Burma Redux: Global Justice and the Quest for Political Reform in Myanmar (15 page)

Animating the junta’s governance agenda was the core theme of unity. Its Three Main National Causes were non-disintegration of the Union, non-disintegration of national solidarity, and perpetuation of sovereignty.
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Its four-point “People’s Desire,” made up of “three opposes and one crush,” mandated resistance to perceived threats to national integrity.
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Its four political objectives voiced parallel concerns. All were reproduced daily in the regime’s major media outlets and had to be carried in other publications, including many books. Large billboards stating the People’s Desire in either the Myanmar language or English were erected at strategic points. In Yangon, they were placed across the street from the US Embassy, on the main road from Mingaladon Airport to the heart of the city, close to major tourist attractions such as Shwedagon Pagoda, and so on. During set-piece mobilizations on Independence Day (January 4), Union Day (February 12) and Armed Forces Day (March 27), the discourse became especially elevated, and patriots were urged to cultivate “strong Union spirit” and hew closely to the junta’s political path. Often the USDA played a key mobilizing role, commonly requiring households to send at least one member to mass events designed to celebrate the regime’s achievements.

From language used in the junta’s most emblematic statement, the “one crush” from the People’s Desire, it was always clear that top leaders did not intend to foster unity in diversity. “Crush all internal and external destructive elements as the common enemy” does not have that spin, and neither did the drift of policy. Rather, unity was set within a Bamar straightjacket formed both by ongoing military action against minority populations, and by policies prioritizing the junta’s reading of Buddhist culture throughout the nation.
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In this way, political discourse was dominated by regimental calls for discipline, strength and vigilance in defense of territorial integrity: nationalism as political paranoia.
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Indeed, the generals pursued unity so intensely and purposively, notably through persistent reference to the perils that awaited the nation should it fail in its collective task, that room for competing political values was reduced to insignificance.
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The core theme of
tatmadaw
government was not, then, the harmony talk emanating from Beijing at the start of the twenty-first century, but rather a militant unity discourse insisting that a diverse nation fall in line with a martial vision of social peace and economic development.
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Top generals argued that this was the only route to salvation for a fractured nation that ever since independence had exhibited fissiparous and chaotic tendencies.

Closing down the public sphere was therefore a central objective. In the months prior to the May 1990 general election, some political activity and debate were possible. In total, 235 parties registered, and 93 stood candidates. From an electorate of nearly 21 million, more than 15 million voted in 485 constituencies. In a result that was to haunt the regime, 392 seats went to the NLD, 23 to the Shan Nationalities League for Democracy, 11 to the Arakan League for Democracy and 5 to the Mon Democratic Front. The NUP, aligned with the junta though gaining little active backing from it, took only 10 seats. Once this outcome was known, however, the generals fell back on their repressive instincts. Already Aung San Suu Kyi was serving her first term of house arrest, imposed on July 20, 1989. Now the democracy movement was brought under tight control. Following a two-month standoff, the NLD planned to meet at Gandhi Hall, Yangon on July 28–29, 1990 to demand an immediate power transfer. On July 27, however, SLORC issued Notification No. 1/90 to repudiate any competing claim.
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On January 9, 1993, when a National Convention set in motion a tightly managed and glacially slow constitutional process, it reneged further on its promises by ensuring that among 702 delegates only 99 had been elected in 1990, and around 500 were hand-picked township officials.

As a backdrop, almost all major NLD figures were held for years under house arrest or in jail, and other members suffered every form of abuse up to and including death. Aung San Suu Kyi’s three periods of house arrest came in 1989–95, 2000–02 and 2003–10, with restricted movement in between.
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As she often pointed out, however, this confinement was merely the most visible aspect of a systematic campaign of coercion. One notorious instance came on May 30, 2003, when USDA vigilantes ambushed an NLD convoy at Depayin, Mandalay Division. Some 70 people were murdered, and Aung San Suu Kyi was taken into “protective custody” lasting for seven and a half years.
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If anything, there was subsequently a rise in USDA violence spearheaded by its
Swan Arr Shin
militia, “well-trained thugs, who operate with impunity alongside riot-control army and police units.”
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Despite several mass pardons, human rights organizations estimated that the total number of political prisoners, put at around 1,100 in mid-2007, grew to some 2,200 by the end of 2008 and stayed at that level through to 2011.
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In jails up and down the country, living conditions were systematically subhuman.
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Rights violations were routine.
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Ever present was the chance of being sent to a labor camp, a fate so terrible that prisoners sought help from fellow inmates to mutilate themselves and avert the possibility. Htein Lin’s
Six Fingers
, painted secretly in Myaungmya Prison in 2001, speaks directly to this practice.
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Karen Connelly’s
The Lizard Cage
is an agonizing fictional account of prison life under the junta.
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By the end of the period the NLD had been significantly weakened. After its September 1988 launch, the party amassed 2–3 million members and opened branches throughout the land. By 2011, however, only its dilapidated Yangon office functioned, and surviving members faced harassment in almost every aspect of life touching the state, including education, healthcare, employment and multiple forms of registration and permit.
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Moreover, because renewal was so hard, the party was dominated by an aging group of “uncles.” In a poisonous political climate, leaders were criticized for perceived elitism, endorsing sanctions, opting not to contest the 2010 poll, and projecting a Bamar identity.
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In 2010 Khin Zaw Win, pro-democracy activist jailed from 1994 to 2005 and later grassroots political leader, argued that the NLD had become “virtually a single-issue party” focused on democracy. It dealt with key issues of economic development “in a cursory, cavalier fashion,” and was in danger of making a similar response to the ethnic nationalities question. “This shirking of national responsibility will no doubt add to the long list of developments that will happen without the NLD.”
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While core democratic principles retained considerable latent support and Aung San Suu Kyi was held in reverence and capable of drawing huge crowds when allowed to undertake political tours, by the close of the period the party had almost none of the organizational capacity required by a serious competitor for office.
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Indeed, by 2011 it had become an extra-parliamentary opposition and social welfare body. Over the course of two decades, one of the junta’s most salient achievements was to diminish the reach and power of the NLD.

Predating the party’s formation was the 1988 student movement. When SLORC took power, systematic
tatmadaw
repression ensured that leaders not killed on the streets were hunted down relentlessly. Some 10,000 fled to ethnic nationality areas and soon congregated in border camps in India and above all Thailand to plan counter-offensives.
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Others were arrested and sentenced to jail terms of 15 years or more. Activism, though visible in student strikes in Yangon in 1996 and 2002, was quelled.
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However, in the mid-2000s most 88 Generation leaders were released and in late 2006 orchestrated small civil disobedience campaigns. In mid-August 2007, they led street protests in Yangon against a withdrawal of fuel subsidies and a large rise in transport fees, set in a context of grinding rural and urban poverty. Key figures, including Min Ko Naing and Ko Ko Gyi, were arrested and sentenced to long prison terms.
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In the event, however, this action was the stimulus for the saffron uprising.
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On September 5, when Buddhist monks led a demonstration against the high cost of living in the central monastery town of Pakokku, several were roughed up by the USDA. Soon after, dissent spread to major cities. On September 22, monks filed past Aung San Suu Kyi’s house in Yangon, and in the confusion that occasionally gripped street-level military commanders at that time the tall metal gate to her compound was opened for her to pay silent tribute.
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On September 24, more than 50,000 marched in Yangon, and parallel protests took place elsewhere. The crackdown, feared for some time, came on September 26. Order was soon restored, and allegedly “fake” monks were run to ground across the country. At least 30 are known to have died and Kenji Nagai, a Japanese photo-journalist, was shot by a soldier at point-blank range in Yangon. Many surviving monks were rounded up in detention centers and banished from the
sangha
.
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The film
Burma VJ
, directed by Anders Østergaard, is one of the best evocations of those days.
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In peripheral regions, about two dozen ethnic armies continued to fight the
tatmadaw
after the CPB splintered into ethnic battalions in 1989. However, from 1989 to 1996 most major militias reached ceasefire deals with SLORC, sometimes under duress.
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Often neither actually signed nor made public, these were informal agreements typically amounting to little more than a loose truce. Around 15–20 groups thereby “returned to the legal fold,” though the pivotal Karen National Union did not.
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Always there were tensions, particularly when the 2008 constitution provided for ethnic militias to form a Border Guard Force within the larger
tatmadaw
and subject themselves to central direction. By the time discipline-flourishing democracy was instituted in 2011, BGF clauses had thus been only patchily implemented. Nevertheless, it was clear that ceasefire deals had changed the landscape quite considerably, with the junta consolidating power, ethnic nationality leaders often turning to commercial ventures, and ethnic political identities and commitments fragmenting in perplexing ways.
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In 2011, Ashley South argued that the long-term prognosis was for “a decline of insurgency,” with the once powerful KNU in “deep crisis.”
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Challenged by a breakaway group from 1994 and unable to represent all shades of Karen opinion in a nuanced social, political and religious setting, its authority was in a state of disintegration.

In a few ethnic nationality areas local elites continued to exercise power.
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Regime strategists split the territory into white areas under military control, brown areas accessible to government and insurgent troops, and black areas controlled by enemies of the state. In 2007 Callahan also made a tripartite division, identifying extensive devolution of power in the Wa and Kokang parts of Shan State, brutal military occupation in northern Rakhine State and parts of Karen, Kayah and Shan States, and coexistence between central and local leaders in parts of Kachin, Karen, Mon and Shan States.
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However, as she and others noted, the situation on the ground was often still more complex.
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In 2011, South wrote that “In reality, areas of disputed authority and influence blur into each other, with frontiers shifting over time in accordance with the season and the dynamics of armed and state-society conflict.”
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In variegated ways, then,
tatmadaw
government remained a grim reality in much hill country, secure in some places, bitterly contested in others. Throughout the period, abundant reports testified to the oppression felt by ordinary people caught in the crossfire of civil conflict.
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