Jason Carter says he won’t try to fill his ailing grandfather’s shoes next week when he becomes chairman of the Atlanta-based human rights organization former U.S. President Jimmy Carter and former First Lady Rosalynn Carter founded more than three decades ago.
Instead, the younger Carter said he and The Carter Center’s board of trustees will serve as a “north star” to keep the nonprofit on its current path. The organization, Carter said, is headed in the right direction with healthy finances and a strong staff, including CEO Mary Ann Peters, a retired U.S. ambassador.
Carter spoke to The Atlanta Journal-Constitution Sunday from Yangon, where he was on his first overseas trip with the center as its incoming chairman. He was there to monitor Myanmar’s historic parliamentary elections, which drew long lines of enthusiastic voters.
The center’s board picked Carter in March to serve as its next chairman. That was before the former president announced he would “fairly dramatically” reduce his work at the nonprofit organization as he undergoes treatment for cancer.
“My job is not to run the Carter Center or try to fill anybody’s shoes,” said Jason Carter, 40, a former Democratic state senator and gubernatorial candidate from Atlanta. “It is just to be there to provide sort of a north start and ensure we are continuing to move on a path that… is true to all of the principles we have always had.”
The Carter Center, which established an office in Yangon in 2013 and monitored Sunday’s activities at the invitation of Myanmar’s election commission, is expected to issue a report about its findings this week. More than 90 different political parties participated in the process, Carter said, and Election Day attracted about 11,000 domestic and international observers. Carter said he met voters who showed up hours before the polling stations opened and then waited patiently for their turn to cast ballots.
“For the most part, it was excitement,” he said. “You had a lot of folks who were very calmly waiting in very long lines in order to cast ballots.
“One person that we talked to said he had been there since 3 in the morning. I said, ‘That sounds like a long time to wait.’ And he said, ‘Oh, but I have been waiting much longer than that.’”
A nation of more than 50 million people, Myanmar has been ruled for decades by its military, which controls important ministries and a quarter of the seats in parliament. That parliament is expected to choose a president by March.
“The military has in that sense put their thumb on the scale of the electoral process in a very substantial way,” Carter said. “That certainly does not comport with international democratic norms. But — within that flawed framework — all of the political parties including the main opposition participated.”
“What we do know is that this was an historic election in Myanmar,” Carter continued, “and this country’s transition to democracy has taken a step forward with great caveats from our standpoint.”
Also known as Burma, Myanmar is the source of the largest group of refugees to resettle in Georgia in recent years, U.S. State Department figures show. Since 2012, more than 3,000 refugees from Myanmar have arrived in the Peach State. Many are Rohingya, a stateless Muslim minority that has long faced persecution in their predominantly Buddhist homeland. The Myanmar government regards its estimated 1.3 million Rohingya as interlopers from neighboring Bangladesh and blocks them from obtaining citizenship. Hundreds of thousands of them were removed from the voter rolls prior to Sunday's election.
The next Myanmar government, Carter said, must deal with the plight of the Rohingya.
“No matter how it is constituted,” he said of Myanmar’s government, “they are going to have to confront that, particularly given the international community’s correct and justifiable outrage at the way they have been treated.”
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