differences it has from my own, and the sadness I may feel about its many tragedies.
It seems to me that Burma, like many other countries, is trapped in its own labyrinth – a labyrinth composed of wars, dangerous delusions, unaddressed grievances, furious hatreds and power structures that leave most of its inhabitants impoverished in virtually every sense. The Burmese people are trying to find their way out of that maze, and if they seem to be unable to find the exit, it is precisely because many of them are trapped inside and can see only its confining walls, and not its overall shape. In this book, I try to offer both a sense of how different people see things from inside such a labyrinth, by giving voice to the people I have interviewed over the years, and a general vision of the historical, cultural, social and political forces that have shaped it.
Brennan was not Spanish, and I am not Burmese. When I read Brennan’s book, I often felt that there were things he just did not understand – that only a Spaniard could possibly appreciate; some of his generalizations annoyed me at times. I can imagine that any Burmese reading this book may have similar feelings, and I can only apologise in advance, and assure them that I have tried my best to understand the country. But at his best moments, it was precisely Brennan’s detachment that produced insights that only a foreigner, seeing things ‘from outside’, could offer. That is partly why his book remains readable seven decades after its publication. This book is written from a similar position of detachment – but one that does not represent any attempt to be ‘neutral’. Most conflicts in Burma, particularly in Arakan, revolve around clashes of historical narratives, and my intention is not to present the versions of ‘all sides’ without critically examining them. Ultimately, the motivation of this book is the hope of adding something of value, however small, to the collective endeavour of mapping the Burmese labyrinth. My hope is that this endeavour might help all the people of Burma to cast off the dead weight of history.
‘Discipline-Flourishing Democracy’
The transition to a ‘discipline-flourishing democracy’ started with an election, held on 7 November 2010. The event hardly seemed promising at the time. Few thought that it would herald a period of deep change in the country. It seemed unthinkable that an extremely repressive and deeply entrenched military dictatorship might voluntarily relinquish its power, even partially. The election itself was a tightly controlled affair, and was conducted without any transparency. Few journalists covered the election from within the country, and most of those who did so travelled clandestinely, at a moment in which it was nearly impossible to obtain a media visa.
No international observers were present, and the election was widely condemned as a sham. The results were as unsurprising as they were unlikely: the Union Solidarity and Development Party (USDP), a proxy for the military, won 50.7 per cent of the votes, and the National Unity Party, an older proxy party of the military founded in 1988, came second, with 19.3 per cent. Both parties represented a regime widely despised by most of the population, and it was difficult to believe that they could possibly have come out on top in a free and fair election.
Few doubted that the National League for Democracy (NLD) would have emerged as the victor in any fair election. For many Burmese, it was the only party that could possibly represent their democratic aspirations. Over the past twenty-two years, millions of Burmans – the majority ethnic group in the country – had placed their faith in the NLD, or more accurately, in its leader, the charismatic Aung San Suu Kyi, as the saviour of the country. Daughter of Aung San, who led the country to independence from the British in the aftermath of World War II, Suu Kyi had established herself as the leader of the pro-democratic opposition to military rule in 1988, when a massive wave of urban protests had overthrown the dictatorship of General Ne Win, who was replaced by a no-less-dictatorial military junta. Her party won an election in 1990, yet the generals refused to acknowledge the results, and she was forced to spend most of the subsequent years under house arrest for her political opposition. During this period of seclusion her mystique as a human rights icon, both within Burma and abroad, only grew. In 1991 she was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. At the time of the 2010 election, she was still locked in her house, a lakeside villa in Rangoon where she had spent a great part of her childhood.
The NLD was undoubtedly the most popular party in the country, at least among the Burman majority, but it had decided to boycott the election. In April, the NLD had issued a statement announcing its decision on the basis that ‘the electoral laws issued by the [State Peace and Development Council] are unfair and unjust’. It also criticized the Constitution, stating that ‘forcing parties to pledge to obey and abide [by] the 2008 Constitution is a violation of democracy and human rights’.1 The electoral laws made the process of registering a party extremely cumbersome, and the decision to accept parties was made by an Election Commission controlled by the junta. It was also very expensive: the parties had to pay US$500 to register each candidate, meaning that they would have to pay the huge total of US$580,000 if they wished to compete for every available seat.2 But the main objection was to the law that banned anyone with a criminal conviction from being a member of a registered party. Most of the party leaders were political prisoners or former political prisoners. The rules were clear: if the NLD wanted to register for the elections, it had to purge its most prominent members, including Suu Kyi herself.
If the electoral law was hardly democratic, the 2008 Constitution was no more so. The process of drafting it had taken decades, and the NLD had played no significant role in it. After the NLD electoral victory in 1990, nothing happened for three years. Finally, in 1993, when the junta allowed a National Convention to draft the new Constitution, its composition did not reflect the results of the election, as most of its members were appointed by the military. Eventually, in 1996, the party of Suu Kyi boycotted the drafting process, and the Convention was suspended for eight years. When it convened again in 2004, the NLD did not participate.
It took four years to draft the new Constitution, and it was approved in a popular referendum held in 2008. In the days ahead of the referendum, a devastating cyclone hit the southern coast of the country, killing at least 138,000 people in the Burma Delta. It was the biggest natural catastrophe in the nation’s history, and the refusal of the military junta to accept any international aid for three weeks provoked a diplomatic uproar. In spite of the disaster, the junta went ahead with the referendum one week later, postponing it for three weeks in the most affected areas. The new constitution was approved by an improbable 92 per cent of the votes.
The Constitution was clearly designed to provide legal cover to the military’s permanent control over the country. It reserves 25 per cent of seats in parliament to unelected military officers appointed by the commander-in-chief of the armed forces. This military bloc makes any constitutional change extremely difficult, and dependent on the authorization of the military, as any major amendment requires ‘the prior approval of more than seventy-five per cent of all the representatives of the Pyidaungsu Hluttaw [both houses of parliament], after which in a nation-wide referendum only with the votes of more than half of those who are eligible to vote’.3
Moreover, the Tatmadaw (as the Burmese army is known locally) would retain a great measure of executive power through the appointment of the three most important ministers – those in the Ministry of Home Affairs, the Ministry of Defence and the Ministry of Border Affairs – headed by Defence Service personnel nominated by the commander-in-chief of the armed forces.4 The three security ministries are under the control of the military, while the Ministry of Home Affairs also included the General Administration Department (GAD) – the
