Myanmar: Suu Kyi’s search for ‘one brave soldier’

Michael Peel and David Pilling

The opposition leader has become the symbol of change but power still lies with the army

©Reuters

Aung San Suu Kyi has made a long journey to her new base inside the sprawling parliamentary complex of pagoda-like buildings in Naypyidaw, where Myanmar’s military junta built its eerily empty capital miles from anywhere. Years of house arrest in her lakeside Yangon residence behind her, she now has the run of an office presided over by a portrait of her father Aung San, the murdered nationalist leader.
But for all the trappings of freedom and power, she is still searching for something — the “one brave soldier” who will break ranks and help prise the generals’ grip from power. The military’s guaranteed bloc of 25 per cent of parliamentary seats gives it an effective veto on constitutional change, which requires a more than three-quarters majority.

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“I haven’t seen the one who was prepared to vote against orders from above yet,” says Ms Suu Kyi, who is wearing her trademark sarong and flower in her hair. “It’s a question of the military coming to terms with the new situation. If they really want to move on to democracy then they must accept that civilian control, civilian authority should be supreme and that it’s the people’s right to choose the government.”

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This is a defining year for Ms Suu Kyi, who turns 70 in June, and on whom the western world has hung its hopes for transition to a liberal democracy in Myanmar. Elections likely to take place in November will plausibly be the freest in the nation’s history since the military grabbed power in 1962.

Ms Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy overwhelmingly won the 1990 elections but the junta ignored the result and launched a brutal crackdown instead. This time she faces formidable constitutional obstacles but it is still just conceivable — if increasingly unlikely — that she will emerge as the nation’s leader nearly 30 years after her return to the country in 1988 electrified the pro-democracy movement. More likely she will have to satisfy herself with less than a fairytale end: a supporting role as kingmaker in a country awash with troubles but also international hopes.
Asia’s last great frontier
The outcome of the elections, and the constitutional and factional tussles leading up to it, will shape the future of a strategically important state that is wedged between the great powers of China and India. Myanmar, potentially Asia’s last great economic frontier, has been a trading entrepôt, an empire builder and a victim of colonialism.

The modern-day forces tearing at it include a civil conflict more than 50 years old, rising religious tension and widespread disappointment from those who are missing out on the fruits of strong economic growth. But if one thing unites the factions battling for control it is a sense that some of its former glories can be restored.

“We are seeing one of the most remarkable transformations in a society that the world has ever seen,” says Richard Horsey, a Yangon-based political analyst. “The fact that it hasn’t solved all the country’s problems? Well, this isn’t Utopia. It’s a managed transition rather than an Arab spring uprising, which is probably all the better.”
The transformation was triggered by the release of Ms Suu Kyi from house arrest in November 2010. The military junta created a parliament that soon acquired real teeth, released hundreds of political prisoners and curbed censorship. Staffed with former generals the government began serious talks with the west to end decades of sanctions. For western businesses, the country was transformed from a no-go area to the hottest new potential market.

The west has tended to view Myanmar through the prism of Ms Suu Kyi’s struggle with the generals for democracy. The story is far more complex than that. Since the British invaded Upper Burma in 1885 one of the world’s most ethnically diverse countries has failed to establish a stable political framework. In 1962, 14 years after independence, the generals declared an end to the democratic experiment in the name of stabilising a country in danger of splintering as ethnic minority armies fought for separate states along its borders.
So began the disastrous road to “Burmese socialism”, an exercise that left it with one of the worst records on human rights and economic development in the region. The run-up to the election, which includes an attempt to settle the “ethnic question” of the patchwork of minority groups, is thus as much about creating a new country as putting an existing one back together again.

Ms Suu Kyi is now one influential player among several scrambling for alliances and sway over an untested election process for which few are willing to predict the results. Thant Myint-U, an author and historian, compares the main characters’ manoeuvrings to “a poker game where they don’t yet know their hands”.

“It all revolves around a handful of people,” he says, adding that a “temporary political crisis” is possible after the elections if no agreement can be reached. “Unfortunately there’s not much of a culture of real political bargaining, only polite talks masking differences, leading at some point to an irrevocable break.”
One measure of the machinations is that Ms Suu Kyi has little chance of leading the country even though she is its most popular politician and heads the party likely to secure most seats in parliament. The immediate obstacle is a constitutional article, conceived with her in mind, that bans any person with foreign children from the presidency (Ms Suu Kyi’s children are both British). A deeper problem is the suspicion of senior army officers, many of whom distrust their long-time antagonist and her hostile western supporters.
Strange bedfellows
A further sign of the political twists and turns — and the strange relationships they are conjuring up — is that Ms Suu Kyi’s closest ally in the new Myanmar is a former military man and senior member of the junta she battled for almost a quarter of a century. Thura Shwe Mann has reinvented himself as a leader of a newly assertive parliament under civilian rule. Some expect Ms Suu Kyi to nominate him as president and become speaker herself or, more likely, take a powerful behind-the-scenes position given her sway over her party, if it does indeed end up dominating parliament.

But elements in the military are as sceptical about Mr Shwe Mann as about Ms Suu Kyi. Some officers feel betrayed that one of their former helmsmen has recast himself as a civilian politician and promoter of parliamentary democracy. There’s also no sign that such a deal would have the support of President Thein Sein — who may yet run again — or his government.
Ye Htut, minister of information, is highly critical of what he characterises as Ms Suu Kyi’s attacks on the military and Mr Thein Sein, himself a former general. “The idea is to work together. You cannot force the military out. You have to see them as part of the solution, not part of the problem,” he says.

Mr Ye Htut’s nod to the diversity of Myanmar’s interest groups is a sign of a further simmering tension in this election year. The polls have put paid for now to efforts to launch a nationwide ceasefire and peace process to end civil conflicts that have flared on and off for more than half a century between government forces and ethnic militias. For many in the ethnic minority regions, national elections in the absence of any clarity on a federal structure are little more than a distraction. Some are as wary of Ms Suu Kyi as of the generals, seeing both as representatives of the majority Bamar ethnic group.

Hardline Buddhists

A further faultline in this precarious process is the scope greater political freedom has allowed for growing religious intolerance and violence from parts of the Buddhist majority. In the western state of Rakhine, increased friction has led to dozens of deaths and the herding of hundreds of thousands of Muslims into bleak refugee camps. In the rest of the country, there has been a sharpening of anti-Muslim rhetoric by rightwing monks who claim that Myanmar’s Buddhist foundations are under assault. That taps into a widespread fear by ordinary people that the Muslim population is outpacing the Buddhist one and that Myanmar needs to be vigilant against fundamentalist influence. Internationally, Ms Suu Kyi — who calls for an acknowledgment of the fears of both sides — has been criticised for not speaking out strongly enough in defence of the Muslim minority. In Myanmar itself, she has been pilloried by some as a weak defender of Buddhist interests.

Zarganar, one of Myanmar’s most famous dissidents, says dark forces close to the government are deliberately whipping up religious conflict and could intensify it in order to ratchet up pressure on Ms Suu Kyi. “These things are controlled by military people behind the curtain,” he says, likening interreligious tension to a time-bomb.

Whatever the result of the elections, whoever takes over will inherit a country with deep problems. Although the World Bank estimates economic growth at more than 8 per cent both last year and this, the spoils are far from evenly spread. Much of the wealth created has gone to a tiny business elite, many of whose members got rich during the military junta. The contrast between the narrow pockets of urban wealth and the broader picture of rural poverty is stark. “The military have systematically degraded this place for 50 years,” says one western diplomat. “Every institution, except the military itself, is in a desperate state.”

Whoever wins in November will also have to play a delicate strategic balancing act if competing pressures from China and the US are to be successfully negotiated. Money from Beijing helped prop up the former dictatorship. There is widespread resentment at what is seen as China’s brutal approach to extracting minerals, timber, hydropower and profits from the country. US investment is not yet in a position to fill the gap. Its companies, put off by Myanmar’s lack of capacity and infrastructure and still hampered by lingering US sanctions, have been slower to invest than many wished.

The uncertainty enveloping Myanmar as it enters this landmark year is clear in Ms Suu Kyi’s curt response to a question about what her future government might look like. Many have criticised her for being big on change, but hazy on what she would do if she were to end up as president. “It’s a very big question. It’s a very iffy question,” she retorts. “We haven’t even decided whether or not we’re going to be contesting the elections. So how can I tell you what kind of government there will be?”
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Mixed fortunes at frontier
Yangon, Myanmar’s main city, has proved to be both boomtown and let-down for the businesses that have poured in since the country ended its long commercial isolation.
Incoming western consumer goods companies have contributed to a business buzz in the metropolis — an energy that seems to make the traffic worse every month as car imports continue to flow in.

Communications have been transformed by the launch of new mobile services by Telenor of Norway and Qatar’s Ooredoo, sending the price of sim cards plummeting from well over $100 to less than $2. Companies such as Coca-Cola, Unilever and British American Tobacco have launched or restarted operations in a market of more than 50m people that is hungrier than most for foreign goods after the years of isolation.

The vast Japanese-backed Thilawa industrial zone west of Yangon says it has deals with 20 foreign companies to build factories there, in what the government hopes will be a model for similar schemes across the country.

But the deeper story is less encouraging for both eager multinationals and the government.
Some industries that are thriving, such as clothing, are recovering ground lost after businesses contracted sharply under the impact of junta misrule and international sanctions.
In other cases, foreign companies that have come to check Myanmar out have gone home chastened by problems.
These range from the lack of basic services such as electricity, to the political and legal difficulties of competing with companies linked to the military and their cronies in industries from mining to beer.
Businesses across the country — including in Thilawa — face battles to secure land in the face of historic seizures by the military.
The focus on this year’s landmark elections makes it hard to see those problems easing any time soon. But neither will the excitement around a country whose resources and strategic geographical position make it a compelling commercial frontier.

By www.ft.com