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2 The case for royalty in
Myanmar By Michael Vatikiotis
The forlorn hope of progressive political
change in Myanmar using all modern means suggests
that reaching back in time and resurrecting the
long-dismantled monarchy could provide a
prescription to cure the ills of one of the
world's most isolated countries, which on Thursday
honored the 59-year anniversary of its
independence from colonial rule.
There was
a popular uprising against military rule in 1988
which failed, followed by nearly a decade of
international economic
sanctions which have failed as
well. Regional engagement conferred legitimacy on
Myanmar's military junta as an Association of
Southeast Asian Nations member, and there have
been a string of special envoys from the United
Nations promising aid in return for democratic
progress. These carrots were ignored and brushed
aside by the current ruling junta, known as the
State Peace and Development Council (SPDC).
Myanmar seems destined to drift through
the first decade of the 21st century much as it
has for the past 60 years: teetering on the brink
of economic collapse, cut off from the wider world
and led by a bombastic clique of military officers
convinced they are the only true defenders of
ethnic Burman nationalism. All this suggests there
is a much deeper malaise afflicting Myanmar's
society, one that is only partially explained by
the faulty logic of military rule and perhaps
rooted deep in the country's traumatic history.
To be sure, it's hard to visit Myanmar
today without sensing a society that long ago lost
its bearings. A once proud and assertive culture
now languishes listlessly among the scant and
dusty remnants of a glorious pre-colonial past.
There are few material remains of the Konbaung
dynasty's determined and victorious armies, or the
meticulously kept royal courts of Ava and later
Mandalay.
By far the most important
fulcrum of Myanmar's history was the sudden and
undignified removal of Thibaw, the last king of
what was then called Burma after the fall of
Mandalay to British forces in 1885. Never
restoring the monarchy, something the British
colonial rulers considered but casually rejected,
created a cultural vacuum that condemned Burmese
society to its modern fate.
"Burma without
a king," writes Thant Myint U in a new history of
the country "would be a Burma entirely different
from anything before, a break with the ideas and
institutions that had underpinned society in the
Irrawaddy valley since before medieval times".
The significance of The River of Lost
Footsteps, Thant's rather personal and
passionately written history, is that it helps us
understand that the roots of Myanmar's malaise lie
in a deeply wounded historical psyche.
Burma after 1885, he writes, was adrift,
"suddenly pushed into the modern world without an
anchor to the past, rummaging around for new
inspirations, sustained by a more sour nationalist
sentiment". With these elegantly expressed words,
Thant, who is former UN secretary general U
Thant's grandson, drives at the heart of modern
Myanmar's problem, which is the fruitless search
for missing pieces of history.
Historical isolation Too often
Myanmar is considered in isolation to other
mainland Southeast Asian states like Thailand and
Cambodia, a sad legacy of the fact that the
British ruled what was then called Burma as a part
of British India. In fact, the traditions and
cultures governing the organization of these
societies spring from the same root. Mainland
Southeast Asian Buddhist societies are anchored in
a blend of animistic and Buddhist beliefs layered
and ordered by rituals of kingship derived from
Brahmanical Hinduism. And neither element on its
own provides quite enough social stability and
direction.
Just ask the Thais. Thailand at
the end of the 18th century was disoriented
following the sacking of their glorious capital of
Ayudhya by the Burmese army in 1767. For decades
the countryside was plagued with banditry as rice
production broke down and people preyed on one
another to survive. These were dark chaotic years
barely remembered in Thai history because they
were succeeded by the establishment of a new royal
line, the current Chakri dynasty, which built a
shiny new capital on the banks of the Chao Phraya
River, restoring the old ritual and order of the
kingdom and even using bricks from the ruined
capital of Ayudhya.
Fast forward to 1990
and the end of the long civil war in Cambodia; who
knows what the final death toll was after the
1975-1979 period of tyrannical Khmer Rouge rule.
Two million people may have perished in the Khmer
Rouge's killing fields, as a brutal self-styled
peasant government moved to erase Cambodian
history through its ill-conceived utopian "Year
Zero" policy and moved everyone out of the towns
and cities and put them to work on the land,
weeding out intellectuals and professionals for
execution.
Significantly, despite such a
wrenching and bloody break with the past, there
was little hesitation about restoring
Cambodia's
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