In the often black and white, good-versus-evil debate over how to deal with the brutal military regime in Yangon, Myanmar , Ma Thanegi lives in a world of gray.

To her admirers, the feisty 61-year-old Myanmar painter and writer is a voice of reason — a former assistant to opposition leader and Nobel peace laureate Aung San Suu Kyi who, after being jailed for three years herself, bravely opposed Suu Kyi’s misguided call for Western economic sanctions to pressure the junta into relinquishing power.

To her critics in the democracy movement, Thanegi is a sellout who parrots government propaganda to foreign tourists. Meeting openly with me at a major hotel suggests that — with her writings on Burmese culture and cuisine, not politics — she has little to fear in the continuing crackdown on dissidents after the fall’s protests led by Buddhist monks.

In reality, Thanegi seems an equal opportunity critic, which — with the world out of options for dealing with the junta — makes hers a voice worth hearing.

Expressing her hopes for “freedom of publication,” she says that with a military government “it’s a given that they are very rigid, not knowing anything about the running of the economy.” She slams “sycophants” in both government and the opposition who have created “so much mistrust” that any real dialogue is “a pipe dream.”
“I am not a traitor or a turncoat,” she insists. “I wish with all my heart that I had been wrong, that the strategy laid down by Suu Kyi, who we love so much, was the right one.” But Western sanctions are “costing us jobs and hurting people.” In brief encounters, ordinary Myanmar people tell me much the same thing: “We love Suu Kyi. We hate the military. But please, get rid of the sanctions.”

For Maung Zarni, it’s an especially “bitter pill” to admit that sanctions have failed to moderate the regime. As a graduate student in the US a decade ago, his Free Burma Coalition led the grass-roots campaign for sanctions and divestment, which forced corporations like PepsiCo and Texaco to leave Myanmar.

But we “failed to account for China and India,” he says, explaining why he began opposing sanctions. “We can’t isolate a regime that’s trading and buying arms from the fastest growing economies in the world.”

He concedes that more foreign investment could further enrich the criminal regime he opposes. But Zarni — who first befriended Westerners as a young tourist guide in his native Mandalay — argues that “this is a small price to pay in the short term for the longer term benefit of creating jobs.”

“Economics is the key to progress,” he says. As in dictatorships-turned-democracies like Indonesia, South Korea, Taiwan and Chile, “economic reform could lead to political reform.”

Thant Myint-U also challenges anti-sanctions orthodoxy. A historian and grandson of former UN secretary general U Thant, he argues that “if over the last 15 years there had been trade and investment, and not just increasing isolation from the West, there could have been real economic growth and the emergence of much better conditions for political change.”