Once again India has rolled out the red carpet for Burma's aging despot Than Shwe, whose sleep has reportedly been disrupted by his deep seated fears of being hauled to The Hague for his alleged crimes against humanity.India's conduct today reminds me of the "politics-is-not-about-ethics-or-compassion" reply I received from the President of Singapore S. R. Nathan, when he was Singapore's ambassador to Washington almost two decades ago. As Nathan bluntly put it, "running a country is not like running a church," implying that ethics, compassion and values don't belong to statecraft.
Nathan was responding to a question I posed during a “questions and answers” session after a lecture he delivered at the University of Wisconsin in Madison: How can your Singaporean government justify selling the Burmese military junta an unknown quantity of arms immediately after the massacre of several thousand unarmed Burmese protesters, including university students, monks, schoolchildren, housewives and even civil servants in 1988? Full Story
