|
| |
Burma*: Will the Generals Prosper?
From: Columbia University
| By:
Thomas R. Lansner |
EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION |
 The long-isolated Southeast Asian country of Burma is a country in crisis, according to Thomas R. Lansner (right), the assistant dean of Columbia University's School of International and Public Affairs. In this essay, Lansner, who covered Burma both a decade ago as a correspondent and more recently as an Open Society Institute consultant, explores the roots of Burma's social, political and economic deterioration.* In 1989, the ruling army junta decreed that Burma's name be changed to Myanmar. This change is rejected by the democratic opposition party that won a landslide victory in the 1990 elections--a victory that was never honored by the military regime--and thus Burma will be used in this story to refer to the country. |
 o most people, Burma is a far-off and little-known land. The name Burma may evoke images of golden pagodas, docile elephants and perhaps the flying fishes that played so famously along the mighty Irrawaddy River in Rudyard Kipling's poetic "Road to Mandalay." |
 Traditional kingships and other local governments that evolved among Burma's peoples over many centuries were largely stripped of their authority after Britain's nineteenth-century conquest of the country. Colonial administration continued with limited local self-government until the Union of Burma achieved independence, in 1948, after Burma was ravaged as a battleground between Japanese and Allied forces in World War II. The new state emerged as a parliamentary democracy, and, while it was torn by ethnic strife as minority peoples demanded autonomy from the ethnic Burman majority, it survived as a representative government until an army coup in 1962. |
 Burma is strategically located in Southeast Asia, between China and India. Inhabited by 50 million people of diverse ethnicities, the country rises through varied ecosystems--from tropical reefs along the Bay of Bengal, through the rich rice lands of the Irrawaddy delta, to thickly forested hills and high mountains on the edge of the Himalayas. Burma was once among Asia's richest countries, with agricultural, fishery, forest and mineral resources to fuel modernization and development; and it was known as "the rice bowl of Asia," because of its exports across the continent. |
While Burma today remains a country of glittering temples and breathtaking countryside, its current reality has little in common with romantic legends or with the potential it once had. Since gaining independence, Burma has largely been run by army-controlled regimes that have isolated the country, wrecked its economy and repressed its peoples. For decades, up until about 1990, the few outsiders to visit Burma would find themselves in a land surreally frozen in time, riding in 30-year-old cars through quiet streets, past often crumbling colonial architecture. |
Changes over the past 10 years have altered the face of Rangoon, bringing high-rise buildings and even traffic jams but only a patina of prosperity. Burma's economy remains stagnant, and the country is today one of the world's largest producers and exporters of illegal drugs, suffering an epidemic of heroin use and of HIV/AIDS spread by intravenous heroin users. And the hopes for Burma's development that once lay with a strong educational system and a high literacy rate have faded, as the educational system and other social services have steadily deteriorated during nearly four decades of dictatorship. |
A glimpse of democratic space disappears
Burma is a country in crisis. Even as many other dictatorships have fallen, Burma's generals appear less willing than ever to cede power to a democratic government and to respect basic human rights. The Burmese democracy leader Daw Aung San Suu Kyi's release, in July 1995, from six years under house arrest was widely hoped to herald a genuine political opening in one of Asia's most intransigent dictatorships. Five years later, that narrow "democratic space" has slammed tightly shut once again. Thousands of supporters of Daw Suu Kyi's opposition National League for Democracy (NLD) and other democracy activists have been jailed or forced into exile. In May, the NLD marked the 10th anniversary of its overwhelming--and still unrecognized--victory in the 1990 elections. |
Burma's ruling military junta, the State Peace and Development Council (known from 1988 to 1998 as the State Law and Order Restoration Council, or SLORC), has now held power for 12 years, following successive military regimes since 1962. Burma's acute economic distress amplifies the broad resentment against the junta's brutality. Today, the Burmese army is essentially an occupier in its own land. |
 As long as Daw Suu Kyi is free, she will remain a visibly implacable foe of dictatorship and a rallying point for pro-democratic forces, even if few Burmese may hear her voice except on foreign radio broadcasts. Daw Suu Kyi is the daughter of Burma's revered leader Aung San, who was assassinated when she was an infant, on the eve of the country's independence. She was a charismatic catalyst for the 1988 democracy movement, drawing huge crowds to her impassioned speeches that demanded reform, but reform only through nonviolent means. She was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1991 while under house arrest in Rangoon. Today, Daw Suu Kyi's freedom of movement is still severely restricted. She is subject to increasingly virulent attacks by Burmese state media, which even recently suggested that she be tried for the capital crime of treason. |
The NLD must decide what degree of agitation can maintain its credibility, raising both popular support and pressure on the junta without drawing a draconian response from the military. The army quelled massive pro-democracy demonstrations of 1988 by massacring thousands, thereby incurring global condemnation and a nearly complete cessation of international aid and loans. Emboldened by cease-fires that have mostly quieted the country's long-running ethnic wars, the junta must measure what degree of continued repression--which is imperative in order for it to maintain its power--will be tolerated by international donors who wish to encourage economic liberalization and political reform. |
For the junta's closest ally, China, and its ASEAN (Association of Southeast Asian Nations) neighbors, such domestic repression is, at least publicly, deemed a purely internal affair. Burma's July 1997 admission to ASEAN reinforced several authoritarian regimes' oft-stated, and certainly self-interested, belief that foreign policy should be entirely separate from human rights concerns. Western countries must choose whether intensified economic sanctions or engagement with the junta can better promote their own interests in Burma. At first glance, these interests might seem few, beyond concerns over severe human rights abuses and the denial of democracy. Such problems, while genuine, also afflict dozens of other countries around the world, including some of Burma's nearest neighbors, with whom Western nations have normal diplomatic relations and burgeoning commercial ties. It is the scale and intensity of the Burmese dictatorship's abuses that demand attention, not their uniqueness. However, Burma's role as a world center of illegal drug production, and the junta's increasingly close ties to China, are also raising regional and global worries. |
Reconciliation vs. reconsolidation
Inside Burma, the gap between the democratic leadership and the army junta extends beyond politics and policies to basic perceptions about their country. While Daw Aung San Suu Kyi and her NLD allies speak of national "reconciliation," the SLORC describes its main goal as national "reconsolidation." This is no mere semantic difference. Burma is a multi-ethnic state that owes its modern borders to British imperialism. Although no reliable census data is available, it is estimated that Burmans make up perhaps 60 percent of the country's roughly 50 million people. Within its frontiers are dozens of ethnic groups, many of which live in remote hill areas and have never accepted more than Rangoon's nominal suzerainty. Some of these groups agreed to become part of independent Burma in 1948 only after protracted negotiations with Aung San Suu Kyi's father, General Aung San. |
For the four decades that followed, large swaths of Burma's borderlands were embroiled in conflict. Since 1988, cease-fires with numerous groups and ceaseless campaigns by an ever-bigger and more formidably equipped government army, which now numbers more than 400,000 men, have imposed an uneasy calm in most areas. The basic question of Burmese nationhood, however, stands unaddressed. The regime's national reconsolidation--and the proposed constitution that is its vehicle--demands the same allegiance to a unitary state that has sparked four decades of ethnic warfare. These conflicts have long provided Burma's soldiery with their primary rationale for exercising power: that only they can maintain "national integrity." It also results in the chronic isolation and underdevelopment of rebellious ethnic hill areas, where much of the world's heroin is produced. |
The 1990 general election that produced a sweeping NLD victory--the party took 82 percent of the seats contested--was never honored by the military regime that was so resoundingly rejected by Burma's voters. The NLD itself was a loose electoral coalition of different political groupings, with crucial support from many ethnic communities that were unalterably opposed to any new arrangement denying significant autonomy for Burma's non-Burman peoples. Constitutional proposals by Burmese groups in exile offer federal structures under which ethnic groups would gain such autonomy. |
There is little doubt that the junta-controlled National Convention that was first convened in Rangoon in January 1993 will eventually produce a document guaranteeing the military's dominance in Burma's political life for the next generation. Its outline resembles Indonesia's model under the fallen dictator Suharto, formalizing substantial military presence at every level of government. A quarter of the seats in the new parliament will be reserved for military appointees. The generals apparently anticipate broad international approbation for a façade of democracy that removes the military from the front line of governance. |
As constructed, the new constitution will likely be rejected by Burma's minority ethnic groups. The draft constitution allows the military to appoint many officials in minority areas. To minority ethnic groups, this cedes power not only to the army but to the majority Burman ethnic group that controls it. This bodes ill for long-term stability in the border regions, and points to ongoing militarization and heroin production in those contested areas even if a civilianized regime succeeds the current junta under an army-imposed constitution. |
NLD: revitalized or marginalized?
The NLD now faces both strategic and tactical challenges. It must seek to avoid long-term marginalization of the democratization movement if the junta transforms itself into a nominally civilian regime. To do so, it must maintain activities that engage domestic opinion but do not frighten the army sufficiently to spark its total suppression. Both the NLD's vulnerability and the junta's abiding insecurity are exemplified by the continued detention of NLD elected members of parliament and other activists. The army has responded to NLD activities with ratcheted but targeted repression; the military seems increasingly sophisticated regarding international perceptions of its actions. Official intimidation has become more subtle, at least in a Burmese context. Members of the NLD maintain its headquarters in Rangoon and some other offices around Burma, but they are under constant surveillance and threat of arrest. Burma's prisons are still filled with political detainees, estimated to number more than 2,000. Thousands more activists are in exile in Thailand, India and other countries. Continued quiet action against individual NLD activists involved in party work--rolling up the NLD from below--could strangle the NLD's efforts at revival without provoking the international outcry that would inevitably greet renewed detention of its top leadership. |
The impact of statements by Daw Suu Kyi and other NLD leaders beyond Rangoon is uncertain. The state media, which runs all broadcasting and newspapers other than those focusing exclusively on sports or romance, ignores them completely. Word of them sometimes reaches Burma's second city, Mandalay, and elsewhere, through the audio and video copies made by NLD workers. Daw Suu Kyi's statements, smuggled from Burma, reach many more Burmese through foreign radio broadcasts, chiefly through Burmese-language broadcasts by the BBC, the US-government-funded Radio Free Asia, the Voice of America and the Burmese exile Democratic Voice of Burma, upon which people in Burma must rely for uncensored news of their homeland. |
Will the generals prosper?
Burmese people are keenly aware of the risks of openly opposing the dictatorship. But as well as facing the stick, the general population also espies a carrot. A veneer of development in Rangoon and Mandalay now offers at least an illusion of progress, entirely absent under nearly 30 years of the quasi-socialist economic nationalism that brought Burma's once-vibrant economy to its knees. |
 The junta appears to hope that improved economic conditions can obviate deep popular anger at repression and widespread military abuses. The effect of even marginal improvements in a desperate society should not be underestimated, and could undercut the NLD's mass appeal. |
Yet even this chimera of progress is fading, and growth, never either broad or deep, has slowed in the face of the Asian economic crisis, sanctions and local corruption and mismanagement. There is little sustainable development, and long-term productivity and job growth is not being enhanced. Serious inflation may now be eroding consumer confidence. Prices of staples such as rice and cooking oil have leaped. The income gap between the wealthy elite in a few cities and the urban and rural poor has become a chasm. Mercedeses and even a few Porsches are seen on the streets of Rangoon, while the country's annual per capita income hovers near $200. A basic problem is the wildly unrealistic official exchange rate, which values the Burmese kyat at six to the US dollar, while the open-market rate is nearly 400 to the dollar. |
 But even if Burma's economic prospects are dim, the junta's grip on the country's peoples remains strong. Renewed foreign investment from Japan and revenue from gas exports could revive the economy and mark a dramatic turnaround from the near economic collapse of 1997-8. |
Here, international investment is especially crucial. The Yadana gas fields in the Gulf of Martaban off Burma's southeastern Tenasserim Coast are now being developed by Los Angeles-based Unocal and the French oil company TOTAL. Britain's Premier and Japan's Nippon Oil are exploiting gas reserves in the Yedagun field. These multibillion-dollar offshore projects could not be undertaken without the backing of these international petroleum giants. |
What the military regime has provided is massive cheap or forced labor to work on infrastructure schemes that support internationally funded projects. Most of the Gulf of Martaban gas pumped by Unocal, TOTAL and their partners will be sold to Thailand through a 65-mile pipeline that was built across Burma from the sea to Thai territory. Human rights groups have produced voluminous and highly detailed accounts of forced labor being used on pipeline-associated projects. People are routinely conscripted and made to work without pay under abysmal conditions. |
Forced labor has repeatedly been cited in annual reports to the UN Commission on Human Rights by the UN special rapporteur on human rights in Burma. One report stated that "there is essentially no freedom of thought, opinion, expression or association" in Burma, and that Burma's peoples "live in a climate of fear." Since 1988, more than a million people, mostly in ethnic minorities, have been forcibly relocated to areas in which they are essentially prisoners, the report said, adding that many people flee their homes in "absolute silence," hoping to "avoid persecution and fearing execution." The report added that "extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions, the practice of torture, portering and forced labour continue to occur in Myanmar." |
In an unprecedented action, the International Labor Organization voted in June 2000 to ask all its member states to review their relations with Burma if the junta did not take "concrete" measures within six months to end its use of forced labor. |
Despite these conditions, Unocal is publicly committed to continue its investment in Burma. Pro-business representatives claim that American oil companies that were forced to withdraw from Burma would be quickly replaced by international competitors, especially since proven gas reserves are available. And an American pullout, they argue, would forfeit any potential positive influence on the country's evolution. However, the company is facing a federal court suit in California, which alleges that Unocal's cooperation with the Burmese regime makes it complicit in human rights abuses linked to the pipeline. Other infrastructure projects using forced labor mentioned in UN reports include several aimed at building tourist infrastructure. |
The regime's grip over both Burma's economy and its political life is quite nearly a stranglehold--the first remains stunted and the second is nearly moribund. Neither the rule of law nor the regulations of the bureaucracy are respected. Genuine stability, which is possible only when there is an ingrained expectation of continuity and consistency in the application of law, is entirely absent. Governmental decision making remains nearly paralyzed below the most senior levels by the allocation of responsibility without the devolution of authority. |
Heroin there and here
Burma's burgeoning heroin production (second in the world only to Afghanistan's) is feeding an explosion of heroin addiction in the United States, as well as in Europe, China, South and Southeast Asia and inside Burma. Heroin addicts are also boosting a regional AIDS epidemic as they share contaminated needles, and the spread of AIDS in India, China and further afield is directly tied to Burmese heroin exports. In the past few years, massive methamphetamine ("speed") production and trafficking from Burma has added a new and dangerous dimension to the narcotics trade. |
Minimally, the junta is abetting narcotics production and trafficking. While stifling any real political dialogue, the junta has followed a strategy since 1988 of mostly appeasing armed ethnic rebels. Part of the junta's cease-fire arrangements with several minority groups is permission for those groups to conduct unhindered trade inside and outside Burma. Heavy trucks belonging to various armed factions travel uninspected across borders and within Burma. Many ply the rugged route from the Chinese frontier through Lashio--the old Burma Road, built by American combat engineers during World War II--to Mandalay. While Kachin and Karen rebels have taken strong stands against drug trafficking, the main product traded by several other ethnic "cease-fire armies" is heroin. Despite recent reports of unrest among Wa and Kokang factions that have signed cease-fires with the SLORC, the groups maintain lucrative border trading routes. It is widely believed that at least some are deeply involved in heroin trafficking, and have now begun illicit manufacture and export of methamphetamine as well. |
Heroin addiction is a very serious domestic threat in Burma. Heroin production in Burma has nearly quadrupled since the current regime took power. There may be as many as 700,000 heroin addicts in Burma today. While the regime proposes various antidrug activities, its sincerity and ability to carry out any such program, especially without a political resolution to the country's ethnic conflicts, is highly dubious. The regime has repeatedly sought American aid commitments before they undertake antidrug campaigns that are anything more than the periodic ritualistic burning of token amounts of opium and heroin in front of cameras and the diplomatic community. |
America's interest in controlling the flow of heroin trafficking is clear. Much of the heroin reaching the US originates in Burma. Its availability in greater quantities, and more cheaply and purer than ever before, is fueling a new heroin epidemic in the US. The overall drug situation, with rampant methamphetamine production added to heroin exports, has in fact grown much worse since a senior State Department official said plainly in 1996, "Burma is a narcotics disaster area." |
International ties: will trade conquer all?
While the junta's repression and its continued dealings with drug lords may block improved relations with the US, the regime is succeeding in rebuilding its international acceptability, largely on the twin bases of cease-fires and opportunities in trade and investment. In July 1997, Burma was admitted to full ASEAN membership. Japan is cautiously resuming aid while actively encouraging trade and investment. India is also seeking better ties. But broader reintegration into the international mainstream depends on the junta's eventual ability to fabricate at least the façade of civilian rule. Even a "D+" constitution and elections would be considered by most Asian nations to be a sign of progress and would be accepted with resigned acquiescence by many Western countries. |
The junta's ties with China remain very close. The countries' top leaders have exchanged regular visits, and Chinese economic penetration of Burma is making the country an important market for exports from the southern province of Yunnan. Beijing is also the junta's principal arms supplier. There are reports that China is reaping strategic rewards for this support: Chinese naval forces have allegedly been allowed access to Coco Island and other islands off the Burmese coast to engage in intelligence-gathering activities in the Bay of Bengal. |
Among many Burmese there is growing resentment of Chinese immigration and expanded presence by the Chinese in the country's business sector. Growing Chinese political, commercial and military influence in Burma is also causing alarm in a region already nervous about Beijing's expansive assertions of a historically legitimated hegemony over East Asia. Some analysts argue that ASEAN membership may help wean Burma from China's influence. Thailand has been steadily losing market share for consumer goods in Burma. It is also facing a larger and more powerfully armed Burmese army across its 368-mile frontier, where deadly incursions by Burmese troops or their locally supported militias against Burmese refugees have raised tensions. |
The Indian government, after taking a strong political stand against the junta until 1994, has signed several memorandums of understanding with the junta, aimed at increasing trade and controlling rebel groups operating along their common frontier. An Indian official described this softer approach as a "difference in tactics but not overall strategy," but one that was still aimed at balancing growing Chinese influence in Burma, especially any naval presence in the Bay of Bengal. India's trade with Burma is growing quickly. In some Indian quarters, it is held that growing commercial relations will lessen the regime's dependence on China. Some analysts feel Delhi's improving bilateral ties with Beijing make China's activities in Burma less likely to pose a threat to India's national security. |
The attitude of the Japanese government is especially important. Japan, Burma's largest bilateral aid donor before suspending its Official Development Aid in 1988, is gradually resuming its program. As expressed by Japanese diplomats in Rangoon, their government's attitude is that the junta "is not going away and we should deal with that fact realistically." So far, Japan has resumed overseas investment insurance for Japanese firms entering the Burmese market, encouraging Japanese corporate investment, writing off some official debt, and granting aid mainly for agricultural and health-related projects. Whether to restore large-scale aid without genuine progress on human rights and democratization inside Burma is being intensely debated by Japanese policymakers. |
Despite US sanctions, potential profits are luring international trade and investment. While simple, the junta's international strategy of courting international investors has staved off isolation, and has drawn sufficient funds to help maintain its power. In a videotaped interview smuggled from Burma and broadcast in August 2000, Aung San Suu Kyi expressed optimism that democracy will be restored in her country, saying that working toward that end is a choice, not a sacrifice. Yet Burma's generals appear determined to maintain their rule by any means necessary--and at whatever cost to, and at whatever sacrifice by, their 50 million countrymen. |
|
| |
