On January 13,
2012, Myanmar did the previously unthinkable and released a number of political
opponents from its malevolent, colonial-era prison system.
If sincere, this move may mark the beginning of the end for military
rule, which began in 1962 when the public broadcasting station was stormed,
peaceful student protestors were shot and the student union building was
demolished. The courage to take such a gamble after decades of entrenched
military rule, is commendable.
Prolonged conflicts and poverty in Myanmar have not only devastated the
people, they have also left Myanmar's military in a state of disgrace.
Real soldiers can now see that ruling Myanmar by arms was not only
wrong but also not feasible. The economic sanctions led by the United States
may have been the last straw that forced the hands of the junta. It may simply
be that the military has run its course and the generals now only want to
preserve wealth and prestige they believed they have earned for their families.
No one knows for sure what took place behind the walls of the opaque military
junta. But it is more important to not be blind to what everyone can see.
The problem with the semi-authoritarian congress of Naypidaw, at the
moment, is its nugatory moral authority and questionable political credibility
to overcome the doubts and challenges of the political and armed oppositions in
Myanmar. But the biggest mistake by the opposition is to abandon the process
entirely to the whimsical military without a clear alternative strategy. This
is probably why Aung San Suu Kyi decided to participate in the April 1
by-election.
It is still too soon to know if Myanmar can be held up as the example
of an authoritarian regime's graceful exit. But it can safely be assumed that
the generals are trying to avoid Libya's fate while the oppositions are trying
to avoid violence like Syria. The 2007 Saffron Revolution demonstrated that the
misery of Myanmar could no longer continue to stagnate in the pond of prolonged
and uneasy peace.
After World War II, as nationalism and anti-colonialism peaked, Asia
plunged into the Cold War. And according to Christopher Bayly and Tim Harper,
2007, Britain had helped to arm Myanmar in 1940 and 1950 when the government in
Rangoon seemed about to fall. And in the coming of age of the new leviathan;
the USSR and China became the new reason for which the British and American
tacitly supported the emerging state of martial rule in Pakistan, Myanmar,
Indonesia, and the softer authoritarianism of Malaysia and Singapore.
Ultimately, the military in Myanmar came to dominate the villages and
control the ministries and the police force. According to "Forgotten
Wars”, Myanmar's army appropriated more and more of the country's diminished
wealth; and benefited from the perception that it was a threatened country in
the midst of an armed camp, with Chinese, the rump of the British Empire or
even India greedily surveying the remains of its assets of oil, timber and
rice.
Finally in the last decades, Myanmar had all but become one of the
first failed states. The British and Americans never sought to bolster General
Ne Win's rise to power but, as in the case of Ayub Khan of Pakistan, Western
politicians were relieved enough when noncommunist strongmen came to control
poor and conflict-ridden countries, said Bayly and Harper.
But the greatest tragedy has been when the Americans and other Western
democracies more or less continued the same policy even after the bloody 1988
uprising in Myanmar, and engaged in business as usual with the SLORC/SPDC
military junta, except for some economic sanctions. But in the aftermath of
2007 Saffron Revolution, Americans and other western democrats who were the
arbiters of new powers in the post-cold war, became the more visible supporters
for the Burmese democracy movement.
The perception of 'civil and political rights', for Americans and other
free societies, may be no more than a tool, or political currency to pressure
unsavory regimes around the world. But for every Burmese including the
soldiers, it is a question of life and death at this juncture in Naypyidaw's
politics. Akhil Reed Amar, 1998, points out that the necessary preconditions
for democratic self-government by the people of a free state is, ''a broad
understanding of arms''. There can be no democracy unless there is a
precondition for democratic self-government, to control the armed forces.
The unparalleled success of American democracy rested on one important
lesson they learned from the Glorious Revolution of 1688; of placing the standing
army under the control of the civilian parliamentary government. It was without
a doubt from the beginning that, Americans could not have dreamed of
unalienable rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness if they have
surrendered the civilian control of the peacetime army. Which unfortunately,
was what took place in Myanmar since independence in 1948 - granting a handful
of armed men in uniforms the power to kill and to reap the riches of Myanmar.
Until this can be altered, like the America's supreme law, the
Constitution - which, according to Akhil Reed Amar, is "superior to all
other legal texts precisely because it was to be ordained, and could later be
altered, by the supreme lawgiver the people - and until the people are given power
to protect their families, their lives and their possessions from the violence
of armed forces, the ship for democracy has not yet sailed for Myanmar.
January 13 may still be the finest moment in the darkest chapter of
Myanmar. The courage to let it happen and the courage to reconcile - has been
breathtaking. But no one should turn their back on the task at hand, No one
knows yet whether the freedom's gate is near. Until the army is behind
democracy, until civilians instead of the army become the arbiter of power in
Myanmar, Aung San Suu Kyi said that freedom is not irreversible. And to change
Myanmar, Aung San Suu Kyi said that the people themselves will have to take the
initiative. The fate of Myanmar has always been in the hands of the Burmese
people; the soldiers, the students and the ethnic nationality leaders.
May Ng
Asia Times
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