70 - Conniving with Putin-like Strong Men Rarely Pays: Myanmar and Sri Lanka
Aung San Suu Kyi, daughter of the general who won independence from Britain and the striking victor in three all-out popular elections (1990, 2015, and 2020), thought that she could commune with today’s Myanmar army generals and eventually out-maneuver them to gain power as the political leader of her people. She aligned herself, a Nobel Peace Prize laureate in 1991, with the generals when they cruelly ethnic cleansed Muslim Rohingya in Myanmar’s west in 2016-2017, and spoke approvingly of that genocide before the International Criminal Court.
Presumably, Daw Suu Kyi, now 77, thought that all was well when she led the National League for Democracy (NLD) to a smashing victory at the polls in late 2020. She expected to rule powerfully and, gradually, to shift the generals away from their stranglehold on the nation’s economy and domestic political future. But, a few weeks after her triumphal election, in early 2021, the generals pounced. (See #23 “Putin-like Compatriots Elsewhere, I: Myanmar,” April 22.)
Their coup ended civilian rule in Myanmar, returned a nation gradually growing after years of autarchy into disarray and intensifying poverty. The coup also unleashed what is now an ongoing civil war, with the massive Myanmar military attempting to crush rural insurgents and an urban maquis – so far with only intermittent success. (More than 2,000 have died, 12,000 being imprisoned.) The Tatmadaw, the Myanmar official military of 325,000 soldiers, is now opposed by perhaps 10,000 new dissidents organized under the People’s Defense Force (PLF) banner. Many of those dissidents are students and professionals learning how to pursue guerrilla warfare. They are joined, however, to the armies of Myanmar’s long anti-government forces from the twelve ethnic states that surround the Bamar (or Burman) heartland. The Bamar are Buddhists, the Kachin, Karen, Karenni, Kayah, Mon, Shan, Wa, and other states are mostly Christians long estranged from central Burma or Myanmar. The ethnic states have long sought autonomy (and were promised it decades ago, when Burma emerged from British rule).
Suu Kyi sided during her years as Myanmar’s dominant political force, from 2016 to 2021, with the soldiers against the ethnic militants. But her successors – the PDF -- are embracing the ethnic states and their goals in order to forge a thoroughgoing new nation. They are attempting to overthrow the old military order as well as the NLD and Suu Kyi’s attempt to become fellow travelers with the Tatmadaw.
For her pains, Suu Kyi was first confined to house arrest by the generals and tried for a number of spurious actions such as importing walkie-talkies and violating Covid-19 restrictions. She is still on (show) trial for additional offenses that could give her a total sentence of 180 years in prison. And, to rub salt in her aging limbs, this weekend she was jailed and placed in solitary confinement.
Top General Min Aung Hlaing, Myanmar’s current ruler, apparently “hates” Suu Kyi. He presumably abhors her popularity instead of his own. He and his clique of military officers also feared that she was about to deprive the junta of its access to illicit raw materials, including jade and opium, and to the payoffs that came from China for pipeline access to the Indian Ocean and for permitting casinos to be opened along Myanmar’s borders with China and Thailand.
Myanmar is wildly corrupt, with the top generals profiting from the thoroughgoing manner in which the state has been criminalized to funnel substantial monetary rewards to the key members of the junta, especially Hlaing.
Sri Lanka Appeals to Russia
Meanwhile, in nearby Sri Lanka, Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe, brought in from the bull pen to save the tottering Rajapaksa empire ( #68 – “Putin-like Compatriots, VI – the Rapacious Rajapaksas, April 29) late last week described his island nation’s economy as totally “collapsed,” having fallen to “rock bottom” economically because of the corrupt, spendthrift, fiscally imprudent policies of President Gotabaya Rajapaksa, his brother former Prime Minister Mahinda Rajapaksa, and his nephew Basil Rajapaksa, the former finance minister,
Sri Lanka, as we have written before, faces extreme food and fuel shortages. The national petroleum corporation is $700 million in debt. There is no electricity because the state power company cannot purchase fuel. The self-serving policies of the Rajapaksa clan, plus the coronavirus pandemic which halved income from remittances, and now the war in Ukraine and increased inflation, has bled Sri Lanka of all of its foreign exchange reserves. So Sri Lankans go hungry, and can’t put petrol in their cars because the island country has no cash. Credit support from India is allowing some foodstuffs to arrive, but Sri Lanka’s 18 million people are in a sorry, bankrupt, state, bemoaning their fate and rightfully blaming it all on Rajapaksa mismanagement and theft, plus bad borrowings from China.
First as post-colonial Ceylon, then as the infant Sri Lanka under Sinhalese-run governments, and even during the long war against Tamil rebels from the north, the nation prospered. It sold textiles and garments, fish, spices, and much prized tea to the world. Tourists arrived in large numbers, flocking to its historic Buddhist sites and its glistening beaches. Its farmers fed their compatriots with home grown rice and pulses.
All went well until the Rajapaksa clan borrowed heavily from China, decided to ban the import of fertilizer (to make every crop forcibly organic), and ran down its reserves. When Wickremesinghe was summoned in April to save the Rajapaksa dynasty and the nation, he found nothing in the safe, nothing in the larder, and no wherewithal to import fuel.
The IMF will help. India is assisting. But impoverished Sri Lanka needs much more to right itself. Most of all, it needs a new president.
Sri Lanka yesterday begged Qatar and Russia to send it petroleum on easy payment terms. That was an indication of how desperate Wickremesinghe is to gain help from anywhere. Washington should offer to send fuel;, if only to enable Sri Lankans to move freely around their own confines. We may have surplus rice that could be given to Sri Lanka as well. Everything, nowadays, helps in the battle against Putin.