After Myanmar’s Coup
Feb 3, 2021SHASHI THAROOR
Although Myanmar’s democracy was clearly a work in progress, that progress
has now come to a jarring halt with the February 1 military coup. The country’s
neighbors are treading warily in its aftermath, and there may be some curious
reversals of earlier stances.
NEW DELHI – Until recently, the last time Myanmar’s military supervised a
general election whose outcome it didn’t like was back in 1990. On that
occasion, a military junta refused to recognize the results, arrested the
democratically elected leaders of Aung San Suu Kyi’s overwhelmingly victorious
National League for Democracy (NLD), and continued to rule the country via the
State Law and Order Restoration Council (SLORC).
The same thing happened again on February 1, when Suu Kyi, now the
country’s de facto leader, and other politicians, including NLD ministers,
were arrested in a
pre-dawn swoop. The military took charge, declared a one-year state of
emergency, and promptly transferred power to the army’s commander-in-chief, General
Min Aung Hlaing. Vice President Myint Swe, a former general, was named
president, but yielded power to Hlaing.
Once again, Myanmar’s men in uniform, who ruled the country from 1962 to
2011 and had co-existed with civilian leaders in a slowly unfolding political
transition over the last decade, have made clear their distaste for democracy.
Last November’s general election resulted in another landslide victory for Suu
Kyi’s NLD, which won 396 of 476 contested parliamentary seats and limited the
army’s proxy political front, the Union Solidarity and Development Party, to
just 33.
Although the humiliated military promptly alleged voter fraud, the election
result did not fundamentally threaten its power. Myanmar’s pre-2011
constitution guarantees the army one-quarter of the seats in parliament, grants
it control over key ministries, and disqualifies people with foreign spouses or
children from becoming president, which prevented Suu Kyi from assuming the
office.
Under these conditions, a modus vivendi of sorts had emerged: the previous
elections in 2015 brought Suu Kyi and her party – full of former political
prisoners – to power in a de facto coalition with their former jailers.
Myanmar’s democracy was thus clearly a work in progress. But that progress has
now come to a jarring halt. In fact, the military staged its coup on the very
day that the newly elected parliament was scheduled to convene.
Recent events in Myanmar are hardly unprecedented. Since the country gained
independence in 1948, the military, now known as the Tatmadaw, has held
power for far longer than civilian leaders have. Suu Kyi herself spent a total
of 15 years under house arrest between
1989 and her release in November 2010, and was awarded the 1991 Nobel Peace
Prize as a celebrated resistance icon. After her release, she exercised
authority under constitutional power-sharing arrangements that entrenched the
military’s clout and even allowed the army to intercede in government decisions
when it judged this to be in the national interest.
It was an uneasy co-existence, further complicated by the contrast between
Suu Kyi’s goddess-like image among
the people and the army’s stone-faced unpopularity. But it seemed to be
working. Suu Kyi made compromises with her uniformed political partners, even
at the price of tarnishing her halo by supporting them in the bitter global
debates over the persecution of Myanmar’s Muslim Rohingya minority.
Suu Kyi seemed to be growing in power at home even as she fell from grace
abroad – notably in the eyes of her Western admirers, and especially those in
the human-rights community, who regarded Myanmar’s brutal military campaign against the
Rohingya as ethnic cleansing and even attempted genocide. In defiant testimony to
the International Court of Justice in The Hague, she refused to utter the word “Rohingya,”
thereby implicitly endorsing the majority view in Myanmar that the victims were
“interlopers” from Bangladesh rather than an ethnic minority.
Critics accused Suu Kyi of everything from appeasement to chauvinism and
racism, while admirers argued that her pragmatism was the only way to advance
democracy in a country still under the military’s sway. Her acquiescence in
arrangements that left hundreds of political prisoners in jail and continued to
punish ethnic minorities disillusioned many, leading Amnesty International
to strip her of its highest award in 2018,
and to calls for her to be stripped of her Nobel Peace Prize as well.
Following Suu Kyi’s recent arrest, the recriminations have ceased. Many
governments have expressed concern and called for her release and the
restoration of democracy. The military, on the other hand, stresses that its
actions are constitutional.
Myanmar’s neighbors are treading warily in the coup’s aftermath, and there
may be some curious reversals of earlier stances. For a long time, India
unambiguously sided with democracy, freedom, and human rights in Myanmar – and
not just rhetorically, like the regime’s Western critics. When the SLORC
violently suppressed a popular nationwide uprising in 1988, the Indian
government initially offered asylum to fleeing students,
allowed them to operate their resistance movement from within India (with some
financial help), and supported a pro-democracy newspaper and radio station.
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But then China made inroads into Myanmar, and Pakistan warmed to the
generals. Chinese port construction and the discovery of large natural-gas
deposits in Myanmar, as well as the SLORC’s support of ethnic insurgencies in
India’s troubled north-east, all posed tangible dangers to India. As a result,
Indian leaders reached their own accommodation with the regime in Yangon.
Today, geopolitics is in flux. China has moved closer to Suu
Kyi, while India takes comfort in the wariness of Myanmar’s military toward
China, long a patron to some of Myanmar’s own ethnic insurgencies. Still,
Chinese official media described the coup as a "cabinet reshuffle,"
and China was alone among member countries (including India) in blocking
the adoption of a condemnatory statement at the United Nations Security
Council. While many in India believe the country must stand up for democracy
and human rights in its next-door neighbor, others counsel pragmatism and
caution as the most effective way of avoiding a repeat of the setbacks of the
1988-2001 period.
“I have a sinking feeling that no one will really be able to control what
comes next,” the distinguished Burmese historian Thant Myint-U tweeted following
the coup. “And remember Myanmar’s a country awash in weapons, with deep
divisions across ethnic & religious lines, where millions can barely feed
themselves.” It’s a sobering reminder for all in the region.
Writing for PS since 2002
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Shashi
Tharoor, a former UN under-secretary-general and former Indian Minister of
State for External Affairs and Minister of State for Human Resource
Development, is an MP for the Indian National Congress. He is the author of Pax Indica: India and the World of the 21st Century.
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