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1. Burma’s Struggle for Democracy and Human Rights before 1988
- University of Minnesota Press
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41 Burma today remains dominated by a military-ruled state that sees democracy and human rights as a grave threat to national security and treats proponents of democracy and human rights as enemies of the state. Accordingly, the Myanmar state has one of the worst civil and human rights records of any state in the world.1 Myanmar’s fears of neocolonization, as well as social disintegration, are real. In its recent efforts to fend off democracy and human rights, Myanmar has adopted two discourses that are common throughout the non-Western world: authoritarian developmentalism and cultural relativism . The first discourse, on authoritarian developmentalism, asserts that a strong (authoritarian) governing hand is necessary to keep a lid on the bubbling cauldron of fractious, interethnic, nationalist rivalries within the country. It is only when the state has guided the country to a critical stage of economic development that it can afford the luxury of a more open (democratic) governing hand. In short, political democracy cannot precede, but rather must follow, economic development. The second discourse, on cultural relativism, emerges in the form of a more particular regional variant that is often referred to as the “Asian values versus human rights debate.” The Asian values discourse challenges the claim that human rights are universal and, furthermore, asserts that they are particularly Western values. Moreover, when the West 1 Burma’s Struggle for Democracy and Human Rights before 1988 42 Burma’s Struggle for Democracy asserts its values as universal and attempts to foist them as universal (or international) standards upon Asian states like Myanmar, the West is in effect deploying human rights discourse as a political ideology that challenges the national sovereignty of these Asian states. It depicts Asian societies as having a different, particularly Asian, set of norms that conflict in important ways with Western human rights norms. Thus, human rights, Myanmar argues, are external to Burma’s national culture. It characterizes activism inside the country that demands democracy and human rights as an expression of cultural neocolonialism (or the Western “brainwashing” of its citizens) and as a threat to the nation’s cultural unity, social integration, and political security. If there is one person that westerners today associate with Burma’s struggle for democracy and human rights, it is Daw Aung San Suu Kyi.2 She is the daughter of the country’s revered military leader and political architect of their independence, General Aung San, who, in 1947, was assassinated with most of his cabinet members by a political rival in the months leading up to Britain’s formal withdrawal from Burma. Like George Washington of the United States, Aung San is referred to as the father of his nation. Even among the people of Burma, Aung San Suu Kyi has become the face and symbolic leader of its movement for democracy. Yet her immeasurably important role in sustaining the movement did not begin until after she returned to the country in 1988. After earning a B.A. degree in philosophy, politics, and economics at Oxford University in 1969, she spent three years in New York working for the United Nations . Later, she married a scholar of Tibetan culture with whom she had two sons, and in 1985 she completed a Ph.D. at the University of London ’s School of Oriental and African Studies. She returned to Burma on April 1, 1988, to care for her dying mother, who once had served as Burmese ambassador to India and Nepal. Although she did not know it at the time, the statewide conflict of “Democracy Summer” soon would command her attention. Aung San Suu Kyi helped to forge a formal political opposition party to the military’s SLORC government and was elected prime minister in a landslide democratic election in 1990 that the SLORC had been confident it would win. The SLORC refused to transfer power. Instead, it created a military-led national convention to draft a new constitution and renewed its campaign to suppress pro-democracy advocates, including elected members of parliament. They also placed Aung San Suu Kyi [3.235.186.149] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 07:00 GMT) Burma’s Struggle for Democracy 43 under house arrest, where she has spent most of her years since. Still, she has received numerous international honors for her efforts to resolve Burma’s conflict, including the Nobel Peace Prize in 1991. Despite the military’s restrictions on her communication, she still manages to exchange information with her first cousin, Dr...