers of truth, the progress of things, as if from unreasoning elements, not towards final causes, the greatness and littleness of man, his far-reaching aims, his short duration, the curtain hung over his futurity, the disappointments of life, the defeat of good, the success of evil, physical pain, moral anguish, the prevalence and intensity of sin, the pervading idolatries, the corruptions, the dreary hopeless irreligion, that condition of the whole race, so fearfully and yet exactly described in the Apostles' words, 'having no hope, and without God in the world' - all this is a vision to dizzy and appal; and inflicts upon the mind the sense of a profound mystery, which is absolutely beyond human solution."

"What shall be said to this heart-piercing reason-bewildering fact? I can only answer, that either there is no Creator, or this living society of men is in a true sense discarded from His presenceif there be a God, since there is a God, the human race is implicated in some terrible aboriginal calamity."