Democracy in Myanmar

Published May 28, 2010

Democracy In Myanmar- an Oxymoron

The concept is no more than a contradiction, in a country where the daughter of a national hero, still lies under house arrest.
The ruling Burmese military junta has kept democracy under lock and key since Beatlemania. When General Ne Win first put an independent Burma under lockdown, Fidel Castro was just getting settled in Havana. That the Southeast Asian nation, under the thumb of despot Senior General Than Shwe, is set to hold democratic elections next year, is of little consolation to those inside and outside the country who have tried in vain to affect change behind the lines of the cabalists for the last decades.
A recent visit by the UN special envoy Ibrahim Gambari, for what UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon envisioned as “a view to further promoting national dialogue and reconciliation,” had Gambari left out in the cold by the Senior General, who was apparently attending to more urgent activities. So insular are the Generals, they built from scratch a new city for themselves from which to rule. They say they will hold democratic elections in 2010.
The generals have shown they are contemptuous in the extreme to outside interference, evidenced by their self-sabotage in the wake of Cyclone Nargis last year, where most international aid workers ready to help were stranded in Bangkok waiting for visas that never came (they waited for business or tourist visas—Myanmar does not offer a visa for aid workers).
“Let them eat worms,” said one general after the disaster that left thousands of Burmese homeless. The Saffron Revolution less than two years ago was quashed with brutality. At the time, photos in Thai newspapers of the army shooting down pods of protesting monks in Yangon and Mandalay, were as crass as they were cruel.
Democracy in Burma: The concept is no more than an oxymoron in a country where the woman who won a landslide victory in the country’s last democratic election in 1990 etches the 14th consecutive year of house arrest into the walls of her Yangon residence. The legal leader of Myanmar is guarded around the clock by military guards.
Aung San Suu Kyi, daughter of a national hero in Myanmar before the 1962 coup d’état, has been absent at various ceremonies around the world that would bestow awards, as prestigious as the Nobel Peace Prize, on her. 2008 was the year the junta was set to review her sentence, but it found the 63 year-old detainee too fierce a threat to let roam freely.
A free and democratic election would likely give Suu Kyi and her party their day in the sun, as according to various reports on the ground, she still enjoys much public support. The junta’s public willingness to go through with the electoral process is perplexing, but according to recent articles published in Asia Times Online, the junta is operating in complete accordance with its character.
On a recent visit to Burma, reporter Jacob Baynham met a man who, after sidling up to him, said in hushed tones, “All people like Aung San Suu Kyi, but talking, danger.” Baynham reported 1 in 4 people in the former capital, Yangon, are government informants.
Journalist Norman Robespierre (a pseudonym) reported at least eight ministers, including the mayor of Yangon, would be stepping down before the 2010 elections. He says, “Several of the outgoing ministers have served especially long tenures for Myanmar’s cut-and-thrust politics and are expected to run for office at the upcoming polls under a military-supported political party.”
Perhaps they’ve been taking notes from the political turmoil in neighboring Thailand, where ousted and exiled former Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra has managed, in absentia, to keep his pawns in play at Bangkok’s Government House. Also mimicking Thaksin’s tactics in Thailand, the ministers stepping down are using the upcoming elections to add to their personal purses.
“There are several allegations of top government officials using their positions to ramp up personal business activities before the 2010 transition towards democracy,” wrote Robespierre about the country that rates amongst the world’s worst in graft ratings, “…if the reported ministerial changes come to fruition, the departure of some of the junta’s longest-serving members will open up to a new generation of soldiers and regime loyalists some of the most lucrative ministerial positions in government.”
In a country squeezed for years by international sanctions where most of the population lives on US$1 per day, what could be so lucrative for the ruling class?
Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization, F. William Engdahl, said in a recent article that, after Afghanistan, Myanmar is the largest source for the world’s heroin, as well as being “Southeast Asia’s largest producer of methamphetamines.”
But aside from the drug trade, Myanmar is a source of what will always draw first-world powers—oil and gas; something that governments, in the quest for supplies, are willing to overlook things like human rights and fascism to secure. And In Myanmar, you go through the generals.
In 2002, said Engdahl, pressure from the British government forced two western firms, Texaco and Premier Oil, to withdraw from a drilling project in Yetagun, a pull-out Malaysia’s Petronas was glad to slurp up. For less scrupulous governments, or government not answerable to their populous—read: democratic—Myanmar is a geopolitical golden goose. Thailand’s pipeline to Burma is worth US$1 billion a year, according to Engdahl, and a democratic post-junta government in Burma may not be so eager to let China suck its oil fields dry through the foam of an unaccountable oligarchy.
Democracy in Burma? With the Generals pawning their country off like a game of Monopoly at the inhumane expense of their people, energy hungry neighbors eager to exploit resources would rather skip the democratic process. According to Canadian attorney and financial activist Robert Amsterdam, the UN is where beneficiary countries like China stall the international condemnation against the junta, by their “authoritarian veto” power.
And with the US and China still lead astray by the southeast Asian peninsula from the view of military positioning that hasn’t changed much since the Vietnam War, the answer, for now, would have to be No.

Caroline Andrade
Age: 21
Bangalore, India

Democracy in Myanmar

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