Political History
Individual Documents
Description:
"Six-and-a-half months after Senior General Min Aung Hlaing and his generals staged a coup and launched a brutal crackdown on popular resistance to the power grab, it is becoming increasingly clear that Myanmar is seeing a return to the dark old days of pre-2011 junta rule. It is particularly evident in the abolition of the freedom of expression and press freedom that the people of Myanmar were given a taste of for almost a decade. That also means that the military has killed the hopes and aspirations of millions, young and old—and that civil-military relations, a favorite subject of national and international studies, are beyond repair. The military has become the country’s most hated institution, and the political gobbledygook it produces in print and online to justify its actions would be laughable, if not for the tragedy that surrounds the bloody coup and its aftermath.
The appointment of an ex-military officer who writes under the peculiar name Chit Naing (Sate Pyin Nyar), or Chit Naing (Psychology), as the Information Minister after the coup was a clear indication of what to expect. Mischievous people with a sense of humor usually refer to him as Chit Naing (Sate Yaw Ga), or Chit Naing (Mental Case). His literary credentials rest primarily on the quantity of books he has produced, rather than their quality. Vendors who used to sell his writings on pavements in the old capital Yangon stopped doing that after the coup, while pictures on social media show the books being torn apart both by booksellers and angry customers. Chit Naing (Psychology) was promoted to “Minister of the Union Government Office” when Min Aung Hlaing formed a “Caretaker Government” on Aug. 1, which may mean that we will see more of his writings being churned out by the military’s propaganda machine.
The junta’s first lengthy attempt at disseminating its version of events to the outside world came in the form of a 118-page book that was produced in time for Min Aung Hlaing’s trip to Jakarta on April 24 to meet representatives of ASEAN. Titled “The Current Political Situation in Myanmar” and written in quaintly jumbled English, it contains accusations of protester violence including alleged attacks on the police, details of supposed fraud in the 2020 election, several references to the 2008 constitution to “prove” that the military, known as the Tatmadaw, had not broken any laws—and then an assertion and a pledge: “the Tatmadaw always keeps its promise” (sic) and “we can reassure all the member states that we will be fully cooperating with all of friendly member states including other countries across the world.” (sic) Then, the supposed author, Min Aung Hlaing, added a caveat: “We can vividly learn that the interesting issues have emerged in all respective ASEAN member states…I kindly remind all of you that we may possibly face with certain difficulties, it we miss something at the certain corner.” (sic)
Before that, the military produced much shorter newsletters called “Information Sheet” with headlines such as “Containing Riotous Situations in Some Townships in Line with Rules and Regulations”, “The Rioters’ Conducting Anarchic Mob like Activities and Sabotage Activities”, and “Findings on the Announcement of UEC [Union Election Commission] regarding the Inspection of the Voter Lists and Withdrawal/Receipt/Use Remaining Ballot Papers.” An amnesty announcement from the military’s “information team” published in the official newspaper The Global New Light of Myanmar on April 2 was headlined: “Re-invitation to Myanmar citizens who have arrived at various regions for many reasons.”
While it may be easy to make fun of the military spokespersons’ lack of proficiency in English, their mumbo jumbo doesn’t make any more sense in Burmese, thus echoing the disinformation campaigns of old juntas, the State Law and Order Restoration Council (SLORC), which was set up after the 1988 massacres and in 1997 became the more palatably named State Peace and Development Council (SPDC).
In the late 1980s, the military published collections of speeches by SLORC chairman General Saw Maung, and, at the same time, a book titled “A Skyful of Lies” (sic) accusing the BBC, the VOA and other foreign broadcasters of reporting falsehoods about the situation in Myanmar. But street vendors were soon forbidden to sell both books at the same time because crafty street vendors would first hold up one of the them, saying “General Saw Maung’s speeches!”, then lower their hand and raise the other holding the book about the broadcasters: “All lies!” So it became “General Saw Maung’s speeches! All lies!” It is unclear whether any vendors were arrested for making this rather humorous protest against military rule.
In fact, the lies begin on the front page of The Global New Light of Myanmar and its Burmese edition, Myanmar Alin. “Founded in 1914” has at last been taken off the English edition but it remains on the Burmese version. While it is true that a vernacular newspaper called Myanma Alin with The New Light of Myanmar on the front page also in English was founded in 1914, it has nothing to do with today’s paper of the same name. The real New Light of Myanmar was very outspoken against colonial rule and, from 1920 to 1947, managed by U Tin, a well-respected newspaperman who became independent Myanmar’s first Minister of Finance and Revenue. But that paper was shut down by the military in 1969.
After general Ne Win’s coup in 1962, his ruling Burma Socialist Program Party began publishing its own, tabloid-sized propaganda sheet called The Working People’s Daily in English and Loktha Pyithu Nezin in Burmese. That name was not in line with the new, ostensibly free-market oriented policies that were introduced after 1988, so the name of the state organ was changed to The New Light of Myanmar and Myanma Alin respectively. U Tin would turn in his grave if he knew about this theft of the name of his paper. Its website claims that it is “Myanmar’s oldest English daily” and the lie has even made it into Wikipedia, where it says that “the newspaper was founded in 1914.”
How many others this has fooled is hard to say, but it can’t include many of those who are familiar with the history of the media in Myanmar. Successive attempts by the generals at presenting themselves in a more favorable light have been equally unsuccessful. After the February coup, the latest junta, the State Administration Council (SAC), hired Dickens & Madson, a firm headed by Israeli-Canadian lobbyist Ari Ben-Menashe, to help polish its image. According to documents filed with the US Justice Department, the contract Dickens & Madson signed with Myanmar’s military leadership is worth US$2 million and is designed to explain “the real situation in the country” and to communicate with the United States and other counties who had “misunderstood them.”
Ben-Menashe’s own record is far from stellar. A former Israeli intelligence officer, he was arrested in the US in 1989 for violating the law by trying to sell three C-130 Hercules transport aircraft to Iran, but was later acquitted. After that, he worked as a PR agent for Zimbabwe’s strongman Robert Mugabe and Zimbabwe-born drug trafficker Paul Le Roux (who after his arrest in the US agreed to cooperate with its Drug Enforcement Administration), and Sudanese warlord General Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, whose forces committed crimes against humanity in Darfur in 2014-15.
Ben-Menashe’s involvement in Myanmar goes back to the 1990s when he, according to internal documents in my possession, tried to sell sophisticated military equipment to the Tatmadaw, including missiles and attack helicopters. Nothing came of those attempts, but his standing with the Tatmadaw doesn’t seem to have been shaken by those shenanigans. Even so, his $2-million deal with the SAC appears to have come to nothing. In mid-July, Ben-Menashe announced that he had ceased working with the generals because sanctions prevented him from being paid.
The track records of previously employed PR firms also leave little hope for Myanmar’s generals. Few, if any, of those efforts to gloss over Tatmadaw atrocities had any influence on US and other Western opinions. The first was also the worst of several ill-fated attempts at improving the image of the Tatmadaw. It involved Edward von Kloberg, whom many described as “a lobbyist from hell”. Prior to representing the Myanmar Embassy in Washington after the 1988 pro-democracy uprising, he had defended Iraq’s Saddam Hussein, Liberian coup maker Samuel Doe, Romania’s tyrant Nicolae Ceausescu and Zaire’s dictator Mobutu Sese Seko. Alexander Cockburn and Ken Silverstein write in their book Washington Babylon about von Kloberg that “even within the amoral world of Washington lobbying, [he] stands out for handling clients that no one else would touch.” Sick and broke, von Kloberg committed suicide in 2005 by jumping from the walls of the Castel Sant’Angelo in Rome.
Next in line was Jefferson Waterman International, then headed by Ann Wrobleski, who had served as assistant secretary of state under President Ronald Reagan in 1986 and was instrumental in denying Myanmar US anti-narcotics aid following the 1988 massacres. At that time, she said Myanmar was unlikely to make progress in fighting narcotics “until a government enjoying greater credibility and support among the Burmese people than the current military regime [is] seated in Rangoon.” As a PR agent for the generals, Wrobleski advertised Myanmar as a “beautiful and exotic country” and repeated the generals’ claim that the US had engaged in terrorism by supporting pro-democracy groups outside the country. That did not help the military dictatorship burnish its reputation in the US or elsewhere; nor did endeavors by the Atlantic Group, a lobbying group that was working more directly to help overturn US sanctions, or the DCI Group, which was hired for the same purpose.
The sad state of the media in Myanmar under military rule does not do justice to the country’s rich literary and intellectual traditions. Prior to the 1962 military takeover, the country had more than 30 daily newspapers. Apart from the leading ones in Burmese and English, there were also five in Chinese, two in Hindi, and one each in Urdu, Tamil, Telugu and Gujarati, apart from magazines and journals in Shan, Kachin, Karen and other ethnic minority languages. The vitality of Myanmar’s press was effectively undermined at the beginning of 1964 when the Law to Protect National Solidarity was promulgated. All privately owned newspapers were to be banned and all their property and assets confiscated. Printing, the military stated, had to be done only in English or Burmese. Apart from The Working People’s Daily and the Loktha Pyithu Nezin, there were three papers—the Guardian, Kyemon and Botahtaung—that had been nationalized by the then junta, Ne Win’s Revolutionary Council, and ceased being independent publications.
Nothing changed until the August-September 1988 uprising, when the traditional creativity of the Myanmar psyche flourished again after 26 years of silence. New privately produced publications appeared, some daily, some intermittent, with fanciful names such as The Light of Dawn, The Liberation Daily, Scoop, Victory and The Newsletter. But that brief period of freedom ended when the military stepped in on Sept. 18 to reassert power and announced the formation of the SLORC. People were gunned down in the streets of Yangon and elsewhere, thousands were arrested and former activists fled to Thailand and India, where new publications—first printed and later online—began to appear. One of them was The Irrawaddy, which first appeared as a newsletter in Bangkok in 1990, published by exiles from Myanmar.
It was not until after the 2010 election and the appointment the following year of a quasi-civilian government headed by Thein Sein, a former general, that Myanmar experienced another rebirth of its proud media traditions. But that too has now come to an end, as the military is tightening its grip on the nation. Journalists especially have become targets of the SAC’s efforts to try to crush all opposition to its self-imposed rule. Many journalists, poets and other writers are languishing in jails all over the country. Many more are in hiding while a fortunate few have managed to flee to other countries. The Committee to Protect Journalists stated in a July report that Myanmar has become “one of the world’s worst jailers of journalists.”
At the same, two things are evident: Myanmar’s generals don’t realize they have no credibility, and they have not learned from the past. They are yet again printing crude propaganda and wasting huge amounts of money on feeble and fruitless attempts at defending their violent repression of a population that does not want to live under yet another dictatorship. The independent press is back in exile, now using the internet to disseminate their work and, in that way, reaching many more people inside the country than the printed publications ever did after the 1988 crackdown, when there was no digital media.
It is anybody’s guess how long it may take before the exiled journalists can return to Myanmar and continue the work they were doing before the coup. But the formation of a “caretaker government” with Min Aung Hlaing as its prime minister and characters like Chit Naing (Psychology) in charge of publicity is a clear sign that the military is determined to exercise absolute power for many years to come. “Free and fair” polls in 2023 and then a transfer of power to a popularly elected government, as the Tatmadaw has promised? Only fools, and perhaps the military’s ASEAN allies, would believe that is a likely scenario. It is, to quote what the street vendors in Yangon said in the late 1980s, “All Lies!”
Source/publisher:
"The Irrawaddy" (Thailand)
Date of publication:
2021-08-16
Date of entry/update:
2021-08-16
Grouping:
Individual Documents
Category:
2021 Burma/Myanmar coup d'état, Politics and Government - global and regional - general studies, strategies, theory, Military History, Political History
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Description:
"Myanmar’s military regime, which has dubbed itself the State Administration Council since the February 1 coup, recently proclaimed that it was inaugurating a caretaker government which will step down after cleaning up the mess left behind by what the junta regards as an incompetent and corrupt National League for Democracy (NLD) administration. An election is supposed to follow sometime in 2023 and a new government will then be inaugurated.
The term ‘caretaker government’ invokes remembrance of times past and the first of four military interventions following independence. Between 1958 and 1960, a highly successful, if authoritarian and dictatorial, military administration governed. It was formed on the basis of a “constitutional coup”, as military control seemed inevitable but was in fact approved by the legislature. Following that interregnum, the military held free elections, in which its preferred party lost, and the military retired [temporarily], returning the government to the then Prime Minister U Nu.
In 1960, the military proclaimed its outstanding success. On terminating its ruling role, it specifically likened its accomplishments to Hercules cleaning out the Augean Stables. Its Ministry of Information acclaimed its deeds in the volume: Is Trust Vindicated? A Chronicle of a Trust, Striving, and Triumph. Being an Account of the Accomplishments of the Government of the Union of Burma, November 1, 1958-February 1, 1960. In the estimations of today’s internal or external observers, will this present caretaker regime succeed as the first caretaker government did in 1958-60? As Eliza Doolittle said in My Fair Lady, “Not bloody likely”.
The origins and conditions of both coups are different. In 1958, the politically ubiquitous Anti-Fascist People’s Freedom League was split by personal rivalries and civil war was feared by the military, which was already fighting two communist insurgencies and a Karen rebellion. It was a peaceful transfer of power, with little overt dissent, at least among the majority Bamar people, because of the blatantly ineffective civilian administration.
The military substituted army officers in critical positions throughout the government and they were uncorrupt and effective, if demanding and insensitive to local feelings. But there were no political arrests and no one was killed. What was a loss for democratic governance was compensated for by a string of successful economic, political and even international measures.
Prices were forcibly lowered in the bazaars, the military efficiently ran an extensive series of economic ventures, some 170,000 squatters were removed to the outskirts of Rangoon, the legal prerogatives of the Shan sawbwas were terminated, education was improved and a Burmese Oxford professor became vice-chancellor of Rangoon University, while a border agreement was negotiated with China. This period may have provided both the rationale and belief for the military that it could effectively run the country for a longer period. History has proven this to have been an illusion.
Present conditions are counter to those of 1958. The NLD’s sweeping victory in the November 2020 election may not have been an endorsement of the rather ineffective Daw Aung San Suu Kyi government, although it probably was an endorsement of her personally, but it evidently reflected the widespread distrust of another potential administration influenced or controlled by the military. The extensive nationwide violence against the subsequent coup, whose opponents straddle all classes and regions, is an indication that the fairly extensive reforms of freedom over the previous decade have inoculated the population against repression. The military has responded with over 900 civilian deaths and more than 5,000 arrests and the people are equally vehement in their rejection of the coup. The deaths, violence, and unrest associated with the current state of play in Myanmar will not go unremembered in the future.
In 1958, the military was uncorrupt, vigorous and motivated by a sense of patriotism in saving the state from unprincipled civilian politicians it regarded as bent on their own aggrandizement or, in the case of Prime Minister U Nu, adhering to his unrealistic Buddhist-based sense of governance. The same cannot be said today, with the generals in control of much of the economy and retired members of the military and their cohorts ensconced in positions of economic advantage. Shared poverty was once a national characteristic. It isn’t now.
Today’s resistance to the military is unprecedented in modern Burmese history, surpassing the failed people’s revolution in 1988. Then, the slaughter by the military was far greater but resistance was not founded on violence. Today, the widespread opposition has discarded Daw Aung San Suu Kyi’s former insistence on non-violence. Death tolls on all sides continue to climb. As hostilities on both sides continue, the purist moral position of the opposition will probably suffer.
Some talk of the beginnings of civil war or a Syrian-style debacle. These seem extreme views but, even if the military were able to prevail until their supposed departure from office in 2023, public acquiescence is far more difficult. The exposure to freedoms built over the previous decade vaccinates against easy compliance with any new government the military would be willing to tolerate. Its objective is evidently to destroy the NLD and render Daw Aung San Suu Kyi politically demolished for her remaining vital years either in jail, under house arrest or under legal and political restrictions that the military will enact.
The next two years, whatever the outcome, will be difficult and destructive. The caretaker government concept is more akin to a warden monitoring the activities of the state’s confined inmates, alas, than the nurturing of the needy.
David I. Steinberg is distinguished professor of Asian studies emeritus, Georgetown University..."
Source/publisher:
"The Irrawaddy" (Thailand)
Date of publication:
2021-08-14
Date of entry/update:
2021-08-14
Grouping:
Individual Documents
Category:
2021 Burma/Myanmar coup d'état, Politics and Government - global and regional - general studies, strategies, theory, Politics, Government and Governance - Burma/Myanmar - general studies, Political History
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Protests were staged around the country on Sunday as a younger generation renews the struggle against military rule
Description:
"As Myanmar marked the 33rd anniversary of the “Four Eights” pro-democracy uprising on Sunday, activists around the country renewed calls to end military rule once and for all.
Anti-dictatorship protests were held in both urban and rural areas to commemorate the 1988 uprising, which began on August 8 of that year and was crushed the following month by a bloody coup that claimed thousands of lives.
Coming 188 days after the latest military coup, the anniversary was remembered with a renewed sense of urgency, with many activists linking the two events.
“Let’s struggle together towards completion of the unfinished 8-8-88 people’s liberation movement” was a slogan seen on placards and banners at a number of protests.
Some signs, meanwhile, bore starker messages.
“Blood that was shed in ’88 must be repaid in ’21,” read one that hearkened back to the violence that ushered in nearly a quarter century of brutal military rule.
That era ostensibly ended a decade ago after the military orchestrated a “transition” to quasi-civilian rule that left its power largely intact.
However, the country was again plunged into crisis when the military seized direct control on February 1, citing alleged irregularities in last year’s election.
Since then, the newly installed regime has killed nearly a thousand civilians and arrested another 7,000 in an effort to crush a massive popular resistance movement reminiscent of the one that emerged in 1988.
Many who came out into the streets on Sunday made it clear that they considered themselves heirs of that earlier struggle.
“We are carrying over the effort of previous generations who fought against the military dictatorship. The responsibility falls upon our generation now – a student activist.”
“The current generation must learn from history and defeat the fascist military dictatorship once and for all,” the General Strike Committee, a protest organizing coalition, said in a statement released ahead of the protests.
Nyi Zaw, the chair of the Yangon University Students’ Union, also pointed to the intergenerational nature of the current anti-coup movement.
“We are carrying over the effort of previous generations who fought against the military dictatorship. The responsibility falls upon our generation now,” he told Myanmar Now.
Others, meanwhile, called for unity among anti-regime forces, including people of different ethnicities, and emphasized the endurance of the resistance movement.
“Our public struggle and resilience over the past six months are the best proof that we will achieve victory,” said Tayzar San, a prominent anti-coup activist from Mandalay, who spoke to Myanmar Now on Sunday.
One of the most prominent voices of the 1988 uprising used the occasion of the anniversary to denounce the military for acting in bad faith during its past engagement with pro-democracy forces.
“It seems that we need to win by a knockout. Fine, then. We’ll give them a knockout – Min Ko Naing.”
Min Ko Naing, a former student leader who spent nearly two decades in prison for his outspoken opposition to military rule, told Myanmar Now he didn’t think the younger generation would fall for the “lies” that kept the former regime in power for so long.
“All their lies were unmasked on February 1,” he said.
As hundreds of members of the Myanmar diaspora gathered in Washington, D.C., on Sunday to call on US support for the shadow National Unity Government, Min Ko Naing also reflected on the international response to the crisis in Myanmar.
“Our people have fought every round and won every one with a high score. The world knows that. But it seems that we need to win by a knockout. Fine, then. We’ll give them a knockout,” he said..."
Source/publisher:
"Myanmar Now" (Myanmar)
Date of publication:
2021-08-08
Date of entry/update:
2021-08-09
Grouping:
Individual Documents
Category:
Anti-coup protesters, 2021 Burma/Myanmar coup d'état, Freedom of Movement, violations of in Burma/Myanmar, The Military's political role, Political History
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"On this day thirty-three years ago, the entire nation of Myanmar, comprising of all ethnic communities and the whole swathe of the society from the religious leaders to students, intellectuals, workers and peasants, yearning for freedom and democracy, joined hands and took part in the ‘8888’ Revolution against military dictatorship. The people of Myanmar defied brutal and ruthless suppression by the military regime, which unleashed indiscriminate killings, torture and incarceration; their brave and selfless sacrifice earned the 8888 Revolution a hallowed place in the history of our nation’s democratic evolution.
Even though the 8888 Revolution did not lead to immediate victory for the people, the movement was nonetheless crucial in putting our nation on the path to freedom and democracy. The people of Myanmar have consistently and resolutely demonstrated our rejection of one-party and military dictatorships. From the 7th July Yangon University protests of 1962, U Thant funeral crisis of 1974, workers’ strike of 1975, Thakhin Kodaw Hmaing centenary uprising of 1976, the ‘8888’ movement of 1988, students’ strike of 1996 to the Saffron Revolution of 2007, we have long proved by our actions that we will never bow before our oppressors in our struggle for freedom.
Thirty-three years from the historic 8888 Revolution, the people of Myanmar are now waging ‘Spring Revolution’ to uproot the military dictatorship and to establish a fair and just society where equality and democratic rights are assured to all citizens and communities in our Union.
Since 1958 in Myanmar, a dictatorship with its despotic rulers had not only repressed our citizenry throughout successive eras, but also reduced one of the richest countries in Southeast Asia to become one of the poorest and most backward in the world. From the beginning of 2015, under the leadership of the first civilian government in generations, the whole country had strived hard to place ourselves on a true path to democracy, yet the reckless seizure of state power in a coup d’état by a covetous, greedy military clique had reversed our gains and brought untold hardship and enormous challenges to the people.
With firm belief in democracy and revulsion of military totalitarianism, which are both firmly rooted in the 8888 Revolution, the people of Myanmar are presently waging a historic and momentous revolution to rid ourselves of the military dictatorship that for many decades had been committing unspeakable crimes, and to uproot the evil system of military domination from our soil once and for all.
With principles and conviction borne out of the 8888 Revolution and the determination to persevere in the 2021 Spring Revolution till our ultimate and inevitable success, we the National Unity Government wish to honour all those who share our ideals, be they individual citizens inside Myanmar, freedom-loving expatriates, or those friends and supporters from abroad who cherish democracy. We, the National Unity Government, in conveying this message of commemoration, do solemnly undertake to pay homage to our heroes who had given blood, sweat and tears, and our martyrs who had made the ultimate sacrifice, by toiling day and night to achieve victory that our people so justly deserve..."
Source/publisher:
National Unity Government of Myanmar
Date of publication:
2021-08-08
Date of entry/update:
2021-08-08
Grouping:
Individual Documents
Category:
National Unity Government (NUG), Politics and Government - global and regional - general studies, strategies, theory, The Military's political role, Political History, Military History
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Description:
"Non-democratic regimes often – but not always – seek to institutionalize their
political domination and immunity through the enactment of a specifically
designed constitutional document (Ginsburg and Simpser 2014). Military
regimes, in particular, can use constitutional texts to strengthen the foundations of
the political intervention of the armed forces (Feit 1972; Finer 1975; Stepan
1988). Likewise, when military juntas ultimately set in motion a transition from
direct military rule to a civilian one, the armed forces are often tempted to control
the constitution-drafting process and secure key legal prerogatives for the military
institution under a new hybrid “post-junta” regime (Barros 2002, Croissant and
Kamerling 2013; Chambers 2014; Negretto 2014). Myanmar2
offers a case of a
dominant military institution using a constitutional drafting process and a new
supreme law for its own corporate interests. Indeed, the constitution adopted in
2008 confers high levels of policy prerogatives upon the Burmese armed forces –
or Tatmadaw – and embeds “praetorianism”3
in Myanmar’s polity in a way that
the country’s two previous post-independence constitutions had not. Since it won
its freedom from the British in 1948, Myanmar has produced three constitutions.
The first postcolonial constitutional text was adopted in 1947, but its provisions
were suspended after the coup d’état staged by General Ne Win in March 1962.
A second constitution drafted by Ne Win’s military administration was passed in
1974, but was abrogated in September 1988 following a further coup d’état
orchestrated by the Tatmadaw leadership. The third and latest constitutional document was promulgated in 2008 after a controversial drafting process that lasted
15 years. All three constitutional texts which Myanmar adopted in 1947, 1974,
and 2008 were quite different in content and spirit. They were framed in different
political contexts and under the supervision of different leaderships with divergent political agendas. Above all, they made very different references (if at all) to
the role of the Tatmadaw as a major state institution and potential policy-maker.
The texts adopted in 1947 and 1974 indeed aimed to neither entrench military
rule nor institutionalize the political intervention of the armed forces.
This chapter seeks to understand how and why the Tatmadaw has chosen to
formulate its own constitutional vision in the early 1990s and thereafter establish a legal political system, which I define as “constitutional praetorianism.”
Drawing on the extant literature on postcolonial Myanmar politics, this chapter
first provides a comparative overview of the first two postcolonial constitutions
of the country and examines why both documents bestowed a marginal role upon
the Burmese military. The study then focuses on the country’s third constitution,
which was adopted following a controversial referendum in 2008. It argues that
the constitutional text embeds and institutionalizes praetorianism. As the literature on civil–military relations demonstrates, there are different levels of political intervention by the armed forces: they range from direct military rule to
hybrid systems led by civilians, but in which the armed forces remain a powerful
lobby (Egreteau and Jagan 2013; Bünte 2014). Building on this scholarship as
well as on a series of interviews with Burmese parliamentarians and party
leaders carried out in both Yangon and Naypyitaw (2013–2014), this chapter
argues that the 2008 constitution serves three clear purposes for the Burmese
armed forces. First, it manifests the Tatmadaw’s view of itself as a legitimate
political and policy-making state actor following 60 years of regular and pervasive intrusion into Burmese postcolonial politics and public affairs.
Second, it provides the military with legal instruments for a long-term policy
intervention and influence. Third, it offers the armed forces and their personnel a
form of self-insurance protecting soldiers from any form of prosecution and
securing a much sought-after immunity for the leaders of the 1988 coup d’état.
As long as this unhealthy policy influence of the army institution prevails, constitutionalism will not emerge in Myanmar. A thorough revision of the 2008
constitution remains highly unlikely. Despite the formation of a joint parliamentary committee tasked specifically to propose potential amendments, the
first-ever attempt at reviewing the constitutional text was vetoed by the militaryappointed representatives in June 2015. Given the country’s historical and political legacies of military intervention, ethnic separatist insurgency, and political
instability, I conclude this chapter with the bleak prospects for swift constitutional reform unless the Tatmadaw decides otherwise.
Army and constitutions in Myanmar: a background
A civilian supremacy in the 1947 constitution
The 1947 constitution4
was designed to ensure a smooth – but quick – transfer of
power from British colonial rule to an independent and, above all, legitimate
Burmese civilian administration (Steinberg 2006: 199). Despite flaws, the constitution envisioned a federal state structure and a multi-party parliamentary system
with competitive and regular elections to be held once independence was granted
on January 4, 1948 (Inlow 1948; Maung Maung 1959). There were no nonmilitary functions assigned to the Burmese armed forces, nor any specific prerogative for the wider security forces enshrined in the document. The weakness
of the Burmese military forces in the last months of colonial rule may explain
this lack of involvement in constitutional drafting. Since the early 1940s, the
Soldiers, state, and constitutions in Myanmar 119
driving force behind the Burmese independence struggle had been the Burma
Independence (and, from 1943, National) Army (BIA/BNA) under the aegis of a
young military officer, Aung San. Yet, despite the glory inherited from several
years of anti-colonial and then anti-Japanese fighting, it was not the nascent Tatmadaw that was asked to frame the first charter of the country after the end of
the war in 1945. Rather, the Anti-Fascist People’s Freedom League (AFPFL) – a
loose coalition of political parties, charismatic politicians, and pre-war student
activists – took up the task. At that time, the Tatmadaw was a fragile body, illequipped to form a powerful policy lobby. It also had to face myriad rival private
armies and ethnic militias operating throughout the country (Callahan 2003:
115–116). Therefore, its senior officers, themselves bogged down in inter-ethnic
dissension, could not ensure a crucial role for the military in shaping the new
state structures.
A civilian committee of legal, political, and academic experts gathered in
1946 to draft a new constitution. A constituent assembly was elected in April
1947. It discussed several drafts prepared by the committee. The final one was
eventually adopted on September 24, 1947 – two months after Aung San’s assassination. Despite shortcomings and flaws, the constitutional text provided legitimacy to the newly created state, but interestingly not to the actors who
participated in the independence struggle – the Tatmadaw in particular. This
underscored some initial efforts by the AFPFL to keep the military out of politics. Aung San himself had relinquished his own military positions early on.
This was not without debate, though. As highlighted by Maung Maung (1959:
146–147), in one of the first constitutional drafts submitted to the Constituent
Assembly in June 1947, one article proposed the creation of a special “Defence
Council.” Through this non-elected body the President of the Union would have
exercised “the supreme command of the armed forces.” But the proposal was
dropped at Aung San’s own suggestion. Thus, in the final text, the Burmese
armed forces were not granted any special place: they had to remain subordinate
to the post-independence elected civilian authorities. Besides, to avoid the maintenance of competing private armies, the right to raise and maintain national
military forces was then vested exclusively in the elected Parliament seated in
Rangoon (Article 97 of the 1947 constitution).
The first post-independence constitutional framework lasted less than 15
years. During the 1950s, the raging civil war between Myanmar’s central government and myriad ethnic and communist insurgencies propelled a more cohesive Tatmadaw into broader non-military policy roles. Under the charismatic
leadership of General Ne Win, uncontested army chief from 1949, the Tatmadaw
soon transformed itself into a disciplined and unified corporate institution,
increasingly willing to discuss policy issues and civilian affairs (Callahan 2003).
Above all, it started to openly highlight its legitimate role as guardian of the
nation and its institutions against an array of centrifugal insurgencies, but also
external threats – a common trend observed among coup-prone armed forces in
the rapidly decolonizing world at that time. A mere decade after the country’s
independence, Maung Maung indeed noted: “the role of the [Defense] Services 120 R. Egreteau
as a guardian of the constitution and servant of the people has [now] been clearly
defined and deeply impressed on all officers and men by General Ne Win”
(Maung Maung 1959: 146).
The 1974 constitution: drafted by, but not for, the Tatmadaw
A first political intervention of the Tatmadaw was staged in September 1958.
General Ne Win then formed a caretaker military administration at the invitation
of U Nu, leader of the civilian government since February 1957. Sanctioned by
Parliament a month later, this caretaker government – a perfect example of a
short-lived praetorian intrusion into politics – lasted a year and a half. The
military hierarchy kept its initial promises to hold national elections, and then
withdrew to its barracks in April 1960 (Butwell 1961). However, a full-fledged
military coup was ultimately staged by Ne Win on March 2, 1962. Less than two
years after the caretaker administration was disbanded, the Tatmadaw clearly
stepped in – this time without any invitation from the civilian authorities. The
1947 constitution was not abrogated per se, but gradually all its fundamentals
were nullified. Unlike in 1958, Parliament was dissolved a day after the coup,
and the Supreme Court and the High Courts of the country were disbanded. A
socialist revolution was then imposed, one that could not be defined by a constitution, but rather by well-oiled propaganda and ad hoc legislation enacted by the
military rulers (Badgley 1962; Cady 1965). The 17-member Revolutionary
Council formed by Ne Win in March 1962 began to shape the new state institutions and ideology through the release of various official documents and policy
statements.5
These included the “Burmese Way to Socialism” (April 1962) and
the “The System of Correlation of Man and His Environment” (January 1963),
which both outlined the official ideology of the Burma Socialist Programme
Party (BSPP). The core objective of this newly formed legitimate political party
was to mobilize and educate the Burmese population about the revolution and to
pave the way for a socialist democracy under the monitoring of the Revolutionary Council (BSPP 1963; Taylor 2009: 298–300). According to the original
Revolutionary Council’s statements this had to be fulfilled during a “transitional
period.” Once the socialist revolution was deemed secure, the civilianization of
the regime, installed in 1962, could be initiated, and the disbanding of the
Revolutionary Council prepared – but not before.
For that, conditions were deemed more favorable by Ne Win – then Chair of
the BSPP – in the late 1960s. An observer of the time, Jon A. Wiant, argued that
the BSPP could not long remain the sole instrument of the Tatmadaw or of its
core leadership gathered in the Revolutionary Council (Wiant 1973: 182). Progressively, the need for the institutionalization of a civilian power and the withdrawal of the armed forces from the front scene – and therefore a new
constitution – appeared obvious to the military top brass and to Ne Win himself.
During a BSPP party meeting in 1965, Ne Win made his first public speech
about the need for transition to civilian rule (Nakanishi 2013: 112). Therefore, a
constitution-making process which claimed to involve the Burmese people was Soldiers, state, and constitutions in Myanmar 121
gradually initiated. In 1969, Ne Win asked a panel of civilian experts to make
recommendations on new state institutions. For the first time since the 1962
coup, the regime openly hinted at a possible termination of the revolutionary
moment imposed by the army seven years before.
In September 1971, a 97-member committee convened. Its aim was to draft
the new constitutional text (Moscotti 1977: 7). The process, however, was still
heavily influenced by the military leadership. Indeed, one-third of the committee
comprised high-ranking officers. Fifteen subcommittees were formed but all
were headed by a member of the still active Revolutionary Council. Yet, the
latter was openly looking for a way to bestow some sort of legitimacy upon the
whole process. Ne Win, as well as the members of the 15 subcommittees, toured
the country for months between 1971 and 1973, coordinating thousands of meetings with representatives of the people, the peasantry, the workers, and the
armed forces in their barracks (Arumugam 1975: 41). The well-orchestrated
organization of mass meetings and public consultations aimed to enlist people’s
suggestions on each successive constitutional draft which had been prepared by
the committee. In fact, it was a ritualistic and theatrical exercise purported to
confer upon the document the necessary popular legitimacy that Ne Win was
seeking for the post-Revolutionary Council regime (Steinberg 2006: 183). Ne
Win and other army leaders had long considered the 1947 constitution to be the
product of a handful of elite lawyers, foreign legal experts, and Burmese politicians (Moscotti 1977: 4). By involving mass consultations of the people or at
least giving the impression that the Burmese population had been involved in the
constitutional process, Ne Win sought a broader legitimacy for the new state
institutions.
The fourth constitutional draft was eventually submitted to a national referendum in December 1973. It was claimed that over 90 percent of Burma’s eligible
voters approved the constitutional draft in a tightly controlled vote. The new
constitution6
was then promulgated on the twenty-sixth anniversary of the country’s independence, namely January 4, 1974. A month later national elections
were held, as the new constitutional text envisioned a (single-party) parliamentary system. Once the unicameral People’s Assembly (or Pyithu Hluttaw)
was convened, a few weeks after the elections the transfer of power from the
military-run Revolutionary Council to a civilian government dominated by the
sole BSPP became effective. Ne Win was elected president, and on March 4 he
nominated the new members of his Cabinet, all civilians.7
As long-time Burma
watcher Josef Silverstein then noted, Burma entered a new phase of “constitutional dictatorship” (Silverstein 1977: 35). The 1974 constitution indeed offered
the military-run Revolutionary Council and the armed forces a tool to withdraw
from the direct policy-making process by institutionalizing the authoritarian rule
of a single and trusted political party, the BSPP (Silverstein 1974). The text
allowed the concentration of power in the sole hands of party members and their
local representatives. Nonetheless, in the late 1970s, most of them happened to
be active Tatmadaw officers seconded to the party bureaucracy or retired military
officers (Nakanishi 2013: 108–109)..."
Source/publisher:
Politics and Constitutions in Southeast Asia
Date of publication:
2017-00-00
Date of entry/update:
2021-08-07
Grouping:
Individual Documents
Category:
Politics and Government - global and regional - general studies, strategies, theory, Politics, Government and Governance - Burma/Myanmar - general studies, Military History, Political History
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"Over the past decade, Myanmar has undergone a rapid period of political reform as it has
transitioned away from a military junta towards a civilian and democratically elected government. This period has witnessed a series of land governance reforms, being pulled into
various directions by Myanmar’s pluralistic society and land use and tenure practices,
resulting in overlapping and conflicting policies and legal frameworks in land governance.
Struggles over control and access to land and territory are one of the most pressing political issues facing the new National League for Democracy (NLD) government, which won
a historical victory in the 2015 general elections under the leadership of Daw Aung San
Suu Kyi. Maintaining its broad base support and legitimacy largely hinges on the government’s ability to tackle pressing land governance issues, while dealing with various democratic, ethnic, and developmental crises that plague the country (Callahan 2003; Ferguson
2014; Grundy-Warr and Yin 2002; Willis 2013). The military and its cronies have engaged in
a long history of land grabbing that has sparked protests and civil strife (Aung 2015; Gee
2005; Jones 2014a; Woods 2011). Ongoing discussion on peace processes between ethnic
armed organizations and the central government and military are in large part concerned
with territorial boundaries of ethnic states and authority within them (Einzenberger 2016;
Hong 2017; Kramer 2015). Insecure peasant access to and unclear ownership over land,
due to the central government’s lack of recognition of customary land tenure systems,
has hampered prospects of rural economic development throughout the country
(Boutry et al. 2017; Huard 2016).
This paper looks at how farmers and state actors shape and reshape legal pluralism
within the context of dual authority, where both the Myanmar central government and
the Karen National Union1 (KNU), the latter being the leading political organization representing the Karen’s struggle for political self-determination, are responsible for land management in their respective, albeit overlapping, territories. It illustrates the ongoing power
struggle centered on the central government’s and the KNU’s interests and strategies to
increase the land area under their respective administration, and how this corresponds
with customary tenure systems and farmers’ views on land tenure security and strategies
to ensure their land rights. Two village case studies in Karen State are used to illustrate how
farmers shape their strategies to secure their land rights while navigating through the
blurred boundaries of competing legal systems and spaces, embedded in the context
of dual authority.
The paper looks at state spatiality as complex processes and practices of socio-spatial
regulation across scales shaping and reshaping state-society relations. Placing dual authority as one of the building blocks for state transformation, it illustrates how political authority produces rights, and vice versa (Lund and Rahman 2018), within the context of legal
and institutional pluralism. It shows how these processes and practices are rooted in the
production of political space, centering on farmers’ strategies to strengthen their land
rights, and how these are entangled in the central government-farmers-KNU power
relations. In particular, it looks at: (1) the conflicting legal frameworks pertaining to land
governance in the country; (2) how these legal frameworks are negotiated and appropriated at the village level through various means and institutional set up, including
how they interact with customary land rights; and (3) how it reflects back on and influences farmers’ land tenure security. Building on legal pluralism research (von Benda-Beckmann, von Benda-Beckmann, and Spiertz 1996; Moore 1986; Van der Linden 1989), we
argue that while inconsistent policies and legal frameworks leave the door wide open
for land expropriation, as powerful actors shop for suitable and applicable laws to serve
their interests, it also serves as an entry point for less powerful actors to increase their
room to maneuver and reclaim their rights. Here, rather than portraying inconsistent,
conflicting legal frameworks as merely a sign of a weak legal system in Myanmar’s land
governance, we position it as an entry point for farmers and local communities to fight
for their land rights.
Building on Mann’s definition of states as merely [consisting of] ‘some degree of authoritative rule making and some organized political force’ (Brenner et al. 2003, 125), we view
states as both sets of institutions and an expression of social power relations. As stated by
Jones (2014b, 146): ‘States are seen as being produced, transformed and constrained by
conflicts between social forces, … as they struggle for power and control over resources’.
2
Building on Brenner et al.’s (2003, 11) definition of states as ‘dynamically evolving spatial
entities that continually mold and reshape the geographies of the very social relations they
aspire to regulate, control and/or restructure’, we view state transformation processes as the creation of new political space and institutional emergence shaped by ongoing power
struggles and contestation between and within political actors across scales. Or, as stated
by Lefebvre (2003, 99): ‘State space hinders the transformation that would lead to the production of a differential space’. Here, state transformation is not limited to formal state
actors, but also includes other actors and institutions with statutory capacity. Or, as
stated by Lund and Rachman (2016, 1201): ‘The mutual constitution of rights and authority
takes place in many institutional settings … Government institutions are not the only source
of state effects’.
The paper contributes to the wider literature on legal pluralism and state transformation processes in two ways. First, it brings to light the blurred boundary between the
different forms of (legal) ordering (e.g. state law, customary law, religious law), and
thus between legal systems and spaces. It argues that while legal scholars tend to
view legal pluralism as the conception of different, yet interlinked legal systems and
spaces, they are in fact more than just a compilation of different legal orders. On the contrary, it illustrates the messy realities where boundaries between the different forms of
ordering are at best blurred, as actors and institutions transcend the different legal
systems and spaces in pursuit of their interests, reconfiguring the boundaries of those
spaces in the process.
Second, it presents the concept of dual authority as a theoretical underpinning to
unpack the politics of legal pluralism, centering on the question of ‘who makes the law’.
Current discourse on legal pluralism has highlighted the importance of power analysis surrounding the politics of inclusion and exclusion in the overall shaping of law-society
relations (Boelens, Bustamante, and de Vos 2007). However, it lacks a theoretical
concept to unpack the political power shaping and reshaping the plurality of legal practices (Barzilai 2008). Legal pluralism entails that different institutions can assume jurisdiction, depending on how they view and cope with the conflict situation emerging from
overlapping policies and legal frameworks. As stated by von Benda-Beckmann (1981,
145): ‘While actors in a dispute shop for various institutions of dispute settlement, institutions
also shop for dispute. Depending on which aspect of the dispute is emphasized, a different
institution can assume jurisdiction’. The case studies examined in this paper show how
jurisdiction itself is blurred by plural legal systems and state spaces of dual authority
that interpenetrate one another. As such, political authority and rights that emanate
from different power domains are in a constant state of flux. Rights can emerge and
submerge, depending on what legal system is referred to as well as what authority and
legitimacy actors attribute it in a particular place and time. It highlights the centrality of
political space and institutional emergence in state transformation processes through
the illustration of how ‘state space is represented and imagined both in geopolitical
struggles and in everyday life’ (Brenner et al. 2003, 7). Additionally, it raises the question
as to what ‘state law’ and ‘non-state law’ is and where the boundaries lie in the context
of multiple political spaces and institutions competing for authority (Sikor and Lund
2009), as manifested in the context of dual authority (Huard 2016).
Taking two neighboring villages in mixed government-KNU controlled areas in Karen
state as a case study, the paper shows the localized dynamics that shape the creation
of new political spaces, manifested in states actors’ strategies to increase political authority
and farmers’ strategies to strengthen their land rights, and how the two are intertwined
within the established, yet ever changing geography of state regulation..."
Source/publisher:
The Journal of Peasant Studies
Date of publication:
2019-10-31
Date of entry/update:
2021-08-07
Grouping:
Individual Documents
Category:
Politics and Government - global and regional - general studies, strategies, theory, Land research including land grabbing - global and regional, Peace processes, ceasefires and ceasefire talks (websites, documents, reports and studies), Armed conflict and peace-building in Burma - theoretical, strategic and general, Political History
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"By focusing on the situation of journalists from Burma (Myanmar) living in exile
in Thailand, this article explores the consequences of political violence on the development of indigenous journalism in a multiethnic state. Drawing on data gathered
from participant observation and in-depth interviews with Burmese journalists in
Thailand and along the border between Thailand and Burma, the research examines
how local journalists are struggling to develop a context-appropriate model for
media development that adequately addresses their need to deal with disagreement
and difference in a context of political violence. The research calls into question the
relevance of the dominant U.S. approach to “objective” journalism. In this often dangerous context, the definition of concepts such as unity, media independence, and
censorship must be seen as provisional and contested, given the various pressures
brought to bear on journalists. The model of journalism arising organically in this
context is influenced by the recent surge in foreign funding for journalism training
yet borrows elements of the normative, objective model and the model of peace journalism. The inappropriate nature of imported journalistic ideologies, however, suggests the need for a more complex model of media development in such complicated
and conflictual contexts.....Violence and Ethnicity in Burma: Home to the world’s longest-running civil war, Burma is characterized by great
ethnic diversity, with more than 100 different languages and dialects identified
(Smith, 1999).2 Population statistics are generally unavailable, and contentious when
they are, because there has been no attempt to take a count of the population since
the British census in 1931 (Smith, 1991). The 1974 Constitution identifies seven
divisions and seven ethnic states—Chin, Kachin, Karen, Kayah (Karenni), Mon,
Rakhine (Arakan), and Shan. There are several other large minority groups in the
country, as well as many Chinese, Tamils, Bengalis, and others of Indian origin. The
most recent figures available, from 1983, list the majority Burmans as constituting
69% of the population (Steinberg, 2001).
Annexed by Britain in stages between 1824 and 1886, Burma was governed at first
as a province of India. The British divided its administration in Burma into two divisions: Ministerial Burma in the central area of the country, and the Frontier Areas, in
which the ethnic minority groups were given autonomy to govern themselves. During
World War II, the Burmans fought with the Japanese against the Allies while the hill
peoples such as the Karens and Kachins stayed loyal to the British. The British exacerbated existing tensions between the various groups by using ethnic minority soldiers to police the Burmans agitating for independence in central Burma.
After independence in 1948, civil war broke out between ethnic minority groups
and the Burman government, and Burma experienced only a few years of civilian
rule before a coup brought the military into power in 1962 under the leadership of General Ne Win. Despite reshuffling of personnel over the years, the military has
remained firmly in power, and political violence has been a defining characteristic of
its rule. Worsening economic conditions throughout the 1970s and 1980s, along with
the regime’s abuses of its own people, led to the massive protests in 1988. Initially led
by students, the demonstrations eventually involved hundreds of thousands of civilians who took to the streets. The Burmese military reacted with violence, gunning
down thousands of people during the protests, which with few exceptions were nonviolent.3 The uprisings eventually led to a coup and the takeover by a reshuffled military under the name the State Law and Order Restoration Council (SLORC).
At the time of the 1988 uprisings, nearly 20 insurgent forces were active over
about one third of the country, controlling vast rural areas (Smith, 1995), and it is
estimated that perhaps 60% of Burma’s land area, home to only 10% of the population, was not secured by the government (Steinberg, 2001, p. 186). The ethnic insurgencies and the government’s counterinsurgency operations have led to massive
numbers of casualties4 and to the pattern of violence perpetuating long-standing distrust, especially between the Burmans and the non-Burmans, although factionalism
is also widespread within the Burmese opposition groups.5
Shortly after taking power in 1988, the SLORC began arranging ceasefires with
ethnic nationality groups, who would agree to stop fighting in exchange for government promises of more assistance with development in education, health care, transportation, and infrastructure (Steinberg, 2001). These two things together—the
ceasefires and their relationship to infrastructural development—offered the government a cloak of legitimacy despite its status as an international pariah after the
bloodshed of 1988. Yet many ethnic minority leaders believed, as did Hkun Okker,
president of the Pa-O People’s Liberation Organization, that the military regime got
the upper hand by making deals with groups individually.
The military regime cleverly recognized that the ethnic power has a major role to play
in Burmese politics, so immediately they picked up the armed ethnic groups and they
spread out their power. . . . They recognized that he who rules the ethnics, rules Burma.
(Hkun Okker, personal communication, July 5, 2000)
Nevertheless, the resistance gained new impetus in 1988 when the border-based ethnonationalist movements were joined by thousands of Burman student activists who
fled the country in the crackdown after the uprisings.
Burma’s revolutionaries, so energized back then, have continued to struggle;
however, after close to two decades since the 1988 uprisings, they now recognize
how slow the process of genuine social and political change can be. The Burmese
opposition today must be understood as a dynamic, ever-negotiated “movement” of
groups constantly slipping into and out of tensions and alliances. In general terms,
the movement is widely conceptualized as having, on the one hand, an “ethnic” element, a coalition of minority groups with the shared goal of a dignified measure of self-determination for the ethnic nationalities within multiethnic Burma. The
opposition’s most visible element, however, is the Burman majority, primarily concerned with the development of democratic governance. Despite much genuine
agreement and cooperation between Burman and ethnic nationality groups, significant tensions remain.
The actions of the current incarnation of the military regime, the State Peace and
Development Council (SPDC), have added to the volumes already dedicated to documenting abuses by the Burmese government. Human Rights Watch (2005) sums up
the current regime’s abuses in this way:6
The SPDC restricts the basic rights and freedoms of all Burmese... [and] continues to
commit systematic, widespread, and well-documented abuses in ongoing conflicts with
ethnic minority rebel groups, including extrajudicial executions, rape, torture, forced
relocation of entire villages, and forced labor. As of late 2004, an estimated 650,000
people were internally displaced in eastern Burma alone, and at least 240 villages have
been destroyed, relocated or abandoned since 2002. Some 2 million Burmese have
moved to Thailand, including 145,000 refugees living in camps. (n.p.)
In addition to the struggle for their survival, Burma’s ethnic minority groups are
concerned about preserving their cultures, especially because many are convinced
the military regime is conducting a campaign to “Burmanize” the country. The
SPDC promotes an (apolitical) cultural diversity by celebrating public ethnic minority cultural performances while committing abuses against these peoples in the rural
areas. Meanwhile, the ceasefires between the regime and various ethnic factions continue, although with much mutual suspicion.
In addition to the violence perpetrated against ethnic minority peoples, much
attention is paid to the ongoing detention of Burma’s democratic leader and 1991
Nobel Peace Prize laureate, Aung San Suu Kyi. Beginning with her arrest before the
country’s 1990 elections, which were won by the opposition in a landslide but subsequently ignored by the regime, to her release from house arrest in 1995, rearrest in
2000, release in 2002, and rearrest in 2003, her detentions have garnered international
media attention. Aung San Suu Kyi remains under house arrest as of this writing.
It is within this context of political violence against dissident Burmans and
ethnic minorities that the Burmese opposition in exile is attempting to transform
patterns of behavior that have led to such a factionalized, militarized pattern of
leadership. Media, and especially journalism, are seen as key components in the
transition to a more open and transparent democratic process and a reduction in
political violence. I have seen the Burmese media in exile develop in impressive
ways since my first contact with Burmese activists when I lived in Thailand as a
volunteer teacher in a camp of refugees from Burma from 1989 to 1992. It is this
development, a result of and also in tension with foreign assistance for media development, that is the focus of this research..."
Source/publisher:
Southern Illinois University Carbondale
Date of publication:
2006-10-00
Date of entry/update:
2021-08-05
Grouping:
Individual Documents
Category:
Politics and Government - global and regional - general studies, strategies, theory, Freedom of Movement, violations of in Burma/Myanmar, Freedom of opinion and expression: - the situation in Burma/Myanmar - reports, analyses, recommendations, Military History, Political History
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"Renowned Myanmar architect U Bo Gyi, who designed the mausoleum for Daw Khin Kyi, the wife of independence hero General Aung San and the mother of detained State Counselor Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, passed away of old age at 89 in Yangon on July 27.
U Bo Gyi was pressured by the previous military regime to resign as a civil servant for designing the mausoleum. He joined the monkhood some 19 years ago and died as a monk.
As an assistant of Oswald Negla, a lecturer in architecture at Yangon University (then Rangoon University), he was involved in the construction of the university’s Recreation Center while still an architecture student at the university in 1959. He later won first prize in Myanmar’s first architectural competition, a contest to design the clinic of the Burmah Oil Company (BOC) in Yangon’s Thanlyin.
He was one of the founders of the Architects Incorporated Firm (AI), which became a leading architecture company in Myanmar. The AI was not just a thriving business, but a place for artists, sculptors, writers, musicians and entertainers to rendezvous and debate modern art, until military dictator General Ne Win seized power in 1962.
All businesses were nationalized at that time, and the AI was not spared. U Bo Gyi found himself an employee of the junta’s Housing and Public Works Ministry.
When Myanmar’s first female ambassador, Daw Khin Kyi, passed away in December 1988, U Bo Gyi was approached by Myo Myint Nyein from Daw Aung San Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy (NLD) and his brother Sonny Nyein about designing the mausoleum for Daw Khin Kyi.
The NLD had initially planned to assign the project to seasoned architect and party member U Kyaw Min, who designed the mausoleum of Thakhin Kodaw Hmaing, a poet laureate and the father of nationalist movements in Myanmar. But U Kyaw Min, a US-educated architect who was U Bo Gyi’s teacher at university, was on a trip at the time.
U Bo Gyi was asked to design the mausoleum for Daw Khin Kyi with the approval of her daughter Daw Aung San Suu Kyi and another member of the NLD leadership, U Kyi Maung.
Daw Khin Kyi used to sit on a chair under the portico of the family residence facing Inya Lake in Yangon, counting prayer beads and babysitting her two grandsons, Daw Aung San Suu Kyi told U Bo Gyi, asking him to model the mausoleum after the portico.
The Housing Department planned to punish U Bo Gyi for his involvement in the project, but he was spared after Daw Aung San Suu Kyi intervened and made a phone call to Major General Myo Nyunt, the head of the Myanmar military’s Yangon Command.
The mausoleum was open roofed with a portico. Two curved walls shield the tomb, signifying a pair of hands covering the light Daw Khin Kyi shed on the country, and the sacrifices she made as a wife and mother.
U Bo Gyi designed and personally built the mausoleum for Daw Khin Kyi, which stands alongside those of Queen Supayalat, the chief consort of Myanmar’s last monarch King Thibaw; Thakhin Kodaw Hmaing; and United Nations Secretary-General U Thant.
One year after he volunteered his services for the mausoleum project, circumstances forced him to retire from the job he had done for the previous 26 years, just three years before he was eligible for a pension. But he could no longer cope with the pressures of the workplace, as the regime always tried to find fault with him.
In their books, NLD leaders Hanthawaddy U Win Tin, Thura U Tin Oo and U Win Htein failed to credit U Bo Gyi as the architect of Daw Khin Kyi’s mausoleum. People mistakenly credited U Kyaw Min, because U Bo Gyi worked at U Kyaw Myin’s office on Sule Pagoda Road at the time of the project and put the name of his former teacher before his own on his design sheets.
After resigning as a government employee, he worked for a number of private architecture companies. He joined the monkhood in 2003, taking the monastic name U Pandita.
“I am most satisfied with Daw Khin Kyi’s mausoleum, of all the architectural projects done in my life. The mausoleum was built by the Garrison Engineers of Myanmar [the engineers of the Tatmadaw, Myanmar’s military],” the monk said.
U Bo Gyi also designed Independence Monument in Yangon, the City Hall and Square in Pyin Oo Lwin, the People’s Department Store in Yangon’s Pansodan (now Ruby Mart), and many government-run factories, public hospitals and private buildings..."
Source/publisher:
"The Irrawaddy" (Thailand)
Date of publication:
2021-07-31
Date of entry/update:
2021-07-31
Grouping:
Individual Documents
Category:
Politics, Government and Governance - Burma/Myanmar - general studies, Political History, Society and Culture, Burma/Myanmar - general studies
Language:
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Description:
"June 29th 2020 marks 25 years since the New Mon State Party
(NMSP) agreed a ceasefire with the then State Law and Order
Restoration Council (SLORC) military government in Burma
(as the country was officially called until 1989). The essays
collected here reflect on the experiences of Mon communities
and the NMSP, before and after the ceasefire.
The NMSP and the (ex-Communist Party of Burma) United
Wa State Army are among the few “ceasefire groups” of
the 1990s which still have ceasefires. Other ethnic armed
organisations (EAOs) were either forced in 2010 to become
Myanmar Army-controlled Border Guard Forces (BGFs: e.g.
most units of the Democratic Karen Buddhist Army) or Peoples
Militias (pyithusit: e.g. the Pa-O National Organisation), or
ceasefires broke down amid recrimination and return to largescale state violence against ethnic nationality communities (e.g.
the Kachin Independence Organisation, whose 1994 ceasefire
broke down after 17 years, in 2011). In contrast, other groups
like the Karen National Union (KNU) continued the armed
struggle for self-determination through the 1990s and 2000s,
before agreeing a ceasefire with the U Thein Sein government
in 2012.
The NMSP ceasefire effectively broke down in 2010 under
military government pressure to become a BGF. However,
despite considerable tensions at the time, fighting did not
break out again. The NMSP resisted pressure to transform into
a BGF, and eventually confirmed a new bilateral ceasefire with
the government in February 2012. Both the KNU (in 2015) and
NMSP (in 2018) signed the multilateral Nationwide Ceasefire
Agreement (NCA).
Unfortunately, the NCA has largely failed. The hoped-for
“Political Dialogue” has stalled, with the Myanmar government
and armed forces (Tatmadaw) unwilling to allow necessary
sub-national (ethnic community) consultations, or to accept
EAO demands for meaningful federalism. Security elements of
the NCA (the Joint Monitoring Committee) have been largely
dysfunctional and/or dominated by the Tatmadaw. While key
EAOs (including the NMSP) continue to deliver governance
administration and services (e.g. health and education)
in their areas of control and authority, the peace process has yet to provide a credible vehicle for delivering “Interim
Arrangements”, despite these being mandated by the NCA
(Chapter 6, Article 25).
The four essays collected here discuss different aspects of the
NMSP’s long struggle for Mon self-determination in the context
of the 1995 ceasefire. Martin Smith and Ashley South are
writers and analysts, who have studied Mon history and society
since before the ceasefire. Martin offers a historical-cultural and
political account of the Mon armed struggle, which frames the
essays to follow. Ashley presents an assessment of the NMSP’s
achievements and challenges since the ceasefire.
Nai Kasauh Mon and Nai Banya Hongsar are civil society activists
and authors. Nai Kasauh Mon provides a critical analysis of the
ceasefire years, highlighting both successes and failures. And
Nai Banya Hongsar discusses the challenges that the NMSP and
Mon movement continue to face in a country still entrapped
within a cycle of conflict and ceasefire..."
Source/publisher:
Covenant Institute via Myanmar Information Management Unit
Date of publication:
2020-06-29
Date of entry/update:
2021-07-27
Grouping:
Individual Documents
Category:
Mon New State Party (MNSP), Various groups, Peace processes, ceasefires and ceasefire talks (websites, documents, reports and studies), Political History, Politics, Government and Governance - Burma/Myanmar - general studies, Statistics, profiles, general information etc. on Burma/Myanmar
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"(၇၄)နှစ်မြောက် အာဇာနည်နေ့ အထိမ်းအမှတ် သဝဏ်လွှာ
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ဇူလိုင်လ ၁၉ ရက် ၂၀၂၁ ခုနှစ်။
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၁။ ယနေ့အခါသမယသည် လက်နက်အားကိုးပြီး မိုက်ရူးရဲဆန်သည့် လူတစ်စု၏ အမြော်အမြင် ကင်းမဲ့စွာ လုပ်ကြံသတ်ဖြတ်ခဲ့မှုကြောင့် အမျိုးသားခေါင်းဆောင်ကြီး ဗိုလ်ချုပ်အောင်ဆန်းအပါအဝင် မြန်မာ့လွတ်လပ်ရေး အတွက် အသက်စွန့်ကြိုးပမ်းဆောင်ရွက်ခဲ့ကြသည့် ခေါင်းဆောင်ကြီးများ ဝမ်းနည်းကြေကွဲဖွယ်ရာ ကျဆုံးခဲ့ရ သည့် ၇၄ နှစ်မြောက် အာဇာနည်နေ့ အခါသမယဖြစ်ပါသည်။
၂။ တိုင်းပြည်အသီးအသီး လူမျိုးအသီးသီးတွင် မိမိနိုင်ငံ မိမိလူမျိုးအတွက် မိမိ၏ အသက်၊ အိုးအိမ်စည်းစိမ်ကို မငဲ့ကွက်ဘဲ ကိုယ်ကျိုးစွန့် အနစ်နာခံကာ စွန့်လွှတ်စွန့်စား ကြိုးပမ်းခဲ့ကြသည့် အာဇာနည်ပုဂ္ဂိုလ်ထူး ပုဂ္ဂိုလ်မြတ် များ အသီးသီးရှိကြပါသည်။ မြန်မာနိုင်ငံတွင်လည်း သမိုင်းကြောင်းတစ်လျှောက် နိုင်ငံနှင့် လူမျိုးအတွက် ကိုယ်ကျိုးစွန့်အနစ်နာခံကာ သက်စွန့်ကြိုးပမ်းဆောင်ရွက်ခဲ့ကြသည့် ယင်းသို့သော အာဇာနည်ပုဂ္ဂိုလ်ထူး ပုဂ္ဂိုလ်မြတ်များစွာ ရှိခဲ့ပါသည်။
၃။ လွတ်လပ်ရေးရရှိပြီး နောက်ပိုင်းတွင်လည်း ၁၉၆၂ ခုနှစ်မှ စတင်ကာ စစ်တပ်၏ အာဏာသိမ်းမှုကြောင့် မြန်မာနိုင်ငံသည် စစ်အာဏာရှင်စနစ်ဆိုးအောက်သို့ ကျရောက်ခဲ့ရပြီး စစ်အာဏာရှင်တို့၏ မတရားဖိနှိပ် အုပ်ချုပ်မှုကို နှစ်ပေါင်း ၆၀ နီးပါး ခါးစည်းခံခဲ့ရပါသည်။ တိုင်းရင်းသားပြည်သူအပေါင်း တို့သည် စစ်အာဏာရှင် တို့၏ တရားမဲ့ဖိနှိပ်အုပ်ချုပ်မှုကို နည်းလမ်းမျိုးစုံဖြင့် ကြံ့ကြံ့ခံရင်ဆိုင် ခုခံတွန်းလှန်ခဲ့ကြပြီး စစ်အာဏာရှင် တော်လှန်ရေး ခရီးတစ်လျောက်တွင်လည်း သက်စွန့်ကြိုးပမ်း ထမ်းဆောင်ရင်း ကျဆုံးခဲ့ကြရသည့် အာဇာနည် သူရဲကောင်းများ များစွာရှိခဲ့ပါသည်။
၄။ ယခုအချိန်တွင်လည်း အာဏာလောဘရမ္မက်ကြီးလွန်းလှပြီး အမြော်အမြင် နည်းပါးသောစစ် အာဏာရှင် တစ်စုက ပြည်သူလူထုရွေးကောက်တင်မြှောက်ပြီး အပ်နှင်းထားသည့် နိုင်ငံတော်အာဏာကို လက်နက်အားကိုး ကာ ပြည်သူ့အစိုးရထံမှ မတရားရယူသိမ်းပိုက်လျက် မြန်မာပြည်သူများကို ဥပဒေမဲ့ နိုင့်ထက်စီးနင်းဖိနှိပ် အုပ်ချုပ်လျက်ရှိသည်ကို မခံမရပ်နိုင်ကြသည့် မြန်မာနိုင်ငံတဝှမ်းလုံးမှ တိုင်းရင်းသားပြည်သူများသည် မိမိတို့ ကျရာနယ်ပယ်ကဏ္ဍအသီးသီးမှ ရရာနည်းဖြင့် စစ်အာဏာရှင်များကို ခုခံဆန့်ကျင်တွန်းလှန် နေကြပါသည်။
၅။ ယင်းသို့ ခေတ်အဆက်ဆက် တိုင်းပြည်နှင့် လူမျိုးအကျိုးအတွက် မိမိတို့၏ အသက်အိုးအိမ် စည်းစိမ်ကို မငဲ့ကွက်ဘဲ ကိုယ်ကျိုးစွန့်အနစ်နာခံကာ သက်စွန့်ကြိုးပမ်းဆောင်ရွက်ခဲ့ကြသည့် အာဇာနည်သူရဲကောင်း အပေါင်းတို့အား ယခုကဲ့သို့သော၇၄ နှစ်မြောက် အာဇာနည်နေ့ နေ့ထူးနေ့မြတ် အခါသမယတွင် ဦးညွှတ်ဂုဏ်ပြု အလေးပြုလျက် စစ်အာဏာရှင်စနစ်ဆိုးကို မြန်မာ့မြေပေါ်မှ အမြစ်ဖျက်ချေမှုန်းကာ ငြိမ်းချမ်း သာယာဝပြောသည့် ဖက်ဒရယ်ဒီမိုကရေစီပြည်ထောင်စုကြီး အမြန်ဆုံး ပေါ်ထွန်းလာစေရေးအတွက် မိမိတို့ကိုယ်စွမ်းဉာဏ်စွမ်းရှိသရွေ့ မဆုတ်မနစ်ကြိုးပမ်းဆောင်ရွက်သွား ပါမည်ဟု လေးနက်ခိုင်မာစွာကတိသစ္စာပြုအပ်ပါသည်။
ပြည်ထောင်စုလွှတ်တော်ကိုယ်စားပြုကော္မတီ..."
Source/publisher:
Committee Representing Pyidaungsu Hluttaw (CRPH)
Date of publication:
2021-07-19
Date of entry/update:
2021-07-19
Grouping:
Individual Documents
Category:
National Unity Government (NUG), Politics, Government and Governance - Burma/Myanmar - general studies, Political History
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"U Nay Min, the Yangon-based rights lawyer and indefatigable democracy campaigner, has died of COVID-19 aged 75.
Few people in Myanmar will know his name, particularly not Generation Z. Yet ironically, at a similar moment of revolutionary fervor, this courageous activist seized the hour as demonstrators took to the streets against the dictatorship and at a pivotal moment in his country’s history, he changed it forever.
U Nay Min came to me like a gift from God. A cub reporter, I’d been sent to Burma — as Myanmar was then known — by BBC World Service Radio on an undercover assignment in July 1988. Tensions were at boiling point and people were too afraid to talk to a foreign reporter.
Enter U Nay Min.
With a fearlessness that was his hallmark, under the noses of the country’s ubiquitous Military Intelligence agents, he sought me out at my hotel and offered to arrange clandestine interviews with dissident student leaders.
U Nay Min went further. Having consulted the astrologers for the most auspicious date, he primed the students to tell me their revolution would start at eight minutes past eight on the eighth day of the eighth month of 1988, just weeks away.
The tapes were smuggled out in British diplomatic bags, sent to BBC headquarters in London and broadcast back on the Burmese Service. Zero hour had been announced to a people desperate for change and at the appointed minute, the 1988 revolution began.
U Nay Min was the mastermind of this seminal “big bang” moment, which resonates loudly today as the Civil Disobedience Movement again braves military repression on the streets.
Unlikely spin doctor
In a time before Twitter and Facebook, U Nay Min realized the value for Burma of getting the brutality of the military into the international headlines.
In truth and with decades of hindsight, I salute his manipulation of an inexperienced reporter for the greater good.
Beyond students, U Nay Min introduced me to a disgruntled army officer who described the human rights abuses perpetrated by the military, for example using villagers in the ethnic nationalities areas to walk in front of troops as human mine detectors.
When the people of Burma heard these stories directly from a serving officer, hatred of the army grew further and international outrage against the Tatmadaw (Myanmar’s military) also mounted.
U Nay Min was an unlikely but artful spin doctor, who understood far better than the butchers with the guns the power of the mass media to turn world opinion.
After a week I left Rangoon (now Yangon) in haste for neighboring Bangladesh on the advice of the British Embassy, who saw me as a diplomatic incident waiting to happen.
Undeterred, U Nay Min tracked me down in Dhaka and sent me news by telephone on an almost hourly basis, using the codename Eastern Star.
Journalists across the country had joined the general strike and were reporting in to him, sidestepping state control of the media. Eastern Star had become the most powerful opinion-maker in the land and used his newfound power to maximum effect.
During the twice-daily broadcasts by the BBC Burmese Service, the country came to a virtual standstill, as 44 million people hung on every word of reports that U Nay Min had fed me.
But within weeks he was arrested, given an eight-year sentence, held in solitary confinement and badly tortured. Such was his commitment to the power of truth telling, that on his release, Eastern Star called me in London to give me more information.
He was rearrested and imprisoned for another eight years.
Buddhist conviction
When I returned to Yangon in 2013 for the first time since those events, I made my peace with U Nay Min. It was hard for him. The military told him I had betrayed him to them.
He was gracious and with true Buddhist conviction confessed he must have been a bad person in a previous life.
He was at one with his past, but exasperated by the lack of political movement in the country and frustrated by the military’s decision to revoke his lawyer’s license, which thwarted his raison d’etre: protecting the vulnerable and advocating for the voiceless.
He’d devoted much of his life as a lawyer to defending Burma’s minorities, particularly the country’s Muslims, on one occasion risking his life to write a protest letter to the hated dictator, General Ne Win.
Last week, when we heard he’d contracted COVID-19, we arranged for fresh oxygen to be taken to U Nay Min’s bedside. The tank he was already using had a faulty valve and though we fixed it, the damage had been done and he passed away in the middle of the night.
My only consolation is that U Nay Min would probably have seen this as a fitting end, dying in a final act of solidarity with the most disadvantaged around him.
Rest in peace, U Nay Min. Yours was a life of sacrifice, lived for others. May your foresight, courage and commitment never be forgotten, particularly in Myanmar, a country whose fate you shaped and where your legacy lives on in Generation Z.
Eastern Star may have been extinguished, but your light still shines and always will.
Chris Gunness is Director of the London-based Myanmar Accountability Project, which fights cases in national courts for the victims of human rights abuses committed by Myanmar security forces.
Source/publisher:
"The Irrawaddy" (Thailand)
Date of publication:
2021-07-19
Date of entry/update:
2021-07-19
Grouping:
Individual Documents
Category:
Politics and Government - global and regional - general studies, strategies, theory, Political History, Freedom of Movement, violations of in Burma/Myanmar, Public Health, COVID-19 (Coronavirus)
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"ကြေညာချက်အမှတ် - ၇ / ၂၀၂၁
နေ့စွဲ - ၇ / ၇ / ၂၀၂၁
ယနေ့ ၂၀၂၁ ခုနှစ်၊ ဇူလိုင်လ ၇ ရက်နေ့သည် ဗကသများအဖွဲ့ချုပ်မှ ဦးဆောင်၍ စစ်အာဏာရှင်စနစ်ကို ပြတ်သားစွာ ဆန့်ကျင်ဖွင့်ချ တိုက်ခိုက်ခဲ့သော ၅၉ နှစ်မြောက် နှစ်ပတ်လည်နေ့ ဖြစ်ပါသည်။ ဆဲဗင်း ဂျူလိုင် (၇၊ ၇၊ ၁၉၆၂) အရေးတော်ပုံကြီးသည် ဗမာပြည်စစ်အာဏာရှင်စနစ်ကို ပထမဦးဆုံး စတင်တိုက်ပွဲဆင်ခဲ့သည့် အရေးတော်ပုံ ဖြစ်သည်။
၂၀၂၁ ခုနှစ်၊ ဖေဖော်ဝါရီလ ၁ ရက်နေ့တွင် မင်းအောင်လှိုင်ဦးဆောင်သည့် စစ်အုပ်စုမှ တိုင်းပြည်အာဏာကို အဓမ္မနည်းဖြင့် တကျော့ပြန် ပေါ်ပေါ်ထင်ထင် သိမ်းပိုက်ခဲ့သည်။ ပြည်သူလူထု၏ စီးပွားရေး၊ လူမှုရေး၊ ပညာရေး များသည် ယခင်ကထက် နိမ့်ကျခဲ့ရပြီး ဒီမိုကရေစီ အခွင့်အရေးများလည်း ဆိတ်သုဉ်းခဲ့ရသည်။ ဖက်ဆစ်စစ်တပ်နှင့် လက်ပါးစေများမှ ပြည်သူလူထု၏ အသက်အိုးအိမ်စည်းစိမ်ကို အကြမ်းဖက်၍ နေ့စဉ် ထိပါး စော်ကား သတ်ဖြတ်နေသည်။
စစ်အစိုးရ၊ စစ်အုပ်စု၊ စစ်ဗျူရိုကရေစီယန္တရား (စစ်သုံးစစ်) ကို အမြစ်ဖြတ်ချေမှုန်း သုတ်သင်ရန်မှာ ကျွန်ုပ်တို့ ဖိနှိပ်ခံလူမျိုးပေါင်းစုံ ပြည်သူလူထုတရပ်လုံး၏ အဓိက တာဝန်တရပ်ဖြစ်သည်။ ပြည်သူလူထု၏ သွေးများဖြင့် စွန်းပေနေသော ဖက်ဆစ်စစ်တပ်ကို အမြစ်ဖြတ်ချေမှုန်းပြီး လူထုအာဏာတည်ဆောက်ရမည်။ ထို့ကြောင့် စစ်သုံးစစ်ကို အဖိနှိပ်ခံလူမျိုးပေါင်းစုံ ပြည်သူလူထု တရပ်လုံးက ထိရောက်မှန်ကန်သည့် နည်းလမ်းပေါင်းစုံဖြင့် အုံကြွဆန့်ကျင် တော်လှန်ကြပါရန် ကျွန်ုပ်တို့ ဗကသများအဖွဲ့ချုပ်က တိုက်တွန်းနှိုးဆော်အပ်ပါသည်။ ကျွန်ုပ်တို့ ဗကသများအဖွဲ့ချုပ်သည်လည်း အဖိနှိပ်ခံလူမျိုးပေါင်းစုံ ပြည်သူလူထုတရပ်လုံးနှင့်အတူ စစ်သုံးစစ်ကို အမြစ်ပြတ်ချေမှုန်းနိုင်သည်အထိ ပြင်းပြင်းထန်ထန် တိုက်ပွဲဝင်သွားမည် ဖြစ်သည်။
ဆဲဗင်းဂျူလိုင်စိတ်ဓာတ် ကိုင်စွဲတိုက်ပွဲဝင်ကြ
စစ်အာဏာရှင်စနစ်ကို ရရာနည်းနဲ့ အမြစ်ပြတ်ချေမှုန်းကြ
ဗဟိုအမှုဆောင်အဖွဲ့
ဗမာနိုင်ငံလုံးဆိုင်ရာကျောင်းသားသမဂ္ဂများအဖွဲ့ချုပ်..."
Source/publisher:
All Burma Federation of Student Unions
Date of publication:
2021-07-07
Date of entry/update:
2021-07-12
Grouping:
Individual Documents
Category:
Freedom of Movement, violations of in Burma/Myanmar, Education rights: reports of violations in Burma, Right to Life: reports of violations in Burma, Political History, Politics, Government and Governance - Burma/Myanmar - general studies
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Format :
pdf
Size:
185.85 KB
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"While the whole country has risen in revolt against the Feb. 1 coup—at first peacefully and then more violently when the military began to open fire on the protesters—there is one part of Myanmar that appears to be unaffected by the nationwide turmoil: the Wa Hills of northeastern Shan State. Ethnic groups like the Kachin Independence Army (KIA) and the Karen National Liberation Army (KNLA) have provided shelter to activists who have fled urban areas and even trained some of them in guerrilla warfare. Other ethnic rebels have at least issued statements condemning Senior General Min Aung Hlaing’s power grab, often working together with civil society organizations. Myanmar’s most powerful ethnic army, the 20,000-30,000-strong United Wa State Army (UWSA), on the other hand, has remained conspicuously silent since the coup.
But that doesn’t mean that all Wa agree with the stance that the UWSA and its political wing, the United Wa State Party (UWSP), have taken. On March 25, 10 Wa civil society organizations, among them the Tang-yan Wa Youth Network, university students from the Wa Christian Fellowship and the Wa Women’s Network, sent an open letter to the UWSP/UWSA leadership urging them to say something about the killings and to publicize their stand on the movement for federal democracy. That hasn’t happened, though, and the issue at stake is the UWSA’s close relationship with the security services across the border in China. Those agencies do not want to get involved with any movement that wants to overthrow the coup-installed government in Naypyitaw—and the UWSA is an ally in China’s geostrategic quest for dominance in Myanmar and beyond. Put in plain words, China’s support for the UWSA gives Beijing leverage inside Myanmar, the only neighboring country that provides China with easy and convenient access to the Indian Ocean.
When Aung Min, then president’s office minister in the Thein Sein administration, visited Monywa, a town northwest of Mandalay, in November 2012 to meet local people protesting a controversial Chinese-backed copper mining project in the area, he openly admitted: “We are afraid of China…we don’t dare to have a row with [them]. If they feel annoyed with the shutdown of their projects and resume support to the communists, the economy in the border areas would backslide. So you’d better think seriously.” By “the communists” he clearly meant the UWSA and its allies, offshoots of the once China-supported Communist Party of Burma’s (CPB) powerful army, which collapsed after a mutiny among its hilltribe—mainly Wa—rank-and-file in 1989. And he was right. In fact, the UWSA, which like the old CPB is supported by China, has become even stronger and better equipped than the old party ever was.
The UWSA’s strength—and the scope of its arsenal—was demonstrated on April 17, 2019, when it celebrated the 30th anniversary of the mutiny against the elderly, orthodox Marxist-Leninist and mainly Burman leadership of the CPB. The CPB with its increasingly anachronistic policies had lost its importance to the Chinese, who are now more interested in exporting consumer goods than Maoist-style revolutions. The old CPB leaders were allowed to retire in China, and the UWSA and three other components of the erstwhile CPB were born. Those four former CPB forces also entered into ceasefire agreements with the then junta, the State Law and Order Restoration Council, which suited China’s interests as well.
On that day, a bit over two years ago, thousands of Wa soldiers in impeccable uniforms goose-stepped in perfect formation past the grandstand where their leaders stood at attention. Then came an impressive display of surface-to-air missiles, heavy artillery, mortars, rocket launchers, machine guns, assault rifles, armored personnel carriers and even a weaponized drone. Columns of civilians, mostly Wa tribesmen but also people from other ethnic groups from the over 30,000-square-km area that the UWSA controls along the Chinese border and in the south near Thailand, made their way to the parade grounds. Spectacular fireworks lit up the sky after dark and people cheered and danced through the night.
Needless to say, China’s security services do not want to see a war like the one the CPB once fought from the same areas. Such hostilities would mean instability in the border areas, a flood of refugees into China and a disruption of trade between the two countries. But China, almost the sole supplier of weaponry to the UWSA, wants it to be strong enough to deter the Myanmar military, the Tatmadaw, from even trying to bring its base area under central control. As Aung Min inadvertently admitted, the UWSA has become exactly what the Chinese want: a useful bargaining chip when they want to put pressure on the Myanmar government to get economic concessions. Moreover, before the coup, China was also eager to prevent Myanmar from straying too close to the West. But that is hardly an issue today as the West has condemned the coup and imposed sanctions on the Tatmadaw and affiliated entities.
Today, after the coup, China wants to be seen as a moderating voice that, as Foreign Minister Wang Yi said at the opening of the 9th World Peace Forum in Beijing on July 3, is opposed to sanctions and other punitive measures and wants to see a solution to Myanmar’s current crisis “through internal dialogue and reconciliation.” Russia, the other main power that has come out against Western condemnation and sanctions in the wake of the coup, has adopted a similar view. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov stated during a visit to Jakarta on July 6 that his country supported ASEAN’s five-point proposal for restoring “normalcy” to Myanmar, which includes “a constructive dialogue to find a peaceful solution” to the upheaval.
But Wang is not so naïve as to believe that such a dialogue leading to reconciliation is possible, and Lavrov, an experienced diplomat, must realize that ASEAN’s five-point proposal is a nonstarter. Support for ASEAN’s “peace plan”, however, serves as a convenient cover for protecting other interests and opposition to the West’s sanctions policy. For the Russians, it is a question of protecting lucrative arms sales to Myanmar and other economic interests, as well as gaining a new ally in a region where Moscow’s influence has waned since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. China’s long-term objectives go way beyond Russia’s, and access to the Indian Ocean is only one aspect of Beijing’s massive, all-encompassing and ultimately global Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) infrastructure project, which President Xi Jinping launched in 2013. Myanmar’s strategically important location between South and Southeast Asia is of utmost importance to China.
There is no doubt that the Wa’s dependence on China is real and overwhelming, militarily as well as economically. Apart from being equipped with Chinese-made weaponry, the Chinese yuan, not the Myanmar kyat, is the preferred currency in the area under UWSA control. People are connected to Chinese mobile phone and internet providers, and petrol and diesel come from China, as do medical supplies and most of the food. Furthermore—and this has escaped the attention of the outside world—the UWSA-controlled area is the only part of Myanmar where nearly everyone has been vaccinated against COVID-19. Supplies and even many of the medics administering the vaccine came from Yunnan, across the border.
Nonetheless, it would be a serious mistake to believe that the Wa are hapless Chinese minions and compliant pawns in Beijing’s quest for regional and ultimately global dominance. Many Wa I have met are aware that the Chinese feel superior to them and, in many instances, refer to them as erstwhile headhunters and therefore uncivilized savages. There could be as many as 600,000 Wa in Myanmar—no one knows for sure—and another 400,000 in China, where they are also recognized as an ethnic minority. But what little most Chinese outside Yunnan know about the Wa comes from a series of music videos in which young girls, accompanied by young men beating drums, shake their long hair back and forth. The girls are dressed in red woven skirts with some kind of pattern that looks like it could be of hilltribe origin, and the young men are bare-chested. The problem is that those skirts are much shorter than the sarongs Wa girls would normally wear, and no female living in the hills, where water is scarce, would have hair that long because it would be impossible to keep it clean. Besides, young Wa men these days would not go around dressed in little more than a loincloth, even when taking part in cultural events in their home villages.
Tellingly, these dances are not performed in a rural Wa setting but in purpose-built theaters in front of big audiences. The famous “Wa hair dancers” are, in fact, the daughters of city cadres who are of Wa, Chinese, or mixed Wa-Chinese ancestry. According to Swedish anthropologist and Wa expert Magnus Fiskesjö, the Chinese have created “an official socialist-era image of the Wa as a member of the happy family of nationalities within the Chinese nation: as exotic dancers full of primitive energy, now sanitized and harnessed under Communist Party guidance—the socialist-era version of Wa primitivity.”
In line with this thinking, ethnic theme parks have been established in several Chinese cities where one of the main attractions is “real Wa headhunters” performing exotic dances. Young Wa, because of their dark complexion, are hired to perform not only as wild Wa but, according to Fiskesjö, as Africans, New Zealand Maori and American Indians.
These performers are Wa from Yunnan or Myanmar who have migrated to Chinese cities to find work in factories, and take part in such spectacles to earn some extra money. But it is easy to imagine what the Wa dancers themselves think about their ethnicity and culture being exploited and, in effect, humiliated in this way.
No central or local Chinese authority ever controlled, or even showed interest in, the Wa-inhabited areas of southern Yunnan—not until the communist takeover in 1949. Remnants of the defeated Kuomintang (KMT), who had not been able to flee to Taiwan along with their supreme leader Chiang Kai-shek, retreated into those areas and, more importantly, the Wa Hills of Myanmar. Those hills were only nominally part of Myanmar; at that time, headhunting was part of the way of life there, along with local wars and feuds between different tribes and clans.
In the early 1950s, the communist Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) entered southern Yunnan to prevent the KMT from trying to achieve their stated objective, to “reconquer the Chinese mainland”. Hardly any Chinese had been there before, and the PLA as well as the KMT were seen as foreign forces, so people did not know what to expect and were afraid of them. But the PLA, which needed local support and knowledge of the terrain to be able to push the KMT back into Myanmar, treated the Wa rather leniently. The KMT, on the other hand, could be very rough in its behavior towards the Wa and other tribes in the frontier areas.
After a few years of tolerance—and as soon as the KMT threat had been eliminated—the Chinese authorities brought in an entirely new oppressive system aimed at “uprooting feudal superstition”, as the Chinese communist jargon went. Weapons in the possession of Wa tribesmen, who were used to being armed because they depended on hunting, were confiscated and, according to Fiskesjö, all headhunting paraphernalia was destroyed. Social institutions that were important in Wa society were disbanded. Drum-houses, the main meeting place in every Wa village, were torn down and the Wa’s log drums were thrown out or burned. Only a few survive in a few faraway museums, such as those on display at the Yunnan Nationalities University in Kunming, Yunnan’s provincial capital.
According to Fiskesjö: “Roadside a nog [head-container posts planted along the approach to a village] were destroyed or abandoned; the fortifications protecting villages were broken up and demolished. The major rituals of the past were abandoned. Chief ritualists and other community leaders were demoted, marginalized, or even persecuted.” Wa elders Fiskesjö spoke to during his research in the area in the 1990s regarded 1958 as the key watershed: “Since in that year the Chinese shifted policy from reconciliation to enforcement.” Even the Wa had to become Chinese communists and were herded into people’s communes.
Although this happened in the Wa-inhabited areas of Yunnan, the bitterness based on memories of that repression is deep on both sides of the border. That resentment, and unhappiness with the disgraceful way in which the Wa are being treated in China today, are consequences of a long-standing, strained relationship between these proud tribesmen—regardless of where they live—and the Han Chinese.
Since the 1989 mutiny, the UWSA has built up what amounts to a well-organized, de facto self-governing state between Myanmar and China with its own administrative offices, courts, hospitals and schools. It may be argued that a lot of the wealth that has made this possible comes from the trade in narcotics—first opium and heroin and then methamphetamine—and that is something the Wa leadership cannot hide or escape from. Today, other sources of income exist, such as tin and rare earth metals.
But the way forward, for the Wa and the rest of Myanmar, would have to take into account the unique history of the Wa, and the fact that they have never been ruled by any central authority. Before independence, colonial presence in the area was limited to occasional flag marches up to what the British perceived as the border with China. Then, in the 1950s and well into the 1960s, KMT warlords and local chieftains ruled the Wa Hills. That was the case until the early 1970s, when the CPB took over the entire border area, including the Wa Hills. And after the 1989 mutiny, of course, the UWSP/UWSA became the new governing body.
An enlightened and democratic Myanmar government could through wiser policies than those of the past integrate the Wa Hills with the rest of the country. But the possibility of that happening seems remote: the military, with its chauvinistic approach to ethnic minorities, remains in power in Naypyitaw, and the Chinese are not likely to abandon their strategically important grip over the UWSP/UWSA any time soon. Sadly, the Wa issue is more likely to continue to exist as one of many sources of despair in the seemingly never-ending Myanmar tragedy. But, at least, it deserves a better understanding than what has so far been the case both in Myanmar and internationally. The Wa may be Chinese puppets, but they are no Chinese stooges..."
Source/publisher:
"The Irrawaddy" (Thailand)
Date of publication:
2021-07-12
Date of entry/update:
2021-07-12
Grouping:
Individual Documents
Category:
2021 Burma/Myanmar coup d'état, Politics and Government - global and regional - general studies, strategies, theory, Wa (cultural, political, economic), Political History
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"Burma is a country of great ethnic diversity, in which over one hundred different
languages and dialects have been identified (Smith, 1991b). The country is wedged
between Thailand and Laos to the East, India and Bangladesh to the West, and Tibet and
China to the North. The central plains of the Irrawaddy Delta are ringed by mountains
that are home to a variety of ethnic peoples. Ethnic statistics in Burma are generally
unavailable, and contentious when they are, since there has been no attempt to take a
count of the population since the British census in 1931 (Smith, 1991a). The 1974
Constitution identifies seven divisions and seven ethnic states – Chin, Kachin, Karen,
Kayah (Karenni), Mon, Rakhine (Arakan) and Shan. There are several other large
minority groups in the country as well, such as the Lahu, the Nagas, the Pa-O and the
Wa, and there are many Chinese, Tamils, Bengalis and others of Indian origin living in
the country.
Burma was annexed by Britain in three stages between 1824 and 1886, and was
governed at first as a province of India. The British divided its administration in Burma
into two divisions – Ministerial Burma and the Frontier Areas, in which the ethnic
nationalities were given autonomy to govern themselves. The British also used a divideand-conquer strategy by employing ethnic minority men to help control the Burmans,
who were agitating for independence in central Burma. During World War II, the
Burmans fought with the Japanese against the Allies while the hill peoples such as the
Karens and Kachins stayed loyal to the British. The British exacerbated existing tensions
between the various groups by using ethnic minority soldiers to police the Burmans, who were pushing for independence.
After independence in 1948, Burma experienced only a few years of civilian rule
before General Ne Win took over in a coup that brought the military into power in 1962.
While there has been reshuffling of personnel over the years, the military has remained in
power. In December 1987, Burma was accorded Least Developed Country (LDC) status
at the UN, which recognized that after years of economic decline, Burma was one of the
world’s ten poorest nations. This was so embarrassing that the government in power at
the time, the Burma Socialist Programme Party (BSPP), waited for four months to
announce this news to its own people (Smith, 1991a). And so, while Ne Win instituted
his plan for the “Burmese Way to Socialism,” the country languished in isolation. As
conditions throughout the country worsened for the central regime, territories were
designated as white, brown or black areas, corresponding with the degree of control the
government had over that area. White areas were entirely under the government’s
control, brown areas were partially government-controlled, and black areas were under
the control of ethnic nationalist groups. Visitors to Burma were generally restricted to all
but the white areas.
Scholarly work in Burma has also been severely restricted by the country’s
isolationist policies, and there are few works that examine the development of media and
communications technology use since Burma’s independence. The few descriptions that
do exist make clear that historically, Burma was a highly literate country with “proud
educational traditions” (Smith, 1991a, p. 17). Western-style newspapers were introduced
into the country during the colonial period, and a host of locally-produced magazines and newspapers appeared soon afterwards (Smith, 1991a). This diversity of outlets continued
after independence in 1948, and the Burmese press during the 1950s was recognized as
among the freest in Asia, with more than 30 daily newspapers in several languages and
representing a wide variety of political viewpoints (Hollstein, 1961; Smith, 1991a).
While many of these papers were sympathetic to particular political parties, they
remained relatively free of government control, and there was no serious attempt at
censorship or harassment of journalists or writers (Allott, 1993; Smith, 1991a; Smith,
1999c)..."
Source/publisher:
Academia.edu (San Francisco)
Date of publication:
2003-00-00
Date of entry/update:
2021-07-11
Grouping:
Individual Documents
Category:
Freedom of opinion and expression: - the situation in Burma/Myanmar - reports, analyses, recommendations, Politics, Government and Governance - Burma/Myanmar - general studies, Political History, Politics and Government - global and regional - general studies, strategies, theory
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"Myanmar has entered a Great Depression. It must be spelled with a capital G and D, reflecting the real mood of the people of this country.
This Great Depression began with the coup staged by Senior General Min Aung Hlaing on Feb. 1, which in turn triggered political, social and economic upheavals that continue to this day. This Myanmar version of the Great Depression differs from the severe worldwide economic depression of the 1930s, though.
The trauma of a coup d’état—or even the prospect of one—is familiar to the people of Myanmar, who suffered through three previous coups, and the total breakdowns in order that resulted, over the past six decades, in 1958, 1962 and 1988.
However, the latest coup has been a particularly serious blow, not only politically, socially and economically, but also psychologically, for the whole population.
Since the coup, all people in the country—rich and poor, educated and uneducated, employers and employees, civil servants and private company staff, parents and children, adults and kids, teachers and students, men and women, doctors and patients, villagers and city dwellers, farmers and traders, Buddhists and Christians, Hindus and Muslims, members of the ethnic majority and minorities, locals and foreigners—have been plunged into misery.
Almost everyone I meet and speak to these days has shared with me their deep despair, anger and fear, without even being asked. They all feel lost, and we can all relate to this feeling; there is no need to elaborate.
I tend to express my own feelings back to them with this observation: “This is the era in which everyone in our country, from beggars to the president, are experiencing the worst kind of suffering.”
Shattered expectations
One especially cruel aspect of this Great Depression was that it was thrust upon the country at a time when people had such great expectations. The people were in a delighted mood after November’s election, in which the National League for Democracy won a landslide victory, and were waiting to witness the rare spectacle of an elected government returning to power in order to entrench the country’s fledgling democracy, building on the freedoms, rights and economic opportunities that had been initiated over the previous decade.
Actually, their great expectations were largely confined to practical improvements in their lives; they were not overly concerned with idealistic notions, given their country’s complex political situation, in which the military already enjoyed undemocratic privileges.
But one man alone—an unprofessional general greedy for power—destroyed at a stroke their expectations and dreams of a brighter future. Because of his greed, the entire population now exists in this Great Depression.
Since the coup, the country has endured four months of grief. Not a single day has passed without arbitrary killings, arrests or abductions in one place or another in Myanmar.
So far, the regime’s forces have killed about 880 people, including many children, and have detained more than 5,000 protesters across the country. Hundreds of thousands of people have lost their jobs over the past few months. The United Nations World Food Program (WFP) has warned that up to 3.4 million citizens could go hungry this year amid rising food prices and the loss of manufacturing, construction and service jobs. The coup has driven the economy into a state of rapid deterioration, and it is only expected to worsen in the near future.
A third wave of COVID-19 infections has recently hit the country, but the regime’s response to the deadly virus has been to do almost nothing. Many people recall the systematic measures implemented by the previous civilian government to handle the first and second waves of COVID-19 last year.
These are just the tip of the iceberg of the problems we face in this depression era. The whole situation on the ground is an indescribable catastrophe created by the coup leader and his regime. Min Aung Hlaing’s persecution of hundreds of doctors, teachers and striking civil servants has resulted in family separations as those on the wanted list have either gone into hiding or fled the country. His soldiers’ indiscriminate response to civilian resistance fighters in some urban areas has taken a great toll on people there. In Kayah State, residents returned to their homes to see they had been burned to ashes. Parents mourn their children who have died from pneumonia in rain-soaked forests after being forced to flee heavy-handed raids on their villages by thuggish soldiers.
But this is not the first time for Myanmar. In this country, every generation has its own dark memories. The generations of our fathers and grandfathers suffered similar feelings of despair under successive generals whose decisions destroyed their dreams and their lives too. The older generation felt this despair under the rule of the late dictator General Ne Win for 26 years from 1962 to 1988, while the younger generation felt it under Ne Win’s successors, senior generals Saw Maung and Than Shwe, for the next 23 years from 1988 to 2011. These periods under military dictatorship were an ordeal—earlier examples of the Great Depression endured by the people of Myanmar.
Dragged into a dark past
In the past, however, when Ne Win staged a coup and introduced his autocratic rule to the country, authoritarianism was not peculiar to Myanmar. During the Cold War it was somewhat of a global political trend, existing in countries in Africa, Latin America, East Asia and the Middle East. Myanmar and its neighboring countries in Southeast Asia were not exceptional in this.
In reality, it is not surprising that the rule of such great sinners should bring this kind of Great Depression. One only has to look at the world around us.
Other countries have encountered worse experiences. Just look at the Holocaust, in which Nazi Germany and its collaborators systematically killed some 6 million Jews—two-thirds of the Jewish population of Europe—during World War II. Think about the feelings of Jewish communities across the world; Myanmar people can’t compare their current situation to those Jewish victims.
Cambodia, one of Myanmar’s neighboring countries, suffered such a Great Depression when the Khmer people endured the Khmer Rouge regime’s persecution of its perceived opponents, as well as minorities, causing up to 2 million deaths in the 1970s.
They all suffered deeply, experiencing their own forms of Great Depression during such terrible periods. It is a phenomenon that has afflicted the whole world throughout human history with inexpressible suffering. But all those that experienced it had to overcome these ordeals.
Nowadays, however, far fewer countries find themselves in this situation—for most nations, the most recent examples occurred decades ago. That’s why this latest coup in Myanmar feels so much worse to people than previous military takeovers.
But it shall be overcome. How? One simple and fundamental quality is enough: simply, the will to never give up. In previous Great Depression eras, the people of Myanmar didn’t give up; each time, they continued to struggle until they were able to bounce back. That’s what they are doing now, and every single person needs to keep doing their part through their respective callings. That’s why we’re seeing so many people in Myanmar rejecting the coup in so many different ways, to restore the democracy they expected..."
Source/publisher:
"The Irrawaddy" (Thailand)
Date of publication:
2021-06-26
Date of entry/update:
2021-06-28
Grouping:
Individual Documents
Category:
2021 Burma/Myanmar coup d'état, WFP (World Food Programme), Political History, Military History, Politics, Government and Governance - Burma/Myanmar - general studies
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"After more than two decades under authoritarian rule, the past five years have witnessed profound changes in Myanmar’s domestic politics. Albeit the flawed election in 2010, the newly elected government has symbolized the end of military regime and the restoration of civilian order. Furthermore, the new government has indicated its commitment to advance democratic transition by its progressive policies in liberalizing its economy and domestic press as well as reproaching the opposition leader, Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, as the landmark step toward national reconciliation (Thuzar 2012). As the Indonesian Minister of Foreign Affairs, Marty Natalegawa,
said after his visit to Myanmar, “Myanmar reform is irreversible” (Thuzar 2012). In order to understand how these reforms have been taking place, this paper will examine both external and internal factors as indispensable parts of these reforms. This paper will specifically focus on how major powers and domestic leadership affect the dynamics of political changes in Myanmar which eventually lead to the current reforms. This paper argues that both major powers and domestic leadership have contributed significantly to the dynamics of political changes in Myanmar. The diverging interests and policies among major powers have resulted in different approaches toward the military regime. While the policies of one major power have
weakened the policies of others, these policies in overall have complementary effects in the democratic transition of the country. The engagement policies of China, India and ASEAN, for instance, have been crucial for the survival of the country while sanctions and pressure from US and other western countries have pushed the country forward to democratization. Likewise, different personal leaderships have resulted in different approach to democratization. A more conservative leader such as Than Shwe has succeeded in maintaining order and unity of the country, while the emergence of reformist leader, represented by Thein Sein, has advanced
reform and democratization.
In order to better elaborate these arguments, this paper will be divided into several parts. The first part will provide the historical background on Myanmar’s domestic politics since its independence to its current reform. The second part, then, will examine major powers’ interests
and policies in Myanmar and how these external factors affect the dynamics of political changes in Myanmar. The third part, in turn, will examine the internal factors emphasizing the role of domestic leadership in this reform. Based on these discussions, the last part will conclude the findings by looking ahead the anticipated consequences of the aforementioned factors on the future trajectories of Myanmar’s democracy.....Historical Background: Nation building in Myanmar is perhaps the longest and the bloodiest compared to other countries
in Southeast Asia. After gaining independence from Britain in January 4, 1948, Myanmar was torn into chaos under failed trial of multiparty parliamentary democracy in the first fourteen years. At the center, the Anti-Fascist People’s Freedom League (AFPFL) as the previously
independent movement “who inherited the state” was apparent to be ideologically heterogeneous and failed to reach agreement on how to run the newly independent Myanmar (T. Than 1993). In
the grassroots level, situation was worsening as ethnic minorities such as Karen, Kachin, Mon, and Chin revolted against the government (T. Than 1993). This has not mentioned Muslim Mujaheedin groups and communist elements who attempted to do similar actions (T. Than 1993). Under such circumstances, the government has, from the beginning, relied heavily on military intervention to appease these dissensions (T. Than 1993).
While the charisma of U Nu has succeeded in maintaining this fragile regime for the first decade, the 1962 has seen relentless public dissents and significant economic decline. U Nu’s policy of installing Buddhism as state religion, followed by his resignation in early 1962 has exacerbated the situation even further (T. Than 1993). In order to prevent the state from disintegration, the Tatmadaw or Myanmar’s arms forces who previously stayed in the peripheries to halt the flow of Kuomintang refugees in the northern border has moved to the center and taken over the government under the name of Revolutionary Council (RC) (T. Than 1993). The Tatmadaw has learnt that its task was no longer promoting freedom and democracy as it did
under British rule, but instead, maintaining peace and the rule of Law (T. Than 1993). Under the constitutional military regime of General Ne Win, the RC has redirected the trajectory of the state from chaotic democracy to the so-called Burmese Way of Socialism
(BWS) and renamed the state as the Socialist Republic of the Union of Burma (T. Than 1993). In order to maintain domestic order, the regime has cut off the relations with other states and focused on building socialism under one party system. These two elements, nationalism and domestic order, are key elements in understanding military rule in Myanmar and have characterized most of the subsequent development in its path to democratization. The ratification
of new constitution and the general election in 1974 were evidences that Military were not merely struggling for power, but instead, restoring order within the state..."
Source/publisher:
Sukmawani Bela Pertiwi
Date of publication:
2013-00-00
Date of entry/update:
2021-06-19
Grouping:
Individual Documents
Category:
Politics and Government - global and regional - general studies, strategies, theory, Political History, Business and the Military, Burma's economic relations with ASEAN, Burma's economic relations with China, International Relations
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191.8 KB
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"Following the February coup, the violence used by the security forces against civilian protestors in Myanmar’s towns and cities has shocked public opinion around the world. But, as Naw Hsa Moo and Dominique Dillabough-Lefebvre explain in this commentary, such tactics have long been used by the Myanmar armed forces in military operations in the country’s ethnic states and regions. Awareness is now building and, as they argue, the military coup has brought new understanding and sympathy between pro-democracy and ethnic nationality movements.
Since the seizure of power by the military State Administration Council (SAC) on 1 February, mass protests have swept towns and cities in every state and region in Myanmar. As the days have passed by, civilians have faced the brunt of an increasingly aggressive response from the national armed forces, known as the Tatmadaw, whose indiscriminate use of force has now led to over 70 killed, countless injured, and more than 2000 people detained. And yet, despite the heightened use of military force, the general public throughout the country continue to stand in defiance, leading creative protests, with people of diverse ethnicities and backgrounds joining strikes and the civil disobedience movement.
All nationality peoples are being impacted. For lowland Bamar (Burman) people, the majority ethnic group, the current repression against civilians carries terrifying reverberations of past violent state-led responses towards demonstrators, most notably during the 1988 pro-democracy protests. However, for those living in many non-Bamar areas, the militarisation and pervasive sense of fear accompanying current events are sadly all too familiar. For many decades, they have been regular features of daily life, notably in the Kachin, Karen, Kayah (Karenni), Mon, Rakhine (Arakan) and Shan States.
Karen State in Myanmar’s Southeast is a poignant example of such struggles. Home to what is often considered the world’s longest-running civil war, conflict has escalated between the Tatmadaw and the armed opposition Karen National Union (KNU), with over 6,000 civilians displaced from their villages since the Tatmadaw intensified military operations in December 2020. The majority people living here identify as Karen, one of the country’s largest nationality groups, and are largely farming communities living in forested hills and winding valleys that run down the Thailand border. In response to the twin threats of military incursions and the SAC coup, villagers across Kler Lwee Htu (Nyaunglebin) and Mutraw (Hpapun) Districts have been regularly demonstrating, demanding the removal of the Tatmadaw from their lands and expressing solidarity with the protest movement across the country.
Whether in conditions of war or peace, Karen communities have faced the same challenges in every era of government since the country’s independence in 1948. A ceasefire was agreed between the government and the KNU in 2012 but, to date, this has not brought about a significant reduction in militarisation in many areas. Rather, the patterns of conflict and Tatmadaw encroachment have continued. In particular, the recent increase in Tatmadaw activity is linked to road-building, the expansion of a network of military roads in northern Karen State that first began during offensives in the 1990s.
The detrimental consequences for local villagers are profound. Naw Ghay Hai is the principal of Keh Der school in Kler Lwee Htu District in the KNU 3rd Brigade area. But, as she explained, there is no benefit to the local population: only an increase in land loss and fear:
“The road being built crosses through the paddy fields of local farmers, destroying the irrigation systems in the fields, seriously affecting the livelihoods of local people. They [Tatmadaw troops] build camps nearby that are causing the displacement of local villagers, and they are shelling around nearby villages. When local people hear the sound of guns and mortars, they obviously flee out of fear, and don’t dare to return.”
The latest military incursions are now compounding a worsening pattern of land loss and displacement that has built up among the local population over several decades. According to the Committee for Internally Displaced Karen People, approximately 30,000 people have been displaced in the local area since Tatmadaw “regional clearance” operations were initiated in the 1990s. Military offensives and continuing clashes have caused a loss of shelter, a lack of access to healthcare and difficulties in delivering food supplies to displaced villagers, putting children and elderly people especially at risk. Displaced villagers now live scattered in different locations in several townships across northern Karen State.
For many communities, this is not their first experience of flight. Villagers in Keh Der village tract recently explained to staff members from KESAN, a Karen civil society organisation, that they had started to hear the distant sound of gunshots and shelling from 12 December last year. Although this initially appeared to be occurring some way from their village, everyone was worried. Then, on 11 February – ten days after the coup, Tatmadaw forces moved closer to the village and people started to flee. As the troops moved in, they destroyed the food stores of displaced farmers, seized their livestock, burnt down their houses and, in nearby areas, forced villagers to act as porters to carry supplies for them as they continued their military sweep.
For the local peoples, this latest displacement brought back many memories of sufferings in the past. Constant insecurity and the arbitrary use of force have long been a mainstay in the lives of local people in this region. Saw Lo Wah, head of Keh Der village tract, remembered first fleeing from the Tatmadaw as a child in the 1960s. Those who were captured were forced by the soldiers to work as porters, an especially pervasive and egregious abuse of human rights. As he explained:
“Many people were injured or killed when they worked as porters for the military. For example, my father stepped on a landmine when he was a porter for the Tatmadaw. This was the case for many people as the Tatmadaw used Karen villagers to sweep the area for landmines, usually at gunpoint.”
Such experiences continued into adulthood, with Saw Lo Wah describing the situation as having grown “increasingly worse” during the late 1990s:
“When the military came, one family had to flee so quickly that they were unable to take their two children from their home, and the Burmese military burnt down their house. When the family returned, the children were gone.”
This was by no means the end of local suffering. For his part, Saw Lo Wah had to build his own home on three subsequent occasions, but each time Tatmadaw troops burned it down again, with all of his family’s possessions inside.
After six decades of military-dominated rule and a new regime in power, Saw Lo Wah’s assessment is stark. But he is expressing a view of the latest military takeover that can be frequently heard among communities in different parts of the country today:
“This is the root cause of our poverty. The Tatmadaw doesn’t care if you are young or old, male or female, they will kill everybody. They spare nobody.”.....A backdrop of conflict: militarisation as a way of life: Internal military conflicts have long been central to the nation-building ambitions of the Tatmadaw in Myanmar. In a country where national identity has long been linked to a particularly “racialised” vision of ethnicity, the national armed forces have been engaged in protracted warfare with a wide range of ethnic armed organisations (EAOs), amongst them the KNU, since independence from Great Britain in 1948. During these years, a simplistic vision of national politics has often pervaded popular imagination and discourse. In recent decades, this vision has been marked by the country’s democratic hero, Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, and her party, the National League for Democracy (NLD), who – it was hoped – were gradually leading the country on a path away from state failure and international isolationism towards democratisation and respect for human rights.
These expectations reached a pinnacle when the NLD won the 2015 general election, assuming government office the following year. Yet amidst the period of economic liberalisation that followed the 2011 shift to a nominally civilian system of government, armed conflicts have persisted in ethnic nationality areas outside of the Bamar-dominated heartlands in the centre of the country. While the army's blood-stained campaign against the Rohingya population in 2017 was the subject of much international media coverage, the Tatmadaw has also continued to carry out “anti-insurgency” campaigns against EAOs among several other nationality groups, including the Buddhist Rakhine people who also hail from Rakhine State. The cycles of conflict within the country are yet to be ended.
Many nationality peoples have been affected. Following the expulsion of over 750,000 Rohingya people, the Tatmadaw became locked in an increasingly bloody conflict with an emergent Rakhine force known as the United League of Army-Arakan Army (ULA-AA). But, after the NLD’s accession to office, the Tatmadaw also escalated military “clearance operations” forcibly displacing local populations in the Kachin, Karen and Shan States as well, severely impacting on the security and livelihoods of farming communities who depend on land for their survival.
Accurate humanitarian statistics are difficult to assemble from different parts of the country. But up to 10,000 people are believed to have died during Tatmadaw operations in the past five years, while over a million civilians are currently displaced from their homes, either living as refugees in neighbouring countries or in displacement camps in the hills. The evidence of a pervasive culture of human rights violations is deeply troubling. Today Tatmadaw actions during the events of the past few years are the focus of ongoing human rights investigations for potential war crimes by the International Criminal Court, International Court of Justice and UN Independent Investigative Mechanism for Myanmar.
Finding a political language, though, that unites peoples and addresses the conflict challenges in inclusive ways has historically proven difficult. Distinctions between “state” and “non-state” actors have often been opaque within the geographic boundaries of Myanmar. Shifting alliances between the Tatmadaw, ethnic nationality forces, government-backed militias and local military strongmen have been one of the most persistent realities in defining the functioning of “State” in many parts of the country. Today over 20 EAOs remain active in different nationality lands, from Rakhine State on the Bay of Bengal to the Tanintharyi Region in Myanmar’s far south.
In this context, projections of national unity become a reflection of the complex relationship between the Tatmadaw at the political centre and the peripheries where diverse nationality peoples live in uplands surrounding the Ayeyarwady plains. Over the decades, continued exploitation of the wealth of the resource-rich borderlands has been central to the development of Myanmar state, much in the same way that the plunder of native lands, slavery and a western expansionism was central in the shaping of the American national imaginary. Much of this economy is secretive and under-reported, but Myanmar’s ethnic states are home to large mineral reserves, illicit drug production and lucrative cross-border trades from which powerful elites and outside interests – not local peoples – mostly profit.
Compounding the marginalisation of local peoples, there is often a large knowledge gap in the outside world about the harsh living conditions in the country’s conflict zones. Such a lack of understanding is a constant source of frustration for ethnic nationality peoples trying to make common cause with their fellow countryman, yet find themselves stymied by urban-rural differences as well as ethnic, religious and linguistic divides. Even many well-informed urban Burmese only have a limited grasp of what is happening in the hills. The same lack of awareness exists in the international community, where the confusing array of armed groups poses significant barriers for foreign journalists, policy-makers and other outside actors who seek to understand some of the longest-running conflicts in modern Asian history.
For this reason, the failure of Aung San Suu Kyi and the NLD leadership to address conflict and the grievances of non-Bamar peoples remains one of the party’s most notable failures during its time in government office. The 2015 Nationwide Ceasefire Agreement (NCA), which the NLD-led administration inherited from its quasi-civilian predecessor, was a cornerstone in a faltering peace process that not only failed to include a majority of the strongest EAOs in the country but was also one in which the none of three words in its title could be said to be true: i.e. it was not nationwide, a ceasefire or an agreement.
To try and pick up the political momentum, the NLD inaugurated a 21st Century Panglong Conference in August 2016 with a promise to re-energise the peace process. But the government never acknowledged the NCA’s many failings. The NCA’s largest signatories in terms of EAO combatants – the KNU and Restoration Council of Shan State – could hardly be seen to be representative of the entire country and both continued to clash with the Tatmadaw. At the same time, most of the eight other EAOs that signed the NCA were significantly smaller, some of which had never seriously fought with the government while others, notably the Chin National Front, had not had protracted clashes with the Tatmadaw since the early 1990s.
Equally damaging to the credibility of the NCA, there were powerful and well-organised EAOs in the north of the country that were either not allowed by the Tatmadaw to join the accord or decided to boycott the process altogether. Pre-eminent EAOs which never joined the NCA include the United Wa State Party and Shan State Progress Party which have formal ceasefires with the government, and the Kachin Independence Organisation, Ta’ang National Liberation Army and ULA-AA that do not.
The ethno-political landscape is now highly uncertain. Following the coup, the NCA EAO-signatories collectively issued a statement on 20 February refusing to recognise the new regime as a legitimate power, and leading to a cessation of further talks. This represents a de facto breakdown in a ceasefire which, since its inception, had given little assurances to NCA signatories that the Myanmar armed forces would hold true to their word. For ceasefire EAOs, this represents a dilemma. According to Lt-Col. Saw La Shwe Hai from the KNU’s armed wing, Tatmadaw officers claim to follow the NCA codes of conduct and that they will try to resolve issues through political dialogue, but they do not follow through in practice:
“Instead they try and control more territory, build roads and further infrastructure and keep sending more reinforcements… They are trying to gradually control our area, bit by bit, but pretend they are following agreements… they couldn’t be lying any more”.
For ethnic nationality communities in the conflict-zones, such experiences are hardly new. But there is evidence that the scale of human rights violations across the country since the SAC’s seizure of power is bringing about a change in attitudes among the Bamar-majority population as well. Amidst the protests in the cities, incidents are being documented that the Myanmar military has been looting shops and houses, stealing food from street vendors and taking livestock from markets. Understanding the reality of such violence from the perspective of those living in the ethnic states and borderlands sheds light on the nature of the ethnocratic state-building policies of governments since independence and the ideology of the Tatmadaw.
Echoing this, a vocal minority of Bamar people have begun apologising for failing to stand behind ethnic peoples as they faced persecution. A female activist, who asked to remain anonymous, explained that “the intimidation, harassment and violence by the police and soldiers are nothing new” but that the “the violence and oppression has now been extended to the cities”. She continued:
“We are not even experiencing the brutality of the military yet in the cities, like those people in Rakhine experienced every day and every night. Those in Kachin. Those in Karen. Those in Shan. Now we too have to defend ourselves.”.....Conclusion: As the military coup enters its second month, people across the country are increasingly faced with the striking parallels between the ongoing indiscriminate use of force, intimidation and suppression against anti-coup protestors and civilians in the towns and the military’s historical and ongoing systematic brutality in Myanmar’s ethnically diverse borderlands. For populations in these areas, this has long been part of their lived experience. But for many young Bamar people in the cities, a growing awareness of this offers important lessons for a country coming to grips with the reinstatement of a military dictatorship amidst longstanding ethnic strife.
Such sentiments are not only rising in urban areas. Much of Myanmar’s largely rural population have also long faced the brunt of military-enabled land confiscations and repressive practices, keeping the majority of the population in poverty. As journalist and author Carlos Sardiña Galache succinctly put it:
“The Tatmadaw has always portrayed itself as the only institution capable of preserving Burma's unity, and this coup is proving the point in an unintended way: virtually the whole country seems to be united in rejecting the coup and the Tatmadaw itself.”
Now that these diverse groups are coming together, new alliances are beginning to emerge amidst the chaos. Although Myanmar’s future remains far from certain, the coup has created circumstances through which people in towns and cities across the country can better empathise with the long-suffering plight of residents of the war-torn lands inhabited by the Karens and other ethnic nationality peoples.
Written in collaboration with members of the Karen Environmental and Social Action Network (KESAN) conducting on the ground interviews..."
Source/publisher:
The Transnational Institute (TNI)
Date of publication:
2021-03-12
Date of entry/update:
2021-06-12
Grouping:
Individual Documents
Category:
Politics and Government - global and regional - general studies, strategies, theory, Politics, Government and Governance - Burma/Myanmar - general studies, 2021 Burma/Myanmar coup d'état, Right to Life: reports of violations in Burma, TNI-BCN Project on Ethnic Conflict in Burma, Armed conflict in Burma - attacks on civilians, Anti-coup protesters, Political History
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Sub-title:
Online film festival that runs to June 20 aims to draw attention to Myanmar’s political crisis while raising money for groups inside the country striving to restore democracy and alleviate hardship.
Description:
"Mr Kenneth Wong and his family left Myanmar soon after witnessing the military gun down unarmed protesters on the streets of Yangon in 1988. For Wong, a Burmese language lecturer at the University of California, Berkeley, there’s a painful sense of deja vu over the situation in Myanmar. He was a university student in 1988 when the military violently suppressed a national uprising in which many of his friends participated.
In the decades since, Wong was encouraged by the how much Myanmar had changed each time he visited. Then came the coup on February 1. “The things I’m seeing are things I hoped the new generation would never have to experience,” he told Frontier.
Wong, who is also a poet and artist, began looking for a way to support the anti-coup struggle through art. He got together with a group of filmmakers and directors based in San Francisco and began sounding out Myanmar filmmakers and distributors with the idea of holding an online film festival, with all proceeds going towards humanitarian and pro-democracy groups inside the country. These discussions resulted in the Burma Spring Benefit Film Festival, which features more than 30 films from or about Myanmar, and runs until June 20.
Helping to spearhead the concept was Gaetano Kazuo Maida, the executive director of the Buddhist Film Foundation/International Buddhist Film Festival.
“The filmmaker community really responded to our urgent invitations,” said Maida.
“All of the filmmakers that we reached out to were very generous, knowing that this was the cause,” added Wong.
The film festival has an added poignancy because of the regime’s targeting of Myanmar’s top artists, including actors, filmmakers and bloggers. A fellow film festival organiser, Min Htin Ko Ko Gyi, who founded the annual Human Rights Human Dignity Film Festival, was arrested on the day of the coup. In total, the military has issued arrest warrants for 120 filmmakers, actors, celebrities and journalists for opposing the coup.
“The junta recognises that these entertainers have an incredibly powerful voice and so they target them,” Wong said.
One of the most recent filmmakers to be arrested was Ma Aeint, whose latest film, Money has Four Legs, directed by Maung Sun and released last year, was about censorship in Myanmar. Ma Eaint’s family haven’t been able to contact her since she was detained by police in early June. “We want to get in touch with her her as soon as possible because the interrogation centers are known for torture,” said her sister, Ma Su Wai.
Many of the titles in the Burma Spring Benefit festival encapsulate the sense of deja vu Wong is feeling, at a time when the military is once again in control of the levers of power and the people are once again fighting for democracy.
Burma VJ, a 2008 Best Documentary nominee at the Academy Awards in the United States, shows how thousands of monks led a campaign of nonviolent resistance against the military junta in protests in 2007 known as the Saffron Revolution. Dozens were killed and hundreds arrested, and the Danish team that made the documentary had to smuggle their footage out of the country.
Fellow festival organiser Ms Jeanne Marie Hallacy said the films in the festival were selected both for the strength of their storytelling and filmmaking craft, and their relevance for a general audience to understand the country’s prolonged struggle for democracy and human rights.
One of the newest films to be screened, Burma Spring 21, is unique in that the five-minute film was shot and edited by an anonymous Myanmar filmmaker soon after the coup. Although filmmakers would ordinarily covet acclaim for a completed project, fear of being on a government blacklist and facing potential reprisals means that the message takes precedence.
“Facts and figures are easy to get online,” Wong said. “But what’s difficult to get are the explanations about the socio-political issues that spawned the current crisis. This is the type of information that is better discovered in books, films, and particularly in documentary films.”
A highlight of the film festival will take place on June 11 when it is due to be addressed by two members of the National Unity Government: U Aung Myo Min, the minister for human rights, and Naw Susannah Hla Hla Soe, the minister for women, youth and children affairs.
The film festival is just one event in one US city that is helping to create awareness and raise funds for people resisting the coup in Myanmar. Elsewhere around the world, local activist groups have been holding rallies and raising funds for the protest movement.
Wong is working with the International Network of Engaged Buddhists to transfer much-needed funds to civil servants who have joined the Civil Disobedience Movement and are refusing to work under the junta. “These are lifelines to them, because if you are participating in the CDM, a salary is no longer available,” said Wong.
Although Myanmar faces an uncertain future, Wong hopes for the day when the Burma Spring Benefit Film Festival will no longer aim to raise awareness and funds, and will instead showcase a renewed entertainment scene in all its creative glory. During his trips to Myanmar, he saw clear signs that the country was moving towards a better future after nearly half a century of military rule.
“There were a lot of young people who were launching their own startups and drawing inspiration from Silicon Valley,” he said. “At tea shops, taxi drivers and waiters were eager to talk about politics and express their views without [having to worry about] being arrested. I felt that these were signs that democracy was struggling to be born. So this film festival is about creating awareness.”..."
Source/publisher:
"Frontier Myanmar" (Myanmar)
Date of publication:
2021-06-11
Date of entry/update:
2021-06-11
Grouping:
Individual Documents
Category:
Politics and Government - global and regional - general studies, strategies, theory, Anti-coup protesters, Political History, Military History, 2021 Burma/Myanmar coup d'état
Language:
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Description:
"On this day in 2008, less than one month after over 100,000 people were killed by Cyclone Nargis in Myanmar, military dictator Senior General Than Shwe announced the promulgation of the 2008 Constitution.
Nargis struck the coast of Myanmar on the evening of May 2, 2008, smashing almost all the buildings in the Irrawaddy delta and affecting millions of people, especially in Yangon and Bago regions and Mon and Karen states.
The junta, however, decided to proceed with the vote, holding the constitutional referendum in most of Myanmar on May 10 and in the more severely affected areas on May 24, 2008.
While people were still in desperate trouble, the regime reported a heavy turnout and said 98.12 percent of eligible voters took part and 92.48 percent voted in favor. The constitution thus earned the satirical name, the Nargis constitution.
After refusing to recognize the results of the 1990 general election, which brought a landslide victory to the National League for Democracy (NLD), the military regime took 14 years from 1993 to 2007 to design the constitution which guarantees its political leadership and bars NLD leader Daw Aung San Suu Kyi from becoming president.
The first general election since the 1990 poll was held in 2010 based on the 2008 Constitution, which saw the military’s proxy Union Solidarity and Development Party winning the vote and taking the office. However, no significant changes could be introduced under both the USDP and NLD, which came to power at the 2015 general election.
Military chief Senior General Min Aung Hlaing, who was handpicked by his predecessor Than Shwe, seized power from the NLD government in February after the party repeated its electoral victory in the November 2020 general election.
Constitutions were scrapped when military chief General Ne Win seized power in 1962 and Gen Saw Maung took power in 1988. However, coup leader Min Aung Hlaing said he would act in line with the 2008 Constitution..."
Source/publisher:
"The Irrawaddy" (Thailand)
Date of publication:
2021-05-29
Date of entry/update:
2021-05-30
Grouping:
Individual Documents
Category:
National constitutions, draft constitutions, amendments and announcements (texts), Rule of Law - global and regional, Military History, Political History, Politics, Government and Governance - Burma/Myanmar - general studies, 2021 Burma/Myanmar coup d'état
Language:
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Description:
"On 1 June, it will be four months since a military coup overthrew Myanmar's elected government.
Tens years of democratic reforms have been upended and bloody attempts to silence opposition have shocked the world.
Those on the front line attempting to stand up to the regime are trying to delicately navigate through a new life of protest and safety.
While pro-democracy demonstrations have mostly left the streets, the movement against the junta exists through other means of expression in other realms.
In particular, it has made being an artist in Myanmar a dangerous business.
"I'm sorry that I couldn't turn my camera… messy situation right here", illustrator Raven told RTÉ News over a secure line.
Raven is one of many artists in Myanmar’s largest city Yangon who have been using art as a weapon against the country’s ruling junta, by exploring a digital canvas to showcase political messages against the February coup.
Protests through paint, illustrations, images and words are a more secure place of demonstration, away from the violence on the streets.
However, that is not to say it doesn’t come with its own risks. The sheer level and reach of this expression caught those in power off guard which has led to a clampdown to squeeze out any opposition voices.
According to artists in Myanmar, art studios have been burnt down and state-sponsored news channels broadcast arrest warrant lists regularly that include influencers, actors, film makers, artists and graphic designers.
The New York Times has reported that four poets have been killed and dozens imprisoned in the last couple of months.
Poet Khet Thi, whose work declared resistance to the military, died in detention recently. His family said that his body was returned with the organs removed.
Raven has a reluctance to give anything away about herself, out of fear for her safety.
While working a full-time job she has been leading a double life, shielding herself online by using a fake name so she can "work harder and longer".
She said: "I have been protesting physically on the streets, but when the shooting became serious and brutal, I kind of stopped going outside in person.
"I've been illustrating a lot of stuff every day…listening to people listening to their stories, their ideas and trying to illustrate them and spread the message because it's the only thing you know I can do."
Demonstrations against the coup have been the largest and bloodiest in decades.
Myanmar was ruled by the armed forces from 1962 until 2011, when a new government began ushering in a return to civilian rule.
However in February, the junta seized control again following a general election in which Aung San Suu Kyi's NLD party won by a landslide.
It was a vote the military claimed was rigged. Hundreds of people, including children, have been killed in the last four months.
While the streets have become too risky for protest, the pro-democracy movement continues to live through art in the online world.
The Hunger Games' three-fingered salute has become one of the major symbols, a defiant pose that gripped demonstrators from the beginning with interpretations of the move making its way through digital art.
"Our objective is trying to reflect the people's voices as much as we can so that other people see it, hear it, because not everybody can go out" said Nyi Maw, a Myanmar filmmaker.
He continued: "[The three-fingered salute] is a symbol that people can hold onto. It aligns with the people who in the beginning were demanding the three main objectives: to get democracy, to release the leaders, and to give the people's power back to the people".
Red, the colour of danger, anger and violence, floods most of the imagery.
Art collectives like the Raise Three Fingers group in Yangon have been founded through the frustration by artists and creatives - hoping to bring the global art community together and highlight the crisis happening in the country.
"Clearly art has some kind of power, right? Because it's causing some kind of fear in the eyes of the junta" said a representative from the group to RTÉ News, who is also on the call with Raven.
"We know that art is powerful because it transcends language", they said.
"It can, it's emotional. It can get people to act. You don't need words, right? Anyone can feel moved by a piece of art you might ask", they added.
The Raise Three Fingers (RTF) group lives online with creatives posting their work anonymously from countries around the world, in solidarity with the movement.
TikTok, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram have served as platforms to spread their message far and wide, allowing this movement and many others, to grow, flourish and connect with users globally.
They say access to the world at their finger trips has helped keep the situation in Myanmar on people’s agenda.
It is what separates it radically from the previously pro-democracy movements that have come before in Myanmar.
Unlike the revolutions of 1988 and 2007, the current protests in Myanmar are being led by a digitally savvy generation using hashtags, memes, visual graphics and social media to fight and shape the direction of the movement on a day-to-day basis.
More than a decade ago SIM cards were exceptionally expensive, but after a series of reforms in the country during Aung San Suu Kyi’s time in government, this opened up the digital domain to the people of Myanmar.
"There are figures to show that there are more SIM cards than people in Myanmar. In fact, Facebook is the internet in Myanmar and that's the way in which people, particularly the young, process news", Vijaya Nidadavolu, a gender and development specialist who recently worked in the country, told RTÉ News.
Even now with regular patchy internet access, creatives have the ability to organise, engage and spread the message online across interactive communities.
They can paint, draw, sculpt, animate, sing or dance and share works instantly within their networks through digital platforms.
"The revolutions in 1988 and 2007 was very different because we didn't have this type of access to the Internet. But now it feels like the playing field is different because since day one of the coup, we saw that there was a huge outpouring of art. People were able to like organise protests around a certain theme and get people together", said the RTF spokesperson in Yangon.
This online world of protest has also opened up the movement to more diverse voices.
Iconography surrounding other political mobilisations revolved solely around the figure of politician Aung San Suu Kyi, who became famous in the late 1980s for campaigning to restore democracy.
In 2015, Aung San Suu Kyi led the NLD to victory in Myanmar's first openly contested election in 25 years.
Posters, calendars and billboards all carried her image prominently as a symbol of hope as she spent nearly 15 years in detention between 1989 and 2010, after organising rallies calling for democratic reform and free elections.
"There was no alternative imagery in the public domain," said Vijaya Nidadavolu.
"The current protests have enabled a diverse set of other voices to express themselves and seize the political space, including through art. Aung San Suu Kyi’s image is not the only visible symbol of protest. People are rallying around a diversity of images and iconography, which is a defining feature of the current protest", Ms Nidadavolu added.
That changing political landscape can be seen in the art that has been produced and floods the Raise Three Fingers website.
"It's making room for diversity and inclusion and reparations for a lot of communities, including for the Rohingya communities" said the Raise Three Fingers spokesperson.
"So I think people are making different demands. It's not just about get rid of the dictatorship, we want democracy. We want a better democracy because the democracy we had before failed us", they said.
According to the RTF, Generation Z have been the most active as they have known nothing other than a country moving towards a free nation.
It’s in stark contrast to other age groups who have only gotten a taste of life outside a dictatorship, some of whom are disappointed with Aung San Suu Kyi's record and are still haunted by previous regimes.
"We want this to be the last generation under a dictatorship because we're sick of it quite frankly. For even young adults like me, it just feels like you have to do something because you don't want to go through this anymore", they said.
However, four months since the military coup, the junta still holds a tight grip on the Myanmar and Aung San Suu Kyi remains detained after being hit with a string of criminal charges including flouting coronavirus restrictions during last year's election campaign and possessing unlicensed walkie-talkies.
Social media may offer an alternative reality and solace for those who are trying to keep the pro-democracy movement alive as life on the streets of Yangon and elsewhere are still very different and difficult.
The spokesperson from RTF said: "I feel like I was more confined than during Covid. At least during Covid, if I had my mask on and I was keeping safe, I could go out [and] see friends. But now you know I'll go to the grocery store and I'll visit my parents house and that's about it.
"For for some people life has returned to normal. I see people eating at restaurants."
Many are living with a constant fear of being arrested.
"They're still stopping people checking cars in this street, and there is a feeling of constant anxiety, knowing that you could be arrested at any moment for everything. For having a phone, for having social media accounts" they added.
For Raven, she still puts her pen to digital paper every day with the hope that her images will keep the spirit of the movement alive.
"I definitely believe that we're going to win because we have to. Otherwise it will never win" she said..."
Source/publisher:
RTÉ News
Date of publication:
2021-05-30
Date of entry/update:
2021-05-30
Grouping:
Individual Documents
Category:
Anti-coup protesters, Spring Revolution, Right to Life: reports of violations in Burma, Human Rights and international relations, Politics and Government - global and regional - general studies, strategies, theory, The 2020 General Elections in Burma/Myanmar, Political History, 2021 Burma/Myanmar coup d'état
Language:
more
Description:
"“Kabarmakyaybu” was the revolutionary anthem of the 1988 pro-democracy movement and it becomes to be our chanting anthem to fight for our democracy once again in 2021 Feb. The English translation of the lyrics was done by the E-major students (YUFL) and we give full respect and credit to the original creators of the graphics and music. We created this ENG lyrics video so that world knows the meaning of our revolutionary anthem. It has been a week they overtook the country, and rallies of young & old came out of the street to protest peacefully and face their fears and fight for their rights today. We are so proud of our people. Let the world know we are resisting the group of narcissistic psychopath abusive Juntas who like to stay in power..."
Source/publisher:
GenZrevolutionMM
Date of publication:
2021-02-07
Date of entry/update:
2021-05-30
Grouping:
Individual Documents
Category:
Anti-coup protesters, Spring Revolution, Political History, Politics, Government and Governance - Burma/Myanmar - general studies, 2021 Burma/Myanmar coup d'état
Language:
more
Topic:
Myanmar/Burma, China, ASEAN, sanctions, pariah states, authoritarian transitions, Aung San Suu Kyi
Topic:
Myanmar/Burma, China, ASEAN, sanctions, pariah states, authoritarian transitions, Aung San Suu Kyi
Description:
"Abstract: Myanmar’s liberalizing reforms since late 2010 have effectively shed the country’s decades-long “pariah state” status. This article evaluates competing explanations for why Myanmar’s leaders made the strategic decision to pursue reform and opening. We examine whether the strategic decision was motivated by fears of sudden regime change, by socialization into the norms of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), or by the geopolitics of overreliance on China. Drawing on newly available materials and recent field interviews in Myanmar, we demonstrate how difficult it is for international actors to persuade a pariah state through sanctions or engagement, given the pariah regime’s intense focus on maintaining power. However, reliance on a more powerful neighbour can reach a point where costs to national autonomy become unacceptable, motivating reforms for the sake of economic and diplomatic diversification.....Acknowledgments: We gratefully acknowledge the participation of interviewees in Yangon, Naypyidaw, Seoul, and Washington, DC. Research assistance was provided by Andrew Choi, Esther Pau Sann Cing, Li Xuan, Li Zimeng, Wang Qichao, Wu Shangwei, Zhang Xiaorui, and Zhou Xin. We also wish to thank the editor, three anonymous reviewers, and participants at the 2014 Murdoch-Macau Colloquium on Political Change and Governance in Asia, whose comments greatly improved this article. We thank the Asan Institute for Policy Studies for supporting Leif-Eric Easley’s research travel to Myanmar in 2014. Research for this article was funded in part by a grant from the University of Macau (SRG2013-00057-FSS). For over two decades, Myanmar suffered the reputation of an international pariah. After the 1988 coup that inaugurated 22 years of military rule under the State Law and Order Restoration Council / State Peace and Development Council (SLORC/SPDC),1
Myanmar incurred international condemnation and sanctions for human rights violations, including annulling the National League for Democracy’s (NLD) electoral victory in 1990; detaining opposition leaders, including NLD General Secretary Aung San Suu Kyi; killing civilians during military campaigns against armed ethnic
minority groups; violently suppressing civil protests in the 2007 “Saffron Revolution”; and muzzling free speech and the press.2
The junta appeared unmoved by sanctions and international exhortations to pursue reform and opening. Its apparent steps toward ending military rule under the 2003 “Roadmap to Discipline-Flourishing Democracy” were often marred by process irregularities, lack of inclusiveness and transparency, and restrictions
on and sometimes violent repression of opposition parties. Though the SPDC held landmark elections for a civilian government in November 2010, supporters of democracy were not encouraged when the pro-military Union Solidarity and Development Party (USDP) swept the polls and elevated Prime Minister Gen. Thein Sein to the presidency.
Many were surprised, however, when Thein Sein initiated extensive
reforms in 2011: releasing political prisoners, loosening media and civil
society restrictions, and allowing Aung San Suu Kyi and other opposition members to run for parliament. Myanmar’s pariah status quickly abated as a parade of foreign leaders visited the country and eased sanctions. In November 2015, Myanmar’s first general election under nominally civilian rule saw the NLD defeat the USDP in a landslide, marking a new era in Myanmar’s politics.3
The manner in which Myanmar pursued transformative reforms raises
important questions. Why did the SPDC pursue reform and opening when it did? What motivated the strategic decision to pursue transformative policies? Several scholars have argued that domestic factors drove Myanmar’s reforms. Jones maintains that the junta’s co-optation of ethnic militias allowed it to resume a democratization process it had begun and aborted in 1990 and again in 1996.4 Bünte, along with Croissant and Kamerling, emphasizes
the aging SPDC leaders’ desire to manage succession politics through institutionalization.5 Roger Lee Huang argues that the junta sought to retain political control but did not foresee the extent of reforms under Thein Sein, an assessment shared by MacDonald.6 Other scholarship emphasizes international factors as primary catalysts
for reform. One argument is that Myanmar’s leaders implemented domestic reforms to pursue rapprochement with the European Union, the United States, and other sanctions-imposing countries, and to counterbalance China’s growing political and economic influence.7
Another possible factor behind Myanmar’s transition is the socializing role of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) and more generally, Myanmar’s desire for international prestige.8
While more than one of these factors may have motivated Myanmar’s reforms, an “all of the above” answer leaves the country’s political transformation over-determined and under-examined.
This article weighs the theoretical logic and empirical evidence for three competing explanations for Myanmar’s strategic decision to pursue transformative policies: first, junta leaders’ desire to maintain power and avoid sudden regime change; second, socialization into ASEAN norms; and third, the desire to reduce China’s political and economic influence over Myanmar.9 We base our research on numerous interviews with key informants in or engaged with Myanmar, as well as on primary documents. We find that
while multiple factors motivated Myanmar’s strategic decision, the most important driver was concern about China’s growing influence.
To frame the analysis, the next section defines pariah states and what it means to make a strategic decision to pursue transformative policies and exit pariahdom. We then briefly outline our interview methodology before discussing the timing of Myanmar’s transformative reforms. Subsequent sections review theoretical bases and empirical support for each of the three competing explanations. In the conclusion, we summarize our findings and discuss possible implications for other pariah states and for Myanmar’s political future..."
Source/publisher:
Pacific Affairs (Canada)
Date of publication:
2016-09-00
Date of entry/update:
2021-05-28
Grouping:
Individual Documents
Category:
Sanctions - general, ASEAN-Burma relations, China-Burma relations, Business and the Military, Sanctions, Burma's economic relations with China, About Aung San Suu Kyi, Politics and Government - global and regional - general studies, strategies, theory, Articles on the NLD, Military History, Political History
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"When Myanmar’s ambassador to the United Nations Kyaw Moe Tun took the floor of the General Assembly on Feb. 26 to condemn the weeks-old military coup and announce his loyalty to the elected government, he not only shocked all those tuning in who expected a pro forma defense of the Tatmadaw’s power grab and denunciation of U.N. interference. He also provided Myanmar’s democratic movement a potentially powerful new tool, both to help secure their legitimacy, and to shift the historic dynamics of U.N. failure in Myanmar. To make the most of this tool, the nascent National Unity Government (NUG) must quickly learn how to work with the U.N. system and leverage it for its intrinsic utility as well as to build out their footprint internationally. To date, the results have been mixed, but there are signs that the NUG is learning. Whether these efforts ultimately will be effective also depends on whether the U.N. system can learn from its own failures in Myanmar and make the necessary course corrections at this pivotal moment.....Past Imperfect: The U.N.’s history with Myanmar has been a multi-decade case study in the moral hazards that international organizations face when dealing with regimes that do not care about either the welfare of their own people or the opinions of outsiders. After being one of the first of the newly independent post-colonial countries to join the U.N., Myanmar enthusiastically participated in U.N. activities during the parliamentary democracy period. It even requested the U.N.’s help in dealing with spillover from the Chinese civil war, when both Kuomintang (KMT) and Communist troops breached Myanmar’s border.
After Ne Win’s 1962 coup, however, successive military regimes rigorously limited their engagement with international organizations out of an almost fanatical devotion to neutrality. Like other autarkic dictatorships, the Ne Win regime deeply distrusted the U.N. and particularly eschewed involvement with its field-based activities, even though his countryman U Thant served as U.N. Secretary General during much of the first decade of Burmese Socialist Program Party (BSPP) rule. It was not just the U.N. that drew Ne Win’s suspicions: nearly all foreign organizations were kicked out of Myanmar during the 1960s and diplomats based in the country were heavily restricted. The BSPP’s fetishization of neutrality was such that Ne Win withdrew Myanmar from the Non-aligned Movement in 1978 because he was concerned it had become too partisan toward the Soviet Union. Given the role of Southeast Asia as a major theater of Cold War contestation, and China’s mercurial role in these geostrategic games, one can hardly blame Myanmar for wanting to remain aloof from it all. But Ne Win’s autarky also ensured that Myanmar essentially was suspended in amber for more than a decade.
Faced with a ruinous economic situation, however, the post 1974-BSPP and its successors in the State Law and Order Restoration Council (SLORC), while no less xenophobic, recognized that the U.N.’s rapidly expanding aid agencies could be useful as they attempted to address the country’s disastrous economic situation. The Tatmadaw generals seemed to innately grasp that these various humanitarian and development agencies cared more about their agency’s particular development and humanitarian mission set than about the quality of Myanmar’s governance and these agencies were competing for “clients” in the developing world. Having been locked out of Myanmar at the height of the BSPP’s autarky, these agencies were desperate to experiment on its broken economy and what they viewed as a tabula rasa society ripe for their modernization efforts. This gave the BSPP the ability to arbitrage aid agencies’ ambitions and silos, strictly limiting their staffing and physical access and insisting on a high degree of control over their activities in the country. Even after Ne Win resigned as BSPP chairman in 1988, the SLORC and SPDC continued to use humanitarian access as a bargaining chip to ensure that agency operations were compliant. In the most striking—but far from the only– example of its extreme suspicion toward the U.N., the Burmese regime initially rejected U.N.-led humanitarian assistance in the wake of 2008’s devastating Cyclone Nargis, which killed tens of thousands of people, wiped out the critical Irrawaddy Delta rice production zone, and left millions homeless.....Political Battles at – and Over – the U.N.: In contrast to the aid agencies ostensibly apolitical approach, the U.N.’s Member State bodies have periodically attempted to involve themselves in Myanmar’s politics, especially after the Tatmadaw’s violent suppression of the 1988 uprising. The end of the Cold War and concurrent rise of liberal internationalism were rocket fuel to the U.N.’s political engagement in Myanmar. After the SLORC ignored the National League for Democracy’s (NLD) landslide victory in the 1990 elections, the United States and other western democracies supported various resolutions in the U.N. Human Rights Commission and General Assembly, condemning the military’s brutal usurpation of democracy and appointing Special Rapporteurs to investigate its wrongdoings. The United States and other major donors also restricted U.N. agencies’ and international financial institutions’ cooperation with the military. U.N. agencies, in turn, complained bitterly about what they saw as the negative impact of these donor efforts to ensure aid was not instrumentalized by the military regime.
For their part, Burmese regimes did not appear to differentiate between the component parts of the U.N. system. The Secretary General’s Special Envoys typically were given privileged access to both junta members and detained opposition leader Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, so long as they kept their public statements anodyne and their “negotiations” efforts within prescribed limits. Human Rights Special Rapporteurs, on the other hand, were forced to negotiate access on the narrowest of terms and often subjected to rough treatment on the ground. Special Rapporteur Paulo Pinheiro found a barely concealed listening device in the room where he was holding interviews with political prisoners. A violent mob attacked his successor Tomas Quintana’s motorcade during a field visit to Rakhine State following 2012 anti-Muslim violence there. Likewise, after she spoke out on the situation of the Rohingya, Special Rapporteur Yanghee Lee was subjected to a steady stream of virulent misogynist verbal abuse before seeing her access cut off altogether.
For the U.N. agencies and personnel deployed in-country after 1988, efforts to navigate between their ‘apolitical’ aid and development missions and the extremely political Member-State activities in New York and Geneva—all while dealing with a distrustful and mercurial junta-often proved untenable. The treatment of the U.N. during the Saffron Revolution of 2007 is a case in point. As anti-regime protests intensified in the summer and fall of 2007, the dual-hatted Resident Coordinator/ Humanitarian Coordinator (RC/HC) in Myanmar was Charles Petrie, a U.N. veteran who had been an eyewitness to the international community’s moral failure in the Rwandan genocide, was under pressure to speak out about the situation on the ground. His home agency, the U.N. Development Program (UNDP), was often a target of criticism from human rights groups and the pro-democracy movement as soft on the military regime due to their focus on economic development. Even after the military started shooting at unarmed protesters and arresting U.N., Petrie studiously avoided direct criticism of the junta. It was only after thousands had been killed that Petrie issued a U.N. Day statement that obliquely linked economic hardship in Burma with the protests, after which the junta forced him to leave the country.....The Consequences of Contested Engagement: In trying to manage the sensitivities of both Burmese juntas and subsequent quasi-civilian governments, the U.N. generally has ended up pleasing no one and failing in its most basic tasks. The Tatmadaw was never going to embrace the U.N., given its innate xenophobia and the decades of General Assembly and Human Rights Commission and Council resolutions criticizing its ruinous and abusive rule. Prior to 2010, democratic forces and ethnic civil society criticized U.N. humanitarian and development programs on the ground as doing little more than legitimizing military rule. After a brief post-2010 honeymoon period, Aung San Suu Kyi and the National League for Democracy came to view the U.N. as unhelpful because she felt they consultation with treated her as a ‘box-checking’ exercise as they rushed to expand the UN presence under the Thein Sein government. After the NLD took power in March 2016, Suu Kyi’s negative view of the U.N. hardened in the face of Member State bodies’ condemnations of atrocities against the Rohingya while she was the de facto head of government. Suu Kyi’s antipathy towards the U.N. was undoubtedly fueled by veteran diplomats such as Kyaw Tint Swe who spent their careers vigorously defending military regime abuses and pushing back on the U.N. in Geneva and New York. By the time the August 2017 atrocities against the Rohingya began, there was little trust and empathy between the U.N. and the NLD government.
Once again, the U.N. Resident Coordinator in Yangon, Renata Lok-Dessallien, was caught in these cross currents. A development expert by training, Lok-Dessallien was sent to Yangon to oversee the major expansion of U.N. agency partnerships with Myanmar’s government. In the end, her efforts to soft-pedal concerns about the Rohingya and other human rights issues prior to the 2017 atrocities did little to overcome the deep reservoir of hostility and distrust that colored the government’s view of the U.N. Her development-focused approach did, however, trouble her staff, especially those charged with implementing the U.N.’s “Human Rights Up Front” initiative. As the scale and scope of the atrocities in Rakhine state spiraled and international condemnation grew, Lok-Dessallien was spectacularly ill-equipped to deal with the situation. Although the U.N. secretariat in New York was aware she was flailing, they took no steps to recall or replace her until it was too late. This was all well documented in both contemporaneous media reports on the 2017 Rakhine crisis and the U.N.’s Rosenthal Report on the U.N.’s failure to anticipate or prevent the genocide.
Despite this checkered history, in 2021 protestors in Myanmar initially called on the U.N. to act against the Feb. 1 coup and live up to its founding ideals. Invoking the “Responsibility to Protect” (R2P) and seizing on condemnatory statements by U.N. officials, many young protesters looked to the U.N. to send in peacekeepers or take other steps to restore the elected government. But so far, the U.N. has spectacularly failed to rise to the occasion. Blame for this failure has largely centered on the Security Council, where the United Kingdom and other so-called like-minded countries have taken a cautious incremental approach, ostensibly due to fear of a joint Chinese and Russian veto of any resolution they might table. As time passes since the coup and humanitarian needs rise, there also are growing concerns among the anti-coup forces that various U.N. agencies may be falling back into old habits of willingness to work with the junta in order to retain access to their projects in country.....A New Hope at the U.N.? Options for Constructive Engagement: Yet even as the U.N. has proven unable to stop the junta’s illegal coup or ameliorate the situation on the ground, it does have some specific utility for the democratic movement. For the first time, those facing off against a military junta have a Burmese ambassador in New York who has declared his loyalty to the democratic movement and is empowered to work with the entire U.N. system, including and especially on human rights issues. Practically speaking, control over the U.N. seat in New York can be a beachhead for the NUG’s broader efforts towards international recognition even as the struggle on the ground continues and the democratic leadership builds out its own institutions. Because many other governments will recognize whatever authorities are recognized by the U.N., controlling the General Assembly seat is critical.
Moreover, Permanent Representatives (PRs) in New York hold a privileged position within the U.N. system, surpassed only by ministers and heads of state and government from a protocol standpoint. As long as Ambassador Kyaw Moe Tun remains credentialed to the U.N. as Myanmar’s PR, he is the senior-most Burmese diplomat accredited to the U.N. system. As a result, he can represent Myanmar at U.N. meetings not only in New York but also in Geneva, Vienna, Rome, Bangkok, Nairobi, or any other venue where the U.N. convenes Member States. The U.N.’s continued reliance on virtual meetings due to the pandemic is helpful in this regard, as Kyaw Moe Tun and his designates can remain in New York to defend his seat while representing Myanmar at U.N. events around the world.
On the programmatic side, the Civil Disobedience Movement’s (CDM’s) efforts to shut down economic activity in Myanmar and the NUG’s demand that humanitarian assistance not flow through military controlled channels have highlighted the need to establish parameters for cooperation with U.N. agencies, funds, and programs accustomed to dealing with Member State governments. To this end, the NUG can use their foothold in New York to pull through cooperation with U.N. agencies, including negotiating Memoranda of Understanding (MOUs) on access, financing, and other modalities. By aligning these efforts with outreach to bilateral donors and multi-lateral development banks, the NUG can begin to demonstrate governance capabilities to their own people and the international community alike.
Working together with CDM diplomats in Geneva and elsewhere, the New York mission can coordinate diplomatic engagement across the entire U.N. system on everything from credentialling for meetings to negotiating MOUs with U.N. agencies. The NUG will need to provide strategic and policy guidance, including on where within the U.N. system to prioritize limited human resources for maximum impact. This was recently and unfortunately demonstrated when the junta successfully sent its murderous police chief to a U.N. Office of Drugs and Crime (UNODC) senior officials’ meeting. That event seems to have served as a wake-up call for the NUG on the need to track and manage such U.N. Member State-driven activities more effectively. On May 26, for instance, the World Health Assembly (WHA) refused to seat the junta’s delegate after the NUG submitted a competing credential request. While not a total victory, having the Myanmar chair empty is preferably to having the junta represent the country. The WHA’s decision also kicked the issue back to the General Assembly, highlighting the stakes for keeping the New York mission in the NUG’s hands.
Given the complexity of the task and the small number of diplomats the NUG currently has, both the New York mission and the NUG leadership will need to be creative and disciplined about staffing and other resource allocation decisions. For instance, civil society groups that work on human rights and humanitarian action have substantial resources and influence that make them potential force multipliers in these areas of alignment. While many small Member State missions in New York and Geneva have deep experience working with their own and international allied civil society partners, many experienced Burmese diplomats are more accustomed to seeing civil society as adversarial and both sides will have to overcome both a trust deficit and a learning curve to work together effectively.
The CDM diplomats are fortunate, however, that Burmese civil society has decades of experience partnering with regional and global advocacy groups and diplomats from other governments, especially in the priority areas of human rights and humanitarian assistance. The New York mission should look beyond the Secretary General’s Special Envoy and engage the various Special Procedures of the Human Rights Council that have an interest in Myanmar, including Special Rapporteur Tom Andrews, and Special Representatives of the Secretary General on issues such as the Responsibility to Protect, Sexual Violence in Armed Conflict, and Children in Armed Conflict. These U.N. experts can be both resources for information and potential allies in the system.
Finally, the NUG must have a clear plan for holding on to Myanmar’s U.N. General Assembly seat when the next General Assembly session begins in September. The NUG and the junta are likely to submit competing credentials for the session, and the U.N. Credentials Committee and ultimately the General Assembly itself will likely be drawn into a credentials fight. While the technical and protocol aspects of U.N. credentialling are relatively straightforward, those credentials fights that have taken place over the 75-year history of the U.N. have largely followed a pattern where initially ‘possession is 9/10ths of the law’ but the representation usually ends up aligning with political reality on the ground—regardless of the legitimacy of that reality. The refusal to seat representatives of South Africa’s apartheid government is one of the few cases where the U.N. acted from a moral imperative.
The situation of Myanmar is likely to challenge the U.N., both institutionally and among its individual member states. By working now to establish Ambassador Kyaw Moe Tun as an active and credible representative of the Burmese people across the U.N. system, the NUG can create facts on the ground that may prove dispositive when his credentials are challenged in September. The more his counterparts in New York see him as the legitimate representative, the more likely they are to support him, if for no other reason than they themselves would not wish to be arbitrarily replaced as the result of an illegal coup. For its part, the U.N. system should recognize that they have an historic opportunity to align with the Burmese people’s democratic aspirations and contribute positively to this hinge moment in Myanmar’s history. By drawing lessons from the missed opportunities and failures of the past, the system can try to turn a new page.
For the programmatic pillars of the system, this means being more cognizant and tolerant of political risk than they are typically comfortable being. The UNDP—both because of its past issues in Myanmar and because it has specific responsibilities with regard to governance—should stake out a leadership role in supporting the democratic aspirations of the Burmese people and work with both the NUG and civil society on urgent governance challenges that have resulted from the coup. UNDP also has an existing MOU to work on Rakhine State, signed with the NLD government, that can provide the basis for addressing that troubled region. Likewise, agencies such as U.N. Fund for Children (UNICEF) and the World Food Program (WFP) can work directly with the NUG to address urgent humanitarian needs. In the past, these agencies have been more adept at handling political ambiguity and demonstrating flexibility, and these skill sets will be necessary to navigate the current situation.
On the Member State side, creativity will also be required, including looking beyond the politicized Security Council and Human Rights Council (HRC). One potential solution is to empower entities such as the Independent Investigative Mechanism on Myanmar (IIMM), that were created by Member States but operate as independent technical bodies. The IIMM’s mandate should be interpreted (or expanded) as needed to allow it to provide technical assistance directly to the NUG, including by confidentially sharing evidence about the atrocities against the Rohingya. Helping the NUG and its ministers to understand and come to terms with the scope and scale of atrocities the Tatmadaw committed during the NLD’s watch could help to advance the cause of recognition and reconciliation that ultimately is core to Myanmar’s nation-building project. This is a delicate task, but one that the IIMM – as a technical body that is built on collecting and following the evidence rather than advocating for any particular outcome – is uniquely qualified to undertake. Given that the overwhelming majority of Member States have supported resolutions in the General Assembly condemning the atrocities against the Rohingya, the NUG’s inability to date to adequately address the Rohingya issue remains a major stumbling block as countries consider whether to recognize it. A successful two-way partnership between the IIMM and the NUG could help to address this issue in a more constructive way.
In light of the many challenges facing Myanmar’s pro-democracy movement at the moment, leveraging the country’s U.N. General Assembly seat may not be top of mind for the NUG. Nonetheless, the seat – and the source of legitimacy that comes with it – represents a major tangible asset that has real value to other countries that otherwise may be inclined to pay the NUG little attention. Whether the NUG can deploy this asset strategically and successfully could make the difference as it struggles to establish itself on the international stage. After decades of awkward and all-around frustrating engagement, the U.N. also needs to step forward with a more flexible and conscious approach that shows it has learned from past mistakes. Even if both sides can break old habits, there is no guarantee that the outcome will be successful for the Burmese people. But if the NUG and U.N. squander this opportunity by repeating old patterns, it is virtually guaranteed that everyone stands to lose..."
Source/publisher:
Just Security (New York)
Date of publication:
2021-05-27
Date of entry/update:
2021-05-27
Grouping:
Individual Documents
Category:
2021 Burma/Myanmar coup d'état, The UN and Burma - news and commentary, Human Rights and international relations, Political History, Anti-coup protesters, Politics and Government - global and regional - general studies, strategies, theory
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Sub-title:
The Tatmadaw, Myanmar's powerful army, controls every aspect of its soldiers' lives. And those who leave pay a heavy price. DW spoke to three defectors.
Description:
"As he witnessed the brutal crackdown on unarmed civilians protesting the army's takeover, the young lieutenant felt increasingly disgusted. Soon after, he left without saying goodbye to his parents, fleeing the country first on motorbike and then on foot, aided across the border by local villagers.
Along the way, he stuck to smaller roads, carefully avoiding checkpoints and detection.
For if caught, he knew he would pay a heavy price for his desertion: In Myanmar, army defectors are usually sentenced to death — which is then commuted to life in prison, as the death penalty has not been carried out in over three decades.
That could, however, change as the army faces opposition within its ranks to its power grab.....Rare insight into Myanmar's military: The lieutenant is one of three defectors DW has spoken to in recent weeks, exchanging almost daily messages with them. The man, who peppers his messages with laughing emojis, is in hiding in India. The other two, both high-ranking officers, are on the run in Myanmar, moving from one safe house to the next. Their accounts provide rare insight into an otherwise opaque institution that is known for committing gross human rights violations against its own citizens — and shows the army's stranglehold on soldiers' lives, minds and, DW has learned, also finances.
The interviews were conducted via messenger apps, including patchy video and audio calls, given that the army's ongoing internet crackdown hampers most communication with the outside world.
DW has not been able to independently verify their accounts, but the interviews corroborate each other in key aspects. In two cases, military identification cards were shown.
Their identities are not disclosed in this report due to fears for the defectors and their families' safety.....'Every move monitored': The three men describe a cloistered, strictly controlled life, based on a stringent, overarching hierarchy. Soldiers, they say, are required to live on army bases and are only allowed to leave if granted permission by superiors. The army dictates what soldiers and their families "wear, say and believe in, even how to decorate your home," one man said. "They can check your house at any moment," he added.
The wives of soldiers, he explains, are not allowed to wear the color red, which is associated with Aung San Suu Kyi's National League for Democracy (NLD), or spout any other political symbols.
"Everything is monitored," says another defector, who was deliberate with each word used to recount his experience. "They want to turn people into robots, who don't think (for themselves)."
A monitoring team within the army using Facebook, all three sources say, watches over soldiers and their families' activities, scrutinizing every single like, share and post. Soldiers, one defector says, have to hand over their log-in details for Facebook, including sign-up phone numbers.
"If people post political things, they can be arrested and put in jail for three or four weeks," one defector tells DW. Another says that soldiers have been denied promotions after sharing social media posts criticizing the leadership of the Tatmadaw — as Myanmar's military is known — or voicing support for the NLD party.
One man recalls taking part in a training course a few years ago, where officers were shown how to tap into CCTV and intercept phone calls using Russian and Chinese technology — although he did not know the extent of surveillance.
Low-ranking soldiers, one defector says, were treated "like slaves," with their wives forced to clean high-ranking officers' homes without pay. Another said he had witnessed a superior asking the wife of a low-ranking soldier to give him a massage. He says the woman acquiesced, knowing that refusing could have negative repercussions for her husband.....Anti-Muslim propaganda: According to DW's three sources, soldiers are fed a steady stream of propaganda that views the Tatmadaw as the guardian of the embattled Buddhist nation of Myanmar. The enemies, according to this propaganda, are made up of a shadowy cabal of Muslims, Aung San Suu Kyi and her NLD party, who are bent on destroying the Buddhist country.
It's an ideology that has been forged in a decades-long, at times brutal battle against a myriad of ethnic insurgencies that have been fighting for independence from the Burmese majority and, at times, each other.
In Myanmar, a state with 135 different ethnic groups, where roughly 90% of the population adheres to Buddhism, politics and religion are closely interwoven. Generals have long built pagodas, erected Buddha statues, and paid homage to influential monks to legitimize their claim to power as a unifying force. Anti-Muslim sentiments are widespread, which the Tatmadaw is adept at exploiting for political capital.
And this anti-Muslim, Buddhism-first propaganda is instilled into soldiers of all ranks. Soldiers, one source says, are being "brainwashed" into buying the army's worldview. Another said while he did not believe the propaganda, he did not speak out against it, for fear of being punished. One defector recalled how he had been verbally abused when he dared to question the narrative that Rohingya — a Muslim minority long denied full citizenship rights — were "terrorists" bent on destroying the country and that they had no place in Myanmar.
One of the men, who, like many officers hails from a military family and had grown up on an army base, said that he had long believed the Tatmadaw's propaganda: When friends dared to question the army, he would defend the military, recalling his anger at anyone who spoke negatively of the institution he had been taught to revere.
His views, he said, only changed following the coup when he witnessed the army's crackdown on peaceful protesters — unarmed men, women and children that the army labels "terrorists.".....Myanmar army is a state within the state: The Tatmadaw's outsized role is intertwined within Myanmar's political and economic life — a lucrative advantage that succeeded colonial rule.
Following independence from Britain in 1948, a military junta took control in 1962, ushering in a prolonged period of iron-fisted rule characterized by strict censorship, imprisonment of opponents and international isolation.
While in power, the army — as well as individual officers and their families — amassed great wealth. This included land, economic and financial assets.
The generals only eased their grip on power in 2010, which culminated in elections that allowed for Aung San Suu Kyi's NLD party to form a government.
Even after ceding some control to elected politicians, it continues to play a vast role in both the political and economic field: The constitution guarantees the military 25% of parliament seats, meaning that the army can block any constitutional amendments it dislikes.
It also retains control of important ministries, including defense and home affairs.
Likewise, it continues to own and run a myriad of lucrative business interests without any independent oversight. The Tatmadaw runs its own schools, universities, hospitals and court system.
In short: The army has established what is basically a powerful state within the state. And, since the coup, it is now formally back in power.
In absolute terms, this professional army is the 11th largest in the world, with some 406,000 soldiers in active duty as of 2019, according to the International Institute for Strategic Studies.....Economic exploitation: The Tatmadaw not only tries to control soldiers' ways of thinking — but also their finances. Military personnel of all ranks, DW has learned, are forced to support military-owned companies through two mandatory schemes: This includes, the three defectors say, requiring soldiers to sign up for a life insurance policy with Aung Myint Moh Min Insurance Company Ltd. The policy, which they are forced to select, renews automatically every five years — with no way for soldiers to opt-out.
The company is an alleged subsidiary of one of the military's two conglomerates, Myanmar Economic Holding (MEC) and Myanmar Economic Holding Limited (MEHL), according to a 2019 UN report. These conglomerates, benefit both the Tatmadaw and high-ranking individual officers and their families.
The company did not respond to DW's requests for comment.
Soldiers are also forced to make mandatory payments into MEC and MEHL, which are converted into shares. In return, soldiers receive a small dividend every year, defectors say.
It is likely a way to both generate revenues for the military and individual generals — whilst buying loyalty. Many high-ranking officers upon retirement are often awarded posts in the two holdings, their subsidiaries and affiliated companies. Others are given posts in the civilian administration.
The army does not respond kindly to those who attempt to leave its fold. One of the defectors tells DW that soldiers "cannot leave the army."
In theory, another explained, soldiers can submit a letter of resignation after 10 years. "But that is only in the law," he explained drily. "In practice, it is not easy and it takes three to four years to submit the process (of leaving the army)." And even then, he added, it was not a given that the army would let the soldier go.
He says he regrets his decision to join the army in the first place.
The Myanmar Embassy in Berlin did not respond to DW's request for comment.....Tatmadaw hunting down defectors?: All three men are aware of the Tatmadaw's reach, as the army pursues defectors. One man says he had heard from a contact in the Tatmadaw's headquarters that it had compiled a list of some 300 defectors and was going after them and their families. It was, he says, "a manhunt."
DW cannot verify the claim, however, given that the authorities have compiled a wanted list of activists and journalists that is broadcast every night on state television, it's likely that the same is happening with army defectors.
One man describes how his family receives threatening phone calls. "They said: Where is your son? If you support him, you will get arrested." Soon after, he severed all communication with his family, fearing for their safety.
Another source refuses to acknowledge whether he is still in contact with his family, fearing it would risk their safety.
Despite all the high risks, one defector has no regrets. Life on the run and hiding in a different house each night to keep safe is, for him, a consequence of maintaining integrity. He stands by his decision to leave the army he had served for so many years, saying he did not want his future children to "think I did nothing to stop this illegal coup."..."
Source/publisher:
"DW News" (Germany)
Date of publication:
2021-05-22
Date of entry/update:
2021-05-22
Grouping:
Individual Documents
Category:
Political role of the Tatmadaw, The Military's political role, Politics, Government and Governance - Burma/Myanmar - general studies, Politics and Government - global and regional - general studies, strategies, theory, Racial or ethnic discrimination in Burma: reports of violations against several groups, Human Rights and international relations, Military History, Political History, 2021 Burma/Myanmar coup d'état
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Sub-title:
While one party courted controversy by deciding to attend, others said they didn’t even consider taking part
Description:
"Leaders of most of Myanmar’s major political parties have decided not to attend a meeting with the country’s junta-appointed election body on Friday.
The meeting will be just the second held since the military appointed all new members to the Union Election Commission (UEC) in the wake of its February 1 coup, which it staged on the pretext of alleged irregularities in last year’s election.
The first meeting, held in late February, was attended by 53 political parties, only 10 of which had won any seats in the November 2020 general election.
Major ethnic parties such as the Shan Nationalities League for Democracy (SNLD), the Arakan National Party (ANP), and the Kachin State People's Party (KSPP) are among those that will not be in attendance on Friday.
Also absent will be the Democratic Party for a New Society (DPNS), formed in 1988, and the United Nationalities Democracy Party (UNDP), which was founded in 2019 by former members of the National League for Democracy (NLD).
The NLD, which won last year’s election by a landslide, was due to form a new government when it was ousted by the coup. Most of its leaders are now in detention or in hiding.
Aung Moe Zaw, the chair of the DPNS, said in a video uploaded to the party’s Facebook page on Wednesday that his party refused to attend the Friday meeting because it rejected the coup regime’s “illegitimate” actions. It also boycotted the previous meeting.
“We are a political party that always says we are working for the public. They are killing and arresting members of the public on a daily basis and even threatening us with arrest. I myself have been charged with incitement. I don’t think we should attend the meeting for any reason,” he said.
The longtime pro-democracy activist added that the party would continue to boycott the regime until the path to democracy is restored in the country. He also called on other political parties to stand together with the people.
The chair of the SNLD, Sai Nyunt Lwin, told Myanmar Now that his party—which won 42 seats in last year’s election—did not even consider attending the meeting on Friday.
The SNLD, which is the largest ethnic party in the country, is more concerned with ongoing clashes and the Covid-19 pandemic, he said.
The party was also absent from the first junta-led UEC meeting in February.
The KSPP and the ANP, which both joined the February meeting, said they decided against attending this time around for a number of reasons.
“We were busy with Covid-19 issues and with our plans to relocate our party headquarters,” said KSPP central executive member Jan Hkung, adding that there was no discussion in the party about whether to accept the invitation of the military council’s UEC.
Tun Aung Kyaw, the joint secretary of the ANP, said that his party did discuss the possibility of attending the meeting, but decided against it on security grounds.
“As we all know, even administrators have been shot in the head. And there have also been explosions,” he said.
Naw Ohn Hla, the prominent rights activist who is also vice-chair of the UNDP, declined to comment on the party’s decision not to attend, apart from noting that it made the same choice in February.
Most of the parties that attended the last meeting were allied with the military-backed Union Solidarity and Development Party, although a handful of ethnic parties also took part.
During that meeting, the junta-appointed UEC chairman announced that the results of last year’s election had been annulled over allegations of voter fraud.
In its final report on the election, however, the Asian Network for Free Elections (ANFREL) said that “the results of the 2020 elections were, by and large, representative of the will of the people of Myanmar.”
The regime has said that it will hold elections again at an unspecified time, but few observers believe that they will be free or fair.
“The junta that staged the coup appointed the people who will run the election. How can we trust them to hold a fair election?” said the leader of an ethnic party who spoke to Myanmar Now on condition of anonymity.
One of the few parties not directly connected to the military that decided to attend the meeting was the People’s Party, whose chair, Ko Ko Gyi, has been a well-known political figure since the 1988 pro-democracy uprising.
Ko Ko Gyi declined to speak to Myanmar Now about the decision, but in a recent interview with the BBC, he said that most of the party’s members agreed with the move.
“The majority of members think we should attend the meeting to officially express the party’s political stance and our views,” he said.
However, a number of senior party members, including the party’s general secretary and Ko Ko Gyi’s longtime associate Ye Naing Aung, have resigned over the decision.
The party did not send representatives to the UEC meeting in February..."
Source/publisher:
"Myanmar Now" (Myanmar)
Date of publication:
2021-05-21
Date of entry/update:
2021-05-21
Grouping:
Individual Documents
Category:
Burma/Myanmar's political parties, The Military's political role, Politics, Government and Governance - Burma/Myanmar - general studies, Political History, 2021 Burma/Myanmar coup d'état
Language:
more
Description:
"I wrote the following piece after 3 March 2021, on which 38 people died from the crackdown. Now the protest is over 100 days, and 782 people (as of 10 May), including children, have been killed. Over 3,740 people are in detention. Ordinary people all over Burma are living on edge due to the random acts of violence by “security forces.”
When I got up on 1 February, I heard about the coup in Burma, my country. I tried to identify an assortment of feelings: anger, despair, distress, sadness, hopelessness. None of them seemed to fit precisely what I felt. Since I am not in Burma, I rely on Facebook, the communication channel most Burmese use for information, to stay informed. With those unnamable feelings in my chest, I started checking Facebook almost hourly to catch up with the ongoing situation. When a 19-year-old girl died, the first death of the protest, I could finally name the assortment of emotions I was feeling – trauma. A few years ago, a former political prisoner told me the whole country was experiencing trauma because of the violent suppression of resistance over five decades. Her words now came back to me as I tried to understand the emotions running through me.
We are re-experiencing the collective trauma of living under the grip of the military. Every day the violence against protesters escalates and reminds those of us who lived and grew up under the military regime and who witnessed many violent crackdowns since 1962, of “the dark times.”
I was born two years after the coup in 1962. I remember talking with my friends about politics and rumours we heard from adults, when we were about ten years old. Had Ne Win died? How much we children and the adults around us wanted him to be gone, the former dictator. My overriding memories of growing up in Burma under the military dictatorship involve a sense of lacking – of lacking necessities, and above all lacking rights and freedom. Economic struggles, censorship, martial laws, fear of the military and people associated with them; these were a big part of our everyday life. In the backdrop, there were ongoing wars with various ethnic groups. I can still recall watching tanks drive through our township to suppress the student demonstrations in 1974. The next day, we heard many young people had been killed or arrested. The atmosphere was full of fear and suppression, and it was suffocating. Then in 1988, the military killed thousands of people during a massive popular uprising for democracy. My mother went into depression in 1988 at the loss of life she witnessed. This is etched deeply in my memory.
History has shown us again and again that it is always the young people who fight back, and now like before, they can be killed, beaten, tortured, raped. Still, these young people go on and take the front line. Now in 2021, Burma is a different country, but it is still beset by endless political, social and economic problems. Despite these problems, people have some freedom and hope, and communication with the outside world. There is also the widespread use of social media, which we didn’t have access to in 1988. Hence today’s young people, Generation Z, live in a very different political, social, and economic context. However, like many generations before them, they are the ones who dare to start the fight back and sacrifice their lives. The pain, sadness, anger, and anxiety of the families of those young people killed and arrested are unfathomable.
Many people are saying that the revolution is close to victory. I want to believe that the people will win in the end, but at this point, it is not easy to see how the whole debacle is going to unfold. How do you fight an institution that does not hesitate or express remorse about using any weapon available to kill their own people—who are simply asking for their rights to be respected?
People, especially Generation Z, persist despite the violence. On 3 March, Burma mourned the death of Kyal Sin, a 19-year-old girl who got shot in the back of her head. The words on her T-shirt said “Everything will be OK.” She left a note asking for her organs to be donated if it were not possible to resuscitate her.
I felt devastated at the death of Kyal Sin and other youths on 3 March. However, it was seeing an emotional video posted on Facebook by a young woman, and recognising her own trauma, that led me to write this piece. In the video, the young woman films herself narrating her experiences of helping protesters on the frontline. This first-hand account is a plea for others to understand the violence that protesters face every day.
This young woman has been helping protestors to flee from police violence. She repeatedly saw young people being brutally beaten up by the police. She had been using her car to block the road to delay the police vehicles so that she could assist the protesters to safety. It had been getting more and more difficult for her to do this because fewer people were turning up for the protests. The increasing use of tear gas, stun grenades, and live bullets emptied some of the main streets, and it was easier for the police vehicles to get through quickly to attack the protesters. Sometimes the makeshift roadblocks put up to deter police forces or police cars from passing through accidentally blocked her from reaching protesters. Other times people taking videos of the protests ignored her request to let her car pass through. Not being able to get through to the people she intended to help, and seeing police beat up her colleagues brought her to breaking point that day. She repeatedly said, “They asked the kids (protestors) to put up their hands on the heads and then they relentlessly beat them on their backs.” This broke her heart more than anything else.
This woman knows she might die helping them, but she puts herself at risk to rescue the core young protestors. She wants more people to participate in protests to fight against the military and shield the front-line protestors. Since 1 February, she has hardly slept and has only eaten one meal a day because she is too tired. For her, the Civil Disobedience Movement (CDM) is not helping unless everybody participates in the protests. Like most young people, her fear of losing out to the military is far greater than her fear of dying. Her emotional response on Facebook to those criticizing young protestors for confronting the police instead of having small protests near their places of residence, and her plea to people, gave me a glimpse of what young protestors are going through.
There are good days and terrible days in the over-a-month-long ongoing protests. On good days, most protestors get away unscathed, inspired, hopeful, and with renewed aspirations. On terrible days, some get killed, wounded, arrested, but the people do not give up. Every day, they come out to protest the coup. They are determined to make sure the military goes down. That’s when you can see the best of Burmese people, their resilience. The younger generation fights with creativity, resilience, and humour that keeps them going even though they are putting their lives on the line. You can see messages or posts on Facebook that encourage unity, such as “we can have different opinions but we are not divided.” People set aside religious and ethnic tensions to fight the common enemy – the military, and, by doing so, they have more compassion and understanding of years of atrocity and violence directed at ethnic groups, including the Rohingya.
I have learned from a good friend of mine, a survivor of violence, that post-traumatic growth and resilience emerge in the aftermath of violence. Dealing with trauma is not a walk in the park. There are good days and bad days. Bad days can take you to the edge, but resilience can bring you back to embracing life. Sometimes it comes from inside. And sometimes the help from outside is necessary to keep on going.
More than ever, people in Burma need every possible form of assistance from the international community to continue their long struggle. The UN, ASEAN, China, Russia, India, Japan, and other countries need to take action. Every country can take action if they take their mind off trade, regional competition, and geopolitical influence. The Burmese people have shown their spirit and resilience in the face of the violent suppression by the military. Day by day, people in Burma realize they cannot depend on outside help, not even the UN. Regardless, they are determined to continue their revolt against the military. The protests have grown so large and spread across the country that they have become transformed into revolution. Even if the international community fails to help Burma, the “Early Summer Revolution” (named by the protestors) will go on.
People of Burma have experienced collective trauma, but they have tremendous resilience, and the world needs to stand by them.
The following is an English translation of a post by a poet that was shared on Facebook:[1]
I am afraid of mornings.
When he wakes up, he goes straight to the bathroom, has a shower, changes his clothes, picks up his bag, and gets ready to go out of the door.
He doesn’t even notice the breakfast I prepared for him.
I ask, Where are you going today?
He used to tell me whether he was going to Hledan, Sule, Sanchaung, or Bargyar.
Now he only says where the protest is.
I warn him they are going to shoot today.
He said they are shooting every day. Don’t spread that kind of talk. Instead of 100 people, only 50 will come to protest. Don’t make me afraid. It’s not the time for fear.
Looking thin and sunburned, no gun, no bullet, just a backpack and the three fingers salute.
He: Don’t keep calling me.
He goes, and I go. I can exhale when everybody comes back home in the evening.
Exhausting days since the coup.
I have absolute empathy for the fallen heroes and their families. Salute to them!..."
Source/publisher:
Tea Circle (Myanmar)
Date of publication:
2021-05-17
Date of entry/update:
2021-05-19
Grouping:
Individual Documents
Category:
Anti-coup protesters, Spring Revolution, Political prisoners and other violations in Burma - reports, Freedom of Movement, violations of in Burma/Myanmar, Freedom of opinion and expression: - the situation in Burma/Myanmar - reports, analyses, recommendations, Freedom of Peaceful Assembly and Association, violations of, Human Rights Defenders, Right to Life: reports of violations in Burma, Armed conflict in Burma - attacks on civilians, Military History, Political History, Politics and Government - global and regional - general studies, strategies, theory, Human Rights and international relations, 2021 Burma/Myanmar coup d'état
Language:
more
Description:
"The Asian Network for Free Elections (ANFREL) released the final comprehensive report of its international election observation mission to the 2020 Myanmar General Elections on 17 May 2021.
The 2020 Myanmar polls encountered several challenges including restrictions amid the COVID-19 pandemic. Despite the observed shortcomings, the outcome of the elections were deemed to reflect the true will of the electorate.
The members of the Pyithu Hluttaw (lower house of Myanmar's national Parliament) were scheduled to convene for their swearing-in ceremony on 1 February 2021, but, the Myanmar military staged a coup and seized power from the civilian government alleging electoral fraud. Several key political figures and activists including President U Win Myint, State Counsellor Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, and the chair of the Union Election Commission (UEC) U Hla Thein, were arrested. The country was placed under state of emergency.
The people of Myanmar continue to resist military rule through peaceful protests across the country but such efforts have been met with violent crackdowns by the military arresting thousands and killing hundreds of people.
ANFREL recognizes the voice of the people of Myanmar and hopes this report illustrates the progress achieved by Myanmar as a democracy prior to the coup. ANFREL wishes that the country may soon return on the rightful path to an elected civilian government.
ANFREL deployed 13 long-term observers for 24 days, eight short-term observers for eight days, three Election Day observers, a core team based in Yangon, and four electoral analysts, one in Yangon and the rest working remotely. The observers were deployed in 13 out of 14 states and regions in Myanmar.
ANFREL's international election observation efforts follow a methodology based on international principles contained in documents such as the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, the Bangkok Declaration for Free and Fair Elections, and the Dili Indicators of Democratic Elections. ANFREL is a signatory of the Declaration of Principles for International Election Observation..."
Source/publisher:
Asian Network for Free Elections (Bangkok)
Date of publication:
2021-05-17
Date of entry/update:
2021-05-18
Grouping:
Individual Documents
Category:
The 2020 General Elections in Burma/Myanmar, 2021 Burma/Myanmar coup d'état, Politics and Government - global and regional - general studies, strategies, theory, Political prisoners and other violations in Burma - reports, Human Rights Defenders, Human Rights and international relations, Political History
Language:
Format :
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Size:
6.91 MB 6.76 MB
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Description:
"Myanmar is on the brink of collapse. Its armed forces are continuing a brutal crackdown—arresting, torturing and killing protesters—as Aung San Suu Kyi, Myanmar’s de-facto leader, is detained. Our experts answer your questions..."
Source/publisher:
The Economist
Date of publication:
2021-05-11
Date of entry/update:
2021-05-16
Grouping:
Individual Documents
Category:
2021 Burma/Myanmar coup d'état, Human Rights and international relations, Racial or ethnic discrimination in Burma: reports of violations against several groups, China-Burma-India relations, Russia-Burma relations, Sanctions - general, Political History, Economic activities of the Myanmar Military, Business and the Military, Sanctions, Spring Revolution
Language:
more
Topic:
Poets
Topic:
Poets
Description:
"Poet Khet Thi was arrested by some 100 junta troops on the evening of May 8. The following day, he was dead. His wife reportedly had to ask the authorities for permission to collect his body, whose internal organs had been removed for autopsy, from Monywa Hospital.
The 45-year-old poet was arrested for alleged possession of explosives, but no evidence was found at his home. He was the third poet to be killed by junta forces in Sagaing Region’s Monywa in just two months. Poets K Za Win, 39, and Kyi Lin Aye, 36, were shot dead in crackdowns in March.
Poet U Yee Mon, the poet-turned-defense-minister in the National Unity Government (NUG) formed to rival the military regime, wrote on his Facebook page: “Khet Thi and K Za Win, two Monywa poets have fallen. I am sad. I am committed to fight until we win.”
More than a dozen poets who have shown solidarity with the people against the military regime have also been detained in Yangon, Ayeyawady’s Pathein and Taninthayi’s Myeik.
In Myanmar’s long history of revolution, poets have fought injustice with the power of art.
After Myanmar’s last monarch King Thibaw was dethroned and sent into exile, renowned poets from the royal capital Mandalay, including Saya Pe, Sebunni Sayadaw, U Kyawt and Maunghtaung U Kyaw Hla, wrote poems intended to promote nationalism and patriotism. Saya Pe was not content fighting with the pen and went to Shan State to take up the sword. He died there. Maunghtaung U Kyaw Hla was also the first poet to be arrested under colonial rule for his anti-colonialist poems.
The most famous poet laureate in the colonial period was Thakhin Kodaw Hmaing, also known as Maung Lun, who said he would fight with poems for the independence of the country.
His pen proved to be mighty in instilling nationalism and patriotism in Myanmar’s people.
In 1941, his reputation as an anti-colonial nationalist and patron of Doh Bamar Asiayon (the We Burmans Association) earned him a place on the British authorities’ “Burma List,” making him an “enemy of the state.” The association played an important part in Myanmar’s independence struggle, bringing together nationalist elements and fresh political ideals while raising political consciousness.
In the time of the Anti-Fascist People’s Freedom League government after independence, poets Daung Nwe Swe, Ne Thway Ni, Maung Yin Mon and others were known for their works supporting the movements of students, workers and farmers as well as anti-war poems and satirical works critical of bureaucrats.
However, draconian censorship was imposed after General Ne Win seized power in 1962. Poet Min Yu Wai was sacked as the chief editor of military-run Myawady Magazine after he wrote a poem deemed to be critical of the dictator.
Poet Win Latt and editor Win Khet of ‘Perspective’ Journal were sentenced to two years in prison for publishing a satirical poem about Ne Win and his wife Khin May Than.
Many poets were put behind bars under the rule of Burma Socialist Program Party (BSPP) as they took part in every movement against the repressive regime.
In 1970s, poet Lay Maung from Mandalay, who was serving his time as a political prisoner in Coco Islands, staged a hunger strike together with other prisoners. They called for abolishing the island prison, which was dubbed as a Burmese “Devil’s Island.” He died in prison after staging a hunger strike for more than 50 days. Thanks to the sacrifices of the poet and seven others, BSPP transferred all the prisoners to Yangon’s Insein Prison, marking a significant event in the history of Myanmar’s correctional system.
Poets were united with the people in the pro-democracy uprising in 1988 that toppled the single-party dictatorship of Ne Win. U Min Ko Naing, one of the prominent student leaders in 1988, is also a poet.
Student leader Shwe Phone Lu, who would later become a best-selling author-cum-poet under the pen name Taryar Min Wai, wrote a poem asking the students to boycott education as the military regime re-opened universities and schools after the uprising. He was jailed for five years for that poem.
Famous writer-cum-poet Min Lu was also arrested in 1989 for his satirical poem “What has happened?” criticizing coup leader General Saw Maung and Myanmar’s military. Both he and the publisher were given five years in prison as the poem became a phenomenon.
Poet Min Thu Wun, father of the 9th president of Myanmar and the first president of the National League for Democracy (NLD) government, U Htin Kyaw, had also had his poems banned by the military regime after the NLD won the 1990 general elections because he took an active part in the party’s campaigns.
Poet Tin Moe, a prominent figure of the NLD, was also jailed for five years because he wrote poems and gave talks across the country for the cause of democracy. He was forced into exile after his release and died abroad in 2007.
In 2008, poet Saw Wai was arrested for his Valentine’s Day poem with a coded message, ridiculing the then-dictator Senior General Than Shwe. The first words of each line of the poem read, “power-crazed Snr-Gen Than Shwe.”
Over past 136 years since King Thibaw was dethroned in 1885 to military chief Senior General Min Aung Hlaing’s seizure of power on Feb. 1, 2021, poets have shown solidarity with the ordinary people and have been at the frontline in every revolution in Myanmar. Khet Thi’s following poem is a testimony to that.
“In heads, they shoot
Never do they know
Revolution lies in hearts.”..."
Source/publisher:
"The Irrawaddy" (Thailand)
Date of publication:
2021-05-15
Date of entry/update:
2021-05-16
Grouping:
Individual Documents
Category:
Abstracts, bibliographies, scholarly journals, libraries, institutes, universities, other research tools, Political History, Freedom of opinion and expression: - the situation in Burma/Myanmar - reports, analyses, recommendations, Human Rights Defenders, Right to Life: reports of violations in Burma, 2021 Burma/Myanmar coup d'état
Language:
Format :
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Size:
247.43 KB
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Description:
"On Feb. 1, 2021, the Myanmar military – the Tatmadaw – shattered the all too brief effort to transition to democracy in Myanmar. Over the past two and a half months, the Tatmadaw has continued its illegitimate effort to undermine the democratic elections from last year and prevent the elected government from taking power. In the face of mass popular opposition and international condemnation, the military has only escalated its use of violence against its own population – systematically stripping away rights and violently attacking protestors and dissidents, reportedly killing over 700 civilians as of Apr. 20, 2021, and detaining more than 3,000.
Despite the continued threats and extreme violence, the people of Myanmar have stood their ground and refused to be silenced. On Apr. 16, opponents of the coup from across the political spectrum announced the formation of a National Unity Government (NUG) to resist the military. Just as importantly, the Civil Disobedience Movement (CDM), a grassroots movement aimed at disrupting state functions and crippling the economy in order to undermine the military’s attempt to rule, has been hugely successful in galvanizing collective action since early February. In addition to the tens of thousands of CDM participants walking out of their private and public sector positions, protests across the country have seen massive youth engagement on a scale not seen in a generation. The organizing power has been impressive. Social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and TikTok have been used to spread awareness and coordinate protests, strikes, and other forms of peaceful resistance. The military has taken notice of the CDM’s power, issuing threats against young people protesting and shooting indiscriminately at protestors of all ages, including children. Parallel movements have arisen in areas like neighboring Thailand, with Thai youth protesting their own authoritarian government in solidarity with activists from Myanmar.
Today we launch a Just Security series that will take a deep dive into the situation in Myanmar. The series will provide insights that put the coup and civilian response into historical and modern context, deepen unexplored angles on the current crises, and survey possibilities and ways forward over the next six months to a year. This series also aims to elevate policy discussions on a number of issues, ranging from peace and accountability to religion and democracy, asking: What is happening now and why?
Within the series, contributions from authors from Myanmar and others working closely on the situation will explore topics such as youth leadership in the CDM and protests, domestic and international solidarity, environmental concerns, the dissolution of rule of law in Myanmar, and what the coup means for ongoing international accountability efforts. Below, we offer an overview of the major themes of the series, along with a timeline of the struggle for democracy in Myanmar. The current uprising against military rule must be understood in the context of these decades-long struggles for peace, democracy, accountability, and justice..."
Source/publisher:
Just Security (New York)
Date of publication:
2021-04-26
Date of entry/update:
2021-05-10
Grouping:
Individual Documents
Category:
Anti-coup protesters, Spring Revolution, Political prisoners and other violations in Burma - reports, Freedom of opinion and expression: - the situation in Burma/Myanmar - reports, analyses, recommendations, Freedom of Peaceful Assembly and Association, violations of, Right to Life: reports of violations in Burma, Freedom of Movement, violations of in Burma/Myanmar, Human Rights Defenders, Racial or ethnic discrimination in Burma: reports of violations against several groups, Discrimination against the Rohingya, International Criminal Court, Several Groups, Rohingya (cultural, political etc.), International Court of Justice (ICJ) - General, 2021 Burma/Myanmar coup d'état, National Unity Government (NUG), Various groups, Political History, Politics, Government and Governance - Burma/Myanmar - general studies, Politics and Government - global and regional - general studies, strategies, theory
Language:
Format :
pdf
Size:
257.17 KB
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Description:
"In the early hours of February 1st, 2021, the Myanmar military known as the Tatmadaw seized power of the country. The coup led to the ousting of democracy icon, Aung San Suu Kyi and brought Myanmar's decade long experiment with democracy to a crashing halt. A mass uprising soon broke out across the country. The security forces responded by launching a brutal crackdown against the protesters, turning some areas of the capital, Yangon into battle zones.
But why did the army stage a coup and shatter the hopes and dreams of many of its citizens? Will the violence and protests in the streets help restore democracy in Myanmar?..."
Source/publisher:
"CNA Insider" (Singapore)
Date of publication:
2021-04-08
Date of entry/update:
2021-04-29
Grouping:
Individual Documents
Category:
2021 Burma/Myanmar coup d'état, The 2020 General Elections in Burma/Myanmar, Anti-coup protesters, Spring Revolution, Political prisoners and other violations in Burma - reports, Freedom of opinion and expression: - the situation in Burma/Myanmar - reports, analyses, recommendations, Freedom of Peaceful Assembly and Association, violations of, Right to Life: reports of violations in Burma, Freedom of Movement, violations of in Burma/Myanmar, Racial or ethnic discrimination in Burma: reports of violations against several groups, Political History
Language:
more
Topic:
Myanmar (Burma); democratic transition; rural working people; military coup; politics of agrarian transformation
Topic:
Myanmar (Burma); democratic transition; rural working people; military coup; politics of agrarian transformation
Description:
"Myanmar is in a dangerous and uncertain moment following the
military coup on 1 February 2021. The articles in this Special
Forum provide timely contextual analysis. Written before the
coup, the articles delve into the politics of agrarian
transformation in the context of (what was then) an ongoing (but
fragile) opening up of political space. This introduction outlines
three themes that connect the articles and now also shed some
light on what the future may hold: (1) the limited character of the
2010–2021 ‘democratic transition’; (2) the struggles around land
and natural resources amidst a social reproduction crisis and (3)
the responses of rural working peoples. This Special Forum on Myanmar’s agrarian transformation concludes at a moment of great
danger and deep uncertainty resulting from the military coup that took place on 1 February 2021. All the articles were written before the coup, and all the authors were keen to engage
explicitly on the politics of agrarian transformation in the context of (what was at that time) a still ongoing (fragile) opening up of political space and the social-political challenges of working in such a context, including examining the changing political agency of the implicated differentiated rural peoples (along lines of class, gender, generation and in Myanmar the all-important question of ethnicity). Reading their analyses now may thus help to dampen any temptation to romanticize about what life and politics was like for many people before the coup. And it will put under a critical spotlight the call by some segments
of the resistance movement for a return to where everyone/everything was before the coup, that is, to restore the NLD government to power under the military-crafted 2008 Constitution. Most of the authors who contributed insights and analysis to the six articles constituting this special forum are long-time social activists who have been working for many years outside the spotlight and under the radar, alongside many other veteran activists, grassroots organizations, issue-based associations and ethnic communities. In the years before and since the national political cycle that began with the March 2011 handover of government by the military-run SPDC to the quasi-civilian Thein Sein administration, they have been in the trenches, so to speak, along with many others,accompanying ordinary people in doing the everyday politics of regime transition. Such efforts have involved the crucial but often intangible work of feeling for openings, testing limits, deploying razor-sharp political humour, calculating risks, calibrating interventions, reaching out and ratcheting up, building bridges, stepping up and stepping back, pushing with restraint, articulating hopes, managing fears, calling bluffs, etc. It’s worth mentioning here too that this has also necessarily involved working to ensure the material conditions needed to enable these dynamics of activism to survive and thrive, despite increasingly bureaucratized and periodically politicized relationships with both government
donors and international non-governmental donor agencies. While for various reasons and at various times government donors and donor agencies could become quite allergic to activism – especially activism taking extra-parliamentary form – this was not always the
case, and despite what may have been risks involved in supporting social change activism during the post-2011 opening, some of these actors supported this work anyway. Much of what the bulk of ordinary people actively trying to shape the transition underway have been doing has remained invisible and in the shadow of a still fairly draconian ‘rule of law’, while the international media spotlight has tended to focus on increasing space for elite politics and elite-driven economic reform, as if these were all that mattered
in the regime transition underway. It was important that these ‘invisible’ politics remained so at times, in order to protect and shelter them, and at other times, it was critical that they surface, in order to try to propel more central political processes in a more radical direction.
But while much of the social activism for meaningful agrarian change has resurrected and unfurled in the lingering shadows cast by past coups, past waves of resource grabbing, and past ‘high politics’ turning points, at the same time, a fairly clear set of major neoliberaloriented economic reforms have been initiated and steadily pushed since 2011 as part and parcel of a ‘rule of law’ reform agenda aimed at creating the ‘positive enabling environment’ for big Asian, US and EU-based business interests itching to enter or do more
business in Myanmar. Hitherto, earlier rounds of market liberalization following the thenmilitary regime’s response to political and economic crises in the late 1980s had mainly benefitted regional (especially Chinese and Thai) and local capitalists (with the exception of two
infamous gas projects – one led by Total, one led by UNOCAL – see ERI 1996). The consequences of these reforms have been hitting the ground hard, yet affecting different groups of people differently depending on class, ethnicity, gender, generation,
and geographic region. And so here is one crux of the matter for many of the hardest hit people today: as huge masses of people from all walks of life spill currently into the streets to protest the military coup – how and to what extent will the broad anti-coup resistance
movement be able to take on 1. the contradictions emerging from capitalist development and 2. the growing aspiration for a democratic federal union? Capitalism is not tied exclusively to any particular kind of political system: it can exist under outright militarized
authoritarian conditions, and also under still-militarized, semi-authoritarian political conditions where participation in decision making is open to some segments of society to some degree, but many (if not most) remain excluded more or less completely (e.g.
more akin to what the country had been experiencing in the decade prior to the coup). Since 2011, capitalist development has wrought a new configuration of winners and losers, where a wider range of people found opportunities and breathing room to
accumulate and have seen their living conditions improve, while many others have seen their situation deteriorate significantly. The ranks of those engaged in ‘3D’ migrant labour work abroad (e.g. dirty, difficult, dangerous) and the importance of migrant worker
remittances to the national economy, for example, have increased dramatically since 2011 as a result partly of the new laws and policies put in place by the quasi-military Thein Sein government but then continued and even deepened by the ‘democratically-elected’ NLDled government (Borras et al. 2020). The agrarian crisis that is pushing many people, from different walks of life (both ethnic Bamar and non-Bamar), further toward or deeper into landlessness and precarious labour conditions, has been deepening throughout the
country. But its precise character has varied, shaped by complex social-historical and political-economic particularities, including politicized geographies of race/ethnicity, obtaining in different regions and subregions. To be sure, however, regions and subregions where various non-Bamar ‘ethnic nationalities’ (a term increasingly preferred nowadays by non-Bamar activists themselves, in a bid to put the term ‘ethnic minorities’ firmly into the past) are most concentrated, have been clearly targeted for ‘accumulation by dispossession’ via outright extra-economic coercion, in tandem with and alongside
processes of commodification, as discussed below. The increasingly organized, multiethnic demand for abolition of the 2008 Constitution and building of a democratic federal union is therefore very much underpinned by the intensely racialized/ethnicised
character of Myanmar political-economy historically..."
Source/publisher:
Routledge (London)
Date of publication:
2021-04-25
Date of entry/update:
2021-04-27
Grouping:
Individual Documents
Category:
2021 Burma/Myanmar coup d'état, Freedom of opinion and expression: - the situation in Burma/Myanmar - reports, analyses, recommendations, Freedom of Peaceful Assembly and Association, violations of, Politics, Government and Governance - Burma/Myanmar - general studies, Politics and Government - global and regional - general studies, strategies, theory, Political role of the Tatmadaw, Military History, Political History
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While the world gasps at the Myanmar military's brutal crackdown, there is little hope for a soldier-led mutiny or countercoup
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"A military coup that overthrows a democratically elected government and sparks three months of nationwide protests and strikes. More than 700 people including children as young as five shot and killed as security forces fire into crowds of anti-military demonstrators.
Thousands of people, among them not only politicians, activists and journalists but also some of the nation’s best-known singers, movie stars and celebrities arrested on various trumped-up charges. An economy on its knees with non-performing banks and foreign investors running for the exits.
Such a litany would normally be enough to bring down any coup-installed government through a counter-coup or some other action by a military’s top brass who could see the self-defeatism of trying to cling to power when nearly the entire population is opposed to your takeover and rule.
But not in Myanmar. Instead, the military and its controlled police seem prepared to do whatever it takes to preserve its democracy-suspending power grab.
So far, there have been no signs of substantial cracks or divisions within the security establishment apart from a handful of policemen who have fled to rebel-held territories near the Thai border or across the border into neighboring northeastern India.
But is Myanmar’s military truly full of spineless, mindless yes-men, or is there something else that holds the institution together in the face of massive local resistance and rising international condemnation?
The simplistic explanation, put forth mostly by foreign security analysts, is that the Myanmar military, known as the Tatmadaw, is a battle-hardened force that has been fighting against an array of political and ethnic rebels continuously for more than 70 years.
Myanmar’s civil wars broke out shortly after independence was achieved from Britain in 1948. Before that, an army founded by independence hero Aung San had fought alongside the Japanese military against the British and then, at the end of World War II, allied themselves with the British and turned against the Japanese.
Consequently, the Tatmadaw sees itself as the true defender of the nation’s independence and the only force that can hold the ethnically diverse and politically divided country together.
But that analysis misses the enigma of military power in Myanmar. Although Aung San’s daughter and coup-toppled democratic leader Aung San Suu Kyi once referred to the Tatmadaw as “my father’s army”, the military force which fought during World War II had little in common with the army that emerged after independence.
Because of post-war agreements with the British, most of the old fighters were demobilized and turned into a militia known as the People’s Volunteer Organization (PVO) which, in turn, resorted to armed struggle against the government because it saw independence as a sham that perpetuated colonial rule.
By then, Aung San had been assassinated and of the legendary “Thirty Comrades” who had followed him to Japan to receive military training before the Japanese invasion of Myanmar in 1942, only three remained in the Tatmadaw in the 1950s, including army chief General Ne Win, who eventually seized power in a 1962 coup, the first absolute military-takeover in Myanmar, then known as Burma.
By the 1950s, Myanmar’s civil wars were more or less over, with the rebel Karen National Union (KNU) and Communist Party of Burma (CPB) pushed back into remote areas. Persistent internal political turmoil, though, led to the formation of a caretaker government led by Ne Win, which was in power from 1958 to 1960.
Rather than fighting the rebels, Ne Win and his 4th Burma Rifles spent the latter part of the 1950s building up a power base — and a business empire that in many ways endures today — centered around their regiment.
In 1958, it published a document called “The National Ideology of the Defense Services” which strikingly resembles the dwifungsi, or dual function, doctrine of the Indonesian army that stated that the military has both a defense and social-political role.
Ne Win also established an entity called the Defense Services Institute. (DSI), which soon controlled vital sectors of Myanmar’s economy. It had its own retail stores in Yangon and elsewhere it controlled the lucrative importation of coal for the railroads, electric supplies and inland water transport.
DSI even established an external shipping line, the Five Star Line, and took over an English-owned bank and renamed it the Ava Bank. A newspaper, the Guardian, and a publishing house were also controlled by DSI. Meanwhile, the once-tiny Myanmar Army, perhaps as few as 2,000 men in 1949, grew steadily in strength and importance. By the late 1950s, Ne Win had more than 40,000 soldiers under his command.
The army was becoming a state within the state, but few Myanmars, the vast majority of whom had faith in the nation’s then democratic system, constitution and rule of law, paid much attention until New Win seized power in 1962.
Significantly, the junta that overthrew a democratically elected government introduced a new economic system called “the Burmese Way to Socialism.” But rather than establishing a socialist regime reminiscent of those in Eastern Europe, the Soviet Union or China, Ne Win’s rendition meant that everything was nationalized and taken over by 23 military-run state corporations.
Military coups were not uncommon in Asia at that time, but the difference in Myanmar was that the military seized not only political but also economic power. While the economies of Thailand and Indonesia, for instance, blossomed because the military entered into marriages of convenience with indigenous plutocracies, Ne Win took Myanmar in a completely different direction.
The old business community, which was mainly of Indian and Chinese origin, had their properties and assets seized by the military, driving hundreds of thousands out of Myanmar into India, Southeast Asia or Taiwan.
But if the 1962 coup had been meant to squash what was left of the insurgents, it turned out to be counterproductive. A rebellion broke out among the Kachin in 1961 in areas of northern Shan state. After 1962, it spread to Kachin state and the Kachin Independence Army took over most of the state.
An even smaller rebellion among the Shan, which broke out in 1958, escalated into full-scale war as several bands grouped together to form the Shan State Army in 1964. The Burmese Way to Socialism had, hardly surprisingly, led to economic collapse — and a flourishing black market with neighboring Thailand.
The KNU, which controlled the border areas, collected taxes on that trade, and was able to buy modern guns from the Thai black market. And, most devastatingly, China decided to give all-out support to the CPB, including modern, sophisticated weaponry of kinds that the old forces in central Myanmar never possessed.
Thus, the new power structure that emerged in Myanmar after 1962 had more to do with preserving an order that hugely privileged the military in an otherwise collapsing society than the fact that officers had seen fierce combat.
That new order had a very narrow base, consisting of men from Ne Win’s own regiment, the 4th Burma Rifles. And Ne Win himself was probably the least battle-hardened senior officer in the Tatmadaw as he arguably spent more time gambling at horse races than on the battlefield.
Actually, the country’s most battle-hardened officers – among them the popular Brigadier Kyaw Zaw, who was purged in the late 1950s, later joined the CPB and ended his life in exile in China, and General Tin Oo, who fought in several frontier areas and in 1988 became one of the leaders of the then newly-established National League for Democracy (NLD) – did not become killers of civilians.
Rather, it was Ne Win loyalists who opened fire on demonstrating students in 1962, on students and workers in the mid-1970s, and then the massacres in 1988, when thousands of pro-democracy protesters were gunned down in the streets of Yangon and elsewhere.
Ne Win and his men from the 4th Burma Rifles remained in power until after the events of 1988, when somewhat younger officers took over. Ne Win’s legacy was finally dismantled in 2002, when he died and his relatives were purged allegedly for plotting against the then-military government. But the system he created lives on today.
The military became the ruling class, which enjoyed privileges denied ordinary citizens. It had its own schools and hospitals and it was rare for someone who did not come from a military family to get a job in the government.
The new army that emerged after 1962 also included a series of Light Infantry Divisions, which became notorious for their brutality when fighting rebels and suppressing civil movements in urban areas, as they did in 1988 and are doing once again in the wake of the February 1 coup.
The Burmese Way to Socialism was abolished after the 1988 uprising, but the military retained an important role in the semi-capitalist system that succeeded it. While Ne Win had his DSI, Myanmar’s new military leaders established powerful companies like the Union of Myanmar Economic Holdings and the Myanmar Economic Corporation, which currently have vast holdings across the economy.
As such, the very concept of the 1958 declaration and the 1962 coup has not been abandoned but rather reshaped: the military should have a defense function as well as playing social, political and economic roles.
Whether Suu Kyi and her NLD aimed to roll back those roles and holdings in a second elected term is an open and important question.
Suu Kyi largely refrained from challenging the Tatmadaw’s political and economic power in her first term, but the NLD’s overwhelming election win last November – which coup-makers claim without evidence was fraudulent – gave her a strong mandate to push for more democratic change.
Top brass leaders also likely feared the risk of retribution for their many crimes. All senior Tatmadaw officers know where the skeletons are buried of past atrocities, both in ethnic minority areas and now also in urban centers home to the middle class.
The current commander-in-chief, Senior General Min Aung Hlaing, is now widely loathed across the population for his regime’s ruthless post-coup clampdown. He and his associates know by now that they either maintain power or land in prison — or worse.
But it is a combination of those fears, deeply entrenched economic interests and a dual-function ideology that holds the Tatmadaw so tightly together, not some underlying sense of patriotism or because officers have been hardened through battles in the field.
And that explains why no cracks have or are likely to emerge in the Tatmadaw, despite the brutal, irrational and seemingly self-defeating orders being handed down by officers and carried out by unswervingly obedient foot soldiers..."
Source/publisher:
"Asia Times" (Hong Kong)
Date of publication:
2021-04-20
Date of entry/update:
2021-04-23
Grouping:
Individual Documents
Category:
2021 Burma/Myanmar coup d'état, Politics and Government - global and regional - general studies, strategies, theory, Politics, Government and Governance - Burma/Myanmar - general studies, Anti-coup protesters, Spring Revolution, Political prisoners and other violations in Burma - reports, Political History, The Communist Party of Burma (CPB), Various groups
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"Did migration processes into colonial Burma – from India and elsewhere – amount to a “transfer of civilians” into an occupied territory, a practice prohibited by international law today? Should the international community reconsider such colonial-era population movements as a “colonial wrong”, conceding that a historical injustice has been committed by European colonialism, in order to make contemporary Myanmar political and military actors more ready to accept accountability for the severe human rights violations committed against the Rohingya? These questions, based on problematic assumptions about history and with potentially dangerous political implications, were discussed at a meeting of international lawyers in Yangon, the proceedings of which were recently published online (Morten Bergsmo, Wolfgang Kaleck and Kyaw Yin Hlaing (eds.): Colonial Wrongs and Access to International Law; Brussels: Torkel Opsahl Academic EPublisher 9 November 2020).
International criminal justice faces a crisis of legitimacy. The International Criminal Court (ICC, constituted by the Rome Statute and operative since 2002) especially stands accused of applying what Wolfgang Kaleck has called “double standards”. Its prosecution of severe human rights violators focuses on persons from countries with little power in global politics, many of them in Sub-Saharan Africa so far. At the same time, the Court finds it virtually impossible to prosecute perpetrators protected by major powers in the international system, especially the United States. The argument of “double standards” can be extended by giving it a postcolonial pitch: international criminal law is unable to address “colonial wrongs” – crimes committed by colonial powers – and thus cannot deal with the history behind current governance failures and violent conflicts that contributed to the very human rights violations it tries to prosecute.
In order to address such questions, senior international law specialists and academics met for a conference in Yangon in November 2019. Myanmar constituted a very conscious choice of location for the conference and provided the backdrop to discuss questions such as: Did the migration of substantial non-indigenous populations (primarily from India) into colonial Burma constitute a “transfer of civilians” into an occupied territory – a practice that is regarded as a crime against humanity under today’s international criminal law? And if so, how should this be taken into account as a “colonial wrong” when prosecuting perpetrators of severe human rights violations, especially those perpetrated against the Rohingya in Myanmar’s Rakhine State in 2016-7? (The conference volume includes papers on systematic legal aspects and a few other country case studies, especially on the fate of indigenous populations in European settler colonies. However, it does not include studies on other historical examples of colonial-era population movements that could have put the Burma case into a broader historical perspective.)
The decision by the Yangon conference organizers to discuss their agenda through the lens of Burmese history (and, of course, to hold it in Myanmar itself) could be seen as courageous; one may regard it as hazardous as well. The hazard is likely obvious to students of Myanmar history and contemporary politics: Does this “transfer of civilians into occupied territory” line of argument really do justice to Burma’s actual colonial history? And does it not risk undermining the citizenship rights of people whose ancestors migrated into Myanmar a century or more ago – and whose very citizenship rights are already severely embattled in Myanmar today?
The organizers of the Yangon conference were of course aware they were entering a particularly difficult territory. They did so for good reason. In his concept paper laying the groundwork for the conference (first published in August 2019), Morten Bergsmo observes an “unusually polarised climate” in Myanmar around the issue of human rights violations in Rakhine. The official Myanmar narrative frames the issue primarily as one of “illegal migration” and “suppression of terrorism”. By contrast, a major strand in the international narrative (in reality mostly that of Western countries, U.N. institutions and the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation) discusses “the Rohingya genocide” and calls for prosecution under international criminal law. Bergsmo suggests that a recognition of “colonial wrongs”, especially the destruction of the sovereignty of the precolonial Burmese kingdom and the following mass migration of people from India into Burma, enabled by the British, may help to create a bridge, enabling a more fruitful dialogue.
I certainly agree with Bergsmo’s observation on the “unusually polarized climate” around Myanmar today that currently makes meaningful dialogue about severe human rights violations very difficult, if not impossible. However, I very much doubt that the acceptance of what may be called a “postcolonial guilt theory” of acknowledging “colonial wrongs” in Burma will contribute to any greater degree of acceptance for ICC proceedings in Myanmar. I doubt this not merely because the argument is based on weak legal and misleading historical foundations. Even worse, such a line of reasoning – if it ever enters mainstream political debate – obviously risks strengthening the militant exclusionary nationalism in Myanmar that stands at the root of the Rohingya crisis. And it risks doing so for all the wrong reasons.
To be sure, Bergsmo and the other international lawyers involved in this project do not want to trade responsibilities: In their view, this is not about downplaying or relativising responsibility for killings and other human rights violations against the Rohingya or others. It is about creating a dialogue that may lead to greater acceptance of international judicial proceedings on these violations. The book itself includes an explicit warning by the only Myanmar contributor and editor, Kyaw Yin Hlaing of the Centre for Diversity and National Harmony in Yangon. In his chapter, he reviews how contemporaries perceived the migration of Indians, and especially Indian Muslims, into colonial Burma as a result of the colonial situation, stoking fears of indigenous people being overwhelmed, of indigenous men losing their land and their women to foreigners; he also recalls how these sentiments were systematically fuelled further by military rulers as part of anti-colonial narratives since the 1960s. Kyaw Yin Hlaing cautions that, within this context, legal arguments about historical wrongs run a high risk of being misused to undermine peaceful coexistence among different ethnic groups today: “Promoting accountability and the legitimacy of international law are valid considerations, but are less important than the lives and well-being of the populations (of all kinds) living in former colonies” (362). The remainder of the volume, however, does not take much notice of this warning. Instead, rather than reflecting the concrete historical and social context that their legal arguments about “colonial wrongs” may meet in Myanmar today, the contributors proceed, with what they appear to think of as their righteous “postcolonial” approach, into very treacherous legal and historical territory.
On the legal side, the limitations of the argument are obvious and even acknowledged accordingly by contributors. The “transfer of civilians” into “occupied territory” constitutes an international crime only since the (Fourth) Geneva Convention of 1949. The Convention explicitly outlawed such a practice informed by the experiences of Nazi Germany’s exterminatory policies in occupied Eastern Europe. (In more recent decades, the concept has usually been applied to legally attack Israeli settlement policies in the West Bank, though not for example, against Moroccan population settlement policies in the former Western Sahara). “Transfer of civilians” was reaffirmed as a “crime against humanity” and “war crime” under the Rome Statute that created the ICC. Legally, therefore, any “transfers” before 1949 – including nearly all population movements under European colonial rule in Africa and Asia – are not covered under these prohibitions. Nonetheless, various contributors to the volume set out to develop lines of argument designed to describe actions by European colonial states as legally relevant “colonial wrongs” or “grievances” that may have led to atrocities later on. Not being a lawyer myself, I am not in a position to judge whether and how any such arguments have a potential to become part of relevant international law; the authors are surely committed to this. Beyond the immanent logic of these legal arguments, however, we also need to ask whether they make sense in the concrete case of the history of colonial Burma.
It is one thing to assert historical and political responsibility of former colonial powers for obvious atrocities committed during their rule, such as the 1904-8 genocide of the Herero and Nama people in what was then German South West Africa (Namibia), or the issue of British capital punishment practices in colonial Kenya during the Mau Mau war in the 1950s. It is an entirely different – and very wrong – matter to group British migration policies in colonial Burma into the same (or a similar) class of “colonial wrongs”.
The volume under review includes two contributions, by Jacques Leider and Derek Tonkin, which document the history of migration into Arakan / Rakhine in great detail. While there has been a presence of Muslim communities in Arakan for centuries, they show specifically that labour-related cross-border migration from the Chittagong area of Bengal began even before British colonial rule and expanded rapidly under it, especially in the latter years of the 19th and the early 20th century. Labour needs of local ethnic Rakhine landlords were a major factor; settlement and land acquisition by the migrants followed. Over time this led to a concentration of Muslim agriculturalists in Northern Rakhine who later acquired the Rohingya ethnonym (a fact disputed by Rohingya nationalists who claim a much earlier origin of the term). Until 1937, all this happened within the single territory of British India of which Burma was a part, without any internal border controls. Migration into colonial Arakan, with no force by the colonial power involved, was driven by economic needs and interests, and it was pursued by local individual and group agency. To categorize this process as a “colonial wrong” constitutes an ahistorical narrative which in effect denies agency to any colonial subjects.
Likewise, Indian migration into the mainland and the urban centres of colonial Burma, especially Rangoon, was driven by the economic interest and agency of those who migrated, mostly from other parts of British India (while some came from China as well). Again, no forced labour was involved here. British policies played a stronger role than in Rakhine, in so far as the colonial state and the colonial economy created a demand for business professionals, traders and urban workers from India to move to Burma. In addition, civil servants and soldiers were temporarily transferred into colonial Burma, and some of them may have decided to settle there later on. For all of these groups, the colonial state made movement and long-term settlement possible, for example by creating an enabling environment of transport systems and urban facilities. All this led to social tension and instances of violence by the 1930s and contributed to the prominent anti-Indian streak within Burmese anti-colonial nationalism.
However, the policies and incentives employed by the British in Burma were pretty much standard practices of “development policy”, as conceptualized by colonial powers in the first half of the 20th century; some of them were even continued after independence. To describe resulting migration processes under colonial rule as a “transfer of civilians” into an “occupied territory” (with the connotation that they were designed to overwhelm, drive out or exterminate the local Burmese population) does not only constitute a severe category error. It risks feeding into the “anti-foreigner”, xenophobic narrative within Burmese (and Rakhine) nationalism that has its historical roots in the late colonial period but has become ever more extreme under military rule since 1962. In effect, this narrative culminated in the discriminatory 1982 Citizenship Law and contributed to the perception of the Rohingya as “illegal aliens”, leading to violence and ultimately resulting in their flight and expulsion, in 2017.
Of course, the experts advancing the “colonial wrongs” argument who contributed to the volume under review do not intend to condone any such discrimination or violence. But they appear to underestimate the fact that a core element of the very narrative they are proposing in order to increase global acceptance for international criminal law – that colonialism committed a crime by bringing in “foreigners” – is in fact already a core element of the exclusionary narrative of Burmese nationalism. It has been in use for decades, has been worsening over time, and it has already led to extreme marginalization and violence.
Does all this matter? Clearly, a more balanced approach – one that does not just let powerful perpetrators off the hook while prosecuting only those who are already out of power – is very necessary in order to secure the very legitimacy of the international criminal law system. However, the Myanmar example shows that an inappropriate application of a simplistic, if not outright wrong postcolonial narrative is risky. Defenders of the Myanmar official position on the Rohingya issue hardly need international lawyers to remind them that “Indians”, “Bengalis” or other foreigners who migrated into the country in colonial times came in as a result of a “colonial wrong”. They have been making this point all along, but now they can do so with innovative phrasing and the international academic and legal legitimation provided by this volume.
Disturbingly, they appear to do so already: Derek Tonkin (281-2, and email communication, 18.11.2020) documents the first two instances of the verbatim use of the “transfer of civilians” argument employed by high-ranking Myanmar officials in U.N. contexts, within weeks after the publication of Morten Bergsmo’s concept paper. It is difficult to think of this as a mere coincidence.
The military coup of February 1st, 2021, has led the country into a massive crisis. The outcome is anything but clear at this point in time, and Myanmar may face an extended period of military rule, violent conflict, economic decline and even state failure. But the broad resistance against the military takeover and the political dynamics since the coup also have a potential to do away with long-established, outdated ideas and institutions in Myanmar’s political and legal system, in order to create a true break with the past.
Many in Myanmar and internationally no longer see the Myanmar military as a legitimate partner in any substantive discussion about the political future of the country; in their view, the Tatmadaw has to return to the barracks without claiming special political prerogatives, or it has to disappear as an institution. A Rohingya voice has been emerging in the protests against the regime, and there is hope that the community will gain broader acceptance among the Burmese majority population.
The declaration of the Federal Democracy Charter and the intent to abolish the 2008 constitution by the Committee Representing Pyidaungsu Hluttaw (CRPH) on March 31st, 2021, imply an outright rejection of fundamental political ideas and institutions imposed by the Tatmadaw over decades. This could and should include a rejection of the very concept of belonging represented by the idea of “national races” (taingyinthar), and of the system of graded citizenship rights, based on an individual’s real or putative migratory background. Instead, Myanmar should acquire a new citizenship law that follows globally accepted standards, is inclusive and provides equal rights to everyone living in the country, not subject to political or bureaucratic manipulation.
I have shown in this article that arguments about real or imagined “colonial wrongs” in the debate and legal discourse about contemporary human rights violations, when applied to Burma/Myanmar, were highly problematic even before the coup. Now and in any future processes of transitional justice, however, they deserve to be discarded in their entirety, as a misguided attempt of appeasing perpetrators of human rights violations on a grand scale and their political allies.
Dr. Axel Harneit-Sievers, a historian by professional background, has been the country director of the Heinrich Böll Stiftung’s Myanmar office in Yangon from 2018 until May 2021. Opinions expressed here are personal and do not necessarily reflect the position of the Heinrich Böll Stiftung..."
Source/publisher:
"Tea Circle" (Myanmar)
Date of publication:
2021-04-19
Date of entry/update:
2021-04-19
Grouping:
Individual Documents
Category:
Political History, Atrocities Against Groups, International Criminal Court, Genocide, Discrimination against the Rohingya, Politics and Government - global and regional - general studies, strategies, theory, Politics, Government and Governance - Burma/Myanmar - general studies, Rohingya (cultural, political etc.), Arakan (Rakhine) State - reports etc. by date (latest first)
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"On 1 February 2021, military television channel Myawaddy told the people of Myanmar that a state of emergency had been declared. President Win Myint and State Counsellor Aung San Suu Kyi, both senior members of the National League for Democracy (NLD), had been arrested.
Former vice president Myint Swe — now serving as President — used his constitutional authority to declare the state of emergency, then transferred state power to the Commander-in-Chief of the Myanmar Armed Forces (Tatmadaw), Min Aung Hlaing.
The Tatmadaw claimed that widespread election fraud in the November 2020 elections resulted in the NLD landslide victory. On 2 February 2021, they announced that a new State Administrative Council had been formed to take over all state legislative, judicial and executive functions. This has been called a coup by most Western media.
After 10 years of varying levels of cooperation between the Tatmadaw and the NLD, the democratic transition has taken a serious U-turn. But given the strained relations between the Tatmadaw and the NLD — and given the fragility of all democratic transitions — the potential for such a reversal was always there, lingering in the shadows.
Most Western governments and media outlets were quick to denounce and condemn the Tatmadaw and tried to draw attention to what they saw as a slow and weak response from the Japanese government. Certainly, Japan was not included in the 15 February statement by ambassadors to Myanmar that called for the military to show restraint and condemned the detention of political leaders.
But Japan was a signatory to the G7 Foreign Minister’s statement on 3 February, ‘condemning the military coup’. On 21 February and again on 28 February, the Japanese government said it ‘strongly condemned’ the situation in Myanmar. In the same statement it said, ‘the government of Japan once again strongly urges the Myanmar military to release those who are detained … and swiftly restore Myanmar’s democratic political system’.
Leaving aside Western governments’ failures to facilitate positive change in Myanmar — and ignoring the high probability that they are merely appealing to domestic activist stakeholders at a relatively low political cost — Japan’s different approach to the coup in Myanmar does raise questions.
The day after the Tatmadaw took power, Japan’s State Minister of Defence Yasuhide Nakayama told Reuters, ‘If we do not approach this well, Myanmar could grow further away from politically free democratic nations and join the league of China’. This reveals the Japanese government’s understanding of the geostrategic significance of Myanmar in the region.
China’s increasing influence in Myanmar has long been a concern for Japanese leaders. Fear over increasing dependence on China was one of the factors that led to the Tatmadaw deciding to initiate political reforms and open up Myanmar in 2011. The government of Japan was instrumental in this process, facilitating re-engagement between the international community and the government of Myanmar.
On the condition that democratisation proceeded, Japan cancelled much of Myanmar’s outstanding debt in 2012. But more importantly perhaps, Japan provided a bridge loan to Myanmar to enable it to clear its arrears with the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank in the same year. This allowed these financial institutions to begin development aid and support the democratic transition of then-president Thein Sein.
Japan’s diplomacy should also be viewed within the framework of relations with ASEAN, a key strategic partner for Japan. Tokyo has spent decades investing in the stability and prosperity of Southeast Asian countries and Japan’s economy is heavily dependent on them. On 10 February there was a phone call between the foreign ministers of Japan and Indonesia, with the main issues discussed being the situation in Myanmar and issues related to the South China Sea and the East China Sea. For Japan — and for ASEAN alike — these issues are all linked.
The Japanese government’s approach to the coup in Myanmar is in some ways a middle road between the ‘distant’ Western states that prioritise human rights and democracy and the ‘local’ Asian states that prioritise stability and development. In this way, Japan is treading a fine line between its position as a liberal democracy and its dependence on stability and development in Southeast Asia. The overriding international concern for all states in Southeast Asia is China’s rise and responses to the coup in Myanmar are best understood within that framework..."
Source/publisher:
"East Asia Forum" (Australia)
Date of publication:
2021-04-17
Date of entry/update:
2021-04-18
Grouping:
Individual Documents
Category:
The 2020 General Elections in Burma/Myanmar, Politics and Government - global and regional - general studies, strategies, theory, Political History, Politics, Government and Governance - Burma/Myanmar - general studies, Japan-Burma relations, 2021 Burma/Myanmar coup d'état
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Description:
"Committed since 2003 to its “Road Map” for national reconciliation, the military regime in Myanmar persevered with the adoption of a new
constitution in 2008, then held multi-party elections in November 2010. Each of these steps was criticized for significant procedural and substantive flaws, and the overall process was neither democratic, transparent, nor inclusive. The freeing of opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi in November 2010 was welcomed, especially her freedom to carry out political activities. Next, the new parliamentary assemblies were convened in January 2011, and the reins of government were formally handed over to a new, “civilianized” government on 30 March 2011. The new government under President (formerly General) Thein Sein began quickly to introduce some reforms and to set out its own agenda for change in line with the 2008 Constitution, and in its first twelve months in office released a large number of political
prisoners. However, a number of substantive issues — such as the ongoing conflicts with several significant ethnic groups — remain unresolved, and some have even worsened. Government action in relation to the ending of human rights abuses continues to be manifestly insufficient, and the role of the military remains unchecked. No substantive measures for reforms to underpin the rule of law have been implemented, and the restoration of various freedoms, including freedom of the press and freedom of association, are being introduced only slowly and partially. The eleventh Myanmar/Burma Update conference was held at the Australian National University (ANU), Canberra on Monday, 16 and Tuesday, 17 May 2011. It was supported by a grant from the Australian Agency for International Development (AusAID). Co-conveners of the conference were Professor Monique Skidmore, University of Canberra, and Trevor Wilson and Nick Cheesman of the ANU. The conference was sponsored by the Department of Political and Social Change, School of
International Political and Strategic Studies, College of Asia and the Pacific, ANU. The keynote speaker was Dr Thant Myint-U, historian and author, and formerly of the UN Department of Political Affairs..."
Source/publisher:
"Institute of Southeast Asian Studies" (Singapore)
Date of publication:
2011-05-00
Date of entry/update:
2021-04-18
Grouping:
Individual Documents
Category:
Politics and Government - global and regional - general studies, strategies, theory, Politics, Government and Governance - Burma/Myanmar - general studies, Political History
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Sub-title:
Mass protests have been taking place across Myanmar since the military seized control on 1 February.
Description:
"Elected leader Aung San Suu Kyi and members of her National League for Democracy (NLD) party are among those detained.
Hundreds of people, including children, have been killed.
Where is Myanmar?
Myanmar, also known as Burma, is in South East Asia. It neighbours Thailand, Laos, Bangladesh, China and India.
It has a population of about 54 million, most of whom are Burmese speakers, although other languages are also spoken. The biggest city is Yangon (Rangoon), but the capital is Nay Pyi Taw.
The main religion is Buddhism. There are many ethnic groups in the country, including Rohingya Muslims.
The country gained independence from Britain in 1948. It was ruled by the armed forces from 1962 until 2011, when a new government began ushering in a return to civilian rule.
Why is Myanmar also known as Burma?
The ruling military changed the country's name from Burma to Myanmar in 1989. The two words mean the same thing but Myanmar is the more formal version.
Some countries, including the UK, initially refused to use the name as a way of denying the regime's legitimacy.
But use of "Myanmar" has become increasingly common, and in 2016 Ms Suu Kyi said it did not matter which name was used.
What has happened now, and why?
The military is now back in charge and has declared a year-long state of emergency.
It seized control on 1 February following a general election which Ms Suu Kyi's NLD party won by a landslide.
The armed forces had backed the opposition, who were demanding a rerun of the vote, claiming widespread fraud.
The election commission said there was no evidence to support these claims.
The coup took place as a new session of parliament was set to open.
Ms Suu Kyi has been held at an unknown location since the coup. She is facing various charges, including violating the country's official secrets act, possessing illegal walkie-talkies and publishing information that may "cause fear or alarm".
NLD MPs who managed to escape arrest formed a new group in hiding. Their leader has urged protesters to defend themselves against the crackdown.
Who is in charge now?
Military commander-in-chief Min Aung Hlaing has taken power.
He has long wielded significant political influence, successfully maintaining the power of the Tatmadaw - Myanmar's military - even as the country moved towards democracy..."
Source/publisher:
"BBC News" (London)
Date of publication:
2021-04-01
Date of entry/update:
2021-04-15
Grouping:
Individual Documents
Category:
2021 Burma/Myanmar coup d'état, Politics and Government - global and regional - general studies, strategies, theory, Anti-coup protesters, Freedom of Movement, violations of in Burma/Myanmar, Political prisoners and other violations in Burma - reports, Armed conflict in Burma - attacks on civilians, Political History
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Topic:
CDM, civil disobedience movement, colonial rule, Coup, junta, military regime, U Ottama
Topic:
CDM, civil disobedience movement, colonial rule, Coup, junta, military regime, U Ottama
Description:
"It was just two days after the junta’s Feb.1 coup that the civil disobedience movement (CDM) started in Myanmar. Refusing to work under military rule, doctors left their hospitals, railways staff stayed home and tellers avoided their counters.
People from all walks of life have since joined civil servants in a wider CDM by saying ‘no’ to products and services from military-owned businesses. They have boycotted products and services from military-owned businesses. They have boycotted the state lottery. They stopped putting advertisements and death notices in state-run newspapers. And they are withdrawing their savings from government and military-owned banks. All of this is being done to starve the military regime of income.
But the current CDM is not the first in Myanmar’s history. Myanmar people also rose in revolt against oppressive British colonial rule in the 1920s by saying ‘no’.
They did not pay tax to the colonial government. They refused to obey its orders. They didn’t bid for fishing, slaughterhouse and liquor licenses. They did not appear in court when they were prosecuted. And when they were forcibly taken to court they refused to answer the judge.
Buu (the Burmese word for ‘No’) associations mushroomed in towns across the country. The English phrase ‘non-cooperation’ became popular even among illiterate farmers in rural parts of the country.
Just as people today are boycotting the beer, cigarettes and telecom services owned by the military, people in the 1920s boycotted imported products or burned them in protest at colonial rule. They also stopped having western hairstyles.
Buu associations first emerged in Hinthada in Ayeyarwady Region, before spreading to Shwebo and Monywa in central Myanmar and Dawei in southern Myanmar. The nationalist Buddhist monk U Ottama, the first person to be imprisoned in colonial Myanmar for political activities against British rule, travelled through southern Myanmar urging the people not to pay the colonists taxes..."
Source/publisher:
"The Irrawaddy" (Thailand)
Date of publication:
2021-03-29
Date of entry/update:
2021-04-14
Grouping:
Individual Documents
Category:
Anti-coup protesters, Anti-coup campaigns, Spring Revolution, 2021 Burma/Myanmar coup d'état, Political History, Politics and Government - global and regional - general studies, strategies, theory
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Description:
"The primary security problems continue to be concentrated in the border regions where ethnic and tribal minorities are the source, although not always the cause, of problems that have turned violent. One ethnic problem caused by violence is the million ethnic Rohingya Burmese pushed into neighboring Bangladesh since 2017. The pushing was done by Burmese Buddhist nationalists and the army. Burma is being accused of war crimes over this and is depending on neighbor and ally China to help get them out of this mess. Despite over two years of effort few of the Rohingya Burmese refugees in Bangladesh have returned. This has caused a diplomatic problem but otherwise is ignored by most Burmese. No compromise seems possible and with a powerful ally like China (and its UN veto and economic clout) to block major UN action Burma can afford to just let the situation simmer and concentrate on the other ethnic problems it must cope with. All this is the result of how the modern state of Burma was created after World War II. That process was messy and it was in part become no one had done it before. This was all about the relentless spread of nationalism over the last few centuries. This eventually became a European effort to ensure that everyone belonged to some kind of nation. Before that large portions of the world were inhabited by humans but there was no local government or ownership. By the 20th century that was no longer acceptable, at least to the European nations that had taken, or simply assumed control over the many remaining blank spaces where there was no government that owned or controlled an area. Bringing education, modern medicine and the industrial revolution to these areas proved to be more expensive than anticipated. Then there were a lot of locals who become more aware of nationhood and demanded it for themselves. So between the late 1940s and 1960s, most of the colonial areas were turned into sovereign states..."
Source/publisher:
"Strategy Page"
Date of publication:
2019-12-05
Date of entry/update:
2019-12-05
Grouping:
Individual Documents
Category:
Political History, Politics and Government - global and regional - general studies, strategies, theory
Language:
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