LAST WEEKEND the United Nations Secretary-General, Ban Ki-moon, asked permission to visit Aung San Suu Kyi, Burma’s imprisoned pro-democracy leader. Predictably, Burma’s military supremo, Senior General Than Shwe, and his subordinates refused the request. The generals know that Aung San Suu Kyi’s dignified opposition remains a potent weapon against their rule. It is no surprise that they continue to isolate the country’s most famous prisoner. But is the focus on Burma’s best-known democracy activist stopping us from taking the military government seriously?
Countries like Australia and the United States hold up Aung San Suu Kyi’s incarceration as a symbol of the persistent injustice, deadening political stalemate and egregious human rights situation that have prevailed for decades in Burma. Over the past twenty years they have repeatedly attacked the generals as unsophisticated thugs prepared to sacrifice their countrymen on an altar of political expedience and economic control. They have been distracted by irregular crises, and occasional flashes of hope, that catapult Burma onto the agenda. In May 2009 we witnessed the most recent, and unusual, of these episodes when an American intruder, John Yettaw, interrupted Aung San Suu Kyi’s house arrest by swimming to her lakeside residence. As a result, she faces a fresh batch of charges, which have only served to motivate another chorus of outrage against the generals. Her trial, adjourned for a month in curious circumstances, reconvened on 10 July.
The consensus is that this incident provides the generals with a special opportunity to ensure Aung San Suu Kyi’s exclusion from the elections planned for next year. This exclusion will be part of an ongoing campaign against Aung San Suu Kyi and her political party, the National League for Democracy. The last time Burma held an election, in 1990, her party won 392 of the 492 seats, and that result remains the key plank in the resistance by Burma’s pro-democracy campaigners. Their organising principle, and defiant mantra, is that an elected government exists; it has just never been allowed to assume its legitimate mandate to rule.
Unfortunately, the post–Cold War period has been unkind to Burma’s pro-democracy fighters. Year on year, decade on decade, they have been forced into maintaining their rage against a government that has proven itself impervious to opprobrium. As Aung San Suu Kyi faces more years locked up, and the generals look set to engineer a crowning legitimisation through the 2010 elections, it is worth re-examining Burma’s politics.
The morality play of virtuous democracy pitted against the despotic military machine is now two decades old. To recast the Burmese drama we must accept the reality of the military government’s control. The generals are in charge and even in a hypothetical future in which elected politicians hold formal sway it is likely that military men will remain powerbrokers. The 2008 constitution sets aside large numbers of parliamentary seats for the military and – by restricting eligibility for high public office – seeks to guarantee a political future in which the generals retain much of their influence.
As the country continues to prepare for the 2010 elections this reality has important implications for anyone who hopes to see change in the country. Aung San Suu Kyi embodies hopes for parliamentary democracy and political pluralism but she will likely be barred from any role in the elections. Even if she does come to power one day it is increasingly clear that without a concerted effort to re-shape the armed forces totally she will be forced to accept compromises about the role of the military in Burma’s public affairs.
Just as the militaries of neighbouring Thailand and Bangladesh still demonstrate their appetite for intervention, Burma’s army will probably need many years of electoral experience before it finally disavows political power for good. Long after a consensus for post-military government has evolved it will be worth keeping an eye on the generals and the alternative they represent. This means that those of us who hope to see positive political change in Burma need to learn more about the generals. We could begin by asking – how have they managed to stay in control for so long?
To answer this question it is worth highlighting those of their strategies that have proven most effective. Their rule is coloured by four important, but hardly glorious, objectives: the suppression of internal dissent, the implementation of ceasefire deals, the management of factional politics, and the maintenance of a strong external posture.
The pro-democracy protests spearheaded by Aung San Suu Kyi in 1988–90 left the generals shaken. Those protests were organised in a pre-internet world, one in which the potential for widespread street demonstrations to coalesce into global news was more limited than it is today. Nonetheless, word of brave defiance against the military machine seeped out. The generals learned an important lesson about resilience, the media and democracy.
That lesson was on show when news of the protests of September and October 2007’s abortive “saffron revolution” spread around the world. Mass discontent with military rule was transmitted through the internet and out to a hungry media. Solidarity marches, activist blogs and supportive speeches marked a new period of optimism, providing renewed impetus for Burmese and efforts to undermine the government. But the force of those heady protests was short-lived. In the end, they merely reinforced the success of the generals in continuing to identify, intimidate and prosecute opponents, ensuring that the protests didn’t escalate beyond a manageable level. The long-term consequences of those protests have been few. A new generation of radicalised regime opponents were brought onto the streets and crushed.
The generals have also worked hard to secure ceasefire deals with two dozen rebel armies to provide a degree of security and prosperity in formerly restless border areas. The agreements bring these armies, to a lesser or greater extent, under the central government’s control. It’s no coincidence that the major ceasefires were confirmed in the years around Aung San Suu Kyi’s rise to political prominence: as pro-democracy sentiments ran through the cities the generals saw a need to co-opt their armed opponents. The commanders of the ethnic armies were persuaded to cease their decades-long battles in exchange for wealth from the country’s economic liberalisation. Newly empowered ethnic armies took on a diverse portfolio of commercial activities. The proceeds of mining, logging and, of course, narcotics lined the leaders’ wallets and filled the treasuries of formerly rebellious armies across the country.
Only a few armies have yet to sign ceasefires. The most celebrated rebel force remains the Karen National Liberation Army, which is currently facing a major challenge from Burmese government forces and their ethnic allies. Recently one of their last remaining strongholds fell and thousands of refugees fled across the border to Thailand. The KNLA has been at war with a series of Burmese governments for over 60 years. If its forces capitulate in 2009, or are pushed deeper into jungle obscurity, it will mark the end of an era for Burmese politics.
As the government moves towards the planned 2010 elections the generals are also working to neuter the armies that have already signed ceasefires. The generals hope largely to demobilise these armies and use remnant forces only as border guards. In the case of the Kachin Independence Army, which has bases along the border with China, this would mean a transition from an armed strength of around 5000 to only a few hundred. Their commanders have indicated an unwillingness to sign up to this new arrangement, although smaller, and weaker, armies have already made such deals. For the time being the Kachin Independence Army, and a handful of other large ceasefire armies, are keeping their guns.
Co-opting the ceasefire armies is an important goal for the long-term but maintaining the generals’ own command cohesion is arguably a more crucial objective for ensuring their immediate survival. With an armed strength of almost 500,000, and countless potentially volatile factions, the generals face a significant task. Cohesion has been managed by a prestigious officer corps imbued with a spirit that melds ancient Burmese martial chauvinism, British colonial military tradition and the experiences of decades as politician-commanders. In such a system it remains remarkable that there are so few major schisms. Command loyalty and solidarity remain hallmarks of the Burmese military system.
The purge of former military intelligence chief and prime minister, General Khin Nyunt, in 2004 was the crescendo of one particularly challenging period for that system. The manoeuvring took considerable nous on the part of the more senior officers, who reputedly feared the growing autonomy of his intelligence network and worried, perhaps with some reason, that a plot was in motion to engineer the “retirements” of the most senior military commanders. The Than Shwe power clique moved first and Khin Nyunt subsequently disappeared. He reportedly enjoys a quiet life under house arrest in Yangon.
The management of such potentially destabilising command politics remains a key government objective. The world continues to wait for a schism within the ruling clique to precipitate its end. During times of tension there is well-meaning speculation that a rebellion from within the ranks will undermine the top generals and lead to a more moderate faction taking control. Over the decades this expectation has become muted and it is now rare to hear anyone confidently predicting this outcome.
Finally, and most importantly, the generals have managed an external stance that discourages efforts to remove them from power. They have cultivated strong ties with all of the neighbouring countries, underpinned, in most cases, by increasingly ambitious economic integration. These neighbourhood ties are augmented by relationships with powerful countries – like Russia, North Korea and Israel – further afield. These distant friends offer much-needed technical, logistical and financial support, and the Russian and North Korean governments are increasingly linked to the generals’ nascent nuclear ambitions.
At the same time, the United States, United Kingdom, European Union and Australia have continued to voice concern about Burma’s lack of democratic progress. However persuasive their moral arguments, they have never been supported by a broad-based coalition. When a major Burma resolution was debated in the United Nations Security Council in 2007 it was defeated by vetoes from Russia and China. There is still no consensus about what Burma needs. The Russians and Chinese have come to the conclusion that, at least for the moment, the country needs to be left alone. The foreign policy objective of the generals is now echoed by these powerful friends. So while the Burmese generals are regularly dismissed as unsophisticated and unsubtle, they have managed to defeat the efforts of generations of savvy diplomats, negotiators and activists working to undermine their government system. This is the over-arching success of their rule and the one that points, most starkly, to the challenge that their critics must face.
The objectives of the Burmese generals need to be explained because there remains a lingering sense that they will inevitably stumble in their efforts to retain control. Is this likely? They have clearly proven adept at managing their military dictatorship. New revenue streams and collaborations probably mean that they are far less vulnerable than many expect. Over the decades they have asserted control across the length and breadth of the country in a way that previous governments, even the British colonial government, struggled to achieve. They have also inculcated a feeling of normality that is largely ignored by outsiders. It often surprises first-time visitors to the country that life on the streets is not nearly as tense, difficult or militarised as they have been led to believe. Human rights abuses and outrages are, at least for the casual observer, largely out of view.
We remain far from the day when Burma will be considered a “normal” country. But the elections of 2010 are supposed to bring that distant future closer to reality. Managing this difficult period will test all of the resources of the generals, and those who seek to break their yoke. Although Ban Ki-moon, Aung San Suu Kyi and others like them will have a part to play in these battles, it is increasingly obvious that efforts to undermine the Burmese government must first come to grips with the day-to-day mechanics of military rule. A critical and unflinching understanding of the generals and their objectives is the best starting point for any future effort to bring them down. •
Nicholas Farrelly is a Southeast Asia specialist in the College of Asia and the Pacific at the Australian National University. In 2006 he co-founded New Mandala, a website on mainland Southeast Asian affairs.
