Burma Redux: Global Justice and the Quest for Political Reform in Myanmar (17 page)

In short, no credible dataset or anecdotal evidence paints a rosy picture. By the late 2000s, the economy was distorted and trailing its neighbors. “Genuine economic ‘development’ is not taking place in Burma,” wrote the Turnell team in 2009.
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One year later, Turnell found the economy to be “grim.”
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While plentiful natural resources gave grounds for hope, they also created a classic resource curse. “Burma’s state is almost wholly predatory, and it is not so much parasitic of its host as all-consuming.”
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Fundamental institutional reform was urgently needed, embracing effective property rights, basic freedoms, functioning infrastructure, rational policymaking, and market-opening policies internally and externally. “Laying the foundations of a market-centered and rule-based economy will be vital to the success of any transition strategy to lift Burma from its present ‘least-developed’ purgatory.”
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In December 2009, visiting 2001 Nobel Economics Laureate Joseph Stiglitz stressed the need to reform agriculture and improve farmers’ access to credit.
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Banking changes and microfinance projects were also required.
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All that said, few indicators pointed to a society mired in sub-Saharan African levels of distress. The Human Development Index 2010 ranked Myanmar 132 out of 169 countries, with gross national income of $1,596 per capita in 2008 dollars using purchasing power parities.
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This made it the only ASEAN state in the bottom category, below Cambodia at 124 ($1,868), Laos at 122 ($2,321), Vietnam at 113 ($2,995) and Indonesia at 108 ($3,957), but kept it out of the lowest 20 percent globally.
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Nevertheless, given what might have been expected, the performance was clearly disastrous. In 1982, David I. Steinberg drew a comparison with South Korea and Thailand, arguing that in the mid-1950s Burma was “the potential economic and political leader of the three.”
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It was exporting food and fuel and had extensive natural resources, good transport infrastructure, high literacy rates, widespread use of English, and a modern legal system. Half a century later, however, the 2010 index placed Thailand at 92 ($8,001) and South Korea at 12 ($29,518). Whereas both had passed through lengthy periods of military control and repression to create functioning democracies, Myanmar remained authoritarian.

Social control

The society shaped by two decades of junta government was heavily though not totally controlled by a state operating through propaganda, surveillance and fear. Callahan notes that in the early days citizens believed MI had spies everywhere. “Still today,” she wrote in 2007, “people regularly whisper in public when their conversations turn to senior officials or politics, although less obviously so than in the early 1990s.”
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In 2010 she held that the unpredictability of power made citizens “the object of punitive, extractive, capricious and indifferent” public action.
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In
Secret Histories
, an alluring account fusing past and present, Emma Larkin reports similar surveillance while retracing Orwell’s footsteps across the country.
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Although there may not have been a systematic Stasi-style network of informers, citizens were obliged to negotiate much street-level red tape. Every household had to register members and visitors with PDC authorities liable to trigger random nighttime checks. Roadblocks were set up on major routes to track and tax civilian travel, and movement between the country’s 14 states and divisions was monitored.
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For a person seeking a job, enrolment in school, college or university, access to healthcare, official documentation, or mere release from intimidation, joining the USDA was nearly compulsory. In November 2005, membership was officially recorded as 22.8 million.
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Moreover, reinforcing petty control was terror. Ground down by fear, individuals became programmed to avoid political controversy.
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Many people simply left the country.

Still more critical not only politically but also socially was the dominant
tatmadaw.
Total enlisted personnel stood at around 200,000 in 1988, rising to about 400,000 in 2002 before falling back to 300–350,000 by 2011. At least 90 percent of all men served in the army, with air force and navy numbers only very small.
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Some 20 percent of recruits were allegedly not men at all, but boys.
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In remote parts, army divisions were often required to live off the land through extortion and foraging.
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Always faced with structural problems, including desertion, low morale and false reporting, the
tatmadaw
was nevertheless the essential institution. In an overwhelmingly rural society with limited employment opportunities, a career in the army was one of the few avenues for upward social mobility. Furthermore, the sheer size and constant presence of military forces meant that many individuals maintained links of one kind or another. Indeed, the parallel structure of hospitals, schools and so on created by the
tatmadaw
ensured that access to the military through extended family and friends was frequently critical for social welfare. Even basic necessities such as quality rice and cooking oil might be available only through military channels.
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In the wider society, restrictions on information and communication were retained and enlarged. The Burma Wireless Telegraphy Act 1933, creating an offence of possessing a telephone without permission, was supplemented in 1995 and 1996 to include fax machines and computer modems. The censorship system established by the Printers and Publishers Registration Law 1962 also grew.
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For years, two state-run television channels and state-controlled newspapers regurgitated propaganda from the Office of Strategic Studies, and private-sector journalism was censored through the Press Scrutiny and Registration Division of the Ministry of Home Affairs. More than 100 weekly journals and news magazines operating at the end of the period were required to submit all copy one week before publication, and could lose articles or entire issues. One third of a magazine’s content was often removed.
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Non-state titles could also be required to carry stories written by or for the regime, frequently recycled from government outlets. In a 24-page issue, they would typically fill a page or two. Books were subject to censorship of the final published version.
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Completed films were checked by the Film Censorship Board under the Ministry of Information. Videos were vetted by the Video Censorship Board. In 2006, Reporters Without Borders noted an enhancement of telephone tapping capacity, three-year prison terms for two photo-journalists who took unauthorized pictures of Nay Pyi Taw, and 19-year sentences for two young people who distributed poems supporting the NLD.
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In 2010, it stated that special police had tried to hunt down clandestine reporters, that collapse of a pagoda near Yangon could not be disclosed because Than Shwe’s wife had been involved in its dedication, and that gross intimidation of journalists was widespread. Its evaluation was damning: “Burma is a paradise for censors.”
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While Myanmar under military rule was wrapped in a thick blanket of control, chinks of light were still able to penetrate. Despite strict censorship, literature, music and art remained vibrant and even political in major cities.
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From outside, radio was a potent means of disseminating information. International broadcasts could be picked up on short wave, and BBC Burmese, Voice of America, Radio Free Asia (based in Washington, DC) and Democratic Voice of Burma (based in Oslo) all beamed into the country.
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A staple of Aung San Suu Kyi’s daily routine under house arrest was listening to these stations. Satellite television was increasingly accessible and popular, notably during major global events such as the 2010 football World Cup in South Africa and military action against Libya in 2011.
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Although websites were heavily censored and owners of internet cafes were required to supply the authorities with regular snapshots of on-screen activity, many users were able to circumvent regime firewalls through proxy servers, and most owners declined to drive away business by submitting full reports.
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By the end of the SPDC years, young people even in small urban centers of 20–30,000 people could find internet cafes and were allowed to access Gmail accounts and Facebook pages alongside Myanmar-language chat rooms and sites.
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Thus, despite harsh junta clampdowns, news of the 2007 fuel price protests and saffron uprising were soon transmitted out of the country by citizen-reporters operating in big cities. News bulletins plus global commentary were then broadcast back in through short-wave radio services informing the population about censored items. Certainly technological advance associated with the internet was no more of a panacea in fighting this dictatorship than in opposing any other.
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In April 2011 Freedom House reported on extensive internet control in Myanmar, finding only Iran less constrained.
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Nevertheless, information was able to flow somewhat more freely than state leaders would have liked.

In civil society, countervailing power was for many years systematically extinguished.
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In 1997, Steinberg wrote that “Since 1962, the military has destroyed civil society in Burma.”
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By and large the claim was valid, as state bodies ruthlessly dominated civil space. However, since then there has been a renaissance. Although the International Crisis Group argued in 2001 that civil society was “at its weakest state in decades,” a small but steady growth was already disproving the claim.
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When in 2006 an activist group held that the country was “devoid of a civil society,” with only the USDA and parallel state bodies able to “mobilize the masses” and “carry out carefully scripted functions,” it was wide of the mark.
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In 2004, South had already pointed to a tentative revival.
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In 2006, Karl Dorning, Brian Heidel and David Tegenfeldt, all in-country INGO workers, published separate analyses of local civil society.
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Dorning noted that 62 local NGOs had a Yangon office, with 17 created in the 1990s and the rest in the 2000s. Others operated elsewhere. He reported more than 200,000 community-based organizations, though many would have been very local indeed and some may have existed in name only. Nevertheless, in 2007 Kyaw Yin Hlaing’s evaluation was that while bodies deemed subversive would not be permitted, “Myanmar does have somewhat vibrant civic and social organizations.”
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A step change in civic development then took place in the wake of Cyclone Nargis.
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Sweeping through the Ayeyawady Delta and up toward Yangon on May 2–3, 2008, Nargis was a category 4 cyclone that devastated towns and villages with a wave surge of up to 3.5 meters, rapidly becoming the worst natural disaster in the country’s recorded history. In its path, about 450,000 homes were totally destroyed, 197,000 partially damaged, 126,000 slightly damaged, and only 16,000 untouched.
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As news of the tragedy seeped out, humanitarian agencies and governments around the world mobilized to act. However, the junta’s response in the critical early days and weeks was to look first to its own security needs, and only second to human needs. While the full consequence will never be known, it is certain that some of at least 138,000 deaths resulted from constraints imposed on relief efforts.
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Furthermore, while a May 22–23 visit by UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon afforded some relaxation of the lockdown placed on the delta, the junta was always wary of domestic and foreign action.
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Indeed, some political prisoners were convicted for Nargis humanitarian work. Most famous is Zarganar, a comedian who sometimes poked fun at the regime and publicly criticized the blocking of Nargis aid. He was jailed for 59 years in November 2008, and had his term revised to 35 years in February 2009.
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