Rohingya women were at the very bottom of the heap, suffering the abuses of their own male-dominated society in addition to those of officialdom and other ethnic communities. Stateless, denied access to education or even the most elementary health care, they also had little understanding of family planning. Many married extremely young, aged fourteen or fifteen, and had several children by their early twenties. Often, a Rohingya woman or girl was the second or even third wife of a husband who had a limited ability to care for her, eking out an existence on the equivalent of a dollar or two a day, sometimes abandoning her in a desperate search for a job overseas.24
In February, the president signed a bill giving Muslims in Arakan holding temporary white ID cards (as opposed to the pink ID cards held by citizens) the right to vote. Parliament had originally rejected a bill giving voting rights to temporary card-holders, but reversed its decision at the request of the president. In Sittwe, mass protests soon followed.
One of the protest organizers was Nyo Aye. Then in her mid-fifties, she had been active in politics all her life. “Growing up, I had absolutely no problem with our Muslim neighbors,” she says. “We played sports together in school and visited each other at home. The only difference was in dietary restrictions. I remember once I accidentally offered a pork dish to a Muslim friend, thinking it was mutton. I still feel bad about it.”25
As a teenager, she took part in demonstrations over the rising price of rice. “Then it was Buddhists and Muslims together protesting against the military regime.” And during the 1988 uprising, she took a leading role. “We wanted democracy, a return of power to the people,” she explained to me. She had read many books on political theory: Marx, Engels, various works on socialism. “I didn’t necessarily want either a capitalist or socialist system. I wanted power transferred from the army to the people’s elected representatives.” When the army cracked down, she was caught up in the arrests. “I’ve never told anyone what happened to me in prison. I still don’t want to think about it. I haven’t even told my husband, though he asks me sometimes because I used to wake up in the night.”
Nyo Aye was a member of the National League for Democracy for nearly a quarter century, facing constant threats from the army regime as a result. She says everything changed in 2012, with the communal violence in Sittwe. When I met her in 2018, she reflected on this period: “We have to ask how is it that at exactly at that moment in our politics, when we were starting to return power to the people, that so much paranoia was spread, and then the first killings happened?” Like so many others in Arakan, both Buddhist and Muslim, she suspected dark forces at work, but didn’t say exactly who they were. “We were just about to collect 300,000 signatures against the Chinese pipeline,” she told me. “We had 200,000 already.”
Yet she was unequivocal in her belief, shared with nearly every Burmese I’ve ever met, that illegal immigration from Bangladesh was real, and a threat. “In the 1990s and early 2000s, a person from Bangladesh could pay 5,000 kyats [then about $10] and cross the border without a problem,” she said. The two million Arakanese Buddhists felt squeezed between the Burmese military on one side and Bangladesh’s teeming population on the other. In 2015, she was adamant that Muslims holding temporary ID cards shouldn’t be allowed to vote. Demonstrations spread from Sittwe to towns around Arakan, and then to Rangoon. Within days, the government buckled under pressure and canceled the cards altogether. A million Rohingya would have no say in the upcoming elections.
Over that spring, 25,000 people from both Bangladesh and Arakan took to the high seas in flimsy boats in the hope of reaching promised jobs in Malaysia. Smuggling routes had existed for years. The smugglers, who were mainly Thai, routinely kept migrants at camps in the jungle, extorted money from relatives back home, and killed those whose families couldn’t pay. When mass graves were discovered in the south of Thailand in May 2015, Thai authorities finally cracked down, leaving thousands temporarily stranded in the Andaman Sea. Hundreds died before they could be rescued by the Burmese or other navies. Bangladeshi prime minister Sheikh Hasina called the Bangladeshi migrants “mentally sick” for attempting to find jobs overseas and hurting the country’s image.26 For most of the world, however, the crisis highlighted the plight of the Rohingya.
For the Rohingya, especially young Rohingya men, the crackdown meant the end of the hope of a new life overseas. They had just one hope left: the election of a government led by Aung San Suu Kyi.
BURMA IN 2015 faced a bewildering array of challenges. The country was enjoying far greater political freedom, including over the Internet, than at any time in over half a century. Hundreds of thousands of people were part of new civil society organizations, mobilized around issues from environmental protection to women’s rights. But in general, this freedom, rather than giving rise to progressive agendas, was reviving older anxieties around race, religion, and national identity. There was still optimism, though, that the country was finally turning a corner. The coming elections could cement democratic progress. But at this point, elite politics unraveled.
Burma’s constitution was not a democratic constitution. The armed forces enjoyed considerable autonomy. They controlled the key ministries of defense, border affairs, and home affairs, as well as a quarter of the seats in parliament. The commander-in-chief, Senior General Min Aung Hlaing, had to be managed by the president with care.
The cabinet, too, had to be managed with care. This wasn’t Thein Sein’s cabinet. Than Shwe, the old dictator, had chosen every one of its members before the junta was dissolved. Ministers couldn’t be easily fired. There were rivalries. Some were termed “hardliners,” as opposed to the reformist clique around Thein Sein. But in reality, the dynamics were as much as anything the result of personality clashes. Government ministers were nearly all ex-generals who had served with one another for decades, some since their teenage years at the academy. They knew one another’s strengths and weaknesses well. There were deep friendships and deeper animosities.
Soe Thane and Aung Min had promised a sunny upland of peace and prosperity driven by Western investment. They had set the agenda from 2011 to 2014. But now their political clout was ebbing, in part because of incessant inter-ministerial turf wars and the inability or unwillingness of the president to always side with his “coordinating ministers.”
The bigger cleavage was between the president and parliamentary speaker Shwe Mann, and by extension between the executive and legislative branches of government. The Burmese constitution resembles the American one, in that parliament, like Congress, is meant to counterbalance an otherwise strong presidency. The ex-generals in parliament demanded “checks and balances.” In other words, they believed themselves no less important than their former army colleagues now running ministries. Shwe Mann, who had wanted to be president and was still ambitious, built up the power of the speakership. He also grouped around him leading businessmen, several also members of parliament, who were of a protectionist bent, and were wary of Soe Thane’s efforts to maximize foreign competition. He also built a surprisingly close relationship with Aung San Suu Kyi.
Aung San Suu Kyi and her newly elected NLD members of parliament had taken their seats in April 2012. No one knew exactly what to expect. Thein Sein was advised to offer her a cabinet position, perhaps as minister of health or education. But this never happened. Shwe Mann, however, immediately gave her the chairmanship of a new parliamentary committee (on the “rule of law and stability”). He also tried hard to make her feel at home in her new Naypyitaw surroundings, treating her as a partner, gaining her confidence. There was good personal chemistry, something Aung San Suu Kyi never had with Thein Sein.
Aung San Suu Kyi herself was very clear about what she wanted: a free and fair election and the chance to be president of Burma. For her to become president was impossible under the current constitution, as the clause listing qualifications for the presidency explicitly states that no one with immediate family who were foreign citizens could be chose
n. Aung San Suu Kyi’s two sons, Alexander and Kim, living overseas, were both foreign citizens. Neither she nor her party liked the current constitution. If it were up to them they would have scrapped it and written a new one with clear civilian control of the armed forces. But at this point, what mattered most was to change the presidential qualification clause, so that Aung San Suu Kyi could lead the government after winning at the polls.
In 2014, Aung San Suu Kyi called for a dialogue involving herself, Shwe Mann, the president, and the commander-in-chief of the army. The country was clearly headed toward a political impasse. Though the president finally relented and meetings were held in late 2014 and 2015, they were far from the open dialogue Aung San Suu Kyi had envisaged. Instead, they were stiff affairs modeled on international conferences, involving not just the four key figures but leaders of lesser political parties as well, with everyone sitting far apart and speaking into microphones. They led nowhere.
By June 2016, all attempts to revise the constitution had fallen through. In welcoming Thein Sein’s reforms in 2011, Aung San Suu Kyi had thought that the army would eventually allow the constitution to be amended. She felt betrayed. “People are now crystal clear about who they have to support,” she said.27
Shwe Mann was siding openly with Aung San Suu Kyi. The ruling party—the ex-generals of the Union Solidarity and Development Party—was essentially riven down the middle, with some on Thein Sein’s side and the others on Shwe Mann’s. The two factions were barely on speaking terms. When the USDP picked candidates for the elections, things came to a head. Shwe Mann’s allies in command of the party’s central office blocked Soe Thane and Aung Min from running, forcing them to stand as independents. There were disagreements too with the army, who had their own list of generals they wanted to retire and run in the elections under the USDP banner.
On the night of August 12, President Thein Sein, with the tacit backing of the army commander-in-chief, forced the resignation of Shwe Mann and his top lieutenants from the party leadership, physically taking over the party headquarters. This was, though, only an internal party purge, aimed at preventing a Shwe Mann–Aung San Suu Kyi coalition from assuming power. Shwe Mann remained parliamentary speaker. The next morning, he posted a photograph on Facebook showing himself back at work.
At a time when the country needed strong collective leadership, the country’s top political figures were split. It was, in a way, a consequence of the move toward democracy and the more competitive political space that had indeed been established.
In September 2015, Thein Sein signed the four “race and religion protection” bills into law. Mabatha, the monk-led nationalist organization, had mobilized millions of people to sign a petition in support of them. The new laws were heavily criticized by Rangoon-based and often Western-funded civil society groups, making Mabatha members feel even more strongly that their values were under threat.28 Though the NLD remained largely silent, Mabatha threw its support behind the USDP.
The Nationwide Ceasefire Agreement, now nearly three years in the making, was also signed before the end of Thein Sein’s term. Some on the ethnic minority side had injected a late demand for the idea of a federal army to be included, meaning that in future each state would keep its own separate armed forces. This was hotly rejected by the Burmese military. The final draft negotiated by the government and a slew of Ethnic Armed Organizations was completed in March 2015. It included lots of tediously crafted political language, weak ceasefire arrangements, and a follow-on process whose complexity rivaled anything I had seen at the UN. There was now intense debate about who could and should sign the accord. Some ethnic leaders speculated that an Aung San Suu Kyi government might give them a better deal. Why give these ex-generals a last-minute boost before the elections? The government wanted as many as possible to sign, other than a few of the smaller forces against whom there was still active fighting.
China influenced what happened next. Beijing was unhappy with Thein Sein, having seen his government suspend the Myitsone dam project and then rush to embrace Western suitors. All their ideas for new, big infrastructure projects were stalled. They felt disrespected. The Chinese government was widely believed to have told the armed organizations along the common border, including the biggest ones like the Kachin Independence Army and the United Wa State Army, not to sign.29 They didn’t.
In the end, fewer than half the insurgent armies came to the signing ceremony in October 2015. In order to avoid giving the government a pre-electoral boost, Aung San Suu Kyi didn’t attend either, sending an aide instead. Lian Sakhong, one of the ethnic leaders who had negotiated the accord, believed that the past few years had been a wasted opportunity. “There was a window. Thein Sein was open and willing to negotiate a deal. But we were divided among ourselves and couldn’t agree on a strategy until it was too late.” He was right.
For me, these were disappointing times. I spent a lot of time at the Myanmar Peace Center and on the Beyond Ceasefires Initiative, but it was clear that fresh, outside-the-box thinking was both more needed than ever and nowhere in sight. I proposed discussions on underlying economic and identity-related issues. There was interest, but the peace process had by now become so complex that a focus on anything other than the nuts and bolts of the process itself seemed impossible. I worked as well on Rangoon conservation and urban planning efforts. There had been considerable success, but by 2015 we were hitting a brick wall. Here, too, the problem wasn’t lack of interest or support; the problem was the lack of ability to analyze and imagine different futures. I spoke to one minister about turning the industrial waterfront into a promenade. He politely agreed, but nothing happened. When I saw him a few months later, he had just returned from his first trip to Europe. “Now I understand what you mean,” he said. “Before, I had no idea what you were talking about.” But he was just one of many who had to be convinced. As a member of the National Economic and Social Advisory Council, I was also still an advisor to the president, but after the first year the council met extremely infrequently and had by 2015 become moribund. I knew that people in the government were suspicious of me, as someone who had lived most of his life overseas. My advice was still welcome but, more often than not, it simply drifted into a bureaucratic abyss.
ON NOVEMBER 8, 2015, 22 million Burmese voters, nearly 70 percent of those eligible to vote, went to the polls to choose a government, in the first free and fair election since 1960. Over the past months, the USDP, the NLD, and dozens of other mainly ethnic minority parties had canvassed hard throughout the country. Mabatha campaigned for the USDP, using a vast network of monks. But the momentum was on the other side. Wherever Aung San Suu Kyi went, she drew enormous and enthusiastic crowds. Election day in Rangoon was beautiful and sunny. Offices were closed and, with few cars on the streets, walking became pleasurable again. I remember families queuing up early at the little polling station downstairs in our building, everyone smiling. I saw Ko Ni, the NLD constitutional lawyer who lived around the corner, approaching the booth with his wife. They too were smiling. “We must hope the future will be better,” he said.
The result would be a decisive win for the National League for Democracy. Everyone I asked who voted for the NLD said the same thing: they wanted to show their hatred of past military rule as well as their love and respect for the sacrifices made by Aung San Suu Kyi and other members of her party. They also said they wanted a brighter economic future for themselves and their children. Issues of race and religion played little part in their choice. This was the view in most urban areas. In the countryside, it was different. Many had no idea what they were voting for. An NLD candidate told me that at least one-third of his rural constituency had no understanding of what an election was. Others were swayed by Buddhist monks who were members of Mabatha or the government’s track record, which in many areas had included real improvements in daily life. Here the polls were closer, but the size of the NLD’s margin in Rangoon and other cities ensured an impressive overall victor
y: the party won no fewer than 86 percent of the seats up for grabs and 57 percent of the popular vote, against 28 percent for Thein Sein’s USDP. The NLD did not win in Arakan, which voted decisively for an Arakanese Buddhist party, but they won in many other ethnic minority areas, including strife-torn Kachin state.
In general, people had voted for a better tomorrow and had rejected an ethno-nationalist turn. The entire world—including China and America, Europe, India, and Japan—stood ready to help. Burma seemed on the brink of its best opportunity in decades to unite around a new agenda for peace and development, and a more equal society. Politics and the weight of history, though, would get in the way.
NINE
UNFINISHED NATION
THE MONTHS FOLLOWING the November 2015 election were a period of intense uncertainty. Under Burma’s constitution, the president is chosen by parliament. He or she then appoints the rest of the government, including the chief ministers of the fourteen states and regions. The National League for Democracy had won a big enough landslide that even despite the army’s hold on a quarter of the seats in parliament, they still had a majority. At least in theory, they could choose the next head of state without relying on either the army’s votes or those of another political party. This was a scenario few, if any, had predicted.
The Hidden History of Burma Page 23
