WASHINGTON
- After a period of broad bipartisan
support, US President Barack Obama's cautious opening towards Myanmar's
reformist quasi-civilian government is starting to meet resistance in Congress.
Concerns
center on Obama's budding engagement with Myanmar's rights-abusing military and
his administration's reluctance to place preconditions on expanding strategic
ties.
Military-to-military
relations have so far apparently been limited to such matters as allowing
Myanmar observers to two US-led Cobra Gold regional military exercises in
Thailand, talks on human rights and exchanges on the rule of law. Obama
administration officials have claimed the limited engagements have exposed
Myanmar's military, known as the Tatmadaw, to international norms of behavior
and built new trust after decades of disengagement with the previous
military-led regime.
Congressional
critics, on the other hand, believe that Obama has moved too fast and given too
much. Representative Steve Chabot, the Republican chairman of the House Foreign
Affairs Subcommittee on Asia and the Pacific and sponsor of new pending
legislation on the issue, has raised questions about whether Myanmar has
instituted enough reform to justify Obama's unilateral decision to undertake
high-level military-to-military engagement.
In
October last year Cabot told a meeting at the Heritage Foundation think tank in
Washington that despite superficial changes, problems related to ethnic
insurgencies and political prisoners bubbled below the surface. "The
[Myanmar] military's leverage over the government remains intact and its
participation in human rights abuses against ethnic and religious minorities is
rampant," Cabot said.
Chabot's
proposed legislation would bar security assistance to Myanmar unless the
secretary of state certifies the country has taken steps toward political and
military reform in establishing civilian oversight of the military, addressing
human rights abuses committed by the military, severing military ties with
North Korea, and ending the country's numerous ethnic conflicts.
The
bill does not bar Myanmar's participation in a Defense Department program of
training on civil-military relations and human rights or prevent US provision
of disaster assistance in the country. Chabot told the same meeting that in
switching from an "action-for-action" policy approach to a less
restrictive strategy the Obama administration had "essentially given
[Myanmar] a blank check."
Myanmar's
military has and maintains a reputation for brutality. On June 9, the third
anniversary of renewed fighting between the Tatmadaw and the rebel Kachin
Independence Army (KIA), the Thailand-based organization Fortify Rights issued
a report saying that Myanmar authorities have "systematically
tortured" Kachin civilians believed to be aligned with the KIA for the
past three years.
The
report stated that "Myanmar Army soldiers are operating within a
permissive environment with respect to the use of torture, and torture appears
to be carried out with the knowledge and consent of senior military
officers."
The
same day a group of Kachin Americans visited Washington to lobby members of
Congress, calling on them to back legislation that places conditions on future
assistance to Myanmar and ties military engagement to progress on human rights.
A
handful of bills has been filed recently with bipartisan backing in both the
House of Representatives and Senate. Legislation has included a bill similar to
Chabot's earlier version introduced last year by Senators Robert Menendez, Bob
Corker, Benjamin Cardin and Marco Rubio, the senior Democrats and Republicans
on the Foreign Relations Committee and its East Asian and Pacific Affairs
Subcommittee.
Rubio,
the Asia subcommittee's top Republican, lauded efforts to strengthen reform in
Myanmar but said that "while the Obama administration has continued to
normalize relations, I am concerned about long overdue political and military
reforms that are yet to be taken."
The
bill, he said, would provide the means to ensure "that US military
assistance is not provided to the [Myanmar] government until meaningful
accountability reforms are taken, including the fair and equal treatment of all
ethnic groups, addressing human rights abuses committed by the military, and
cutting off military relations with North Korea."
Limited encouragement
Obama
administration officials contend that engagement with Myanmar's military is
limited and should be sustained to encourage continued reform. Judith Cefkin,
the State Department's senior adviser for Myanmar, told Chabot's subcommittee
in December that "carefully calibrated military-to-military engagement to
share lessons on how militaries operate in a democratic framework will
strengthen the hand of reformers."
Those
views were echoed by a senior State Department official in a recent interview
with this correspondent. "Our experience," the official said,
"has led us to feel very strongly that engagement is the way that we're
going to have more leverage and more influence, and we've seen examples of that
in the last several years."
The
official, who requested anonymity, said that while there is a "whole
variety" of areas where the Obama administration expects Myanmar to make
progress, "we don't want to necessarily tie ourselves up, saying, you
know, well, they've made great progress on 'a, b, c,' but we told them they had
to do 'd' before we could do 'a'. We think that through flexibility and being
able to be nimble and respond to developments on the ground we're actually
going to have more influence with them than by having a very rigid
script."
The
official described current military-to-military engagement as "virtually
nothing right now" and stressed the US is moving forward cautiously and
slowly. While the Obama administration would like to expand its current
exchanges to include more formal training in such areas as human rights and
civilian control of the military, there were no plans for training in
"anything that is in the traditional military combat [or] logistical
capacity building."
"I
mean, nobody has an interest in that until there's really substantial changes,
reform of the institution," the official said.
It is
not clear that any of the proposed legislation will pass within this year.
However, it does seem that the administration will face increasing resistance
on future Myanmar policy, one of Obama's few self-touted foreign policy
successes.
Vikram
Singh, until recently deputy assistant secretary of defense for South and
Southeast Asia, said in an interview that he sees major risks in adopting the
sorts of preconditions to even modest military engagement that congressional
critics are proposing. Even so, he sees skepticism emerging toward the
administration's opening towards Myanmar.
Singh,
now vice president for national security and international policy at the Center
for American Progress in Washington, suggested that because conditions might
not be met for years Myanmar's military could opt instead to develop ties with
other countries.
"I
think the opportunity cost there is that the void will get filled by others,
that we will diminish our influence, that we will fail to build the
relationships we could build with the leadership of what is and will be a very
vital part of this society for a long time," Singh said.
Instead,
he said US policy should be more oriented towards supporting President Thein
Sein's democratic reform efforts. At the same time, Singh acknowledged that
there has been recent deterioration in support for the administration's Myanmar
policy, partly due to the natural consequence of its novelty wearing off,
partly due to concerns it has moved too fast in some areas.
"I
would argue," Singh said, "that they moved quickly in a lot of
symbolic ways but moved very carefully in substantive ways."
Inviting
Thein Sein to visit Washington last year, he suggested, was seen as giving too
much, too fast. At the same time, Singh said "that was a very useful
symbolic gesture. It showed, hey, we support you because you have taken the
hard steps of reform, and it didn't mean that we somehow opened the
floodgates."
"I
think," he said, "the administration has been trying to do a very
carefully crafted, step-by-step engagement process and sometimes the public
part of that, which is that we should embrace the reform, gave people the
impression that they must be going way faster than we think, or being more
reckless than we think."
Frank
Jannuzi, formerly the Senate Foreign Relations Committee's policy director for
East Asian and Pacific affairs, suggested that what is causing congressional
concern is that the pace of the US-Myanmar military relationship has
accelerated quickly, even if it is still a limited relationship.
Some
sort of engagement with the military is necessary both from the US and Myanmar
perspective, according to Jannuzi, now president of the Maureen and Mike
Mansfield Foundation in Washington. The Myanmar military, he said,
"remains the most influential, important institution in the country."
Given
its institutional power, Jannuzi said, the military "has to see value from
the normalization process. They have to see some benefit for them flowing out
of handing over more and more power over time to the civilian leaders, because
if they don't they'll put a halt to it."
In
addition, he said, the US has a range of security issues it wants to pursue
with the Myanmar military in areas such as Myanmar's regional role, potential
counter-terrorism cooperation and balancing China's growing influence in
Southeast Asia. He suggested the administration could accomplish its greater
goals with proposed congressional restrictions in place, as proposed
legislation does not aim to cut off all military engagement.
Congress,
he said, "is just a little bit gun-shy - literally - about sort of
over-militarizing the US-[Myanmar] relationship at a time when it's US policy
to bolster the civilian side of the governance package in Myanmar."
Jannuzi
suggested the US has more leverage with Myanmar's military than the
administration thinks partly because of its interest in moving away from China
as its sole benefactor and returning to the good graces of the US. The
administration wrongly believes that if it were to demand significant,
measurable military reforms in exchange for graduated assistance "that
basically the [Myanmar] military would tell the US to go to hell."
Steve
Hirsch
Steve Hirsch is a Washington DC-based
journalist who has reported extensively on Myanmar and Western policies towards
Myanmar.
Business & Investment Opportunities
Saigon Business Corporation Pte Ltd (SBC) is incorporated
in Singapore since 1994.
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