Burma Redux: Global Justice and the Quest for Political Reform in Myanmar (4 page)

Throughout, this book joins many others in taking Burma to signal aspirations for democracy and diversity. In rejecting the authoritarian path of repression and despair signposted Myanmar, down which military leaders have driven the nation, it simultaneously indicates a commitment to the democratic path of freedom and hope marked Burma for which citizens mobilized in 1988. At the same time, however, the book consciously makes use of the official terminology in referring to the years since the late 1980s. In all that follows, Myanmar is the label applied to the nation subjected to rule by junta until 2011 and to military-dominated ersatz democracy thereafter, for it neatly encapsulates much that has happened in the past two decades and more.
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Deviations from official usage are made only in cases of ethnic nationalities that prefer to retain the old terms. As a prime example, the book thus refers to Karen State and the Karen people, rather than Kayin State and the Kayin people. Moreover, for the period prior to 1989, the old lexicon is kept in play. This runs counter to military policy and also to some current scholarly practice, both of which reach back into history to read recent name changes even into the colonial period, when standard English usage was Burma, Rangoon, Irrawaddy and so on. Such an anachronistic approach, though politically correct in military circles, is not taken here.

Finally, in the whole of this analysis Burmese (since 1989 Myanmar people) designates citizens of the country and is blind to ethnicity, whereas Burman (since 1989 Bamar) identifies members of the main ethnic group. While this conforms to current practice, it conflicts with imperial convention. This is, for instance, what colonial official, educator, scholar and post-independence adviser J. S. Furnivall wrote: “‘Burman’ connotes all the indigenous inhabitants of Burma together with permanent residents of alien origin who have come to regard themselves as natives of the country; this leaves ‘Burmese’ for use as a distinctively racial term.”
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Precisely the opposite usage is adopted here.

Framing a situation

Once a position is taken on terminology, a larger issue is how to frame Myanmar’s current situation. In a history of the past 125 years published in 2009, Michael W. Charney identified several themes that have “transcended the phases of the Burmese experience … and contribute to something that might be called the rhythm of Burmese history.”
³²
He listed them as first the relationship between Burmans and non-Burmans (or Bamars and non-Bamars), second impoverishment of the general population, third confrontation between democracy and authoritarianism, fourth fear of foreign domination, and fifth monastic participation in politics. For an analysis centered on promoting political reform inside the country, however, it is perhaps acceptable to focus on three main features.

Two were most visibly on display in the seismic events of 1988. The first part of a grim dialectic unleashed then was popular protest fueled by economic mismanagement and hardship, triggered by official incompetence and brutality, and detonated as the 8-8-88 democratic movement. The second part was the reassertion of military power undertaken six weeks later, which reflected and indeed consummated the decisive 1962 coup by setting in place a formal junta.
³³
Other events of the past quarter-century, including the abortive 1990 general election, student strikes in 1996 and 2002, the 2007 march of the monks widely known as the saffron uprising, the criminally mismanaged 2008 Cyclone Nargis, the 2010 general election, and even the installation of notionally civilian government in 2011, were little more than somber footnotes. Two defining features of Myanmar’s situation can therefore be found in what became in 1988 a violent clash between popular demands for democracy, and entrenched military rule.

Alongside these twin features, the third essential dimension is the series of increasingly localized civil wars bleeding the country’s borderlands since independence in 1948. In the early decades, sporadic fighting mainly pitted the ever more Burman
tatmadaw
against both a force raised by the Communist Party of Burma, and a series of militias and ragtag bands of soldiers put together by ethnic nationalities, giving civil conflict ideological and racial strands. However, the CPB’s abrupt splinter and collapse in April 1989, when anti-communist revolution was also sweeping East-Central Europe, left only ethnic conflict in place.
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To this day fighting sometimes erupts in peripheral parts, and even zones not subject to overt violence endure deep insecurity.
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Indeed, the state of nature described by Thomas Hobbes in
Leviathan
nearly four centuries ago, in which the life of man is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short,” is often nothing other than a precise description of desperate daily conditions in frontier lands.
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In such areas a multitude of distinct political dynamics plays out.
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However, within this broad context of democratic aspiration, military repression and ethnic conflict, not everything has been static during the past 20 years and the country is in no sense trapped listlessly in a late 1980s time warp.
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Then, the political environment was characterized chiefly by a junta that held power by coercion but had no clear strategy for retaining it, and opposition groups, both democratic and ethnic, with immense moral authority but no viable program for seizing control. In the heartland, tense standoff was the order of the day. In peripheral parts, sporadic skirmishing continued to take place. Thereafter, though, the opposition’s resolute push to secure full recognition of its 1988 street presence and above all its 1990 electoral triumph was obliged through force of circumstance to become more responsive and reactive to moves made by military leaders. For the NLD, one consequence was official liquidation of the political party in 2010 as senior figures decided not to contest the junta’s managed election.

Across the same period, the wider society also experienced substantial change as local organizations emerged in many parts of the country to tackle problems faced by ordinary people in their everyday lives, notably during the emergency situation generated by Cyclone Nargis. Clear signs of a revival of civil society created much greater communal complexity and gave a further twist to political development.
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Similarly, in the borderlands a decline in actual fighting took place in the early 1990s as a set of ceasefire deals was struck by the
tatmadaw
and most of the ethnic militias that for decades had confronted it.
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The political space created by these agreements enabled local people to pay at least some attention to rebuilding shattered communities. It also allowed many individuals to play an important role in the wider national push for democracy and human rights, and ensured that by the time of the generals’ 2010 election ethnic nationality activists were a key part of the peaceful political opposition.
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In addition, major changes have taken place on the side of the military machine. In the immediate aftermath of the September 1988 restoration of
tatmadaw
control, the junta lived from day to day with little more than a sharp survival instinct to sustain it. There was no grand strategy, and shocks like popular repudiation in the 1990 general election were dealt with strictly on an
ad hoc
basis. For a decade thereafter, serial attempts were made to stabilize the political situation. At home, a National Convention was established in January 1993 to draft a constitution to replace the 1974 charter abrogated at the time of the 1988 coup, ceasefires were agreed with ethnic nationalities, and from time to time talks, secret or otherwise, were held with opposition leaders. In November 1997 the junta renamed itself the State Peace and Development Council, indicating that Than Shwe, dominant figure from April 1992, intended to retain power for a long while. Abroad, bilateral links with China were reinforced following massacres in Rangoon in 1988 and in Beijing in 1989, and multilateral ties were developed through membership of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, to which Myanmar was controversially admitted as a full member in July 1997. However, while these policy strands succeeded in their minimal aim of keeping the junta in power, they did not enable it to seize the political initiative.

Soon after the turn of the millennium, though, military leaders registered greater progress. In August 2003, Khin Nyunt, incoming prime minister and key regime strategist, unveiled a seven-point roadmap to a “discipline-flourishing democratic state.” Built on drafting work commenced more than a decade earlier, the map traced a path to a constitutional referendum, a general election and installation of civilian government. Although Khin Nyunt himself was purged in October 2004 and placed under a long term of house arrest, the roadmap remained in place. Notwithstanding major challenges, it created an opportunity for the generals to take the lead in political development and pursue a game plan looking beyond the immediate future. In the margins, they displayed growing self-assurance by starting in November 2005 to transfer government functions to Nay Pyi Taw, a brand new fortified capital located 250 miles north of the restive city of Yangon.
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By releasing Aung San Suu Kyi from house arrest six days after the 2010 election, they signaled further belief that politics in their garrison state were firmly under control.

Analyzing a society

Democratic aspiration and authoritarian reaction, witnessed most clearly in 1988 but viscerally present since 1962, did not emerge from nowhere. Similarly, ethnic contestation and revolt, a scar on the landscape since 1948, have profound social roots. To understand contemporary Myanmar, it is thus necessary to investigate the forces that have shaped it. Within a body of English-language scholarship amassed mainly by outsiders, many options are available.
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Among political scientists, however, two broad clusters predominate.
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One is a cultural approach looking to underlying modes of social integration and interaction and employing methodologies from anthropology and sociology. The other is a historical approach tracing social and political development into the past and seeking thereby to comprehend present-day society. While there are clear overlaps, the two have different reference points and dynamics.

Under the British, cultural approaches were a popular means of tapping into a distant territorial possession to understand what colonial administrator James George Scott, in a remarkable analysis published in 1882 under the pseudonym Shway Yoe, called
The Burman: His Life and Notions.
In 64 chapters, the human cycle is presented from first years to death and burial, with domestic life, religion (including Burma’s famous
nats)
, village life, and governance all examined.
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The Soul of a People
(1898) and
A People at School
(1906) by British official H. Fielding-Hall also probed political culture.
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After independence, though, surveys penned by informed outsiders operating on an immersion basis were less common as foreign engagement tailed off. In their place came occasional cultural analyses written in the emergent idiom of political science, notably Lucian W. Pye’s pessimistic analysis of political trust in
Politics, Personality, and Nation Building: Burma’s Search for Identity
(1962).
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Modern anthropological studies were also launched by E. R. Leach in
Political Systems of Highland Burma
(1954), F. K. Lehman in
The Structure of Chin Society
(1963) and Manning Nash in
The Golden Road to Modernity
(1965).
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In Burma’s years of great isolation from 1962 to 1988, however, little fieldwork was possible.
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Only later did ethnographic accounts of politics in part or all of the society reemerge. Christina Fink’s
Living Silence
(2001) and Monique Skidmore’s
Karaoke Fascism
(2004) both address Myanmar as a whole.
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More commonly in recent decades, scholars of national politics have turned to history. Arthur P. Phayre in 1883 and G. E. Harvey in 1925 both drew on direct local knowledge to write pioneering books under the title
History of Burma
.
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The late colonial and early postcolonial periods then witnessed wide debate as former officials and academics trained their attention on the war-torn colony and emergent state. Among erstwhile administrators, Furnivall, already mentioned in passing and soon to be encountered again, was preeminent. Set within a broad range of study,
An Introduction to the Political Economy of Burma
(1931),
Colonial Policy and Practice
(1948) and
The Governance of Modern Burma
(1958) most fully displayed his deep understanding.
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F. S. V. Donnison, Chief Secretary to the Government of Burma in 1946, also drew on intimate experience to write
Public Administration in Burma
(1953) and
Burma
(1970).
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Among professional historians, examinations of the modern state informed by long or short surveys of the past came notably from D. G. E. Hall in
Burma
(1950), Hugh Tinker in
The Union of Burma
(1957), John F. Cady in
A History of Modern Burma
(1958), Dorothy Woodman in
The Making of Burma
(1962), Frank N. Trager in
Burma, from Kingdom to Republic
(1966), and Maung Htin Aung in
A History of Burma
(1967).
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