143 - Tyranny in Myanmar: Thanks to Russian and Chinese Backing
Two years ago to the day Myanmar’s corrupt military junta shut down the country’s first democratic experiment since Burma (as it was originally called) won independence from Britain. The coup plunged Myanmar into civil war, with the junta’s Tatmadaw army arrayed against a rag tag collection of students and professionals – a middle-class fighting force -- together with farmers, farmworkers, and laborers under the banner of the so-called National Unity Government. These peoples’ militias are joined as well to the enduring anti-regime fighting forces of Myanmar’s dozen or so non-Burmese ethnic soldieries. The new People’s Defence Force claims 65,000 active soldiers against the Tatmadaw’s 350,000.
In many parts of Myanmar, especially the cities, the junta remains in oppressive control. Sections of the countryside are in opposition hands. Nearly 3,000 persons have been killed and almost 16,000 detained for opposing junta rule. About 1.5 million civilians have been displaced. The UN Human Rights Office says that the repressive forces of the junta have committed numerous shameful crimes against humanity. And warfare continues.
In late 2022, military helicopters fired on schools in the Sagaing region, where resistance has been effective. In Kachin State, in Myanmar’s north, soldiers burned down villages, raping and killing as they marauded. Data for Myanmar, an NGO, says that the junta’s forces have torched more than 28,000 homes since the coup. Torture is rife, as are rampages by the Tatmadaw, one of the world’s largest forces.
In 1962, General Ne Win and his Revolutionary Council of the Union of Burma ousted a democratic government that had originally gained independence from British colonizers in 1948. Its first leader was General Aung San, father of Aung San Suu Kyi. He was assassinated by rivals six-months before his country officially broke with Britain.
Ne Win’s harsh rule impoverished Burma and turned it sharply inward. His autarkic regime largely stopped trading with the outside world or dealing with the realities of the long Cold War. Once the rice bowl of Asia, Burmese soon went hungry while their country gradually became the largest producer of opium in the world. Its once famed universities stopped producing trained professionals.
Ne Win’s control was so tight that everything that was once promising and prosperous in Burma decayed. Meanwhile, his rule had alienated nearly all of the disparate ethnic groups (many Christian) that comprise 40 percent of Burma’s people, as against the 60 percent who are Bamar (Burmans) and Buddhists.
In 1988, after Burmese monks, students, and professionals rose up against dictatorship, demanding elections and freedom, Ne Win fell from power. It was during this sudden attempted revolution against dictatorial rule that Aung San Suu Kyi, then residing in Oxford, England, with her husband and young family, visited her aging mother in Burma and – with no previous leadership experience -- got swept up into billowing winds of Burmese change and emerged as the icon of opposition against the military-led State Law and Order Restoration Council (SLORC) that had followed Ne Win’s fall
. An overwhelming triumph in the parliamentary elections of 1990 elevated her to power as the head of the newly constituted National League for Democracy (NLD) government. Together, they won 80 percent of seats.
But that surprising success was far too threatening to the military men who ran the SLORC. Suu Kyi and thousands of her supporters were detained. She was placed under house arrest and, as a vocal Mandela-like feminist symbol of Burma’s freedom struggle, was rigorously confined to her country dacha on Inya Lake near Rangoon (now Yangon) until 2010. She won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1991. (She was allowed out of house arrest only for a few weeks in 1997. By good fortune, I happened to be in Burma then and spent many hours with her and attended local rallies before they were shut down and she was re-confined.) Burma officially became Myanmar in 1989.
The SLORC morphed into the State Peace and Development Council in 1997, with General Than Shwe as its head. In 2010, the junta decided to come in from the cold a little.
General Thein Sein, a close ally of Than Shwe, became president of Burma in 2011, after the military staged a parliamentary election and won 77 percent of the seats. Suu Kyi, finally released from detention, and other leaders of the NLD also gained parliamentary places. A new constitution gave the Tatmadaw 25 percent of parliament’s seats, and a veto on all policy decisions.
But in 2015, (having by then moved its capital from Yangon to the newly created up-country city of Naypyidaw) Myanmar experienced its first fully free election since 1990. The NLD, led by Suu Kyi, triumphed and Suu Kyi (not allowed to call herself president or prime minister) became the leader of Myanmar’s second period of democracy as a self-styled state counselor – a de facto head of government. She formed a cabinet and attempted to steer Myanmar carefully between the Charybdis of democracy and the Scylla of junta prerogatives.
During this 2015-2020 interregnum, Suu Kyi sought deftly to return Myanmar to its very early days of glory under her father’s successors, such as U Nu. She edged Myanmar into the world and also closer to China, its main protector and trading partner. But she also greatly compromised her reputation and legitimacy locally and globally by embracing the junta’s vicious pogrom against Muslim Rohingya in Rakhine State (nearly 2 million Rohingya fleeing into Bangladesh, with thousands being killed and numerous villages burned by the Tatmadaw). She also turned, as the military preferred, against the ethnic minorities, and became a sometime apologist for the Tatmadaw and, unexpectedly, a Bamar/Buddhist chauvinist.
Suu Kyi and her party overwhelming won the late 2020 parliamentary elections. By doing so, and by indicating her intent to rule even more expansively than she had from 2015, Suu Kyi rattled the junta’s ruling generals led by Senior General Min Aung Hlaing. He greatly resented her new local and global prominence. The Tatmadaw’s control of lucrative (and corrupt) industrial, mining, and smuggling interests were also threatened. Its kleptocratic profits were set to be curtailed by Suu Kyi’s growing ambitions and power.
Hence the coup, and the incarceration once again of Suu Kyi. On completely spurious charges, she has now been sentenced vindictively -- after show trials—to thirty-three years in prison. She is 77. (See #23 “Putin-like Compatriots Elsewhere, I: Myanmar,” April 22, 2022; #70, “Conniving with Putin-like Strong Men Rarely Pays: Myanmar,” June 27, 2022.)
The United States imposed sanctions on Hlaing and his compatriots in 2021. Recently it listed and placed sanctions on arms brokers and aircraft suppliers. But only Europe has moved against the export of oil and gas from Myanmar; the US needs to join that ban. The Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) has begun to treat Myanmar as an outlaw. But bringing even more pressure on Hlaing and the junta is essential. Making it impossible for Myanmar’s oil and gas to be sold on world markets could threaten the Tatmadaw and the regime.
China and Russia manage to keep Myanmar as a mostly client state; China has established a warm water port on Myanmar’s southern coast and constructed an oil pipeline from the Indian Ocean to Yunnan. Russia sells Myanmar heavy arms and military aircraft, defying U.S. and UN prohibitions.
The West needs to close everyone of Myanmar’s import and export windows so that the Tatmadaw and its leaders begin to experience real economic pain and global shunning. As compromised internationally as Suu Kyi is, she and her party still are popular and the clandestine National Unity Government carries the hopes of a majority of the people of Myanmar. Finding ingenious ways to support the People’s Defence Force in its battle against the Tatmadaw and the junta is essential if Burma’s democracy is to be restored.