Myanmar's Long Road to National Reconciliation (13 page)

Martin Smith

Since 1988, Burma/Myanmar has remained deadlocked in its third era of political transition following independence from Great Britain in 1948. Military-dominated rule has continued, there has not been a return to elected government, and there have been no substantive benchmarks of political change. And yet Myanmar in the first decade of the twenty-first century is importantly different from General Ne Win’s failed experiment with autarchic socialism in the Burma of 1962–1988. Over the years a series of events have refashioned the socio-political landscape. Defining moments include the introduction of a market-oriented economy following the 1988 assumption of power by the State Law and Order Restoration
Council (SLORC, now known as the State Peace and Development Council (SPDC)); the 1990 general election in which the National League for Democracy (NLD) won victory; and Myanmar’s membership of the Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN) in 1997. Whatever the future holds, in an increasingly globalized world there is little likelihood of Myanmar returning to its hermit-nation status of the Ne Win era.

Myanmar today continues to face a complex diversity of challenges. However, if there is any single issue which is both the key to the political failures of the past and an essential priority for a progressive future, it is the question of national reconciliation and ethnic inclusiveness in the processes of democratic reform. In this respect, the changes in the ethnic landscape have been among the most significant since the SLORC-SPDC assumed power in 1988. Two developments have underpinned such change: first, an ethnic ceasefire movement that was instituted by the military government in 1989 and had spread to over twenty armed opposition groups by the end of the century; and second, the 1990 election in which nineteen ethnic minority
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parties also won seats, forming the second largest block of pro-democracy parties after the NLD.

At the time of writing, it remains important to stress that there are several ethnic minority areas where conflict has continued, especially in the Thai borderlands. There are also unresolved questions about the involvement of electoral political parties in the SPDC’s seven-stage road-map process and the resumed National Convention in 2004 at which the country’s third constitution since independence is scheduled to be devised. In late 2004, further uncertainties were raised by the reshuffles in the SPDC government that led to the downfall of General Khin Nyunt, who had been closely identified both with the ethnic ceasefires since their inception and with the road map.

Nevertheless, on the ground the impact of incremental changes in the ways that ethnic issues have been addressed in Myanmar since 1988 remains notable. In particular, the ethnic ceasefires have meant that many long-off-limits regions of the country have become accessible to outside visitors, including international aid agencies and businesses. This has already had marked socio-economic consequences in the field, as well as sharpening international perceptions about what was hitherto one of Asia’s least-known frontier regions. For, whether due to the residual ethnic conflicts or the changing landscapes after the ceasefires, Myanmar’s ethnic
minority borderlands are increasingly regarded as strategic regions of inter-linked human flow and socio-economic contention or opportunity that is only likely to escalate in the twenty-first century.
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This is a situation that is explicitly recognized by all of Myanmar’s neighbours through their post-1988 policies of “constructive engagement” with the country and its peoples.
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Stated a 2003 report by the Asian Dialogue Society, “The small wars along Myanmar’s borders are a form of contained balkanization and it is not in the interest of Myanmar or Asia that a process towards stabilization be derailed. Asia cannot afford to lose Myanmar and Myanmar cannot afford to lose Asia.”
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As such views highlight, perhaps the most significant change in Myanmar’s transitional landscape has been on the ethnic political front. The challenges of democratic reform are yet to be answered, but with the demise of Ne Win’s Burma Socialist Programme Party (BSPP), the consequence of both the ethnic ceasefires and the 1990 elections has been to return ethnic politics and nationality parties to the centre of the country’s political map. In a country where ethnic minority peoples constitute an estimated one-third of the population of fifty-three million, this was always essential if the country were ever to achieve inclusive peace and reform. But the ethnic parties had been excluded from the public stage for over two decades after Ne Win’s 1962 seizure of power, except in the insurgent
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and “liberated zones”, through which a diversity of armed opposition groups continued to control most borderland areas during the BSPP era.
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Equally importantly, the post-1988 revival of ethnic politics is a reality that, since the early 1990s, has been recognized by the United Nations and other international organizations as an integral element in the “tri-partite” formulation by which dialogue, reconciliation and reform should be achieved — that is, through the military government of the SPDC, the National League for Democracy, and the country’s diverse ethnic minority groups.
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Notably, too, in a marked change from the BSPP precedent, the SPDC chairman Senior General Than Shwe has referred to the ethnic ceasefires as the most defining feature of the SLORC-SPDC era through a policy of what the military government terms “national reconsolidation”.
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Such a claim was reiterated in the state-controlled media on Armed Forces Day in 2004: “Internal insurgency broke out for over 40 years after the independence was regained. Nowadays, national unity has been restored out of goodwill and efforts of the government.”
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The challenge, however, remains: to move on from a backdrop of such promises and rhetoric, in which many different organizations have been involved, to achieving sustainable peace and reform. Many veteran actors in the country’s politics compare the present time of uncertainty and reorientation to the other epoch-shaping moments in post-colonial history, notably during 1947–49 and 1962–64. Indeed, it was recognition of the perceived opportunities provided by Myanmar’s transitional landscape that encouraged the country’s oldest armed opposition group, the Karen National Union (KNU), to resume formal peace talks with the military government in January 2004. The party’s aging leader, General Saw Bo Mya, personally led the delegation to Yangon where he celebrated his 77th birthday. “The present period is like 1947 and 1963; that is why we went to Yangon to meet face to face to see the situation,” Bo Mya claimed. “This time there are no preconditions, so we want to solve our problems in political ways.”
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Somewhat remarkably, the KNU conflict has continued virtually uninterrupted since 1949, in one of Asia’s longest-running insurgencies. However, while it is the political crisis that often gains the international headlines, behind the growing desire for peace also lies very real concern on the part of many communities over the desperate humanitarian situation that exists in many areas of the country. As the door to the country increasingly opens, the evidence is inescapable. Once regarded as among the most potentially prosperous countries in Asia, Myanmar today is one of the world’s poorest, with an estimated per capita income of just US$300 per annum at the turn of the century.
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Equally stark, in September 2004 the World Food Programme estimated that a third of all children aged under five in Myanmar are suffering from malnutrition, with many of the worst conditions of poverty in the ethnic minority borderlands.
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Clearly, the long years of political and ethnic conflict have taken a heavy toll on all aspects of socio-economic life in the country.

In order to comprehend, therefore, how Myanmar became deadlocked in a state of such precipitate decline, it is crucial to understand that the country’s political and ethnic challenges are inextricably interlinked. The corollary that must be drawn from these conclusions is that during any process of social and political reform, dealing with ethnic participation and national reconciliation will remain a vital constant. Indeed, this is a reality that has long been recognized in private by many of the key stakeholders and political actors in the country. In contrast with the
Ne Win era, the need for ethnic peace and democratic reform exists today in the vocabulary of all the leading parties and institutions.

Before moving on to examine the present challenges, some initial caveats are required. For the moment, it is still uncertain whether the country is truly on the path towards inclusive reform. As in other pivotal years in Myanmar politics, 2004 was a year of complex change, with both hopes and anxieties raised in uneven balance.

But rather than providing a rationale for further delays or new cautions, this should only serve to elevate the urgency of establishing a durable peace with the ethnic groups and an inclusive process of reform. Many leaders of ethnic nationality groups fear that if inclusive reforms are not achieved now, when so many groups say that they are willing and prepared, then the foundation for yet another generation of division in the country could be laid. Given Myanmar’s troubled past, this is not a prospect to be considered lightly. The warnings from history have been repeated and are very clear.

Myanmar today is a land still suffering the consequences of over five decades of armed conflict. The evidence is manifest as much in the political and humanitarian aspects of life in Myanmar as in the social and economic spheres. Every single part of the country has been affected at one time or another by insurgency and social breakdown. It has not been simply an issue that involved only non-Burmans, nor has it been simply a case of the Burman majority versus the ethnic minorities. There have, for example, been conflicts between armed groups among the Karen and Mon peoples and among the Shan and Wa peoples over the years. Yet it is the ethnic minority communities that have generally been longest in the front lines of conflict, and among those communities the cumulative effect of their sufferings has left a debilitating legacy of under-achievement and loss in a country that, at the time of independence, was still seeking to come to terms with the divisions and destruction of World War II. To the country’s long-term cost, these unresolved crises have transcended two constitutions and all three political eras during the post-colonial age.

Following the insurrection of the Communist Party of Burma (CPB) in March 1948, political rebellion rapidly spread to the Karen, Mon, Pao, Karenni, Rakhine and other ethnic groups, who took up arms against the
central government in order to gain greater autonomy or, in some cases, to secede. The country’s first constitution, drawn up shortly before Burma became independent in 1948, never gained widespread approval during the era of parliamentary democracy (1948–62). The 1947 constitution embodied too many anomalies; for example, it was federal in concept but not in name; and, setting a precedent for the future, too many ethnic parties felt excluded by the political processes of discussion at that time. In particular, the Panglong Conference included leaders of only the Chin, Kachin and Shan peoples from the colonial Frontier Areas, while the KNU boycotted the elections for the 1947 Constituent Assembly, thus excluding itself from future influence or representation in government.
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Further disruption occurred when remnants of the Kuomintang forces invaded from China and entrenched themselves in the mountains and forests of the northeast borderlands where, with clandestine backing from the United States, they became part of the insurgent mosaic during the 1950s.

Ne Win’s monolithic “Burmese Way to Socialism” came no closer to solving the country’s many ethnic and political challenges. Instead, the takeover of power by Ne Win in 1962 ushered in a quarter of a century of economic misrule (1962–88). The constitution that was eventually adopted in 1974 introduced, for the first time, the appearance of ethnic symmetry in the country’s political map, by the creation of seven divisions, where the Burman majority mostly lived, and seven ethnic minority states: Chin, Kachin, Karen, Kayah, Mon, Rakhine, and Shan. However, the socialist goals of the state, the one-party structure of government (enshrined in Article 11 of the constitution), and the methods of force employed to impose such a system, merely served to increase resistance to the government. Rather than the BSPP crushing opposition, new insurgencies escalated rapidly among the Kachin and Shan peoples, this time spreading to other ethnic groups, including the Palaung, Kayan, and Lahu.

In justifying such tactics, Ne Win expressed implacable opposition to the federal goals of many of the ethnic nationality forces, who subsequently united in the nine-party National Democratic Front (NDF, formed 1976). Indeed, it was to forestall any prospect of federalism, which was then being proposed by the above-ground Federal Movement, that Ne Win claimed to have seized power in 1962. It would, he argued, “destroy the Union”.
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It is important to stress that during the BSPP era there were numerous insurgent challenges to government, including by the deposed prime
minister U Nu, who briefly took up arms in the Thai borderlands with the KNU, New Mon State Party and other erstwhile opponents in the shortlived National United Liberation Front (1970–74). But undoubtedly the most serious military threat came from the revived Communist Party of Burma which, following anti-Chinese riots in Yangon, received full-scale support from China for a decade after 1968. This had a convulsive impact on the direction of armed conflict and ethnic politics in the country. With thousands of freshly-armed recruits among such nationalities as the Wa and Kokang, the CPB was able to seize control of vast new “liberated zones” in ethnic minority lands along the China frontier, from where it attempted to spread insurrection back into urban areas and the central Irrawaddy plains.