Burma Redux: Global Justice and the Quest for Political Reform in Myanmar (18 page)

However, Nargis did generate enhanced response mechanisms, ensuring that when Cyclone Giri hit western Rakhine State on October 22, 2010 deaths were in the hundreds rather than the hundreds of thousands. More broadly, it triggered a dynamic civic response with a lasting impact on the southern delta area.
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In 2008, a staff member from the Local Resource Center, formed to boost capacity and forge links with donors, put it this way: “Nargis destroyed much, but it also revealed much as well. No one can any longer deny that there is an active and capable civil society in Myanmar, one that made an immeasurable life-saving contribution with minimum support from international agencies.”
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By the end of the junta years the total number of local NGOs had climbed to 82, and even official media were prepared to cover a sector once deemed highly sensitive.
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In 2010 Paung Ku, a consortium of local and international agencies founded in 2007 to strengthen civil society, noted that the sector was generally weak and strikingly diverse across distinct local contexts.
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Clearly, though, it was becoming increasingly substantial.

Perhaps the greatest shaping efforts in the junta years targeted ethnic nationality peoples. Myanmar, the language of the Bamar majority, remained the main medium of instruction throughout the land, though in some areas teachers were themselves unable to speak it. Especially in monastery schools that always bore a large part of the educational burden, much instruction therefore continued to take place in Chin, Kachin, Shan, and so on. Nevertheless, the policy thrust was deeply resented.
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In a country with many devotees of Christianity, Islam and Hinduism, Buddhism was assiduously promoted. Indeed, despite religious boycotts following the abortive 1990 general election and the 2007 saffron uprising, the junta always sought to align itself closely with the Buddhist hierarchy.
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Other religions, often with plentiful adherents in peripheral zones, were tolerated but received no financial support and were frequently harried and hounded.
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In the background was often overt conflict between the
tatmadaw
and ethnic militias.
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While ceasefires brought a degree of respite and pushed some insurgency into virtual forms, they did not end all violence.
¹⁴⁹
In 2006 alone, fighting in Karen State reportedly destroyed 232 villages plus crops and food stocks, and displaced 27,000 villagers.
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People also faced resettlement campaigns designed to herd them into controlled areas and assert military dominion. In 2006, Human Rights Watch claimed that there were half a million internally displaced persons in eastern Myanmar. For Christian Solidarity Worldwide, the number was twice that.
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Similar statistics appeared to the end of the period.
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The result was less fighting, but no decline in militarization, no real peace, and little concord.
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Callahan describes “a kind of post-civil-war, not-quite-peace environment.”
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Tom Kramer writes of an uneasy situation of “neither war nor peace.”
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Additional impacts were felt across Myanmar’s frontiers as ethnic nationality groups fled army action to live “between sovereigns” in refugee camps or endangered migrant communities, notably in Thailand.
¹⁵⁶
Shelby Tucker’s
Among Insurgents
, Zoya Phan’s
Little Daughter
and Mac McClelland’s
For Us Surrender Is out of the (Question
all provide raw accounts of borderland conflict.
¹⁵⁷

Further forms of abuse are also well documented. Muslim minority Rohingya people living mainly in Rakhine State in western Myanmar were rendered stateless by successive governments and persecuted by officials and citizens alike.
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They experienced an extreme form of human rights violation, with rights to property, marriage, education and employment all curtailed.
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Pushed into Bangladesh or taking to the high seas in flimsy boats to seek sanctuary, many suffered extensive abuse and some inevitably died.
¹⁶⁰
More widely, detailed reports of rape, mutilation and extrajudicial killing were too numerous to be dismissed.
Women in and from Conflict Areas of Burma
(2000),
License to Rape
(2002),
Shattering Silences
(2004),
Dignity in the Shadow of Oppression
(2006),
State of Terror
(2007),
Unsafe State
(2007),
In the Shadow of the Junta
(2008) and
Walking amongst Sharp Knives
(2010) all describe
tatmadaw
violence against women.
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Scorching human rights reports often surfaced. In many years Amnesty International alone released a dozen bulletins, and every one was highly critical. Annual US State Department briefings generally held that the government’s human rights record had again worsened, and backed the claim in harrowing detail. Annual HRW reports took a similar line.
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Even genocide claims were made, with Benedict Rogers in 2004 citing attacks on the Karen people and Guy Horton in 2005 lodging a claim of “slow genocide” against minority peoples.
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In 2009, Barbara Harff estimated that only Sudan faced a greater genocide risk, and in 2010 a former human rights envoy reported that the UN had placed Myanmar on a monitoring list.
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Finally, beyond active harm was willful neglect. Public expenditure was small and at least 40 percent typically went to the military, where some was channeled into parallel welfare provision. In the civilian sphere, key social services received a fraction of public spending. Education consumed about 1 percent of GDP, teaching materials were limited, and little more than half of children completed primary school.
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Most actual learning took place after class, as teachers sought to supplement meager monthly salaries of 30–50,000
kyats
by instructing students whose parents could afford extra payments. Scarcely any universities worth the name existed, and all were subject to long periods of closure. In 12 years from 1988 to 2000, campuses were open for only 36 months. After the 1996 student strike, they were shut for nearly four years. At the same time, a shift to isolated suburban facilities and distance learning programs was made to hamper student mobilization.
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Today, Yangon University has no undergraduates on its historic city-center campus. While by the end of the period many young people in a thin professional stratum had a least one degree, few had learned much from tertiary education. Even less money, around 0.5 percent of GDP, went to healthcare, confirming the World Health Report 2000 evaluation that Myanmar had the world’s worst system bar only Sierra Leone.
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Again, much treatment was paid for informally. For years the SPDC allocated little funding to diseases such as HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria, and USDA harassment prompted some INGO withdrawals. The official Nargis response was callous in the extreme.
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In consequence, international evaluations by the end of the junta years were often shockingly bad. The Press Freedom Index 2010 ranked Myanmar 174 out of 178 countries, ahead only of Iran, Turkmenistan, North Korea and Eritrea.
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The Corruption Perceptions Index 2010 placed Myanmar at 176 out of 178 countries, tied with Afghanistan and ahead only of Somalia.
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The Global Peace Index 2010 ranked Myanmar at 132 out of 149 countries.
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The Failed States Index 2010 put Myanmar on alert at 16 out of 177 countries.
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In 2011 Freedom House found Myanmar again to be one of a mere handful of wholly “not free” countries.
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The Political Instability Task Force and related projects reached uniformly negative assessments.
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Progress toward achieving the UN’s Millennium Development Goals by the target date of 2015 was generally poor.
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Duffield justly wrote of “chronic emergency in Myanmar.”
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Government by junta

In September 1988, Burma’s democracy movement was remorselessly crushed and an internal coup put a fresh cohort of military leaders in direct command of the state. Naked, unvarnished and unapologetic,
tatmadaw
government held sway until 2011. In many ways, overt martial law was little other than an intensification of pre-existing military control. The decisive political event in the country’s postcolonial history remained 1962. In other ways, however, government by junta represented an important new departure.

Internally, as Callahan writes, SLORC and the SPDC oversaw a process of change whereby “the patterns that had long characterized Myanmar’s social order [were] turned inside out.”
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A closed economy was opened to inward investment. Parts of the country’s extensive borderlands, marked for decades by fighting, were allowed a fragile peace and limited development through ceasefire deals concluded with rebel forces. Some frontier zones even became more dynamic than the Bamar core. The
tatmadaw
itself, long pinned down and stretched to the limit by guerrilla action in peripheral areas, was doubled in size and refocused on making money either for survival at lower ranks or for personal enrichment at upper levels. What had been a broadly egalitarian slide into penury under a reasonably ascetic authoritarianism from 1962 to 1988 thereby became a tawdry winner-takes-all race for personal gain led from the top of the political system. Finally, a dead-end, one-party, quasi-socialist state challenged by communist and ethnic insurgents was dismantled and the military machine slowly turned its attention to constitution making in the shadow of Aung San Suu Kyi’s looming presence and moral authority.
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In sum, Callahan argues that the changes engineered after 1988 constituted “a massive remaking of state and society, comparable perhaps to that of the British after 1886.”
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Externally, too, 1988 marked a breakpoint.
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Andrew Selth notes that although Burma under Ne Win was viewed by the global community as a thinly-disguised military dictatorship, it was nevertheless “accepted in world councils.” Moreover, once the rigors of socialist autarky were eased in the 1970s, significant aid was allocated. Looking out from Rangoon, “The regime saw its greatest threats coming from armed insurgent groups, pressure from Burma’s larger and more powerful neighbours and, at a further remove, entanglement in the strategic competition between the superpowers.”
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It thus had an army configured for guerrilla warfare, a diplomatic stance premised on careful management of relations with China and India, and a strategic posture of strict Cold War neutralism. From the late 1980s onward, however, while domestic unrest was still a leading concern, external threat perceptions were “turned on their head.” For the junta, China, India and Russia became close supporters. The US and UK, seen before as broadly helpful, were viewed as aggressors, and the UN was not trusted. Looking out from their fortified new capital of Nay Pyi Taw, the generals remained worried about internal opposition not only from rebel ethnic groups, but also from the democracy movement. By and large, however, their Asian neighbors were less menacing than the US and its allies. Under the junta Myanmar therefore built a large conventional army designed to project a credible deterrent capability, and a diplomatic stance premised above all on tight relations with China and Russia, both veto-wielding members of the UN Security Council. It also cultivated economic and security contacts in Asia and beyond. By the end of the period there were rumors that those contacts extended to a nuclear link with North Korea.
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