Burma Redux: Global Justice and the Quest for Political Reform in Myanmar (40 page)

One way forward would be to focus on the many aid agencies and global corporations unaffected by sanctions maintained only by the US and its leading allies. Operating beyond existing global embargoes are government bodies in non-sanctioning states, INGOs, and corporations based in non-western nations and markets. Moreover, much is already being done in a quiet way by some of these organizations. State development agencies from East Asian jurisdictions such as Japan, South Korea and Taiwan are currently very active inside Myanmar. INGOs are mounting a growing array of programs. Businesses across Asia are taking another look at Myanmar as a potential investment destination, and some are prepared to embrace the notion of corporate social responsibility. Starting out on this basis is then feasible and appropriate, for low-profile humanitarian engagement and inward investment from Asia, perhaps spearheaded by dynamic businesses from China and India, offer the best chance of building a platform for long-term success.
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Ultimately, however, it will also be necessary for the US and its allies to reconfigure their Myanmar policies. Most palatable to western governments and indeed publics is often said to be a
quid pro quo
approach, whereby sanctions are slowly removed in response to measurable political progress inside Myanmar. The Obama administration opted for what is often termed conditionality in its 2009 policy review. The EU similarly takes this position. While ongoing elite-level hostility on all sides could delay implementation, there may be no practical alternative.

In terms of political impact, discursive intervention is unlikely to generate dramatic change. In all probability, intercession and investment will not be revolutionary in their short-term consequences. However, evidence from comparable cases shows that such action can have positive long-term effects if well designed and implemented. In the sphere of intercession, mediation can deliver especially strong results if undertaken in a painstaking and involved manner from the grassroots up, rather than in a quick and easy manner at the elite level. In the sphere of investment, aid agency and corporate action focused on local capacity building can enhance a palpable sense of organic growth in contemporary Myanmar, and a strong feeling across a still emergent domestic civil society that now is the time to boost it still further. More widely, modernization theory has long drawn adherents and can be cited in support of this strategy. The further benefits socially responsible engagement might bring are a forceful additional incentive.

All that said, it is important not to press the claims of this approach too hard, for it is undeniably contentious. Indeed, doing business with a rights-violating regime, whether understood in the narrow or broad sense, can never be anything other than inherently problematic. In 1988, the year of the democracy crackdown in Burma, Norman Bowie focused on the narrow meaning to argue that “businesses have obligations to pull out of oppressive countries if there is little hope of reform.”
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After a brief flirtation with Myanmar, executives in prominent global corporations took note of the junta’s response to the 1990 general election and quickly followed his advice. Taking the broader sense, many leading western powers have also focused above all on isolation strategies and clean hands. In all cases, the reasoning and the action are fully comprehensible. On the ground inside Myanmar, however, the result has been a tight concentration of power in the military-state complex to the extent that few options for challenging it now exist. It is for this reason that attempts to boost countervailing power are currently on the political agenda and promoted by local civic leaders. If implemented, Myanmar might within a few years be able to emulate processes of change witnessed in Vietnam since 1986, when
doi moi
(renovation) reforms were unveiled and substantial grassroots dynamism was unleashed.
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If carefully designed and executed, strategies of intercession and investment can be constructive partners for indigenous pursuit of national reconciliation and sustainable democracy.

A final issue is the degree of support the strategy sketched here might command inside Myanmar. Certainly endorsement can be found in debate now taking place among civil society leaders, notably in Nargis-affected areas. Again, however, the limitations of such testimony need to be clearly stated. Existing data are not only restricted in quantity and quality, but also targeted at other matters. Thus, most reports currently in the public domain do not seek to aggregate communal preferences or represent broad social opinion, but rather to provide a snapshot of specific aspects of contemporary Myanmar. Typically, the focus is either on fast-growing community and NGO action in the Ayeyawady delta, or on the peripheral world of ethnic nationality groups, for these are the elements of present-day society with which outsiders have greatest contact and in which they have most interest. By contrast, the opinions of individuals in other groups are rarely captured. At the extreme are the powerful, the favored and those who work with and for them: military commanders, local leaders and officials, well-connected businesspeople and others who have chosen to align themselves with the military agenda and are in no hurry for political change. Across the core of the society are regular citizens eking out a living and doing their best to survive from day to day. Mostly their views are unknown, though it seems highly probable that they are more disparate than mainstream media and activist commentary allows.
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Furthermore, even if public opinion is on the side of those yearning for significant political renewal and change, which seems likely from all that has happened since the late 1980s, it is quite possible that the popular mood leans toward a clean break with praetorian politics. If so, it may not favor a strategy designed to build competing power nodes alongside the dominant military machine, and could instead argue for revolutionary destruction of the military-state complex. While key leaders including Aung San Suu Kyi rule out this possibility, unless and until proper consultation takes place the answer to this critical question cannot be known. More generally, a vein of proud nationalism by no means restricted to military leaders and a generalized mistrust of external action following decades of substantial disappointment could also stand in the way of foreign engagement. Always the main input must be made by local people, and before any strategy of interactive intervention is launched their voices need to be heard as fully as possible.

Nevertheless, the recorded views of many civic actors cannot be wholly discounted. Indeed, if local debate were to take the form of a series of listening projects, the grassroots social leaders who feature so prominently in this analysis would undoubtedly be a key constituency. Even if it were to cast a still wider net across the society, they would remain major contributors. While not wanting to push the issue too far, it can certainly be argued that the line taken here has some domestic support. Moreover, in arguing for consensual engagement, local NGO workers reveal a series of preferences that must be fully acknowledged by outsiders. These are for change to be driven primarily by Myanmar people rather than by foreigners, by grassroots actors rather than by top leaders, and by supportive external bodies sharing and facilitating these goals. In important ways, then, contemporary preferences run counter to the broad policy thrust of much existing external engagement, which particularly through sanctions seeks to put outsiders in the driving seat, focuses on elite politics, and subverts the emergence of civil society.

Conclusion

The twist the Burma story took in the late 1980s, when the early phases of an apparent transition to democracy were decisively curtailed by the country’s entrenched military elite, is often cast as a modern variant of the morality plays that flourished in late medieval Europe. In one telling, Aung San Suu Kyi features as the protagonist embodying the core virtues and highest political aspirations of a repressed, fearful and impoverished nation. “Burma’s Saint Joan” is how an October 1995
Vanity Fair
cover put it.
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Her antagonists are presented neither as seven deadly sins nor as a lengthy parade of vices, but rather as a unified set of largely faceless evildoers grouped together in a brutal military machine. In another more hopeful version premised on the belief that in the end good must triumph over evil, the NLD leader emerges as a Burmese Beatrice guiding her people through Dante’s nine spheres of heaven to the desired destination of vibrant, peaceful and prosperous democracy. In states clustered around the US in the broad western camp, forms of these parables implicitly underpin much government policy, routinely inform media attention sporadically trained on the country, and long ago passed into popular culture through secular sanctification of the 1991 Nobel Laureate and concomitant demonization of military leaders. For years they have been a staple of activist discourse in the diaspora and transnational networks.
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Perhaps something is to be said for Manichean readings of Myanmar politics, for they neatly capture the dark, brooding presence of the dictatorial generals who continue to dominate the country, and the exemplary moral and physical courage of Aung San Suu Kyi in standing up to them and holding in their faces the torch of freedom. They also train attention on the single most unusual feature of contemporary politics: the sheer durability of military rule. That Burma experienced a coup and suspension of democracy in 1962 was not remarkable, and was not seen as such at the time. In Third World nations in Cold War settings, fragile postcolonial democracies routinely succumbed to strongman politics. That the country then moved into a period of destructive state socialism under a malfunctioning command economy was also not uncommon. That eventually there was a popular backlash and mass protest for democracy was par for the course. Rather, what set this case apart was the ability of obscure military leaders to hold off and resist the potent moral power of Aung San Suu Kyi and the transitional wave she personified. In a global context that saw Václav Havel, Nelson Mandela and other democratic rebels prevail at the end of the Cold War, Myanmar under its generals became atypical. Today, as military leaders take the initiative by defiantly rolling out their own praetorian version of democracy, it remains something of an anomaly in international society.

Ultimately such readings are unhelpful, though, for they impose a distorting dichotomy on a byzantine situation, and imply that most current problems can come close to being solved by the elementary expedient of returning the
tatmadaw
to its barracks and placing the democratic opposition in charge of the country. With one bound Burma was free. As Timothy Garton Ash wrote in May 2000, however, “Burmese politics are anything but a simple fairy-tale confrontation between Suu and Slorc, beauty and the beast.” Missing from such a picture are above all “fiendishly complex mixtures of ethnic discontent, insurgency, and drug trade” that have shaped national development for years and vastly complicate prospects for national renewal and reform.
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Also overlooked are further challenges strung across the economic, social and political domains. One important task for any analysis is therefore to step beyond dualistic and reductionist accounts to deliver a more realistic assessment of the current state of affairs. Then the political situation becomes in Steinberg’s term “minimally triangular” as important issues facing the country are imbued with great and daunting nuance.
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At the same time, however, the manifold dimensions of the Myanmar problem must not be allowed to overwhelm and undermine the other key analytical task of trying to chart a way forward for a country many insiders and outsiders agree has gone badly off track in recent decades. Furthermore, although any attempt to do that must be led above all by local people through broad-based analysis and debate, foreigners can also make a positive contribution to sustainable reform. Indeed, the demands of global justice indicate that outsiders must find ways to perform the duties they now bear. Although some duties are perfect and readily identified, the vast majority are imperfect and obscure. While focusing debate on fundamental global obligations, they therefore also direct analysis to the procedural requirements of interactive intervention.

Following on from analysis in earlier chapters, this conclusion wraps things up and turns more speculatively to the future. In his 1967 history, Maung Htin Aung appended a dialogue to convey modes of narration found in classical Burmese plays, staged at night and often unfinished by dawn. “Then the leader of the troupe of strolling players comes out and gives a synopsis of the final act; afterwards he answers questions put by the more interested members of the audience.”
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While the degree of political uncertainty pervading contemporary Myanmar rules out a final act, it remains possible to consider some of the pathways that might be taken by its people. In its initial two sections this concluding chapter looks inside the country, examining prospects on the one hand for unmaking Myanmar and on the other for remaking Burma. In its final two sections it looks outside, first investigating possibilities for external engagement with internal reform efforts and then considering how a future Burma might reposition itself in the wider world from which it has for so long been largely absent. The argument does not seek to minimize the challenges confronting local people. Equally, it attempts to move beyond fatalism by marking out practical steps for an agenda of political change.