Page 2 of 2 The case for royalty in
Myanmar By Michael Vatikiotis
ancient Hindu-Buddhist monarchy when the
resulting civil war was finally settled. Like a
talisman, the monarchy, though powerless, has
helped repair and store a center of gravity to
Cambodian culture, with its religious rituals and
exquisite royal ballet somehow masking the
inexplicable Khmer Rouge past but also tempering
the monopoly of power cleverly exercised by Prime
Minister Hun Sen.
Myanmar had no such
luck. At one point in River of Lost
Footsteps Thant wistfully wonders if King
Thibaw had lived longer
whether he might have become
king again after the British left. He relates
several forgotten half-hearted attempts by minor
princes to restore some of the former Konbaung
dynasty glory, all to no avail. Independence, when
it finally came in 1948, was driven by young army
officers imbued with strident Japanese martial
values and politicians fired up by socialist
principles.
More importantly, as Thant
points out, the nature of British rule emasculated
Burmese pride and culture. Burma was made an
adjunct of British India, never a colony in its
own right; Indian workers were brought in to fill
all the coveted new jobs in the civil service.
"What had been urban and cosmopolitan in old Burma
had vanished. And what was modern in the new Burma
was alien."
So, unlike Thailand, with its
unbroken tradition of bureaucracy serving the
monarchy, or Indonesia with its Dutch-trained
civil service, or for that matter Malaysia with
its pampered but socially dominant Malay rulers,
modern Burma was pretty much at sea without a
captain or cultural anchor. The result is a
country dominated by a 400,000-strong army (the
15th-largest in the world) and no institution of
comparable strength or reputation to balance its
power.
Resurrecting royalty Could re-established monarchy help restore
equilibrium to modern Myanmar? Would it help
repair the strong sense of alienation felt by
those in power and endow them with a sense of
cultural confidence? Would it help relieve the
army of its self-assigned burden of saving the
country and averting disintegration and chaos?
In one practical and rather modern
respect, the monarchy as an institution might help
ease the military out of power. The monarchy in
Thailand has long balanced the civil and military
wings of the Thai bureaucracy, making sure that
neither dominates the power structure by playing
one off the other.
In much the same way,
were a Myanmar general to ascend to a restored
throne, he would logically seek to limit the
army's power by creating his own bureaucratic
counter balance. Not, grant you, the most
efficient path to civilian rule, but one which
would nonetheless achieve that same goal using
arcane methods.
"Unity" and "discipline"
was the great Burmese nationalist leader Aung
San's twin slogans, later echoed by his daughter
and current opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi
during the 1988 popular uprising in Yangon against
the army, which was brutally crushed. During
Thursday's Independence Day celebrations, the
SPDC's aging leader General Than Shwe called on
the nation to unify to uphold "sovereignty" and
"independence", which he contended are still under
foreign threat.
A restored monarchy in
Myanmar could arguably help to achieve unity, at
least if it rose above the bitter and protracted
armed struggles with the country's various ethnic
minorities that the military has fought since
1948. Fanciful as it sounds, consider the latest
moves by Than Shwe to rekindle some of the old
royal symbols of Burmese unity, including the
recent relocation of the capital from colonial
Yangon to the central heartland in Pyinmana, once
the original base of the pro-axis Burma
Independence Army led by Aung San.
The new
capital, now renamed Naypyidaw, which translates
from the Burmese to "Royal Palace City of the
Kingdom", is home to an ornate state room tiled
with jade, where Than Shwe now receives guests. It
is said that locals are made to kneel in his
presence because there are usually no chairs for
them to sit on.
It's not uncommon in
Southeast Asian history for successful soldiers to
establish new royal dynasties. For instance,
that's how the modern Chakri dynasty was founded
and after a period of decay resurrected in the
1940s in Thailand. The problem is that no one
seems to think that Myanmar's contemporary
military strong man is up to the task. And well
into his mid-1970s with frequent reports of health
problems, he probably doesn't have the time to
prove that he is. Perhaps Than Shwe has the right
idea, but is simply the wrong man for the job.
What is certain is that something
different needs to be done. For as Thant concludes
in his River of Lost Footsteps: "In Burma,
it's not just getting the military out of the
business of government. It's creating the state
institutions that can replace the military state
that exists." In other words, Burma needs to start
over again and some of those missing pieces of
history might help.
Michael
Vatikiotis is the former editor of the Far
Eastern Economic Review. He is currently regional
representative for the Henry Dunant Center for
Humanitarian Dialogue based in Singapore.
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