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15. Rethinking International Assistance to Myanmar in a Time of Transition
- ISEAS–Yusof Ishak Institute
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15 RETHINKING INTERNATIONAL ASSISTANCE TO MYANMAR IN A TIME OF TRANSITION Morten B. Pedersen Myanmar’s new government is taking the country in new directions. Early statements by President Thein Sein have been surprisingly frank and honest in their assessment of the country’s deep-seated problems, and have committed the government to a wide-ranging agenda of social, political, and economic reform. Although nagging questions remain about how far it will ultimately be willing and — not least — able to go, subsequent government actions appear to have started Myanmar down a path of meaningful political transition and socio-economic transformation. The sudden movement within Myanmar presents a challenge for an international community whose long-standing absence from the country has left it ill-prepared to understand and effectively respond to the changes taking place. Diplomats are scrambling to catch up, but in many ways it is the aid community that has the biggest steps to take. While recent new aid commitments by Australia and other Western donors are a good start, the overall aid agenda remains decidedly under-ambitious. Aid is still viewed mainly in humanitarian terms rather than as the transformative 272 Morten B. Pedersen tool that it both can and must be at a time like this. This is not to suggest that international assistance provides the solution to Myanmar’s manifold problems, but simply that it offers important opportunities to actively help move the country forward. Indeed, at this point, aid may be the most important lever that the international community has in Myanmar. This chapter reviews past achievements of international assistance to Myanmar and considers its future potential viewed from the vantage point of May 2011. It also outlines a second-generation aid agenda for Australia and like-minded donors. The analysis is based primarily on hundreds of confidential interviews conducted by the author in Myanmar between 1997 and 2011; complementary public sources are referenced where available. PAST ACHIEVEMENTS The dominant story of international assistance to Myanmar over the past twenty years has been one of onerous government restrictions and limited donor support. Since nearly all agencies and programmes in the country are humanitarian in focus, their developmental impact has, naturally, been limited. However, there is a more positive, if rarely told, story about the crucial role international aid agencies have played in lifting the veil of ignorance about Myanmar’s humanitarian crisis, supporting basic needs, protecting vulnerable groups, improving national policy and capacities and, quite possibly, encouraging broader structural change. Importantly, international aid agencies that persisted through the long, difficult years of internal restrictions and external sanctions have built contacts and confidence with local stakeholders, putting them in a key position to contribute to the current transition process. The examples that follow are by no means exhaustive and are intended to convey a general sense of the impact of international assistance over the past twenty years. Lifting the Veil of Ignorance When aid agencies began tentatively entering Myanmar in the early 1990s, little was known about the humanitarian situation in the country. Official statistics had long served as a propaganda tool for a government primarily concerned with legitimacy. Exiles and solidarity groups had begun producing penetrating reports on human rights conditions in the conflict-affected border areas, but had no access to other parts of the [3.238.228.191] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 16:10 GMT) Rethinking International Assistance to Myanmar in a Time of Transition 273 country, and in any case showed little interest in information that might weaken their political agenda of isolating the military regime. Many were openly hostile to any talk of expanding aid beyond small-scale cross-border assistance to internally displaced communities. As a result, the suffering of millions of other families went largely unnoticed. That this regrettable situation changed is due in large part to the efforts by aid agencies working within Myanmar to collect and disseminate increasingly reliable, systematic, and comprehensive data on the socioeconomic deprivation of the general population. It took a decade, but eventually UN-sponsored national health surveys, coupled with increasingly robust advocacy by reputable international NGOs, became too embarrassing for the government and donors alike to ignore, and by 2001 the first substantial increments of international assistance finally began flowing in. The International Crisis Group in 2002 described the role of the aid community in lifting this veil of ignorance as perhaps its single most important contribution to development in Myanmar (ICG 2002). Since then, aid organizations have shifted their focus...