The SPDC continues its campaign to “sell” its 7-point roadmap to the international community while working to consolidate military, economic and political viability at the expense of Burma’s people and their future.

The National Convention (NC), scheduled to reconvene in May 2005 as part of the roadmap, will remain just as undemocratic and repressive as it was when it was suspended in 1996. The unchanged format and structure will ensure that the NC, devised as a strategy to avoid convening a pro-democratic parliament in 1990, remains incapable of delivering much-needed reforms.

The regime has sought to use its limited concessions to some prisoners as a means to gloss over fresh and ongoing repressions. NLD leaders, including Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, remain in detention. As the regime hypes up ceasefire talks with the Karen National Union, it continues to launch attacks on ethnic villagers, inflicting forced labour, forced relocation and sexual violence on civilians.

The regime has used the NC and ceasefire talks as excuses to avoid substantive engagement with the international community on the delivery of irreversible reforms, using their 7-step roadmap to buy time and ease post-Depayin pressure without actually delivering visible progress.