The Seven Sins of the Latest ICG Burma Report

“Myanmar: Major Reform Underway,” a report released on Sept. 22 by the International Crisis Group (ICG or the Crisis Group), the world’s best known think tank on crises, brims with hope, optimism and future possibilities.

For news coming out of Burma is grim most of the time.

Generally, Burma news is about the pockets of near-famine, widespread sub-Sahara-like conditions of life, the world’s longest smoldering civil war, the break-downs of fragile ceasefires, the use of convicts as “human mine sweepers,” new influxes of war-fleeing refugees, environmental degradation, massive public asset transfers to the generals and cronies in the name of privatization, or Burma’s corruption level ranked next to Somalia. This doesn’t even include the more distant but equally disturbing news items like the slaughter of peaceful Buddhist monks in 2007 and blocking of assistance and emergency relief supplies to Cyclone Nargis victims in 2008.

So any news and reports about something good and positive happening, or about to happen, to the peoples and communities we the Burmese exiles left behind for activism, makes our hearts leap.

Dr Zarni ([email protected]) is a columnist for the Irrawaddy and visiting fellow in the Department of International Development, London School of Economics and Political Science .

Last Friday, Myanmar: Major Reform Underway did make me sit up and read. But once I got past the title I realized the report suffers such fundamental shortcomings in its understanding of the Burma crises—note the plural here—that it is not a credible basis either for the exiles’ excitement or any serious international policy discussions.

Here is my short list of seven fundamental sins the ICG report committed.

First, the report’s selection of sources has itself done great damage to its own credibility, and that of the commissioning Crisis Group. It was more than evident that the Crisis Group did not consult with sources that would most provide the intelligence which would contradict or invalidate the report’s sweeping claims about “major reform” in Burma. Nowhere in the 15-page text of the report did the Crisis Group indicate that it entertained, even as a matter of analytical possibility, alternative interpretations of things that the report characterized as part of “major reform.”

The ICG report repeated and amplified President Thein Sein’s offer of peace to the armed ethnic minority resistance groups, active and ceasefire, having gleaned it from the state media and official transcripts. And yet the Crisis Group’s “field research” didn’t deem it necessary to include any information as to how that “presidential peace offer” has been received by the armed groups.

Even if the Crisis Group researcher(s) considers it personally unsafe to travel to the country’s civil war zones, the border towns such as Laiza in Kachin State or Mae Sot in Thailand are accessible. In addition, directly peace-relevant views of the armed resistance organizations—such as the Karen National Union and the Kachin Independence Organization—are only a Google search away.

The Crisis Group forced on its Burma readers the conclusion that it doesn’t want to give minorities’ views vis-à-vis the Burmese military’s policy platform on this vital issue of Burma’s smoldering civil war.

Second, on matters as grave and well-documented as pervasive human rights violations and “war crimes,” the Crisis Group paid lip service while emphatically disapproving UN-sponsored fact-finding through a Commission of Inquiry.

Unsurprisingly, the ICG report mentioned only once the Human Rights Watch in connection with its report on Burma’s “use of convicts” in the military campaigns—at footnote 71 (out of 79 in total). Nor did the ICG consider Amnesty International’s intervention at the last Human Rights Council meeting in Geneva this March in support of the COI important enough to merit even a single mention throughout its report.

Third, on the country’s approximately 2,000 reported “prisoners of conscience,” a long-standing issue of domestic and international policy importance considered a key litmus test of the generals’ will to reform, it even disputed that number compiled by the Burmese-run Assistance Association of Political Prisoners, the main clearinghouse which assists groups like the International Committee for the Red Cross (ICRC).