Myanmar in 2010: The Elections Year and Beyond

One need not have been a soothsayer and, according to Dante Alighieri in The Divine Comedy, go to a very low circle of hell to predict that 2010 would be the year of elections, that all attention internally in Myanmar would be directed towards that end, and this concentration would also affect foreign relations. At the same time, no fortune teller would have been required, beyond picking the date of the elections themselves, to determine that minority issues would profoundly influence the future, as they have done since independence in 1948, and that 2010 would not witness resolution of these to-date intractable problems.¹

The 7 November 2010 elections may have determined the composition of the new government, but they did not change, and specifically were not intended to change, the distribution of effective power, which still rests with the Tatmadaw (armed forces), and is likely to do so into the indefinite future. The State Peace and Development Council (SPDC) efforts — ineffectual at best — to assuage the minorities are unlikely to succeed for several reasons. The minorities have wanted some form of federal system, and many groups have formulated draft constitutions (illegally under Myanmar law and thus they were forced to do so outside the country) for their seven constituent states that incorporated elements of some such preferred system. To the military, however, federalism has been anathema since Ne Win declared it so in 1962. He considered it the first step toward secession, against which the military has always fought since independence. The government’s Border Guard Force concept (see below) has exacerbated tensions; it would result in the effective castration of the ceasefire military of key ethnic groups, and thus has been resisted. It is a subject with which the new government in 2011 will have to deal, and there are fears it may try to do so through military force. The 25 per cent active-duty military in the bicameral national legislative, and even in local ones, prompt questions from the minorities that their rights will not be adequately protected. The glass ceiling has meant top positions in the military itself have been denied to both ethnic and religious minorities under this government. The rights stipulated in the constitution for furthering minority cultures, as in the two previous constitutions, are as likely to be ignored as they have been in the past.² And censorship, marginally relaxed during the period before the elections, still prevails. The Tatmadaw’s filtering of the muddy waters of the new well of a “discipline-flourishing democracy”, as Senior General Than Shwe has said in March 2009, is likely to take quite some time.

The basic question is not, as much of the media has announced, the issue of democracy and how democratic the new government might be. Adjectivally modified terms such as “discipline-flourishing democracy” are inherently suspect. The more germane issue is: how much is pluralism really built into the new administrative governmental configuration and how much pluralism will the new government allow? The first stage towards any functioning democracy is the diminution of centralized authority — the bane of the Burmese administration for half a century. Critical in this configuration is the role of the minorities, their ability to articulate their views legally, practice their languages and cultures, and develop locally through access to state-controlled resources.

More than any other single problem, minority issues are perennial; they have intensely affected the state since independence in 1948, although foreign observers have concentrated their attention on political and human rights problems. The SPDC, the ruling military junta that is to disappear when a new government is formed in early 2011, but in part will be reincarnated into civilianized form, may have believed that by granting minorities more local autonomy, in contrast to national power, than heretofore, they would assuage their fears and aspirations. They were mistaken. As nationalism has grown among the majority Burmans, so has nationalism expanded among the various minorities, of which there are a large, significant, and vocal number.³ Ethnic identity has...