child logo are appearing on the black market. You get upset and think: Never again! I shouldn't have bothered.

Completely understandable, but how then would you save the children? I encountered this kind of questions, and not just in training exercises, when I was a staff member with Unicef, the United Nations Children's Fund.

In crises from Somalia to North Korea, my colleagues at times had to agonise over sending humanitarian assistance, not knowing for sure how much would reach children and women and how much warlords would hijack for the black market or a dictator would siphon off for his army.

Each case is different, but the rule always is, children first, even if only a fraction of the aid gets through and, yes, even if most ends up on the black market. A larger black-

market supply might at least drive down prices of perishable items, making them affordable to some kids and mums.

Such dismal decisions represent the dilemma of sanctions against the Myanmar regime. How badly will they hit the poor and vulnerable? How effective will they be?

Unicef estimated that half a million more children in Iraq would have survived in the 1990s if not for prolonged UN Security Council sanctions as well as the first Gulf war and ensuing civil conflict. Other UN agencies largely corroborated its analysis. A Columbia University study, using non-Unicef data, later arrived at only slightly fewer 'excess child deaths' - 400,000.

Those who want to embargo Myanmar hastily and comprehensively better be prepared for babies with hollow eyes and distended bellies the regime would either hide from view or accuse them of creating. Such innocent lives may be collateral damage in an intervention that might not even work.

Sanctions were not effective in Iraq. They did not hurt the regime, which even cashed in on smuggling, made lucrative by scarcity. As Forbes magazine observed, Saddam Hussein kept climbing its list of the richest heads of state. He built himself palaces and amusement parks. Until the United States stepped in with 'shock and awe', touching off chaos.

Would sanctions crimp the lifestyle of Senior General Than Shwe and company, lighten the glittering diamond necklaces that weighed down his daughter at her lavish wedding? Probably not. And like Saddam, the Myanmar junta probably couldn't care less for the people bearing the brunt.

For a regime that is more xenophobic and reclusive than Saddam's ever was, isolation brought by sanctions holds no fear.

Myanmar people, like Iraqis before them, have little leverage against their dictatorship, and embargoes would transmit little pressure for meaningful constitutional change. Political power is precisely what they are trying to wrest from the military; so an embargo might even be counterproductive, provoking the generals to take harsher measures.

It is the South Africa case that demonstrated, but hardly conclusively, that sanctions might have some impact, contributing to ending apartheid. Ironically, the hardship was not as bad as in Iraq, according to some analysts. And while black South Africans had few rights, whites enjoyed some political influence which they used to pressure the government when sanctions began to bite. In Myanmar, as it was in Iraq, this mechanism is absent.

In Myanmar, Ms Aung San Suu Kyi is calling for what Anglican Archbishop Desmond Tutu urged in South Africa: Impose sanctions; they're 'a price worth paying'. Are the Myanmar people as prepared as black South Africans were to tough it out? Iraqis were largely silent on this score, perhaps because they saw that after 12 years of little impact against Saddam, and with their children dying at twice the previous rate, sanctions were not worth the pain.

It was presumably more out of tactical rather than strategic considerations that prompted Gen Than Shwe to demand Ms Suu Kyi abandon her sanctions call before he would meet her, a condition her National League for Democracy rejected this week. Prudence dictates that she not foreswear such calls for nothing more than mere agreement to talk, while she remains under house arrest.

Not only does she have few options, and one fewer with the rebellion of the red robes being quelled, but also sanctions still hold promise, if they are strategically thought out, diplomatically advocated and skilfully implemented. The international community has a better idea than it did before the South Africa and Iraq instances how they might work, bearing in mind a country's circumstances and characteristics.

The Security Council came up with 'smart' sanctions in May 2002, in response to the outcry that comprehensive embargoes were killing Iraqi children instead of knocking sense into Saddam. Targeting military and 'dual use' supplies but allowing humanitarian items, the strategy was too late to save many children, but those who perished will not have died in vain if lessons learnt help resolve the Myanmar and other crises.

The idea is to target essentially military and then 'dual use' sanctions directly at rogue regimes. In the Myanmar case, such embargoes will require Chinese acquiescence. Beijing is far from ready. It blocked any mention of sanctions in a non-binding council statement this week. With Russia, it vetoed a US-sponsored draft resolution last January even though that did not call for such measures.

Still, even if it does not favour sanctions as an early measure, it may not have ruled them out. After all, it went along with the other four permanent council members a year ago in imposing bans on military and technological materials for North Korea after it tested a nuclear weapon.

China is against an embargo not so much because it needs the money from arms sales to Myanmar, but because it has geopolitical interest in not denying the regime sufficient military wherewithal to maintain the country's stability and territorial integrity, long under threat from armed separatist non-Burman minorities.

It is also in the interest of most neighbours, including Myanmar's fellow Asean members, not to break up the country to break the junta. The US and UK have seen in Iraq the bloody unintended but not totally unforeseeable consequences of regime change. As Oscar Wilde might have quipped, to split Iraq into rival Shi'ite, Sunni and Kurdish pieces would be regarded as a misfortune; to splinter Myanmar into feuding Burman, Shan, Mon, Karen and other states would look like carelessness.

Such an outcome would have regional and international repercussions not easy to predict fully but probably none of them desirable. Other powers, including the US and the European Union, would do well to understand, if not share, China's caution over pushing the regime too hard.

So what can we expect, since neither sanctions nor constructive engagement has brought Myanmar closer to national reconciliation and real reform?

Many among those who marched against the regime recently belong to the generation that grew up after the deadly 1988 suppression. Will it take another generation to force a change? For outsiders trying to help, the choice remains as dismal and difficult as ever.

ekoh@sph.com.sg