Myanmar Explained

    Aung San Suu Kyi, the Rohingya, and a coup

    About a month ago I finished reading “The Hidden History of Burma: Race, Capitalism, and the Crisis of Democracy in the 21st Century” by Thant Myint-U. I had felt I needed to know more about the region and what was going on. 

Then there was a coup.

 I felt like I had just been preparing myself to understand what was happening. Much of what follows is based on my reading of Thant Myint-U’s telling of the history of Myanmar/Burma and the quotes are exclusively taken from this fascinating book. So, I’m not an area expert, or at all qualified to express any views on what should be done, or how this should be handled. But I did read a book, and you didn’t. Here are my thoughts on the matter:

    If you live in the global “West” and you don’t understand what’s going on in Myanmar, you are forgiven. Firstly because, as a “Westerner,” there’s very little reason to feel the need to understand what’s going on pretty much anywhere in the world. But particularly in this case, because western media does a dismal job of giving context to this area without viewing it through global finance eyes. Therefore, all the coverage you get on western media discusses this issue in regard to how it affects China. Considering what’s actually happening there, it’s a pretty icky lens through which to view this. If you’re interested, I’m gunna’ try to break this down as best I can, as simply as I can.

    First off, Myanmar was officially known as Burma until 1989. (We’ll come back to that, because the name itself is actually relevant to what’s happening.) It shares a border with India, China, Laos, Thailand, Bangladesh, as well as sporting a long coastline on the Indian Ocean. The north is a heavily mountainous region which has been a headache for China’s perennial attempts to establish a trade route to the South Pacific for centuries. Chinese dynasty after Chinese dynasty has tried and failed to achieve this goal. This obviously has been a source of frustration for China. But while pissing off China rarely goes well for anyone, to explain just how destabilized this region has been, Chinese aggression and manipulation has always been pretty far down on any list of Myanmar’s problems. 

    Over the last several years, the words you have probably heard most often associated with this region are “Rohingya” and “Aung San Suu Kyi”. “Rohinga” is a designation used to refer to a Muslim ethnic minority, predominantly located in a western province of Myanmar on the border with Bangladesh.  Aung San Suu Kyi (Ong saan sue chee) is the daughter of the former military leader of Burma and was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1991 for her efforts to peacefully establish a democracy in the newly named Myanmar. She is a complex character who it is not simple to categorize as either good or bad. Discussing her requires nuance and an understanding of the political climate in Myanmar. 

    Recently, the news coming from Myanmar is that there has been a military coup and the leader, Aung San Suu Kyi, has been detained by the military. While this coup is not directly related to the Rohingya, in that there are many more factors that you could have examined that would have led you to predict that this coup would happen, the Rohingya issue gets to the heart of the troubles the country has been facing that led to this moment.

    At the risk of overly simplifying this, the core problem haunting Myanmar is ethno-nationalism and the consequences of colonialism. The British occupation of India and large sections of this region to the east are somewhere intwined in the roots of the conflicts that exist today. The British colonists set into place a racial hierarchy during their rule, and its insidious legacy permeates the politics of this country to this day. To explain how the British felt about the people who populated this region during their colonial rule, one British author at the time (N.C. MacNamara) described them as “the Irish of the East.”(p21) For anyone who does not know THAT history, coming from a British person, that is a massive insult. As was so commonly practiced when one showed up to colonize an area, the racial hierarchy was established to create conflict between those who cohabitated prior to white arrival. This way, certain groups would be held above other groups to establish a ruling racial class that would be loyal to the colonizer while subjugating the rest, all to the benefit of the colonizer. With a racial hierarchy set into place that dictated your place in society, this way of looking at the world and your neighbors becomes ingrained. The idea that there are distinctions based on visual criteria and that these differences carry important weight that indicates who you are and how you should be treated is not easily wiped away. The British, who were not alone in this sort of racial thinking at the time, were obsessed with categorizing people by race. This was apparently a very important thing to know. Without any introspection regarding the fact that these racial distinctions were largely their own creation, during the 1911 colonial census, the British began to worry that there was “racial instability” in the region. They were having trouble labeling people because the differences between these designated races were “neither definite, nor logical, nor permanent, nor easy to detect… they are unstable from generation to generation, the racial designation of a community sometimes changes so rapidly that its elders consider themselves as belonging to one race whilst their descendants claim to belong to another.”(p23) This passage is a great example of what is wrong with race as a concept to begin with, and if such importance is placed on the distinctions between races, you’ve dug your own confusing, racist grave. Unfortunately, it was not the grave of the British that was being dug, but rather the grave of those upon whom the British imposed this way of thinking.

    The colonial imposition of a racial hierarchy has infected the politics of Myanmar. Remember how I mentioned the name itself is relevant? Well, “Myanma” in the Burmese language, is an adjective that essentially means “Master race”. It does not hold the sort of connotations that this phrase elicits in those of us in the west but is rather meant to instill feelings of national pride and patriotism. Regardless of its intended purpose, the name chosen points to the underpinnings of the democracy established by Aung San Suu Kyi as being rooted in nativism and ethno-nationalism. This is where Aung San Suu Kyi as a player in this story becomes complex. 

    Considering the colonial history, there is good reason why having pride in the fact that there is a government run by people who have ancestral roots in the region as opposed to a foreign power imposing their will and reaping all the benefits, is warranted and even admirable. After growing up under imperial rule, one would rightfully be proud when your country is then freed from this rule and has the ability to govern and profit from its resources without outside forces intervening. While we see this sort of ethno-nationalism as abhorrent and anathema to a democracy, after experiencing a brutal history of foreign oppression, it is understandable why creating a government based in national pride and ethnic heritage would be a way to galvanize the citizens to rally behind their new government. Considering this, it is hard to criticize Aung San Suu Kyi’s original goal that won her the Nobel Peace Prize. Her father, Aung San, was the leader of the military government for a time as the British were losing interest in their racially complex colony. His goal, which she adopted as her own, was to establish a government in Burma that was not controlled by a military dictatorship or foreign power. An independent Burma. While her father was not successful in bringing about a new era before he was killed by a rival, just as he was supposed to usher in non-militarized home rule post-colonialism. The people of Burma saw him as a hero and a martyr for the cause of an independent Burma. Years later, Aung San Suu Kyi would pick up the mantle and similarly be seen as the great hope for a democracy ruled by the people. It is an admirable goal and is why she earned the Peace Prize after installing what looked at the time to be the most stable, free-market democracy in the region. But with the legacy of racial distinctions and a powerful military in control of most aspects of life, the democracy Aung San Suu Kyi was bringing to the newly named Myanmar in the early 90s was concerning. Concerning in that it was both, not necessarily intended to be what most westerners believed a democracy looked like, while also being doomed to crumble under the weight of a military that was more comfortable being in complete control. The government that was negotiated by Aung San Suu Kyi afforded the military much greater powers than what we would recognize as a democratic level of military control over government. This is not a criticism of Aung San Suu Kyi, but rather speaks to the obstacles she was expected to overcome and what sort of concessions she had to acquiesce to in her attempt to reach a result that was as close as she could come to what she and her father had always hoped for. 

    Since the 90s, Aung San Suu Kyi and her party, the “National League for Democracy” (NLD) were slowly yet persistently attempting to wrest more power from the military through democratic means. This process was going well, and progress had definitely been made. The greatest achievement coming this past year when the NLD won decisively in landslide victories across the country. Obviously, this seems to have been the breaking point for the military leaders and what has clearly precipitated these most recent developments. 

    So, we could just stop here and accept that a tenuous attempt at establishing a democracy failed, and resign it to the heap of democratic failures around the world where a military coup ended an unstable democracy. But that misses what is at the core of the problem. Just as the name “Myanmar” is fraught with controversy, the “National League for Democracy” is similarly not quite what it sounds like to us: “In Burmese, the word for “National” in the name of the ‘National League for Democracy’ is amyo-tha. It’s the same word for ‘race.’ ‘Race’ and ‘nation’ are synonymous, and for some ‘democracy’ should mean nothing more or less than the supremacy of the race-based nation.”(p209) This brings us to why the world has been losing faith in Aung San Suu Kyi’s vision for a democratic Myanmar.

    Over the past several years, reports were coming out of Myanmar that suggested that atrocities and gross human rights violations were growing so rampant as to amount to what many have referred to as genocide against the Muslim minority Rohingya population. More and more accounts of violence perpetrated by the more prominent (and socially favored) Buddhist population were trickling out of the country to the horror of the global community. The world expected their great hope for democracy in the region, Aung San Suu Kyi, would once again show herself as a champion of human rights. This was not to be. The Rohingya were continuing to be oppressed and sometimes slaughtered, and she had come out in defense of the military. Many would wonder if she was being silenced or coerced. But understanding how important ethno-nationalism is to the people of Myanmar, it begins to look like perhaps she truly did not believe this was a violation of human rights. Her vision of bringing democracy to Myanmar, was a democracy based on racial divisions and attitudes that had been in place there since well before even her father was born. To Aung San Suu Kyi, her goal was to protect the people she saw as her countrymen against a culture that she did not see as being her own. To her, the military leadership, and a majority of the citizens she was accountable to, alienating what they saw as an alien race in order to protect and defend HER people was an admiral goal. For many in Myanmar, the Rohingya Muslims were the ones at fault for having immigrated from a different place than them generations ago, and daring to maintain their own culture. Today in Myanmar, it is likely that many who you would come across, see the Rohingya as a dangerous threat to them and their way of life, not an oppressed minority being subjected to a genocide at the hands of their government. They believe they are protecting their culture which is based on the notion of a racial nationalism.

    This is not an effort to make you empathize with people who are accused of committing genocide. Nor am I at all denying that it is one. In fact, it is so decidedly a genocide that even the Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, famous for denying genocide, has referred to it as such. But to understand the contextual/historical reasons why a culture looks at things in a certain way, is to make progress in understanding the underlying issues that contribute to such atrocities and how to address them in a constructive way. 

    The hope that a democratic Myanmar sparked across the world turns out to have been short-lived, but it is important to do a holistic and nuanced post-mortem before we return to our old habits of sanctioning this poor country to high heaven. We’ve tried this tactic and the result is that the poorest in the country suffer the greatest consequences brought about by the sanctions. Perhaps more targeted sanctions could be considered, but unless they are carefully specified and the result of an understanding of the situational factors in the country, they will likely have a deleterious outcome for the most vulnerable citizens. Considering that the military coup has apparently detained Aung San Suu Kyi and her allies, it is as of yet unclear what her role in all this has been, and what it will be in the future. She has garnered herself numerous prominent allies and friends, in leaders across the world. From Mitch McConnell and Laura Bush, to the Clintons and Cate Blanchette, counted amongst those who have spoken highly of her, she has proven herself to be a charismatic, intelligent and complex figure. But as of now, she does not seem to be the champion of human rights she was promised to be. 

    The leaders of the military coup have announced that they believe the NLD’s wins were fraudulent and claim this to be the reason they enacted a coup. (Remind you of anyone? Lucky for us, the American coup was led by an incompetent buffoon.) They have claimed that they will hold control of the government for one year, at which time there will be elections held again. Obviously, it will be necessary to scrutinize the voting process, if one ever actually happens, to verify its legitimacy as it is hard to take seriously those who claim fraud occurred in what has been widely accepted to have been a well-executed election. It is likely that over the course of the next year the military leadership and China will begin some sort of interaction, whether friendly or contentious, and this will likely have the most impact on what direction Myanmar takes going forward. 

    Whatever happens, we have seen an attempt at democracy rise and fall in a region that has few successes on that front. This moment serves as a critically important insight into the difficult process of establishing and maintaining a democracy. Many factors play into what allows a democracy to be successful and while patriotism and nationalism are often seen as what shows the strength of a democracy, pride in one’s nation can mean very different things to different people. It might be best to ask what someone means by “national pride” before commending them for their patriotism.