Ko Ko Thett
Co-ordinator, Asia Europe People’s Forum
Article: Expanding military, shrinking citizenry and the new constitution in Burma
Susanne Prager Nyein., Journal of Contemporary Asia, Vol 39, No. 4, Nov 2009, pp 638-648
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Burma-Myanmar is a country I know very little about, having only followed western media debate about the advisability of economic sanctions and the selection of Aung San Suu Kyi as a Nobel prize winner, and recently having seen the film documentary Burma VJ. I remember also having enjoyed reading the historical novel The Glass Palace by Amitav Ghosh, which describes an Indian-Burmese family history.
The lecture presented recent Burmese-Myanmarese political history, factors influencing the current political situation, and possible outcomes.
The article re-stated the main ideas of the lecture, although the tone of the article’s conclusion was maybe more pessimistic than that of the lecturer; “the structural conditions of military rule and the civil-military relations makes the prospects for a real shift in the power relations in Burma look dismal” (p646). This conclusion can be considered relatively straightforward, since no military dictatorship willingly gives up power, and the debate around the Burmese New Constitution thus becomes of little relevance. A very nice observation in the article was the change in the description of the common populace from “working people” (lok tha pyi thu) during the time of Ne Win to “the class on the bottom” (a kye khan luh than; sa:) used by the current military regime (p644).
The beginning of the lecture presented horrendous human development statistics and an overview of Burma’s post-WW2 constitutional history. The lecturer then presented a series of parameters defining Burma’s political situation: the military (Tatmadaw), the people, geopolitical conditions, the political culture, and inter-ethnic conflict.
The key elements defining Burma-Myanmar’s fate are: Tatmadaw; the people including the Burmese political opposition; and the aspirations of the minority ethnic groups.
As with all military groups, Tatmadaw has its own mythology. It views itself as superior to civilians and the sole guardian of national unity. Its three main national causes are all nationalistic; non-disintegration of the nation, unification of the multi-ethnic nation, and preservation of national sovereignty. The ideas are very similar to those of the Indonesian military of Suharto’s era.
The people and the political opposition are in what the lecturer called “a double bind” – if they take part in political debate, following the rules of the regime, they legitimize the system; if they remain outside the system, they have little influence. The situation is common to all groups agitating for change in a non-democratic system, for example, during the Soviet era, or during various independence struggles (cf. Lai Kek and Chin Peng factions in the Malayan Communist Party during the late 1940s). A further factor affecting the Burmese-Myanmarese people’s attitude to politics are the scars of the brutality of the military - forced labour, poverty etc - and the scars of complicity - in a dictatorship everyone makes compromises (Note the large number of military, 500,000, relative to the size of the population). I briefly worked in Romania shortly after the fall of Ceausescu, and the legacy of mistrust and disillusion lingers long after the fall of a dictator.
The many minority ethnic groups of Burma have suffered greatly and there has been almost constant strife: the Karen uprisings, conflict with the Sha, discrimination against the Muslim Rohingya minority, expulsion of the Indian-Burmese, repression of the Anglo-Burmese community, etc. For positive change and development to occur, any democratic Burmese-Myanmarese government must be able to meet, even minimally, the aspirations of the minority ethnic groups for guarantees of cultural freedom.
To conclude, I would like to comment on the differing fates of Burma and Malaysia. They were both British colonies, they were both run by the British on relatively similar lines, they were both, for the standards of the time, relatively well-developed, they were (and are) both multi-ethnic, and they both gained independence as a consequence of Japanese occupation and British imperial fatigue. Yet, they have taken different paths: Burma a via dolorosa, and Malaysia, while not a path of sunny uplands, relatively steady political and economic progress. The reason is probably merely the chance of history. In Malaya, the Malayan Emergency of 1947 to 1959 was handled such that although British and Anzac soldiers fought against Malayan Communist Party insurgents (primarily ethnically Chinese) it was deemed an ‘emergency’ not a war, i.e. a police operation not a military operation. The Malayan army and police force were composed of Malays, but the Special Branch, who aided the British and Anzac military, were Chinese and able to provide excellent intelligence. The outcome was that when the country gained full independence the supremacy of civilian rule over the military had been cemented such that neither Malaysia nor Singapore, which was then part of Malaya, has political systems in which the military play a dominant role, unlike the other Southeast Asian nations.
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