Читать книгу The Burmese Labyrinth - Carlos Sardiña Galache - Страница 10
ОглавлениеThe transition to a ‘discipline-flourishing democracy’ started with an election, held on 7 November 2010. The event hardly seemed promising at the time. Few thought that it would herald a period of deep change in the country. It seemed unthinkable that an extremely repressive and deeply entrenched military dictatorship might voluntarily relinquish its power, even partially. The election itself was a tightly controlled affair, and was conducted without any transparency. Few journalists covered the election from within the country, and most of those who did so travelled clandestinely, at a moment in which it was nearly impossible to obtain a media visa.
No international observers were present, and the election was widely condemned as a sham. The results were as unsurprising as they were unlikely: the Union Solidarity and Development Party (USDP), a proxy for the military, won 50.7 per cent of the votes, and the National Unity Party, an older proxy party of the military founded in 1988, came second, with 19.3 per cent. Both parties represented a regime widely despised by most of the population, and it was difficult to believe that they could possibly have come out on top in a free and fair election.
Few doubted that the National League for Democracy (NLD) would have emerged as the victor in any fair election. For many Burmese, it was the only party that could possibly represent their democratic aspirations. Over the past twenty-two years, millions of Burmans – the majority ethnic group in the country – had placed their faith in the NLD, or more accurately, in its leader, the charismatic Aung San Suu Kyi, as the saviour of the country. Daughter of Aung San, who led the country to independence from the British in the aftermath of World War II, Suu Kyi had established herself as the leader of the pro-democratic opposition to military rule in 1988, when a massive wave of urban protests had overthrown the dictatorship of General Ne Win, who was replaced by a no-less-dictatorial military junta. Her party won an election in 1990, yet the generals refused to acknowledge the results, and she was forced to spend most of the subsequent years under house arrest for her political opposition. During this period of seclusion her mystique as a human rights icon, both within Burma and abroad, only grew. In 1991 she was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. At the time of the 2010 election, she was still locked in her house, a lakeside villa in Rangoon where she had spent a great part of her childhood.
The NLD was undoubtedly the most popular party in the country, at least among the Burman majority, but it had decided to boycott the election. In April, the NLD had issued a statement announcing its decision on the basis that ‘the electoral laws issued by the [State Peace and Development Council] are unfair and unjust’. It also criticized the Constitution, stating that ‘forcing parties to pledge to obey and abide [by] the 2008 Constitution is a violation of democracy and human rights’.1 The electoral laws made the process of registering a party extremely cumbersome, and the decision to accept parties was made by an Election Commission controlled by the junta. It was also very expensive: the parties had to pay US$500 to register each candidate, meaning that they would have to pay the huge total of US$580,000 if they wished to compete for every available seat.2 But the main objection was to the law that banned anyone with a criminal conviction from being a member of a registered party. Most of the party leaders were political prisoners or former political prisoners. The rules were clear: if the NLD wanted to register for the elections, it had to purge its most prominent members, including Suu Kyi herself.
If the electoral law was hardly democratic, the 2008 Constitution was no more so. The process of drafting it had taken decades, and the NLD had played no significant role in it. After the NLD electoral victory in 1990, nothing happened for three years. Finally, in 1993, when the junta allowed a National Convention to draft the new Constitution, its composition did not reflect the results of the election, as most of its members were appointed by the military. Eventually, in 1996, the party of Suu Kyi boycotted the drafting process, and the Convention was suspended for eight years. When it convened again in 2004, the NLD did not participate.
It took four years to draft the new Constitution, and it was approved in a popular referendum held in 2008. In the days ahead of the referendum, a devastating cyclone hit the southern coast of the country, killing at least 138,000 people in the Burma Delta. It was the biggest natural catastrophe in the nation’s history, and the refusal of the military junta to accept any international aid for three weeks provoked a diplomatic uproar. In spite of the disaster, the junta went ahead with the referendum one week later, postponing it for three weeks in the most affected areas. The new constitution was approved by an improbable 92 per cent of the votes.
The Constitution was clearly designed to provide legal cover to the military’s permanent control over the country. It reserves 25 per cent of seats in parliament to unelected military officers appointed by the commander-in-chief of the armed forces. This military bloc makes any constitutional change extremely difficult, and dependent on the authorization of the military, as any major amendment requires ‘the prior approval of more than seventy-five per cent of all the representatives of the Pyidaungsu Hluttaw [both houses of parliament], after which in a nation-wide referendum only with the votes of more than half of those who are eligible to vote’.3
Moreover, the Tatmadaw (as the Burmese army is known locally) would retain a great measure of executive power through the appointment of the three most important ministers – those in the Ministry of Home Affairs, the Ministry of Defence and the Ministry of Border Affairs – headed by Defence Service personnel nominated by the commander-in-chief of the armed forces.4 The three security ministries are under the control of the military, while the Ministry of Home Affairs also included the General Administration Department (GAD) – the ubiquitous and all-powerful government body that controls bureaucracy and administration at all levels.5
There was also a clause in the Constitution seemingly designed to prevent Suu Kyi from ever ruling the country. Article 59d of the Constitution asserts that the president ‘shall he himself, one of the parents, the spouse, one of the legitimate children or their spouses not owe allegiance to a foreign power, not be subject of a foreign power or citizen of a foreign country’.6 This immediately excluded Suu Kyi, as she was the widow of a British citizen and had two British sons.
If the generals had designed the Constitution to ensure that the military kept a great deal of power to the detriment of any civilian government, they had also designed it to preserve a highly centralized state and make only marginal concessions to the ethnic groups that had been demanding independence, or at least greater autonomy within a federal state, since the British had left Burma in 1948. Burma is home to enormous ethno-linguistic diversity. The Burmans are the majority in the central regions, but the country’s border areas are rugged mountainous landscapes with a bewildering variety of ethno-linguistic groups, many of which have attempted to evade central government control since independence in 1948.
Since then, most of these ethnic groups have formed armed organizations to resist attempts by the Burman-dominated government to unify the state. Some continue to do so, making the armed conflicts in the borderlands of Burma among the longest running in the world. Conflicts of variable intensity have always been a crucial part of the lives of the inhabitants of some of those remote areas, isolated from the rest of the country by poor communications and infrastructure. Often the only Burmans those living in the rural border areas have met are soldiers, or the administrators of a repressive state who accompany them.
Consequently, many among the non-Burman groups bitterly resent the domination imposed by the Burmans after independence, and the new political order designed by the generals failed to address their grievances. The Constitution divided the country between seven Burman-majority ‘regions’ in Burma’s heartland and seven ‘states’ in the periphery, named after the majority ethnic group inhabiting them; but the two types of territory enjoy similar status and autonomy. Neither regions nor states can enact their own constitution or laws, and the most senior authority in each of them, the chief minister, has to be appointed by the president of the country.7 Moreover, the chief minister is not necessarily, in practice, the most powerful figure in a state or regional government, since the GAD and the security forces are constitutionally under the complete control of the Tatmadaw.
Before the election, the junta had been putting pressure on the ethnic armed organizations, some of which had maintained fragile ceasefires for years, to become border-guarding forces under the command of the military. The strongest and most important armed groups refused the order, insisting that their political demands had not been met. This created friction that included a small conflict between the army and a faction of a Karen rebel army on the border with Thailand, which sent more than 10,000 refugees to the neighbouring country the day after the election.8 Nevertheless, the junta allowed some ethnic parties to run in the election, though it selected them carefully; some, like the Kachin people, would have no voice in parliament in the upcoming administration.
In other states, ethnic parties attained more than 25 per cent of the vote. One of the most successful was the Rakhine Nationalities Development Party (RNDP), a forerunner of the Arakan National Party (ANP), representing the Rakhine Buddhist community in Arakan. Arakan is a complex state, the second-poorest in the country, and is deeply fractured along ethno-religious lines. The rift between its two main communities, Rakhine Buddhists and Rohingya Muslims, has grown during the transition period, despite the fact that the two communities have lived side by side for generations. It is often overlooked that the Rakhine, despite closing ranks with the Burmese state and military when it comes to opposing the Rohingya, are fiercely against the domination of the Burmans, whom they regard as their oppressors. They have a strong argument for such resentment in relation, for instance, to the natural resources in their state – mainly the huge gas reserves off the coast, which the central government has exploited with the help of international companies, yielding little or no benefit to the local population.
Burmans and Rakhine share the Buddhist religion and a very similar language; but for most of its history Arakan was an independent kingdom, until the late eighteenth century, when it was conquered by the Burmans. Among all the ethnic groups in the country, the Rakhine are perhaps the most similar, linguistically and culturally, to the Burmans. But despite this, or perhaps because of it, they are among the groups most vociferously assertive of their differences and autonomist aspirations. Rakhine nationalists often say that they are sandwiched between the Burmese government and the Rohingya, whom they and many others in Burma often call ‘Bengalis’, indicating their purported foreign origins. The resentment against one feeds the resentment against the other, in what is in reality a triangular conflict pitting three groups against the other: Rakhine, Burman and Rohingya.
The Rohingya Muslims, who had been stripped of citizenship by the military junta, were allowed to vote in 2010. There were even two Rohingya parties, the National Democratic Party for Development (NDPD) and the National Development and Peace Party (NDPP), the latter widely assumed to be a proxy of the military. These parties campaigned mostly in the Rohingya-majority townships of Northern Arakan, along the border with Bangladesh. There were reports that the NDPD had come under pressure from state officials to prevent it from campaigning, and even that villagers were threatened with eviction if they voted for it.9 Eventually, two Rohingya would sit in parliament – both members of the USDP. Paradoxically, during the subsequent period, in which the Rohingya community would suffer a rapid process of complete disenfranchisement, they also had representation in parliament for the first time in decades, and one of their MPs, Shwe Maung, would be a vocal critic of the government. It was widely assumed that the Rohingya were being allowed to vote in 2010 in order to prevent the Rakhine nationalists from attaining too much power; but it is also true that the Rohingya had been allowed to vote in every election or referendum held in Burma since independence. In any case, Rakhine nationalists resented that the Rohingya had a political voice at a crucial moment of transition in which the future of the country was at stake, and this may partly explain the role that Rakhine nationalists would play in the intercommunal riots two years later.
By late 2010, there remained little doubt that the new political order was scarcely conducive to fulfilling either the autonomist goals of the ethnic minorities or the democratic aspirations of the Burman majority. Nobody expected much from the new president, Thein Sein, a quiet man of the old regime who had been prime minister (a mostly ceremonial position) under the military junta. But in fact his government would introduce far-reaching political and economic reforms. During this period, the country changed at breakneck speed: hundreds of political prisoners were released; the opposition was allowed to conduct its activities more or less freely; freedom of speech was relatively respected, as the government relaxed restrictions on the media; mobile phones and access to the internet, both virtually nonexistent before 2012, spread throughout the country. Most crucially, the parliament turned out to be more open and assertive than had been thought possible. Burma, a pariah country shunned by the Western democracies for more than two decades, was now welcomed into the ‘international community’ with open arms. The United States and the European Union gradually lifted the sanctions they had imposed, and foreign investors began to flock to the country.
The transition came as a surprise that elicited much speculation over the motivations of the military. Some argued that it was due to geopolitical considerations, as Burma had come to rely too much on China as a consequence of Western sanctions and isolation.10 Pro-democracy activists abroad claimed that the sanctions had pushed the generals to introduce reforms. Thein Sein has said that the move was necessary to lift the country from its economic backwardness.11 The Burmese military is notoriously opaque, and the real causes of this period of rapid political change are difficult to know. There were probably many reasons to launch the reforms, but one thing is certain: the generals loosened their grip and allowed the transition to take place not from a position of weakness, but from the position of overwhelming strength they had achieved over many years.12 By the time of the election in 2010, after decades of crushing the opposition and strengthening itself, the military was the only well-established institution in the country, so it could afford to cede some of its power in the confidence that it would retain a pre-eminent position.
As the transition progressed, it would become increasingly clear that it was irreversible – albeit within limits that, in moments of euphoria, were not quite visible. But the transition would also bring to light complexities and dark aspects of Burmese society to which very few had previously paid attention: the intercommunal violence in Arakan and beyond; the emergence of an extremely exclusionary brand of Burman ethno-nationalism that seemed to permeate every stratum of society; and the ambiguous, and sometimes explicitly racist, positions taken by the pro-democracy camp and long-time defenders of human rights. All of this contradicted what one author has termed the ‘neat, if overly simplified, plotline of bad military versus good citizenry’13 that many foreign journalists and external observers, including me, had long taken almost for granted.
Before the transition period, the most common narrative on Burma was that of a democratic opposition led by a courageous and graceful woman, heroically combating by nonviolent means a brutal and cruel regime led by a clique of thuggish generals. Admittedly, quite what the ideology of Aung San Suu Kyi and her party was had never been clear, and nor had her vision of the country’s future, beyond some platitudes about human rights, democracy and freedom. But it was easy to believe that her heart was in the right place; and the sacrifices that she and many pro-democracy activists, who had endured years of jail, were clear proof of their courage and commitment.
The many conflicts with ethnic minorities in the country’s periphery were seen either as some sort of subplot, subsumed within the central epic story of democracy versus dictatorship, or as part of the same struggle, on the assumption that Suu Kyi’s NLD and the ethnic groups were on the same side. The plight of the Rohingya minority, in many respects unique, barely registered, or was seen as part of the wider struggle of the minorities for their rights. The communal cleavages that in the past had violently pitted Rakhine against Rohingya in Arakan, or Buddhists against Muslims in central Burma, were little understood, and were often explained away as mere manipulations by the military. At times they probably had been orchestrated by the military; but the military was exploiting deep divisions that pre-dated its rise to power, and – as would become clear during the transition – were more pervasive in Burmese society than most foreigners had realized.
Such distortions and simplifications, as well as the idealization of Suu Kyi and the pro-democracy camp, had to do with the fact that the country had been largely closed to foreigners, but also with the way many of us approached the issue. Orientalist fantasizing surely played its role, but the point of entry to Burma was equally important, if not more so. This was usually not Burma itself, but Mae Sot, a Thai town on the Burmese border where a sizable Burmese community has lived for decades. Most of the Burmese people living in Mae Sot are labourers working in garment factories, or refugees of all ethnicities living in a camp nearby. But our contacts were usually either Burman political exiles, many of whom had fled the country after spending years in Burma’s prisons as political prisoners, or activists of ethnic minorities, mostly Karen, either belonging to or closely associated with the Karen National Union (KNU). In a sense, Mae Sot was a distorted microcosm of Burma. Karen and Burman activists lived alongside one another, often working and socialising together. It was not uncommon to share a drink with groups that would include, say, a former Karen guerrilla and a Burman ex-political prisoner, both of whom would share a loathing for the military regime, appear to share the same goals, and express similar admiration for Aung San Suu Kyi.
It was self-evident that the military dictatorship was the common enemy, and that would lead many of us to assume that the same goals were shared by the pro-democracy camp, mostly ethnic Burmans, and the Karen insurgents – and by extension other ethnic groups. At that time, few politically conscious members of the ethnic minorities had much reason to distrust Aung San Suu Kyi. While everybody knew that the NLD was a pre-eminently Burman party, it was fair to allow it the benefit of any doubt, given that it had never held power and had made vague promises of federalism.
As journalists, our next step usually included an incursion into the territories held in Burma by the Karen guerrillas – or by some other group, such as the Shan or Kachin – along the Thai or Chinese borders. These were trips on which the reporter would be embedded with armed groups keen to present a positive image of themselves. Moreover, in central Burma, travelling as undercover journalists with tourist visas, who could potentially expose anybody talking to us to danger, we would mostly interview NLD politicians or other pro-democracy activists loosely associated with the party. It is unlikely that those sources were willingly misleading us; most of them were probably sincerely committed to the causes they claimed to defend. But they offered us a very narrow picture of the country, and we often had only ourselves to blame. We rarely asked ‘hard questions’, or talked with government officials, who in our stories remained the faceless bad guys lurking in the shadows. Many of us had formed an idealized image of Burma, and most of our contacts and sources were happy to help us to confirm it again and again.
I was beholden to that image when I travelled to Rangoon for the first time, in November 2010. It was just a few weeks after the election, and Aung San Suu Kyi had recently been released from house arrest. The NLD headquarters was a ramshackle building not far from the iconic Shwedagon Pagoda, constantly watched by secret policemen sitting in a tea shop across the street. Most members of the party I interviewed in the headquarters were former political prisoners with harrowing stories about the harsh conditions they had endured in jail, generally narrated in an almost casual manner. It was difficult not to sympathize with their cause, even though the party had an excessive resemblance to a personality cult devoted to Aung San Suu Kyi, often described as ‘our great leader’.
The first man I interviewed there was the legendary U Win Tin. Born in Central Burma in 1930, Win Tin had worked as a journalist for most of his life. He had been the editor-in-chief of a couple of newspapers, including one that was closed in 1978 for its critical coverage of the Ne Win regime. In 1988 he took an active role in the popular uprising that toppled Ne Win, and was one of the cofounders of the NLD. He was said to have been one of the key figures in convincing Aung San Suu Kyi to join the struggle for democracy. After that, he had spent almost nineteen years in jail, at times in solitary confinement in a dog cell. He was an affable man who would wear the blue shirt that all prisoners wear in Burma’s jails as a gesture of solidarity until his death in 2014. If Suu Kyi was often described as the ‘mother’ of the pro-democracy camp in Burma, U Win Tin was surely its ‘father’.
The NLD was in a very precarious position in those days. After it refused to register for the election, the government warned its members that they could not carry on with any political activity and were only allowed to do ‘social work’. Even in the worst years of persecution by the military, the NLD had been recognized as a political party – though this had rarely implied the freedom to organize or campaign. But now, for the first time since its founding, it had been explicitly outlawed as a party, or at least put into a dangerous legal limbo. ‘The government has told us that we can become an NGO or something like that, but we cannot do that: this is a political party, and the most popular in the country for that matter, as we won the last free elections with an overwhelming victory’, U Win Tin told me, referring to the party’s victory in 1990. ‘For the moment we don’t know if the government is allowing us to work because of the international support we enjoy or they are waiting for the right time to attack us. Maybe they are waiting to convene the parliament and form the new government to take action against us. We don’t really know, we are waiting to see what happens. In any case, when Daw Aung San Suu Kyi was released it was clearly demonstrated that she enjoys the support of most of our country and the international community’, he added.
A few months later, in August 2011, I had the chance to interview ‘the Lady’ – as Suu Kyi is widely known – in the same ramshackle building. With her aristocratic demeanour and unfailing politeness, Suu Kyi impressed a young journalist like me with a charisma that had been built over the years not only by her, but also by the adoration she inspired in many Burmese people, and the admiration with which the overwhelming majority of foreign journalists wrote about her. The uncertainty about where the transition was leading and the role that the NLD could play in it had not changed since my previous visit. Suu Kyi was vague about the plans for the party and its political philosophy, and I interpreted such vagueness as caution. ‘I always say that I am cautiously optimistic. If one is engaged in the kind of work we do, surely we should do it with certain degree of optimism; one has to believe that the goals are not only necessary but also attainable. We believe we can change things, and that’s only possible through negotiation and national reconciliation’, she said. When I asked her to describe what kind of democracy she aspired to build, she replied vaguely that there is democracy ‘when people’s voices are heard’, so I pushed her on the concept’s ideological underpinnings. ‘The universal declaration of human rights’, she replied.
It was difficult to predict at that time, but that situation of uncertainty and legal precariousness did not last for long. A couple of weeks later, in August 2011, Aung San Suu Kyi met Thein Sein; this was the first of several meetings in successive months. The contents of those conversations remain a mystery, as well as the concessions that both sides would be willing to make. But the NLD was allowed to enter the political arena.
In a by-election held in April 2012, the NLD gained almost all of the disputed forty-five seats in parliament, including one for Suu Kyi herself. Western countries had based their policies towards Burma on indications made by Aung San Suu Kyi, or on how she was treated. Such policies had been mostly punitive, including sanctions and embargoes, at least since the late nineties. But the fact that she was now a member of parliament, and her party a legal political force, provided, in the eyes of the so-called ‘international community’, a veneer of legitimacy to the transition designed by the generals. She was even allowed to travel abroad, and foreign dignitaries also visited her and others in Burma during the period.
The main strategy of Suu Kyi over this period was to seek the reconciliation she had mentioned in our interview, and that meant primarily reconciliation between her party and the military. Two years after the beginning of the transition, something happened that would previously have been unthinkable: she attended a military parade on Armed Forces Day in the capital, Naypyidaw, surrounded by the generals of the same army that had kept her captive for almost fifteen years.14 Her rapprochement with the military should not have come as a surprise. In her first major speech, during the heady days of the 1988 uprising, when she entered politics, she had said that she felt a ‘strong attachment for the armed forces’, as ‘not only were they built up by my father, as a child I was cared for by his soldiers’.15 The personal is often political when it comes to ‘the Lady’.
A defining moment for the new Burma, and for Suu Kyi herself, came when she visited Salingyi Township, in Sagaing Division, in 2013. A typical township of the rural areas of central Burma, Salingyi was afflicted by a problem all too common throughout Burma: the eviction of farmers from their lands to make way for mega-projects or big business in the name of economic development. Suu Kyi played a role that would lead to a situation without precedent in the country: people in Salingyi would protest against her – and they would do so spontaneously, without being organized or coerced to do so by the military, as had happened on occasion in the past.
The inhabitants of the dusty villages of Salingyi have been mostly farmers for generations, but life in the township has been dominated in recent years by the gigantic Letpadaung copper mine, the biggest in the country. The mine was opened in 1978, but it was greatly expanded when it began to be operated by the Canadian company Ivanhoe in 1996. In 2010, Ivanhoe yielded to pressures from foreign activists denouncing the human rights violation of the military regime, and withdrew from the project. After that, Wanbao Mining Ltd, a subsidiary of Norinco, a Chinese arms manufacturer, stepped in.16 Since then, the exploitation of the mine is a joint venture of Wanbao and the Union of Myanmar Economic Holdings Ltd (UMEHL), a vast conglomerate owned and run by the Tatmadaw. None of these deals were made in a transparent manner. Nobody had bothered to consult the local population, and the government had evicted hundreds of farmers from their lands in the mid 1990s using laws from the British colonial era. The situation had become even worse after Wanbao bought the project and continued to develop and expand the mine, evicting more farmers for little or no compensation.
In November 2012, many villagers, led by local Buddhist monks and activists, staged a series of protests against the project. The police repressed the protests with brutality, shooting protestors and even using white phosphorus, burning the skin of many of them. In the new Burma, where the media had freedom to report on such incidents, the brutality provoked a scandal.
Aung San Suu Kyi was now a member of parliament, after her party had won some seats in a by-election in April that year, and was invited by President Thein Sein to head a Commission to investigate the incident and the mine project. She accepted the role. The report issued by the Commission in March 2013 failed to demand accountability for the police brutality or the use of white phosphorus, simply recommended improvements in police training.17 The Commission recognized that the mine was bringing little benefit to local villagers, but it argued for the continued expansion of the project, albeit recommending an increase in the compensation handed to the farmers and more thorough environmental assessments. The argument in defence of the project was that it was in Burma’s national interest to continue operations in the mine, as halting them would discourage foreign investors from doing business in the country.18 An abstract ‘national interest’ seemed to override the concrete interests of the very same individuals who were members of the nation.
After the Commission issued the report, Suu Kyi visited the area to talk with the villagers. She was received by the farmers with a hostility she appeared utterly unprepared to confront. She was heckled and shouted at by villagers who were unwilling to listen to her explanations of why a project that was damaging them so much should continue. At some point she took refuge in her car while angry villagers shouted at her. Looking from the window, she seemed completely puzzled. ‘We had so much hope on her, but her report is like a death sentence’, said a woman, crying. The villagers might have refused to understand an argument based on a ‘national interest’ that seemed to exclude them; or perhaps they understood it only too well – but it was clear that she had not understood their position. She had called for compensation for the farmers, but she appeared unable to grasp that they were fighting for their land, too – for an environment to which they felt deeply attached, and where their lives had a meaning for them. Reportedly, she asked in exasperation: ‘Why do they want the mountain?’19
I visited the area a few months later to witness the impact of the mine for myself. The situation was tense, and during the day the police were ubiquitous in the area. But the farmers were protecting the activists organizing the protests, forming patrols and preventing the security forces from searching for them in their villages at night. The deleterious impact of the mine was visible even on the very skin of some of the people I met. Ma Myint Myint, a fragile forty-two-year-old woman, suffered painful open sores all over her body after taking showers with water polluted with acid. In a country with an abysmal public health system, she was too poor to afford treatment in a private hospital, so she had to endure the pain using only an ointment that barely alleviated it.
The area around the mine included a barren yellow landscape, on which farmers who had previously cultivated the land were now forced to eke out a living extracting and processing low-quality copper in small improvised mines. They were receiving the crumbs of a project that was worth millions of dollars. One of them was Ko Nyo, a forty-eight-year-old man living with his wife and two children. He used to make the equivalent of US$150 a month when he was a farmer, and had also been able to produce some food for his family. He had been evicted from his land a couple of years before, and making copper was providing him with the equivalent of only US$90 per month.
The compensation given to those who received it was completely insufficient, according to the young lawyer acting on behalf of the farmers, Saw Kyaw Min, as it was based on a valuation of the land made during the colonial period, more than seven decades before. Given this harsh reality, and the fact that Suu Kyi seemed to have sided with the companies and the military, all the farmers expressed deep disappointment with her. They felt they had been betrayed and were now alone in their struggle. The only person I talked to at the time who said he was not disappointed with Suu Kyi was Thein Aung, a fifty-three-year-old farmer who told me that he ‘had never believed in her to feel any disappointment now’. These sentiments were far from universal among the Burman majority, but a crack had now been opened in Suu Kyi’s hitherto untarnished image.
* * *
The transition was supposed to be a pact of three elites: the military, the pro-democracy opposition led by Suu Kyi, and the leaders of the ethnic minorities.20 The pact between the first two would be surprisingly successful – but not so much the pact with the third. In any case, the terms of such a transition were dictated exclusively by the military, which had designed a bullet-proof constitution and still wielded great power. The reaction of Suu Kyi to such imbalance of power was to try her best to reassure the generals that she and her party posed no threat to them. Since her release from house arrest, Suu Kyi had mostly engaged in playing politics in the opaque corridors of power in Naypyidaw, making tours abroad that mostly served to legitimize the transition in the eyes of the Western powers, rather than listening to the grievances of the Burmese population, whose support she probably took for granted. Even the outspoken Win Tin criticized this aloofness from the public, and it became increasingly easier to find Burmese saying that she was not close enough to the people.21 She went as far as to assure the ‘cronies’ (a handful of extremely rich businessmen who had amassed huge fortunes during the junta period through their contacts with the generals) that she would not threaten their position, merely asking them to ‘act fairly’ and ‘work for others’.22
In the name of ‘national reconciliation’, Suu Kyi renounced two important weapons she had at her disposal to extract concessions from the generals – her popular support at home, and the influence she wielded on foreign powers like the United States, at a moment when the government was keen to develop closer relations with the West. Such a strategy reveals Suu Kyi’s deep distrust of participatory politics. Recalling her attitude to the protests against the copper mine in Letpadaung, she reacted with indifference, and even veiled hostility, to the wishes of the people.
The only issue on which she campaigned strongly was the clause in the Constitution that prevented her from becoming president. Shortly after her release, she called for a multi-ethnic conference;23 but the issue was mostly swept aside by the NLD during the Thein Sein years, leaving the initiative to the government. Moreover, the NLD was scarcely active for most of the period. Suu Kyi’s strategy of winning the trust of the generals rendered the party politically impotent, reducing it to merely reacting to developments shaped by others. Moreover, as the transition proceeded, an ugly truth, previously obscured, became increasingly clear: on the most crucial issues afflicting the country, the NLD’s vision for Burma was not so different from that of the military. Regarding the questions of citizenship, who belonged to the Burmese nation and who did not, and the political rights of the ethnic minorities resentful of Burman domination, the NLD failed to offer any alternative to the military. These were precisely the issues that would prove crucial during the transition.
