SPEAKING FREELY Crisis thinkers or thinkers in crisis?
By Maung Zarni
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A recently released report by the International Crisis Group (ICG), the world's
best known think tank on crises, brims with hope, optimism, and future
possibilities in Myanmar, also known as Burma.
The news coming out of Burma/Myanmar is most of the time grim. More often
than not, Burma/Myanmar news is about the pockets of near-famine, widespread
sub-Sahara Africa-like conditions of life, the world's longest smoldering civil
war, the breakdowns of fragile ceasefires, the use of convicts as human
mine sweepers, new influxes of war-fleeing refugees, environmental degradation,
massive public asset transfers to the ruling military generals in the name of
privatization, or other rampant corruption, death and destruction.
So any news and reports about something good and positive happening, or about
to happen to the people and communities we Burmese exiles left behind for
political activism, makes our hearts leap.
Last Friday, the ICG's Myanmar: Major Reform Underway made me sit up and
read. But once I got past the title I realized the report suffers from multiple
shortcomings so fundamental to comprehending Burma's/Myanmar's crises - note
the plural here - that it lacked a credible basis either for exile excitement
or any serious international policy discussions.
Here is a shortlist of ICG's intellectual sins.
First, the report's selection of sources has undermined greatly its own
credibility, and by extension that of the commissioning ICG. It was more than
evident that ICG allowed no raw information and consulted only with sources
that would provide “intelligence” to uphold and validate the report's sweeping
claims. Nowhere in the 15-page text of the report did ICG indicate that it
entertained, even as a matter of analytical possibility, alternative
interpretations of recent events and pronouncements that it characterized
singularly as “major reform”.
The report repeated and amplified President Thein Sein's offer of peace to the
armed ethnic minority resistance groups, active and ceasefire, having gleaned
it from the state media and official transcripts. And yet the ICG's “field
research” didn't deem it necessary to include any information as to how that
presidential “peace offer” has been received by the armed groups.
Even if the ICG's researcher(s) deemed it personally unsafe to travel to the
country's civil war zones, border towns such as Laiza in Kachin State or Mae
Sot in Thailand could have easily provided directly relevant views of the armed
resistance organizations, such as the Karen National Union and the Kachin
Independence Organization. If that travel was too difficult, those views were
also just a Google search away.
Second, the report paid only lip service to matters as grave and
well-documented as pervasive human rights violations and “war crimes”, while
emphatically disapproving of any United Nations-sponsored fact-finding through
a Commission of Inquiry (CoI). Unsurprisingly, the ICG report only once
mentioned the Human Rights Watch report about the government's “use of
convicts” in the military's ongoing campaigns against ethnic insurgents, and
then only as a footnote. Nor did ICG consider Amnesty International's
intervention in March at the last UN Human Rights Council meeting in support of
the CoI important enough to merit even a single mention throughout its report.
Third, on the country's reported approximate 2,000 "prisoners of conscience", a
long-standing issue of domestic and international policy importance and
considered a key litmus test of the generals' genuine will to reform, ICG even
refuted the figures compiled by the Burmese-run Assistance Association of
Political Prisoners, the main clearinghouse for such information which assists
groups like the International Committee for Red Cross (ICRC).
Crimes of omission
Fourth, ICG obviously prides itself for putting out "field research"-based
reports on existing crisis situations, or those pregnant with crises, around
the world. But after reading Myanmar: Major Reform Underway any professional
researcher with a modicum of standards would be left wondering what actually
constitutes "field research" for ICG considering it clearly never spoke to real
people on the streets or communities across the country's active and smoldering
civil war zones in eastern and northern Burma.
Instead, the report gives an unambiguous impression that its "field research"
in Burma/Myanmar consisted of little more than quoting state mouthpiece media,
presidential speeches and conversations with international diplomats, most
likely in luxury hotel lobbies, bars and restaurants as well as government
offices in the region and Western capitals. ICG sprinkled its report with such
puffed up characterizations of its chosen sources in Rangoon as "well-placed
individuals in Myanmar", "well-informed Myanmar individuals", "recent visitors
to Aung San Suu Kyi", and "people who have had multiple encounters with and
spent a lot of time with President (Thein Sein)".
To be sure, talking to local commercial elites, presidential technocrats and
bar-chatting with "recent visitors" to Suu Kyi is a useful method of
information gathering. But with ICG's lofty stature in the international
community and its message of reform hope, it raises questions about why its
researchers didn't speak directly with either Suu Kyi or the generals.
Fifth, ICG was apparently only interested in gathering corroborating evidence
for its long-standing anti-sanctions stance. I am with the ICG on its
anti-sanctions stance, providing that the generals engage in the give-and-take
of international politics, rather than crying out for an international policy
black check (such as development assistance, loans, normalization, legitimacy,
etc). As early as 2003, I was among the first Burmese dissidents to openly
break with Suu Kyi and her continued endorsement of Western sanctions, notably
at a time when it was politically and personally unfashionable for many of the
latter-day anti-sanctions advocates, Burmese and foreigners alike.
That aside, Suu Kyi has acquired worldwide fame as a staunch advocate of
dialogue. She and her National League for Democracy (NLD) party leaders would,
no doubt, have welcomed an honest conversation with ICG while its researchers
were in Rangoon. Maybe the ICG already knew she and her colleagues weren't
going to give any corroborating oral evidence for the ICG's long-standing
anti-sanctions "field research". Instead, when she was quoted in media reports
it was to buttress ICG's title claim that major change is underway.
It's one thing that ICG was unable to secure opportunities to conduct its field
research in Naypyidaw, the country's reclusive capital, or speak with crucial
ranking military officers who, rather than President Thein Sein, still hold the
real levers of power in Burma/Myanmar. "Senior Myanmar diplomats involved in
negotiations" on the generals' bid to chair the Association of Southeast Asian
Nations (ASEAN) in 2014 simply doesn't cut any ice in Burmese politics. Not
even the foreign minister dares to issue important humanitarian aid worker
visas without a nod from behind the military's curtain.
Sixth, on matters of utmost importance to the country's people and their
collective future, that is, the military, its thinking, its modus operandi, and
its intra-military inner workings, ICG finds itself not only without access to
the decision-making generals but utterly out of its intellectual and analytical
depth. ICG's analytical and interpretative capabilities were hampered
significantly as a result of the extremely selective way it went about
conducting in-country "field research", with the obvious objective of sifting
and finessing evidence to fit its predetermined policy template.
Shallow understanding
Instead, ICG's report tucked away the single most important issue in
Burma/Myanmar politics, economy and society, as well as her foreign relations,
on page six of its 15-page report that skims over "the constitutional and de
facto independence of the military". Even then this unquestioned constitutional
primacy was mentioned only in passing, while the report spilled inordinate
quantity of ink on the symbolisms - for instance, the bigger physical size of
the Central Bank of Myanmar vis-เ-vis that of the Ministry of Finance,
and the reappearance of the martyred independence hero Aung San on the
presidential office wall.
The result is that ICG was unable to offer any shred of evidence or explanation
as to what really is the power base of President Thein Sein, whom the report
lionized in terms of his stature, vision and political will. Never mind that
this ex-general, considered "thick" by dissident military officers who worked
with him in the General Staff of the Ministry of Defense, spent half of his
career at the desk. The soft-spoken and mild-mannered ex-general, may be
presentable to international diplomats and local commercial elites, but he has
no power base inside the military, the government's backbone since 1962 and to
present.
Perhaps ICG erroneously thinks Thein Sein's base is a mixture of the country's
wealthy cronies and puffed-up presidential advisors. The truth is Thein Sein's
advisers are so intellectually neutered in support of regime-led change that
they are unable to address the most obvious point: that "major reforms" are
inconceivable without confronting head-on the military's class rule and the
generals' greed, delusions and paranoia.
At the root of any real reform is a fundamental shift in power. However, in a
country such as Burma/Myanmar - where the military is a well-oiled a killing
machine with sophisticated surveillance apparatus - without the backing of
regional commanders and those who hold strategic military posts, ex-generals
pushing for reforms, however genuine, have absolutely no chance.
It is a melancholy fact that ICG really has nothing concrete, insightful or
policy-relevant to say about the military's vested class interests, how those
are going to manifest themselves in "Myanmar's major reform" said to be
underway, and how junior generals can be persuaded to voluntarily permit
external curbs and control over a half-century of extra-judicial - and since
2008, Constitutional - right to rule the country.
Finally, ICG engages in excessive self-referencing to back up its new report's
assertions and claims. The act of referring to one's previous written work is a
valid professional behavior for researchers whose work is original, humanly
objective, and has lasting validity. But the problem is ICG's analyses in the
past have proven to have a valid shelf life of less than six months. Only six
months ago, on March 7, ICG spoke with an intimidating air of authority in its
Myanmar's Post-Election Landscape report, analysis it is has now turned on its
head:
Predictably, in such a tightly controlled poll, the regime's own
Union Solidarity and Development Party (USDP) won a landslide victory leaving
the military elite still in control ... The new government that has been
formed, and which will assume power in the coming weeks, also reflects the
continued dominance of the old order with the president and one of the two vice
presidents drawn from its ranks and a number of cabinet ministers recycled.
These changes are unlikely to translate into dramatic reforms in the short
term, but they provide a new governance context, improving the prospects for
incremental reform.
Granted that policy analyses and field
reports are not based on rocket science, but are primarily interpretative
exercises. But ICG's Burma/Myanmar reports' less than six-months empirical and
interpretative validity calls into question the value of contributions to
international Burma/Myanmar policy discussions. Obviously, producing analyses
of lasting quality doesn't appear to be ICG's concern on Burma/Myanmar.
For whatever the content of its analyses, it keeps playing the same tune over
and over from its Burma/Myanmar policy hymn book: embrace the generals, in
skirts or in uniform; unconditionally drop any punitive measures; and reward
them with loans, grants, technical assistance and recognition.
Maung Zarni is visiting fellow (2011-13) in the Department of
International Development, London School of Economics and Political Science.
(Copyright 2011 Asia Times Online (Holdings) Ltd. All rights reserved. Please
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Speaking Freely is an Asia Times Online feature that allows guest writers to have
their say.
Please click hereif you are interested in contributing.
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