Myanmar's Long Road to National Reconciliation (6 page)

¹
   Formerly known as the State Law and Order Restoration Council (SLORC).

²
   A similar investigation into associates of former President Ne Win and his family occurred after the arrest of Ne Win’s family in early 2002, but that was on a much smaller scale.

³
   It was criticized for these shortcomings by the United Nations Secretary General, Kofi Annan. “Secretary-General Reiterates that Myanmar’s National Convention Must Be All-Inclusive To Be Credible”, Statement, SG/SM/9309, 17 May 2004. Available at:
http://www.un.org/News/Press/docs/2004/sgsm9309.doc.htm
. Accessed 6 July 2005.

⁴
   Invitations to NLD Chairman, U Aung Shwe, and some other NLD delegates were issued by the Government, but it was clear that any NLD participation would be decided by a party executive decision. NLD Central Executive Committee members were allowed to meet Secretary-General Aung San Suu Kyi and Vice Chairman Tin Oo while they were in detention to deliberate on this matter.

⁵
   Nandar Chann offers an unusually gloomy analysis in “Opposition Blues”,
Irrawaddy Online Edition,
February 2005. Available at:
http://www.irrawaddy.org/aviewer.asp?a=4426&z=104
. Accessed 10 July 2005.

⁶
   In particular, the case of Zarni, the young leader of the US-based Free Burma
Coalition who controversially returned to Yangon for secret talks with the SPDC leadership in May 2004, as part of a wider ongoing SPDC campaign to cultivate selected influential members of the Burmese diaspora. Zarni has set out publicly the reasons for the shift in his thinking in the May Kha List at Listserv.Indiana.edu/archives/maykha-l.html of 6 September 2004, in the form of a letter to one of his questioners, “My One Day Trip to Rangoon and Our Track II Initiative”. (Accessed 12 July 2005)

⁷
   US Department of State, “Conditions in Burma and U.S. Policy Toward Burma for the Period September 28, 2003–March 27, 2004”, Press release by the Bureau of East Asian and Pacific Affairs, U.S. Department of State, 13 April 2004.

⁸
   See, School of Advanced International Studies, Johns Hopkins University, “Conference Report: Burma: Reconciliation in Myanmar and the Crises of Change”, Report of conference held 21–23 November 2002, Washington DC, p. 6. Available at:
http://www.sais-jhu.edu/programs/asia/SEA/SEA_Publications/Southeast%20Asia/Burma%20Conference%20Report_Final.pdf
(Accessed 8 July 2005).

⁹
   Ardeth Maung Thawnghmung, “Agricultural Implementation Processes in Burma/Myanmar: Problems and Limitations”, in
The Illusion of Progress: The Political Economy of Reform in Burma/Myanmar,
edited by David S. Mathieson and R.J. May (Crawford Press, Adelaide, 2004).

Robert H. Taylor

The Myanmar proverb quoted in the title of this paper was first told to me by a friend when, more than twenty years ago, I lamented the slow pace at which we were then travelling in a frequently malfunctioning Volkswagen bus up the old winding road from Mandalay to Maymyo. When, in the reign of King Mindon, a young man was, in his turn, lamenting the slow pace at which they were travelling by ox cart on a pilgrimage to Bagan, his wise father assured him that “if we travel merely a furlong a day, where can Bagan go?”

The road to Myanmar’s third constitution has now been travelled for more than sixteen years, but only in August 2003 were we shown a skeletal “road map” to the eventual destination. The reputed cartographer has now left the stage, but the map remains intact. How closely it will be followed remains to be seen, though the government was quick to emphasize that Prime Minister General Khin Nyunt’s departure would
have no effect on policy. An estimated twenty per cent or more of the population of the country has been born since, in September 1988, the military abrogated the old one-party constitution of the Burma Socialist Programme Party (BSPP) and announced vague plans for elections to choose an assembly to draft a new constitution. But still we have no idea when the journey might end. Readers who have followed Myanmar affairs during the past decade and more will doubtless suffer a sense of
déjà vu
if they read further. But travel on we must, because it is the only political destination we know of, even though we have little inkling of what the weather will be like when we get there or whether the journey will provide the boon so fervently sought.

What passes for analysis and comment on contemporary Myanmar’s politics might be better done by a librettist with Wagnerian tastes than by conventionally-trained political scientists and historians.
¹
We know that events occur, we observe the occasional changes in the leading personnel of the government,
²
we see the results of decisions made somewhere by someone or some collective, but we have little or no idea why events occur when they do, what the leading players think or know, or how decisions are made. While this is true of our efforts to understand the current military government of Myanmar, the State Peace and Development Council (SPDC),
³
so also does this predicament apply to our understanding of the behaviour of the civilian and para-military opposition to the military, the National League for Democracy (NLD) and other political parties, and the various ceasefire or peace groups such as the Kachin Independence Organization (KIO), the United Wa State Party, or the Pao National Organization.

The topic of the holding of a reconstituted national constitutional convention
⁴
has dominated Myanmar politics for the past several years. Since August 2003, when the then Prime Minister, General Khin Nyunt, seized the initiative and redefined the immediate major political issues of the country by announcing a seven-step road map to constitutional government, questions have been posed about the nature of that convention. Would it be inclusive of all the groups which claim a right to speak on behalf of some or all of the population of the country? Would the proceedings of the convention be open and fair? Would the army compromise with their political critics and opponents, or, even less likely, abandon their grip on political power? Would the decisions reached at the
first session of the convention be open to revision or interpretation? Would subsequent amendment of the eventual constitution be permissible?

Whereas the events of 2003 provided high drama and large surprises, plunging the emotions of the participants in, and observers of, Myanmar’s political life from highs of anticipation to depths of gloom and back again,
⁵
2004 demonstrated the apparent unchanging certainties of the country’s politics since the time of independence. Ultimately, the Myanmar armed forces and their rigidly hierarchical chain of command determine what is politically possible. The ouster of Prime Minister General Khin Nyunt on 18 October, after sixteen years as the leading public figure in the regime, confirmed that not only do the defence services dominate the polity, but that infantry
(tatmadaw kyi)
dominate the defence services. General Khin Nyunt’s attempt to maintain his authority as Prime Minister based on his role as head of Military Intelligence
⁶
and the larger National Intelligence Bureau (the latter abolished in the wake of his departure) demonstrated once more Chairman Mao’s adage that political power grows out of the barrel of a gun, not the “ball pen”.

It would require massive changes in attitude and approach to the issues of governing a highly fissiparous society to produce eventually, following the conclusion of the constitutional convention, a regime in which the military shares power with civilian politicians from the majority and minority ethnic communities of Myanmar. There has appeared little evidence that this will be possible, though the convention process itself suggests that some limited progress in the direction of the beginning of a new order may be possible. As one sagacious commentator remarked earlier this year, Myanmar needs less a road map to democracy than a
dah
⁷
to cut a path through the jungle to make a path to constitutionalism.

From the time of the release from house arrest of Daw Aung San Suu Kyi in May 2002 until the attack on her convoy at Depayin at the end of May 2003, many observers held to the hope that the army leadership and the General Secretary of the NLD would be able to cooperate in some manner in order to end the political stalemate that has gripped the country since the elections of May 1990. Even as late as May 2004, after Daw Aung San Suu Kyi and the Vice-Chairman of the NLD, former General Tin Oo, had been held in prison or under house arrest for another year, some observers, and even one or two participants in the Myanmar political drama, still held fast to the hope that the two sides might compromise.
The demands of the NLD, reiterated in January 2004, that the results of the 1990 election, as the party understands them, be implemented and that all NLD members jailed for political activities be immediately released, indicated that their side of Myanmar’s multifaceted political equation had not adjusted its opening bargaining position, if indeed it was willing to compromise at all. The army government, with no need, in its view, to concede publicly or privately the moral equivalency, let alone assumed legitimacy, of its most formally organized, but now badly depleted, civilian opponents, merely ignored the party’s demands and proceeded on a path of its own choosing.

The advent of the constitutional convention was accompanied by a great deal of international attention as Asian and European governments sought some way in which to assist the process of political reconciliation in Myanmar. The high point of that effort was a meeting held in Bangkok in December 2003 and hosted by the Thai government, to allow the Myanmar government to explain its plans for the future and gain international support and understanding for them. The meeting was remarkable for the governments that were
not
invited as for those that were invited and attended. Neither the United States nor its closest ally, the United Kingdom, the former colonial power — the two most judgemental critics of the SPDC and its predecessor regime — were included on the invitation list. The ten invited nations
⁸
represented those states more willing to concede the necessity for external engagement with the political process within Myanmar. These governments tend to see the continual ritual condemnation of the SPDC and all its works, backed with economic sanctions and a restating of unquestioned support for Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, as ineffectual, if not counterproductive. What became known as the Bangkok process was, however, short-lived, and what had seemed to some to be an international opening in Myanmar politics once more proved illusory.
⁹