CHIANG MAI, Thailand -- Two elements could become the basis of further efforts toward a Myanmar solution: an emerging uneasiness -- if not outright division -- among the generals in power over how to handle the growing following of the "the Lady" (democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi), and the long-awaited shift in the Association of Southeast Asian Nations' policy of not interfering in the domestic affairs of its members.
At present the generals may be perturbed not so much because they are sensitive to the international chorus of protests, but because they contemplate more seriously their own future: Will they end up incarcerated like former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic, or will they be offered, as former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein was at one point, a golden exile (one more Western contradiction)?
If real reconciliation could accommodate at least some of the more moderate generals and if such a prospect could somehow be conveyed to them, perhaps a few welcome cracks in the regime's so far monolithic stubbornness and oppression could be engineered.