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South
China Morning Post
Saturday, January 1, 2000
ASIA MILLENNIUM
Democracy beckons people as
generals remain locked in past
BURMA by WILLIAM BARNES in
Bangkok
This millennium holds the promise of dramatic change in Burma - a return
perhaps to the values of liberalism and democracy that briefly flowered after
independence a quarter of a century ago.
The current military rulers, who have held the country in an iron grip for 37 years, have repeatedly claimed to be acting consistently with traditional values and attitudes. The generals claim to be protecting and unifying the country much as did King Anawratha, who reigned from 1044 to 1077, did. Since King Anawratha, Burmese rulers have managed, at least until the British arrived in the 19th century, to be able to claim control over the whole country. In practice, this control was often nominal, with virtually autonomous states paying lip service to Burmese sovereignty. But as long as the Burmese king could set himself up as the protector of the national religion, Theravada Buddhism, and retain the loyalty of a scheming court, his rule as a god-king was unquestioned. Today's authoritarian military rulers, by scrapping even their own 1974 constitution that created a one-party state a decade ago, would certainly seem to have embraced old-style despotism. Yet however tough the old kings might have been, they undoubtedly had - at least for ethnic Burmans - the public's moral sanction to rule. Or, as the historian Josef Silverstein has noted of the military regime introduced by the General Ne Win: "It was a poor imitation of the past." If General Ne Win and his cohorts claimed to have been picking up the threads of pre-colonial culture in the years after civilian rule was overthrown in 1962, in practice they borrowed from models of communist Eastern Europe and retained much of the structure of the colonial administration. The junta reeks of arbitrary rule, a hankering for the authoritarian past and domination by ethnic Burmese. Not surprisingly, ordinary citizens in this century will continue to behave much as their ancestors did going into the last millennium - by staying out of the authorities' way as much as possible. Its still a matter of debate what the Burmese were really showing they wanted when they voted overwhelming for Aung San Suu Kyi's civilian opposition party in a quickly ignored 1990 election. But whatever they wanted there was no doubt they were opposed to military rulers who had shown themselves to be incompetent managers. Anyone who talks to ordinary Burmese today knows that what they dearly want to see is a return to at least the everyday freedoms and relative prosperity Burmese have more often than not enjoyed. The country's intellectuals will also tell you that the current junta is on the wrong side of history in turning its back not only on the freedoms that are at the heart of Burmese Buddhism but also democratic aspirations that so inspired the nationalist movement in the years before independence. |