The “21st-century Panglong” conference and its follow-up meetings had delivered little. The problem wasn’t just the process itself but the idea that a single mechanism could address so many different challenges, from combating discrimination against minorities, to decentralizing government, to ending the long-running conflicts between different armed factions, some tied tightly to illicit trade. As profits from methamphetamine production skyrocketed, funds for arming militias became more plentiful.
There was also rising internal criticism of the government, in the media and from civil society organizations, for its perceived authoritarian style and unwillingness to listen to dissenting views. Aung San Suu Kyi rarely if ever met with local media, and had little contact with civil society organizations. She had selected as her key aides bureaucrats, diplomats, and retired army officers, all from the days of the military junta. Whereas the ex-generals of the previous government had needed to prove their democratic credentials, Aung San Suu Kyi and the NLD, having won an election landslide, believed legitimacy was already on their side.
Another serious challenge was the economy. Growth slowed, business confidence tanked, foreign investment ground to a halt, and tourism dropped to levels not seen in years. The overinflated real estate market buckled into recession. By 2019, top companies were increasingly and in some cases desperately strapped for cash. The central bank had imposed stringent new regulations to bring Burma in line with international standards. The banking system was a mess. Businessmen had borrowed hundreds of millions of dollars as overdrafts, with no real intention of repayment. Now the loans were being called in and dozens of the largest companies were teetering on the edge of bankruptcy.38
Businessmen blamed the government for poor management and the lack of a clear economic agenda. What many wanted was a kind of state capitalism, with a cozy relationship between leading political figures and the private sector at its core. With others, there was simply a hankering for the old days, when officially licensed riches were there for the taking. The government itself seemed torn between the neoliberal prescriptions of experts, both local and international, bureaucratic desires to micromanage the economy, and the old left-wing instincts of many in the NLD rank and file. There were good people on the government’s economic team, but decision-making was slow and there was little coordination across ministries.
For ordinary people, the picture was mixed. Over the past three years, the garment sector had boomed and rice exports to China had soared, benefiting rural families across the country. At the same time, the situation of Burmese workers in Thailand improved considerably, the result of changes made under the past government to legalize migration and facilitate remittances. Over a billion dollars a year were now being channeled back to poor villages. All these things, however, provided nothing approaching real security. In early 2019 China was looking to impose new quotas on rice imports, the garment sector was under threat from possible European Union sanctions, and populist feelings in Thailand were increasingly hostile toward migrant workers.
The underlying problem, as always, was that there was little idea of what life for ordinary people could or should be like in ten or twenty years’ time. And this wasn’t an economy that had been doing reasonably well and needed only a gentle steer: a deeply exploitative colonial economy had been followed by war and a disastrous socialist experiment. Capitalism was then resuscitated in the 1990s by a hodgepodge of illicit industries. It was an incredibly unequal economy that was in danger of being overwhelmed by two unmanageable forces: the disastrous effects of climate change and the rise of China next door.
On all sides of Burmese politics, there was little vision of the future.
EPILOGUE
AUNG SAN SUU KYI had long given up her Rangoon lakeside villa and was living in Naypyitaw in a modest, recently built house, decorated with paintings by local artists and glass coffee tables she had designed herself, together with her beloved golden retriever, Taichito, a gift from her son Kim.1 She had few close friends or confidants, and as a teetotaler no one with whom she enjoyed a drink at the end of the day. She hadn’t lived anything approaching a normal life for thirty years, having gone straight from Oxford housewife into the maelstrom of Burmese politics, then house arrest and the trauma of separation from her family, near death at the hands of the regime, a sudden new political opening, trips around the world, endless adulation, and finally the crisis of the Rohingya. She was, however, close where she had wanted to be for three decades.
In 2019, Burma was a kind of democracy. She had won an election and was for all effective purposes the head of government. She chaired the cabinet and nearly all important committees. Her image dominated state media, and at every public function she attended, from Buddhist ceremonies to diplomatic receptions, she was in the top spot. Power was centralized in her office, and no other figure stood even close in terms of either popularity or decision-making authority. Though the constitutional set-up meant that the armed forces enjoyed near-absolute autonomy, and that the three security ministers were appointees of the commander-in-chief, the chain of command led to a president who was effectively a deputy of Aung San Suu Kyi. All non-military issues, from the government budget to health and education to foreign policy, were in her hands alone.
It was a power she used sparingly. There were no clear-cut policy aims or timetables that had to be met, few changes in government personnel, and little intervention in the day-to-day work of her ministers. There was also little in the way of succession planning. She appointed a new president, Win Myint, and the Mandalay chief minister, Zaw Myint Maung, both former long-serving political prisoners, as her deputies in the party, but both were only a few years younger than she was.
Instead, Aung San Suu Kyi presided over the country, offering up a life story and an example for others to follow, one steeped in nationalism, self-sacrifice, and a gritty determination to stand firm in the face of any opposition. Her rule was never about government solving people’s problems. Her instincts were deeply conservative. Personal responsibility was paramount. In August 2018, in front of a gathering of over a thousand students and teachers at Rangoon University, she held a nearly two-hour-long discussion with a select group of young graduates. The topic she chose wasn’t the economy, the peace process, or even the future of democracy, but literature, her love at Oxford; a central question she posed to the young graduates was whether, in a novel, plot or character was more important.
Three years before, when the National League for Democracy won its landslide election victory, some Burmese analysts had guessed that its government wouldn’t last: differences with the generals would come to a head and there would be an army takeover. But nothing of the sort happened. There was mutual distrust, and at times rising tension. But at the end of the day, the former political prisoners and their erstwhile captors had found a way to work together. At a talk in Singapore, Aung San Suu Kyi said that relations with the military “were not that bad” and that the generals in her cabinet were “rather sweet.”2
In January 2019, the General Administration Department, or GAD, was transferred from the Home Ministry to the Cabinet Office. The GAD was no ordinary department: its 40,000 or so staff were the entire administration of the country, down to the district and township level. They had reported via the home minister, a serving general, to the commander-in-chief as well as the president. Now the military link was severed. It was a big victory for Aung San Suu Kyi’s hope of moving the army away from civilian functions. It was a step toward her dream of fulfilling her father’s legacy and leaving behind an armed forces subordinate to an elected leader. In February 2019 the NLD-dominated parliament set up a new committee to explore options for constitutional reform. After initial opposition, the army agreed to take part.
In a way, the tissue graft of the NLD onto the old establishment, as created and nurtured by the former dictator Than Shwe, had held. There was no rejection. For the army, the NLD in 2019 seemed decidedly less threatening than
it had been even a few years before, and far removed from its revolutionary origins. Both Aung San Suu Kyi and the generals perhaps also sensed in one another similar nationalist leanings, grounded in the same myths around the country’s fall to colonial domination and its resurrection in the 1940s. Both prized discipline and the idea of service to “the people.” A commitment to “free markets” was also unquestioned. There was a shared Naypyitaw view of the world.
And despite a darkening environment for the media, including the imprisonment of Reuters journalists (released under an amnesty in May 2019) and the draconian use of anti-defamation and colonial-era security laws, Burma was undoubtedly a far freer place than the Burma of a decade before. No one then, in their wildest imaginations, would have guessed that Aung San Suu Kyi would within years lead a government chosen in a free and fair election.
The next general election was scheduled for late 2020, and there was every reason to believe that the NLD would win again. Constitutional change with an end to the army’s role in politics might still be long years away. But if the story was just about moving toward a form of democracy—or, even more, if it was just about the coming to power of Aung San Suu Kyi—it was going reasonably well.
Other stories, though, were now commanding the stage. As relations with the West cooled, Sino-Burmese relations were moving into ever higher gear. In early 2019, plans were finally being drawn up for a railway that would connect Rangoon and Mandalay to Shanghai and Beijing. More than two thousand years before, a mission from the Han emperor had tried unsuccessfully to find a passage via Burma to the sea; a millennia-old Chinese dream was coming true. But it wasn’t just an issue of government-to-government ties. Chinese companies saw Burma as a cheap market, a place where quick profits could be made, and Chinese tourists began to outnumber Western ones. As China’s economy advanced, the sheer force of gravity was becoming impossible for Burma to resist.
India, too, attempted to increase its influence, promising through its Act East policy to connect its northeastern states to Burma. These were the very states—Assam and Manipur—whose conquest in the 1820s by Burmese kings had helped trigger the first Anglo-Burmese War. The British were now nowhere in sight, but Burma was being drawn into a new rivalry between emerging Asian superpowers. Diplomatic instincts were to be friendly with everyone, but friendliness alone would do little to prepare for a future in which Burma became a crossroads between the hinterlands of the world’s two biggest nations.
It would be one thing if these tectonic shifts were taking place in an otherwise stable landscape. But Burma in 2019 was a place where core issues around race and identity were not only unsettled but were heating up, with civil society groups, political parties, businesses, militia, and armed organizations all mobilized around ethnic identities to a degree unprecedented in the country’s history.
The latest and worst round of violence in Arakan had begun in 2016, with ARSA’s attacks on the police and army. The scale and ferocity of the response shocked the world. But what happened was far more than a matter of insurgency and counterinsurgency. At the heart of the crisis are issues of blood and belonging that first consigned Rohingya-speaking Muslims to a second-class status and then ostracized them from the emerging democracy.
And far away from the international gaze are a host of other violent conflicts, between the Burman-dominated state army and militias, big and small, claiming to speak on behalf of a bewildering array of ethnic communities. Millions of lives are at stake in remote highlands where identity politics, moneymaking, and a basic instinct for protection intertwine.
The peace process that began in 2011 attempted to stop all fighting. So far, it hasn’t worked. If anything, this period of attempted talks has led to more violent conflict and the emergence of more armed factions than ever before. Part of the problem is that the situation is seen as a “war” requiring “peace,” as if a previously orderly society had fragmented into civil conflict and needed only to be repaired. But Burma was never whole. And it’s not a coincidence that nearly all the fighting since the 1950s has been in what the British termed the “Frontier Areas”: rugged hills and distant valleys that had always been a patchwork of authority and had never before come under the sway of a single state.
The core strategy of the state since independence—of seeing Burma as a collection of peoples with the Burmese language and culture at the core—has failed, and will continue to fail. The government and army may well agree on a formula for constitutional devolution, one that might even be acceptable to many Ethnic Armed Organizations. But to think that was ever the main issue would be a tragic mistake.
Race and identity have been at the heart of Burmese politics since the start of modern Burmese politics a hundred years ago. Colonialism and the immigration of millions of people from India brought on an identity crisis that has not yet been resolved. Any brighter future will depend on Burma crafting a new and more inclusive identity, one not tied to race and one not based on a notion of uniting fixed ethnic categories. The British were correct in analyzing Burma as a zone of “racial instability.” Accepting this, seeing it as a strength rather than a weakness, finding new sources of national identity, separate from notions of ethnicity, and embarking on an aggressive agenda to end discrimination in all its forms, are elements of a conversation that’s been almost entirely absent.
IT’S EASY TO SEE IDENTITY as the driving story today, in Burma as everywhere, and it’s tempting to view the past few years as a democracy experiment gone awry because of a resurgence of ethno-nationalism. But that would be to overlook an even bigger story, one more hidden, which is the story of Burmese capitalism. It’s been the missing element in the thinking of nearly all observers, though not ordinary people, who are prospering or becoming impoverished, living and dying, as a result of markets that are bound by few restraints.
In the late 1980s, left-wing ideologies collapsed and there was a move toward capitalism under the harshest of dictatorships, without debate. Cronyism and racketeering thrived, and in the shadow of rotting state institutions grew powerful networks focused entirely on moneymaking. At the apex are men and women who collude and conspire across every racial and religious divide.
After 2011, the assumption was that the economy needed only reform, in the direction of a cleaner, greener capitalism more integrated with global markets. There was an unstated ambition to transition from the anarchic, plundering capitalism of the dictatorship toward a fast-industrializing state capitalism, one powered by global investment. And today, neoliberalism, a faith in free markets and a disdain for state-led development, is held out as the only alternative to the corrupt and crony-driven capitalism of the past. There is much talk of Burma’s democracy transition but next to no discussion around its transition from one strain of capitalism to another.
Democracy can mean many things, but in Burma it has meant primarily a form of competitive politics, organized around political parties and regular elections. It’s been an elite-level substitute for the junta over a state that is scarcely functioning and that doesn’t even control significant patches of the country.
And democratic change so far has at the very least been insufficient. At worst it has legitimized inequalities and unleashed a maelstrom of identity-based conflicts for which society was ill-prepared.
The sequencing has been misjudged. It’s hard to imagine any meaningful progress toward democracy with existing levels of inequality. To a far greater extent than even twenty years ago, the rich and poor in Burma today live entirely different lives.
The focus should have been on radical measures to fight discrimination, enabling a robust and free media, building new and inclusive state institutions, including for taxation, policing, and justice, and creating a welfare state on which all citizens could depend. Instead, the focus has been on injecting a new layer of partisan competition on an already fractious landscape. The result has been a coarsening of public debate and a polarized political class.
At a time
when democracy and markets are increasingly seen in the West as unable to cope with issues of inequality, identity, and climate change, they have become Burma’s only prescription for the future. Twentieth-century solutions are being offered as the default answers to the country’s 21st-century challenges.
The critical questions are not discussed. Burma will before long bear the brunt of rising sea levels, unbearably hot summers, and more-frequent extreme weather, including cyclones like Nargis. China and India’s gargantuan economies next door may be friends or foes. With automation and a changing pattern of global consumption, the world may soon have no need for Burma’s cheap labor or even its natural resources: the ladder of export-oriented growth so successfully climbed by other Asian countries may soon be a ladder to nowhere. So what economic future is possible? What economy can overtake the pull of methamphetamine production and other illicit industries, withstand climate change, and make possible free and dignified lives for tens of millions of people? As importantly, if given a real choice, what kind of life would Burmese people want to live: the lives of other Asian consumers, or something different?
In the meantime, the plight of the poor in Burma continues to be ignored with impunity. Western sanctions, which included aid cut-offs, destroyed the lives of millions, but on this there has been no quest for accountability. Sanctions during the 1990s and 2000s did nothing to compel the generals in a liberal direction and, if anything, have made any transition to a better future more difficult. Yet they may be returning. Over 2019, the European Union will likely decide whether or not to revoke trade privileges, a move that would collapse the garment industry and throw more than 500,000 otherwise destitute young women out of work.
Since colonial times, whatever has happened in Burma, the ordinary people have consistently wound up the losers.
The Hidden History of Burma Page 27
