SPEAKING
FREELY Myanmar democracy still in
chains By May Ng
Speaking Freely is an Asia Times
Online feature that allows guest writers to have
their say. Please
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contributing.
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.
Speaking Freely is an Asia Times Online
feature that allows guest writers to have their
say.Please
click hereif you are interested in
contributing. Articles submitted for this section
allow our readers to express their opinions and do
not necessarily meet the same editorial standards
of Asia Times Online's regular contributors.
May Ng is a writer for mizzima.com, a
Burmese online news journal. This is her view on
the latest changes inside Myanmar.
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