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To
understand the unrest wracking Burma, consider a new town
built in the lush hills northeast of
Mandalay.
It’s near the British-built hill station of Maymyo, where
Burma’s old colonial masters went to escape the heat and
dust of the plain. Maymyo still boasts red-brick mansions
covered in ivy and pleasant gardens with roses, which
flourish in the almost alpine climate of the hills.
The new
town is also a kind of refuge—but for the Burmese
military. Instead of the British Victorian-style mansions
of the old Maymyo, you’ll find gaudy, luxury villas in the
new one. The town is also home to the Defense Services
Academy, Burma’s West Point, which trained many of the
generals who ordered last week’s crackdown on
pro-democracy demonstrations led by saffron-robed Buddhist
monks. When construction on the officers’ town began in
late 2005, the Irrawaddy, a magazine published by Burmese
exiles in
Thailand,
reported that “no expense has been spared to allow the
generals to live in what basically is a resort, complete
with an artificial beach and a man-made stretch of water
to lap onto it.” The theme-park retreat will also include
replicas of a famous pagoda in Rangoon, the old royal
palace in Mandalay and a popular beach resort—which, the
magazine dryly noted, “is probably where the fake beach
comes in.”
Thanks to
a newly upgraded airport, the retreat is a quick plane
ride to Burma’s new capital, Naypyidaw, built in the
wasteland and jungle 200 miles north of the old capital,
Rangoon (now also known as Yangon). Naypyidaw means “Abode
of Kings,” and kings are precisely what the Burmese
generals see themselves as—even as they face the largest
uprising in 20 years. On the capital’s parade ground stand
newly erected, larger-than-life statues of three famous
precolonial warrior kings whom the junta’s leader, Senior
Gen. Than Shwe, sees as his role models.
As such
delusions of grandeur suggest, Burma is no ordinary
military-ruled country, which the generals call Myanmar.
When the army first seized power in 1962, the country
underwent a transformation entirely different from that of
nearby countries, such as Thailand, South Vietnam,
Indonesia and Pakistan, where the military was also in
control.
That’s
because the Burmese army seized not only political but
also economic power. What the generals branded “the
Burmese Way to Socialism” meant that most private property
was confiscated and handed over to military-run state
corporations. The old mercantile elite, largely of Indian
and Chinese origin, left the country—as did many of
Burma’s intellectuals. Before the 1962 coup,
Burma
had one of the highest living standards in Southeast Asia
and a fairly well-educated population. Afterward, its
prosperity fled along with its best and brightest.
The
Burmese military became a state-within-a-state, an insular
society in which army personnel, their families and
dependents enjoy far more privileges than their
counterparts ever had in, say, military-ruled Thailand or
Indonesia. In both those countries, some degree of
pluralism hung on even during the darkest years of
uniformed dictatorship. But in Burma, the military is the
only elite.
The new
generals’ town and their heavily fortified new capital are
only the most extreme examples of how isolated Burma’s
military men are from the population. The officers live in
secluded, subsidized housing, and their families have
access to special schools, hospitals and shops larded with
goods unavailable in ordinary stores. An army pass assures
the holder of a seat on a train or an airplane, and no
policeman would ever dare report him or her for violating
traffic rules.
The
Burmese Way to Socialism was abolished after a massive
prodemocracy uprising in 1988, following years of misrule.
At the time, even larger crowds than this week’s took to
the streets in Rangoon and other cities to vent their
frustrations with a cruel regime that had done nothing to
improve the lives of ordinary people. Then as now,
soldiers were sent out to disperse the demonstrators, but
using far deadlier force than we’ve seen in the current
crisis. At least 3,000 people were gunned down by an army
bent not on seizing power but on shoring up a bankrupt
regime overwhelmed by popular protest.
After the
bloodshed of 1988, perhaps to appease the international
community, which condemned the carnage, and perhaps
because the military saw that there was money to be made,
the junta permitted private enterprise and foreign
investment. But in essence, there’s not much difference
between the Burmese Way to Socialism and the Burmese Way
to Capitalism: the military is still involved in every
aspect of the economy, and few enterprises escape the
direct or indirect control of the men in green.
The rise
of military power in
Burma
began soon after the country won its independence from
Britain
on January 4, 1948. Burma’s army was only 15,000 strong
then. By 1955, because of an ongoing civil war with
communist and ethnically based rebels, it increased to
40,000. The military was already involved in businesses
such as shipping, banking and publishing. When the
state-within-a-state finally gobbled up the state outright
in 1962, it had some 104,000 men under arms. By the time
of the 1988 uprising, that number had risen to nearly
200,000. And today, the monks and protesters backing the
incarcerated prodemocracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi face a
military whose total strength is estimated at 400,000.
This
latest expansion comes at a time when the junta has
managed to strike cease-fire agreements with most of the
country’s rebel groups, which, over the past decade, has
meant only scant fighting in Burma’s traditionally
volatile frontier areas. The enemy now is the Burmese
population at large. And the military is far better
equipped now than at any time in Burma’s modern history,
mainly due to its massive procurement of arms from China.
Chinese
fighter planes and frigates may be of little use in
quelling the current urban uprisings, but the
modernization of Burma’s armed forces since 1988 was also
intended to ensure the loyalty of the military, without
which the present regime cannot survive. For all the
monks’ gallantry and Suu Kyi’s heroism, nothing will
change in
Burma
so long as the military remains united, and so far, no
credible reports have emerged of splits in the ranks. The
Burmese military, with its privileges and its history of
atrocity, has everything to lose from more openness and
transparency and nothing to gain. Foreign-based opposition
groups like to talk about “dialogue” and “national
reconciliation,” but these buzzwords have little relevance
inside Burma, where the military talks to no one but
itself.
As one
Rangoon-based Western diplomat once told me, “They fear
that if they don’t hang together, they’ll hang
separately.” In the Philippines, “people power” uprisings
have driven two presidents from power: Ferdinand Marcos in
1986 and Joseph Estrada in 2001. But given the Burmese
military’s extraordinary powers and unique position
astride the state, anything similar to the Philippine
uprisings seems impossible in
Burma.
The
warrior kings who had those luxury mansions built for them
in Maymyo—the hard men who make their own decisions
regardless of what their own people say and think, let
alone the outside world—may well be beyond redemption. So
Burma’s only hope is the younger generation of army
officers, which might come to understand the need to
negotiate with the prodemocracy movement. But for now, no
one has been able to identify any “young Turks” lurking in
the wings. At most, the protests could help sections of
the army realize that there is no future in supporting the
present regime. If change does come to Burma, it will come
because of actions taken by younger army officers, and not
by monks on the streets.
Lintner, a former correspondent for the Far Eastern
Economic Review, is the author of Outrage: Burma’s
Struggle for Democracy and four other books about Burma.
Author’s e-mail: lintner@asiapacificms.com. |
