Pro-democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi and 42 members of her party who won seats in Burma's parliament in by-elections this month, insist they will not take the oath of office today unless one word in it is changed.
Instead of swearing to "safeguard" the country's current constitution, they want to say they will "respect" it. So far, the government has not agreed.
The matter is serious enough for a spokesman for the party, the National League for Democracy (NLD), to say that it was "highly unlikely" the newly elected members would be sworn in, which would be a significant setback to liberalisation in a country that has been starting to move away from decades of hermetic dictatorship.
The Associated Press reported yesterday that opposition politicians would not attend the opening session of parliament today.
To many, the byelections, which were closely watched by international observers and resulted in landslide victories for the League, signaled the kind of nonviolent revolution in Burma, now called Myanmar, that the West has been pining for.
Many political analysts have been "heralding a new political dawn in Burma's history," Kyaw Zwa Moe wrote in the Irrawaddy, a magazine about Myanmar that he edits. "But things appear precarious at the moment" over the swearing-in issue, he said.
Some questioned Suu Kyi's strategy in making a stand over the wording of the oath."By participating in the election, Aung San Suu Kyi chose to play by the regime's rules," Min Zin wrote on the Transitions blog of Foreign Policy magazine.
"Now she needs to pick her battles, rather than wasting valuable energy in a fight over symbolism.
"There's an old Burmese proverb: If you choose to live like a bug inside a chili pepper, you can't really complain if you start feeling hot."In the election campaign, Suu Kyi and her National League for Democracy colleagues made an overhaul of the constitution one of their principal promises.
The current document - drafted by the military and passed in a heavily manipulated referendum in 2008 - has many undemocratic features, including setting aside one-fourth of the seats in Parliament for the military.
So swearing to "safeguard" that constitution is not how Suu Kyi and her party members want to begin their legislative tenures.
They must take their seats in parliament to have any means of amending the constitution, though doing so would be a big challenge with only 7 per cent of the votes. But if opposition politicians were to try to amend the constitution after having sworn to safeguard it, hard-liners might use the "betrayal" as a pretext for unseating them and perhaps prosecuting them.
Many existing members of Parliament are recently retired generals who would presumably have little patience with Suu Kyi and her democratic inclinations. They know she would raise the level of criticism against them if given the chance; she has promised as much.
It is not clear how much power the ruling military will cede, or how quickly. In a recent speech, General Min Aung Hlaing, Burma's commander in chief, reiterated the importance of the military's role in politics and its dedication to preserving the existing constitution.
Elsewhere, the European Union suspended its sanctions against Burma for a year following a wave of widely praised political reforms in the country, but will retain an embargo on arms sales, officials said.
The EU wants to support the progress made in the southeastern Asian nation "so it becomes irreversible," said foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton. She will travel to the country this week.
NYT