An upheaval like the pro-democracy uprising taking place in Burma over the past month tends to shake up certainties that had seemed self-evident. Certainties such as the primacy of justice. Or the sanctity of the Olympic Games.Despite an academic industry devoted to the subject, no one can predict when an oppressed people will find that precise combination of hopelessness and hope, impatience and solidarity, and recklessness and anger that leads it to rebel. Nor can anyone answer the most important question facing Burma now: When will the boys and men who prop up a corrupt regime with their guns and prison cells decide that they have had enough -- that they no longer want to shoot unarmed Buddhist monks or round up young girls for possession of cellphones with cameras?
But this much is sure: The first process is rare and precious enough, and the second so difficult to initiate, that those on the outside must do whatever they can to support and encourage both. We're a long way from having fulfilled that obligation.
Over the past decade, human rights advocates have united behind the notion of accountability for dictators and war criminals. They persuaded most of the world's nations to sign on to the International Criminal Court. The theory is no mercy, no compromise, no temporizing.
No one deserves trial more than Burma's Gen. Than Shwe and his cronies. They have looted their country's natural wealth and turned its army into a monster that rapes and press-gangs its compatriots. More than 1.5 million people have been routed from their villages, often with bayonets having been thrust through their rice pots to ensure that they go hungry. Now the regime is rounding up nonviolent protesters in the most violent way, and -- if past practice is any indicator -- torturing many of them in some of the world's bleakest prisons.
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