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Perspectives |
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Politics |
Burma Becalmed
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| Under a cannier president, the world’s harshest junta opens up the road to Mandalay |
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Published : 1 February 2012 |
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AP PHOTO |
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| Days before the Burmese Parliament convened in August 2011,
Aung San Suu Kyi was invited to meet the new president,
U Thein Sein, at his office in Naypyitaw.
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IFTY YEARS AFTER GENERAL NE WIN seized power in Burma and slammed the door on the outside world, could the country that was once seen as Southeast Asia’s brightest hope finally begin to fulfil its promise? |
A year ago, it was hard to say. When I was in Burma in March 2011, Aung San Suu Kyi had already been free for five months but there were few other signs that change was afoot. Her party, the National League for Democracy (NLD), whose landslide victory in general elections in 1990 had been simply ignored by the junta, was still in business, but on a perilous basis. In its ramshackle headquarters near Shwedagon Pagoda in Yangon, where I had interviewed Suu Kyi eight years earlier, posters, keyrings and DVDs of their famous leader and her equally famous father were on sale, and party workers bustled about. But it remained a fragile island of liberty in a sea of repression. Suu Kyi herself was no longer in detention, but the fact that even after five months she had not travelled outside Yangon suggested that her prison had merely become a little more spacious.
But in August 2011, days before the Pyidaungsu Hluttaw, the Parliament, convened, all that began to change: she was invited to meet the new president, U Thein Sein, in Naypyidaw, the regime’s yawningly empty new capital. She and the former general were photographed under a picture of her father, Aung San, the independence hero whom the regime has spent the past 20 years trying to airbrush from history; the president and his wife even invited Suu Kyi to dinner.
It might just have been more gestural politics of the kind which the Burmese regime has long practised; back in 1994, for example, the regime’s then strongman, Senior General Than Shwe, and his intelligence chief, General Khin Nyunt, held two sessions of talks with Suu Kyi which were splashed across the front pages of the regime’s newspapers, but they meant nothing and went nowhere. This time, however, it was different. The first meeting was followed by a flurry of initiatives: censorship was relaxed, several hundred political prisoners were freed, trade unions were legalised and the rules on party registration were changed, allowing the NLD to become a legal political party again. Thein Sein then announced that the construction of a highly controversial big dam on the river Irrawaddy would be suspended because it was “against the will of the people”. This was remarkable for several reasons: in Burma the people’s will has very rarely been invoked as a reason to do anything. And the dam was not only being built with Chinese money but was also meant to produce electricity almost entirely for Chinese consumption. Thein Sein showed that he was not afraid to offend Burma’s giant neighbour.
The president had a particular diplomatic objective in view: Burma, the bad boy of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), has never held the organisation’s rotating chairmanship. That was due to change in 2016, but Thein Sein hoped to persuade his ASEAN colleagues that the country was under new management and fit to take charge much sooner, in 2014. At a regional summit in Bali in November 2011, ASEAN duly agreed.
The reforms might have been ended there, with that important but limited diplomatic victory: the president had already persuaded a stream of foreign dignitaries to visit, Hillary Clinton (who came in early December 2011) being the biggest catch. But it became clear that Thein Sein’s ambitions went further: Suu Kyi herself was permitted to stand as a candidate in byelections to be held on 1 April 2012, which, the world was assured, would be free and fair. Then, on 12 January, the regime answered the most urgent demand of its foreign visitors, announcing a ceasefire deal with the Karen people, Burma’s largest minority, who have been fighting for self-rule since 1949.
Like Orwell’s Oceania, independent Burma has been almost constantly at war; the need to prevent the nation from falling apart provided the army with its perennial justification for clinging to power. Ceasefires with the different insurgent armies have come and gone, but to develop a ceasefire into a lasting peace is a political challenge for which previous Burmese rulers have lacked both aptitude and determination. In the case of the Karen, the largest and bitterest of the junta’s enemies, even a real ceasefire has been elusive. Now, President Thein Sein has nailed it down, which is a real achievement. As one Karen National Union leader, Brigadier-General Saw Johnny, put it, “This time they didn’t ask us to give up our arms, they just want to work for equal rights for ethnic groups. This time we trust them.” He added, prudently, “We’ve been fighting for 60 years ... One meeting alone won’t end it.” The following day, in another dramatic development, many of the most high-profile political prisoners were set free.
As all these changes indicate, Burma today is in flux as it has not been since the coup d’etat of 1962. The common people have yet to see any significant benefit from the changes: the economy remains on its knees, the authorities retain their right to confiscate land and expel residents at whim, controls on political protest continue to be tight, and hundreds of political prisoners are still locked away in squalid jails, many for very long terms. But the abuses of five decades of arbitrary rule cannot be undone overnight. So the question now is: How far is the present government prepared to go? And what is its motivation?
Aung San Suu Kyi has never been one to splash compliments around without good reason, so the fact that she has repeatedly called Thein Sein a man “who can be trusted” and “a good listener” is very significant. Improbable as it may seem, the world’s most famous dissident and the bespectacled general with a pacemaker have decided that they can work together. In her first 14 months of freedom, Suu Kyi has carefully avoided saying anything to suggest she favours the lifting of sanctions, and yet the reforms continue to arrive. It is a process that encourages some optimism.
The question remains: Why? One reason is the parlous, primitive state of the economy: Burma is one of the very few countries with no access to the World Bank or the International Monetary Fund: it has been shut out of the international financial system. The other is that (also as a consequence of the West’s sanctions) Burma has been forced to rely ever more heavily on its relationship with China. But Thein Sein and his colleagues appear to realise that the relationship has now become far too cosy: China dominates Burma’s import-export trade, and large swathes of Mandalay, the last royal capital, are Chinese-owned. Anti-Chinese feeling is strong in the country—“When China spits, Burma swims,” runs the sour Burmese proverb—and some fear that their proud nation could, in the near future, become little more than another Chinese province.
It is this fear, growing in tandem with the surging Chinese economy, which explains better than anything else why the Burmese are finally getting serious about reform. To imagine that these crusty old kleptocratic generals have suddenly fallen in love with democracy would be foolish. But the smarter ones recognise that the only way to counter the Chinese threat is to woo the West; and the only way to do that is to start an honest and thoroughgoing process of reform.
For a number of years, the Indian government has followed the line that, to avoid Burma jumping into the Chinese camp, the abuses of its military rulers must be overlooked and Suu Kyi and her party shunned. This was the policy which culminated in the grotesque spectacle of Senior General Than Shwe, a man with the blood of hundreds of Buddhist monks on his hands, being taken on an official pilgrimage to Bodhgaya to pay homage to the Buddha. India, too, will benefit from the opening of Burma that is underway. But with a little more courage, it could have triggered the process.
Peter Popham is the author of The Lady and the Peacock: The Life of Aung San Suu Kyi.
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