Change the Burmese Public Can't Believe In

Burma is undergoing top-down changes, we are being told.

Norway’s Deputy Foreign Minister Espen Barth Eide, after his whirlwind trip to the country, told the Financial Times on Oct 11, “I almost left the country thinking they're moving a little too fast. I never thought I would say that about Myanmar.”

Dr Zarni ([email protected]) is Visiting Fellow, Department of International Development, LSE and columnist for the Irrawaddy.

Last month, the Brussels-based International Crisis Group (ICG) issued its latest report on Burma, “Myanmar: Major Reform Underway,” which brims with false hopes, unwarranted optimism, and projected possibilities for Burma—so much so that James C. Scott, Yale’s renowned Southeast Asianist, felt compelled to publicly criticize the ICG’s Burma spin in an interview with the Democratic Voice of Burma.

Driven by divergent agendas and interests, both influential external players and local commercial and technocratic interests are ignoring the country’s power and economic realities while singing the praise of Naypyidaw’s reform.

Notwithstanding the new mood music in the background, Burma's generals and ex-generals cannot conceivably succeed in frog-marching the country towards peace, prosperity and democracy. A glance at their half-century-old record of failures at playing omniscient nation-builders suffices.

The country is ranked second to last, just ahead of Somalia, on Transparency International's Corruption Index. There are pockets of local communities whose socioeconomic and humanitarian conditions are closer to those of countries in Sub-Saharan Africa than to those of an Asian country about to “take off” developmentally.

State provision of health services exists only in name, and so does public education, the largest provider of schooling. But that’s good news for global bankers such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF), which typically insists on drastically cutting public expenditures in exchange for massive loans.

The country’s environment and communities face serious threats to their survival from some mega-development projects such as dam construction—there are still six dams being built on the Irrawaddy after the halting of the Myitsone dam—and the two major Chinese gas and oil pipelines and Thailand’s US $13 billion Special Economic Zone construction in the country's far south.

In the midst of economically rising Asia, the country produces the fifth largest refugee population in the world. The Burma Army is still waging military operations against armed ethnic groups such as the Kachin Independence Army and the Karen National Union.

For foreign policy makers and gurus who wish to convince the Burmese public and international skeptics of the genuineness of the changes underway in Burma, they must address two outstanding issues on which they have so far been silent.

First, the current top-down changes are not going to make a dent in the most fundamental power relations between the citizenry and the exclusive ruling club of generals and ex-generals, still in service or in civilian skirts. Without both the genuine acknowledgment of and putting into practice the universal democratic ethos of “We the People as Sovereign,” no government can claim to be moving in the direction of some form of democracy. There are no signs that Naypyidaw-men have stopped viewing themselves as the country’s “divine rulers.”

On the contrary, the Nargis Constitution of 2008—so-called as it was imposed on the country amid the cyclone disaster—places the military above the law and legalizes any military coup at the whims of the commander-in-chief. This clearly violates both the spirit and letter of constitutionalism.