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“Winner-Take-All” 169 169 CHAPTER 6 “Winner-Take-All:” An Analysis of Burma’s Political Elite An element of “winner-take-all” exists in the political culture of Burma and refers to the following events. In the Constituent Assembly election in 1947, the first substantive election in the history of Burma, the AntiFascist People’s Freedom League (AFPFL) scored an overwhelming victory, gaining 248 of the 255 seats. Then, in 1962, Ne Win’s regime took over the state and virtually removed all the influential politicians from power and banned all activities by existing political parties. Thereafter, in the general election of 1990, the first such election since 1960, the National League for Democracy obtained 392 of the 485 seats, although 2,209 candidates from 93 parties and 87 independent candidates ran in the election. Pointing to this repeated overwhelming win by one political actor at a time of regime transition, some observers argue that leaders are inclined to favor neither compromise nor cooperation and suggest that Burmese politics contains an element of “winner-take-all.”1 Although based essentially on observation, the “winner-take-all” argument does point out an important characteristic of Burmese politics. Here “winner-take-all” is defined as a wholesale reshuffle of people in 1 See, for example, Mary Callahan, “On Time Warps and Warped Time: Lessons from Burma’s ‘Democratic Era’”, in Burma: Prospects for a Democratic Future, ed. Robert I. Rotberg (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, 1998), p. 64, where Callahan states, “In any of the colonial, parliamentary, socialist or post-1988 military rule periods, a fight over ideas, visions and policies was always that of winner-take-all.” Also Christina Fink wrote, “The mentality of ‘winner-take-all’ was still so normative that many examples of political violence and abuse of power prevented the development of democratic culture.” See Christina Fink, Living Silence: Burma under Military Rule (Dhaka: University Press, 2001), p. 26. 170 Strong Soldiers, Failed Revolution important political posts during regime transition. Through an analysis of the profiles of the political elite in the Ne Win regime, this chapter will provide evidence of the existence of “winner-take-all” in a regime transition. Fortunately, I have been able to build up a database using official documents of the Burma Socialist Programme Party (BSPP) and the People’s Parliament (PP) that profiles this elite between 1971 and 1987.2 Who made up the political elite during the Ne Win regime? What careers did they have before obtaining important posts? And, how was the political elite transformed by the end of the 1980s? This chapter will examine these questions. It will also take up the following two signi- ficant points. First, the chapter will show the uniqueness of Ne Win’s revolution. It has been difficult to compare the Ne Win regime to other countries’ military dictatorships because in Burma the military commanders created the socialist state. Normally, “generals’ revolutions are rebellions of the status quo.”3 General-grade military officers are not prone to destabilize the existing order because they are already in positions of power. Although fitting the minimum definition of a revolution: a sudden and violent upset of existing political order,4 Ne Win’s revolution clearly differed from those in communist countries such as Vietnam, Laos, and China. This chapter will shed light on one aspect of the Ne Win regime’s uniqueness, focusing on the changes it wrought on the human resources of the political elite. Second, it will provide an understanding of state-society relations in Burma.5 So far these relations have often been depicted in the media simply as “oppressor against victim.” But no matter how oppressive the state may be, it is always tied to its own society in the sense that the same people who oppress others have also been born and raised in Burma, work for the state, and as members of the coercive apparatus are able to suppress others who belong to the same nation-state. Thus, 2 The author acquired some of these documents from used bookshops and others from private collections in Burma. They were not available in archives or libraries. 3 Janowitz Morris, The Military in the Political Development of New Nations: an Essay in Comparative Analysis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964), p. 65. 4 Carl Joachim Friedrich, “An Introductory Note on Revolution,” in Revolution, ed. Carl J. Friedrich (New York: Atherton, 1937), p...

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