Burma Redux: Global Justice and the Quest for Political Reform in Myanmar (27 page)

Nevertheless, total aid spending remains far below levels found in comparable contexts. In 2006, a little before Nargis, Myanmar received $2.88 per person in ODA. This was the lowest figure among any of the world’s 50 poorest countries, and well short of an average of more than $58 per capita assistance across the cohort. Even other countries with highly repressive governments received much higher ODA: $21 per person in Zimbabwe, $55 per person in Sudan, $63 per person in Laos.
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By 2009, per capita aid spend in Myanmar had more than doubled to $6, but still lagged far behind $50 per person in Zimbabwe and unchanged levels in Sudan and Laos.
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On the very broad assumption that a 2009 Myanmar population of 60 million missed out on $50 per person in aid, the total shortfall in that year alone was $3 billion. The loss continues to be of that magnitude today. Finally, within the generally pitiful allocations made to Myanmar since 1988, the profile of international assistance has changed markedly. In the mid-1990s, China replaced Japan as the major donor.
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More recently, the UK, Australia and the US have all substantially increased their allocations to become leading bilateral donors.
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Still the total commitment is very low.

An even larger impact of sanctions came in the business sphere. In 1988, Burma was almost devoid of inward investment. However, the incoming junta liberalized the economy through a Foreign Investment Law promulgated in November 1988, and so thorough was global inattention to the country’s political problems that many major companies went in.
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That soon changed, however, as the controversial 1990 general election confirmed Myanmar’s status as a rogue state. In consequence, the early 1990s saw Levi Strauss, Eddie Bauer, Liz Claibourne, J. Crew, Columbia Sportswear, Apple Computers, Kodak, Motorola, Disney, and PepsiCo pull out. When Levi Strauss left in 1992, it held that it was “not possible to do business without directly supporting the military government and its pervasive human rights violations.” In a single week in July 1996, Danish brewer Carlsberg and Dutch brewer Heineken announced that they were halting engagement. Carlsberg had planned to invest $30 million in a bottling plant. Heineken was involved in a half-built brewery project. “Every billboard in the country will come down,” declared Heineken. “Out is out.”
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Each withdrawal was prompted not by formal sanctions, which came later, but by informal pressure generated by activist groups.
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Indeed, for years the Burma Campaign UK and Global Unions maintained “dirty lists” of companies, though after 2008 the Burma Campaign UK could no longer afford to do so.
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The effect remains potent, and few corporations trading in western markets now do any business in or with Myanmar.
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The case for isolation is also frequently made, as the country has witnessed manifold human rights violations over the past 25 years. Above all, however, proponents look to Aung San Suu Kyi. The official position long taken by the NLD leader is that while she has never called for sanctions, she sees no reason to advise foreign governments to revise measures they have themselves adopted. After her release from house arrest in November 2010, the NLD thus issued short policy analyses and position papers cautioning against precipitate policy change, though at the same time promising a policy review and fresh discussions with sanctioning powers.
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However, this line cannot be fully squared with the historical record. In June 1989, the
Bangkok Post
reported that Aung San Suu Kyi had “said that foreign countries should suspend all trade and economic relations with the junta ‘until they keep their promises’ to hold free and fair multi-party elections.”
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In January 1997, a commencement address delivered by her husband, Michael Aris, to the American University in Washington, and a week later carried under her own byline in
The New York Times
, made an explicit case for activist pressure: “I would therefore like to call upon those who have an interest in expanding their capacity for promoting intellectual freedom and humanitarian ideals to take a principled stand against companies that are doing business with the Burmese military regime.”
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One key reason for obfuscation is that military leaders relish any chance to charge their most famous citizen with economic subversion.
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As with engagement strategies, the major problem with isolation strategies is their failure to deliver. In a working paper prepared for the UN Commission on Human Rights in June 2000, Marc Bossuyt set out a “six-prong test” to ensure that sanctions are imposed for valid reasons, target the proper parties, address appropriate goods or objects, are reasonably time-limited, are effective, and are free from public outcry in the subject jurisdiction.
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As Derek Tonkin noted in a March 2011 analysis, EU (and other) sanctions “record an alarming negative on all counts,” with only targeting proper parties registering even a hint of success.
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Particular cases also expose the inability of sanctions to secure their objectives. After the US imposed a full export ban in July 2003, Nick Mathiason reported in January 2004 that Swift, a hi-tech financial intermediary, had created software capable of converting dealings into euros.
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Looking in December 2003 at informal measures imposed by the UK government, Alan Boyd remarked that “BAT, the subject of intense political lobbying in the United Kingdom, simply off-loaded its 60 percent stake to a Singapore-based investor and will continue to get revenues under a licensing agreement.”
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This is not to argue that economic sanctions have had no effect. In April 2004, the US State Department reported to Congress that the 2003 export ban closed more than 100 garment factories and eliminated 50–60,000 jobs. In May 2005, the Myanmar government put job losses at 80,000.
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Later, Toshihiro Kudo confirmed that “U.S. sanctions seriously damaged the garment industry in Myanmar.”
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Wider opportunity costs are immeasurable. Rather, it is to hold that since sanctions are fragmentary, and even boycotts do not fully tighten the noose, they cannot deliver on their core aims. Kudo found that US sanctions introduced in 2003 “did not have as much of an impact on military-related enterprises as they did on domestic private firms,” and that they “had a disproportionately greater impact on the people than … on the military regime.”
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This was a critical failure, for experience shows that to work sanctions must create sizable political costs for the ruling coalition.
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When the target state is authoritarian this is especially difficult, for then the winning coalition is typically small.
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In Myanmar, the stark inability to damage military interests has made economic sanctions one more instance of a failed embargo.
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Exactly parallel points can be made about activist campaigns. Looking into the future from the perspective of 1990, Steinberg wrote that “an indefinite policy of isolation may not work.”
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So it has proven.

Political leverage

Diverse foreign policies appear to have had some shaping impact on Myanmar’s domestic politics. The painfully slow transitional process currently taking place signals some acknowledgement on the part of military leaders that in governing a country long taken as their reserved domain they must indicate some conformity with global trends and values. US evaluations released by WikiLeaks claim that top generals do not like being sanctioned, and are embarrassed by their rogue status.
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More significantly, in a resurgent civil society a still relatively small cohort of UN agencies and INGOs is able to provide solid support for local initiative. Gradually some political impacts are being registered at grassroots levels. At the same time, however, external action has long fallen far short of its major objectives, leaving ordinary citizens in a desperate state of servitude and impoverishment. Many reasons can be given for this dismal state of affairs, and in such a complex case all may be valid to some degree. In two respects, though, foreigners bear some responsibility.

One is the inattention that has generally characterized external relations with Myanmar. There have certainly been many honorable exceptions, including diplomats striving to craft effective policies, aid workers devoting their lives to assisting people inside the country and along its extensive borders, activists going to considerable lengths to bring scandalous human rights violations to global attention, business executives concerned to create real economic and social benefits for local people, and pockets of engaged individuals from other walks of life undertaking a wealth of productive action. Indeed, the past decade has seen significant reengagement with Myanmar, albeit from the tiny base maintained throughout the 1990s, and much of it has been productive. On the whole, however, the wider world has not focused on Myanmar in the years of great misery and serial crisis that have passed since the late 1980s.

China, the critical external power, has not invested in the bilateral relationship. After a state visit by President Jiang Zemin in December 2001, the only senior officials to visit in the period of junta government were Politburo Standing Committee member Li Changchun in March 2009, Vice-President Xi Jinping in December 2009, and Premier Wen Jiabao in June 2010. Many commercial agreements were signed during the trips, prompting the ICG to remark in September 2010 that “This spike in top-level visits and economic deals sends a signal to Naypyidaw about its importance in Beijing’s calculations and the potential economic largesse it can offer.”
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By the same token, the long span of neglect before that also sent a powerful negative message. Similarly, India has taken little interest. In 2010, a task force of diplomats, academics and policy specialists reached this verdict: “Not a single credible person has dedicated himself or herself to studying Myanmar comprehensively as a primary interest in the so-called strategic community or in academe … More damagingly, of all of its postindependence neighbors, India has paid the least substantive attention at the official level to its relations with Myanmar.”
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Equally, Thailand was held by a 2010 task force to lack the “energy and resources to refashion [its] seemingly rudderless Burma/Myanmar policy.”
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Outside the region, US policy is determined by no more than a handful of individuals in Congress, and effectively made by Aung San Suu Kyi.
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In the EU the situation is more complex. Nevertheless, the policy context in the UK, which as former colonial power is typically the critical voice, is akin to that in the US, though with a possibly still larger activist component.
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Generalized inattention is a major problem because it both feeds ignorance and reduces credibility and legitimacy. Few policymakers have much detailed understanding of conditions on the ground inside Myanmar, options for change, or popular expectations of external engagement. Developing a nuanced and balanced perspective that can inform wider policy analysis and debate is thus inherently difficult. Moreover, in very practical terms no outsider can dip into an issue every now and then and expect either to be taken seriously, or to exercise real and lasting influence. By and large, however, this is the basis on which Myanmar policy is set by key regional powers and still more so by dominant players in international society.

The other respect in which the wider world bears some responsibility for the current state of affairs is the nature of the involvement it does have with Myanmar. Notably on the side of isolation strategies, western powers and activist groups are often content to impose embargoes and lecture the governing elite on human rights and democracy. While this is not uniquely the case following the expansion of aid and willingness to engage in dialogue signaled by Australia, the EU and the US in the late 2000s and early 2010s, it remains the signature theme.
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For a nation ruled for decades by a western power widely held to have exploited the land for its own interests and sowed deep-seated interethnic discord, this approach was always unlikely to work. Furthermore, although they seem paranoid to many outsiders, military leaders’ suspicion of foreign intentions is not wholly unfounded.
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For years, US and other western policy has effectively been premised on regime change. More widely, isolation prevents new voices and influences from registering inside the country, and limits the emergence of counterweights to military rule through a healthy civil society and a vibrant middle class with global links and perspectives. As Thant Myint-U remarked in 2009, “sanctions are extremely counter-productive, in that they’ve held back two forces—American soft power and global capitalism—that could have actually started to change things.”
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