Burmese riddle

The Burmese military junta finally released Nobel laureate Aung San Suu Kyi from house arrest last week. The indefatigable campaigner for democracy in this ill-fated nation has been under house arrest for 15 of the last 20 years.

Suu Kyi’s party, the National League for Democracy (NLD), overwhelmingly won the first and only truly credible elections held in Burma two decades ago. The military junta that held on to power for close to half a century now promptly trashed the results and detained hundreds of NLD leaders including Suu Kyi.

Earlier this month, the junta called for elections. The NLD boycotted this election. The international community rejected the results and decried the coercion that accompanied what should be a democratic exercise. That vote did not impress anyone.

Two years ago, massive protests broke out in Burma’s cities. Those protests were met with brutality. Hundreds of protestors, including many Buddhist monks died in the process.

Meanwhile, Burma has been hit with cyclones and tsunamis, wiping out thousands of its citizens. In the midst of tragedy, the ruling junta showed callousness to the extreme, restricting even the humanitarian aid flowing from abroad.

There is much speculation about why Suu Kyi was granted freedom at this time. One theory is that the junta is reeling from severe international reaction to the fraudulent elections just held. Another theory holds that the junta is signaling the international community that it is ready to relax its grip and normalize politics in this country.

I think Suu Kyi was released because the junta simple ran out of reasons to keep her detained. The junta would rather keep her in a box and out of public view.

 The last time she was tried and additional time was added to her detention was when an insane American male swam across the lake to Suu Kyi’s backyard to personally deliver to her a message from God. It was the lady who was penalized for this bizarre incident.

Suu Kyi has not seen her children for a decade. She was detained when her husband passed away in England some years back. Her ability to keep abreast with developments in Burma and abroad has been severely curtailed.

But by simply refusing to yield, she has become a powerful symbol of the Burmese people’s hopes for a democratic future. Half a century of dictatorship has kept Burma out of the mainstream of a rapidly changing world. Once a thriving civilization, with an intelligentsia that impressed the world, Burma has been kept backward and barefoot while everyone else moved on. It now has the lowest per capita income in Asia, despite the vast natural wealth it sits on and the immense talent of its people.

Shortly after her release from detention, Suu Kyi boldly called for a “peaceful revolution.” What that exactly means, no one is sure. It could mean intense pressure from the streets, although that will likely be met with brutal repression as we have seen before. Or, it could mean a negotiated transition between the junta and the pro-democracy forces.

Burma (the junta prefers the nation to be called Myanmar) is one of those nations emerging from colonialism without fully resolving the tensions between nationhood and democracy. In a way, it is like Iraq.

Torn between communal tensions between Sunnis and Shiites, Kurds and Arabs, Iraq could only be held together by dictatorship — brought to its apex during the rule of Saddam Hussein. When the Saddam regime was deposed by the force of American arms, the communal tensions resurfaced and today expresses itself in radical militant actions. The pro-western Kurdish region has basically evolved into a de facto confederacy, looking after its own affairs with little control from Baghdad. The Shiite minority is in power, supported ironically by Iran and the US, fighting off a largely Sunni insurgency.

Burma, too, is a colonial idea masking the many linguistic and ethnic communities beneath the essentially alien idea of nationhood. Armed separatist movements have held out for decades despite the most extreme tactics of suppression. Only the military apparatus holds the entity together. Democratization is seen as a road to disintegration.

Indonesia was like this once. It was widely held that if the military-backed Suharto dictatorship was displaced by a democratic regime, the nation would fall apart like Yugoslavia or the Soviet Union. Somehow, the Indonesians were able to negotiate their way to a workable national order, with the secession only of East Timor.

The founding father of Burma is Gen. Aung San, Suu Kyi’s father. There is a bit of irony here. Gen. Aung San negotiated nationhood from the British Empire on the strength of his military organization. The British Empire, for its part, was exhausted by the last world war and had little means to resist the independence movement led by the colonial armed forces. That military organization, representing the idea of nationhood, has preempted the development of a democratic polity.

As far as the Burmese military is concerned, it embodies the nation. Any threat to its preeminence is a threat to nationhood itself.

Isolated from the international community, save for its troubled membership in the ASEAN, Burma is almost entirely dependent on China for support. Beijing equips Burma’s army and effectively turned her southern neighbor into a client state, seeking control of the nation’s immense natural resource deposits.

Beijing, more than anyone else, is best positioned to assist in a transformative process away from illegitimate military rule towards a workable democratic order in Burma. She can serve both as broker and guarantor of the process. Beijing, more than the ASEAN, can effectively engage the junta and encourage change.

But doing so might not be at the top of Beijing’s agenda. China, for her part, has to deal with human rights and democratization issues herself. From her point the status quo seems convivial enough. The Burmese riddle will likely fester for very long.