Sunday, September 19, 2010

What's going on in Myanmar?

By Federico Abbasciano
1 CommentsPrint E-mail China.org.cn, September 3, 2010

The biggest country in continental South East Asia, one of the few remaining military dictatorships in the world, will hold elections for the first time in twenty years this coming November. By the look of it, it seems like the junta that rules the country will use the occasion to essentially go on as before, only with a civilian hat. But why is Myanmar—or Burma as some prefer to call it—in this situation? Can we learn something about the country today by looking at its recent past?

Burma enjoys a strategic position between India and China, and once had the region's most prosperous agriculture. As the Asia-Pacific War came to its shores, this proved a curse more than a blessing: much of the country's infrastructure was reduced to rubble during the long and costly Burma campaign. The essentially 'foreign' nature of the war ensured that all subsequent governments would shun any involvement in international organizations, from the British Commonwealth to ASEAN (until 1997). Right after the 1950 independence, Prime Minister U Nu steered the country away from the deadly dangers of the cold war and of the budding Sino-Indian rivalry. He saw Burma as a 'tender gourd among the cactus' and declared that only neutralism could save it. As his government succumbed to intra-ethnic disagreements, with some of the minority groups populating the borderlands threatening to secede from the Union, the head of the armed forces, General Ne Win, took hold of power and effectively began an outright retreat from the outside world that has more or less lasted to the present day.

The other major tendency that, along with isolationism, has been present in all Burmese governments since at least the early 1960s is nationalism. This grew out of the shock for British India's occupation of the country. Unlike with most other colonies and dependencies, the British decided to get rid of Burma's whole ruling class and civil servants, even at the lowest levels. This was done in reaction to the Burmese Crown's stubborn resistance to political and commercial submission. Indeed, as Thant Myint-U reminds us in his The Making of Modern Burma, conquering the whole country had not been in the plans of the Raj at all. Writing to the governor general of India in 1867, secretary of State Lord Cranbourne said "Our influence in that country ought to be paramount. The country itself is of no great importance. But an easy communication with the multitudes who inhabit Western China is an object of national importance." When faced with the elites' total refusal to compromise, though, the British finally seized the whole country and in 1885 made it an Indian province. Distrustful of the ethnic Burmans, the British entrusted the administration and the military to Indians or members of the numerous ethnic minorities. As a reaction to this, the ethnic Burmans developed in the early twentieth century one of the strongest anticolonial movements within the British empire. U Nu's project of a Union inclusive of all nationalities was doomed to fail; governments since 1962, including the military junta now in power, have had very little patience for the non-Burmans, whom they consider traitors for their earlier support of the British and for having cultural, religious and linguistic ties with groups living outside the confines of this artificial nation-state. Only the army can keep the country together, or so the official story goes, obviously. For the army top brass, governing the country after the British said the Burmans were 'lacking of soldierly discipline' is a source of considerable pride. I have little doubt that at least some of them, when they are not too busy hoarding the precious stones the country is famous for or selling its virgin forests to Chinese or Thai logging companies, really think they are defending Burma from interfering foreigners and their henchmen.

This basic outline of Burma's recent history might be helpful if we are interested in understanding its contemporary political developments. UN, US and UK, predictably, have questioned the validity of this coming round of polls, arguing that the continuing oppressive rule of the military means there will be "no level playing field" for opposition candidates. Denouncing elections in Myanmar as "not free and fair", while undeniably true, sounds today almost like criticizing wrestling matches for being rigged. After all, Myanmar hasn't been a democracy for nearly 50 years; it's a country where political activists are routinely harassed by the army or its hired thugs, and where the most prominent opposition politician, Aung San Suu Kyi, has spent 16 years out of the past 21 in confinement. Even if the ruling junta did not put restrictions on parties and candidates eligible for elections—which they did—we would be hard-pressed to find reasons for calling these elections "free". What to do then? Should we boycott the new civilian government, which will very likely be full of former members of the armed forces? Well, we could do that, and that's what Aung San Suu Kyi has been calling on the foreign community to do. Indeed, she's been asking to isolate Burma for most of her active political life, arguing that sanctions will help topple the regime. While I do respect her position and courageous resistance to the junta, I think this strategy is ultimately self-defeating. Heresy? Let's see.

A Burmese army officer once said "I would like to tell my American friends that sanctions will hurt you more than us. After all, we virtually imposed sanctions on ourselves for 30 years, and we are still here." These words were recorded on paper for the first time (in a Christian Science Monitor article by Yves Cohen) on 28 January 1998. Now, over twelve years later, Myanmar is still stuck with sanctions. And, sure enough, the junta is still here. The point is that a regime that feeds on a nationalism that has often bordered on xenophobia and eyes suspiciously not only foreigners, but even local people with foreign contacts or education, will never be swayed by speeches made by foreign diplomats calling for a release of political prisoners (especially if, like Suu Kyi, they went to Oxford and were married to a Brit). Or by sanctions that fail—as usual—to hurt its elites. Add to this the fact that most neighbors of the country in question don't wish to isolate it at all, and you have the net result of twenty years of UN, EU and US Burma policies: zilch. While there are political reasons why many Western governments have held this sort of attitude towards Myanmar (appearing to close eyes to the junta's egregious human rights violations would be a tough sell for the public in most democracies), I have the feeling that some of this resistance to apply options that are not the cookie-cutter sanctions-and-speeches mixture stems from a fundamental ignorance of the country's history. The EU's Special Envoy to Myanmar (you will be forgiven for not realizing there is one), Piero Fassino, declared over two years ago in a press conference "I am not interested in history, I'm a politician". If you are reading this website you will probably agree with me when I say that with this sort of thinking our chances of having an impact on Myanmar are close to zero. It's hard, but let's try again with engagement, because isolation is exactly what the ruling junta is comfortable with.

The elections in Myanmar will not be perfect. The new government will not be a democracy. But after twenty years of political stagnation, the country might finally have some civilian institutions and a national assembly including some opposition parties and representatives of minority groups. This might not seem much but it is better than more of the same.

This post was first published at http://www.understoodbackwards.net/2010/09/02/whats-going-on-in-myanmar/

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