body that controls bureaucracy and administration at all levels.5
There was also a clause in the Constitution seemingly designed to prevent Suu Kyi from ever ruling the country. Article 59d of the Constitution asserts that the president ‘shall he himself, one of the parents, the spouse, one of the legitimate children or their spouses not owe allegiance to a foreign power, not be subject of a foreign power or citizen of a foreign country’.6 This immediately excluded Suu Kyi, as she was the widow of a British citizen and had two British sons.
If the generals had designed the Constitution to ensure that the military kept a great deal of power to the detriment of any civilian government, they had also designed it to preserve a highly centralized state and make only marginal concessions to the ethnic groups that had been demanding independence, or at least greater autonomy within a federal state, since the British had left Burma in 1948. Burma is home to enormous ethno-linguistic diversity. The Burmans are the majority in the central regions, but the country’s border areas are rugged mountainous landscapes with a bewildering variety of ethno-linguistic groups, many of which have attempted to evade central government control since independence in 1948.
Since then, most of these ethnic groups have formed armed organizations to resist attempts by the Burman-dominated government to unify the state. Some continue to do so, making the armed conflicts in the borderlands of Burma among the longest running in the world. Conflicts of variable intensity have always been a crucial part of the lives of the inhabitants of some of those remote areas, isolated from the rest of the country by poor communications and infrastructure. Often the only Burmans those living in the rural border areas have met are soldiers, or the administrators of a repressive state who accompany them.
Consequently, many among the non-Burman groups bitterly resent the domination imposed by the Burmans after independence, and the new political order designed by the generals failed to address their grievances. The Constitution divided the country between seven Burman-majority ‘regions’ in Burma’s heartland and seven ‘states’ in the periphery, named after the majority ethnic group inhabiting them; but the two types of territory enjoy similar status and autonomy. Neither regions nor states can enact their own constitution or laws, and the most senior authority in each of them, the chief minister, has to be appointed by the president of the country.7 Moreover, the chief minister is not necessarily, in practice, the most powerful figure in a state or regional government, since the GAD and the security forces are constitutionally under the complete control of the Tatmadaw.
Before the election, the junta had been putting pressure on the ethnic armed organizations, some of which had maintained fragile ceasefires for years, to become border-guarding forces under the command of the military. The strongest and most important armed groups refused the order, insisting that their political demands had not been met. This created friction that included a small conflict between the army and a faction of a Karen rebel army on the border with Thailand, which sent more than 10,000 refugees to the neighbouring country the day after the election.8 Nevertheless, the junta allowed some ethnic parties to run in the election, though it selected them carefully; some, like the Kachin people, would have no voice in parliament in the upcoming administration.
In other states, ethnic parties attained more than 25 per cent of the vote. One of the most successful was the Rakhine Nationalities Development Party (RNDP), a forerunner of the Arakan National Party (ANP), representing the Rakhine Buddhist community in Arakan. Arakan is a complex state, the second-poorest in the country, and is deeply fractured along ethno-religious lines. The rift between its two main communities, Rakhine Buddhists and Rohingya Muslims, has grown during the transition period, despite the fact that the two communities have lived side by side for generations. It is often overlooked that the Rakhine, despite closing ranks with the Burmese state and military when it comes to opposing the Rohingya, are fiercely against the domination of the Burmans, whom they regard as their oppressors. They have a strong argument for such resentment in relation, for instance, to the natural resources in their state – mainly the huge gas reserves off the coast, which the central government has exploited with the help of international companies, yielding little or no benefit to the local population.
Burmans and Rakhine share the Buddhist religion and a very similar language; but for most of its history Arakan was an independent kingdom, until the late eighteenth century, when it was conquered by the Burmans. Among all the ethnic groups in the country, the Rakhine are perhaps the most similar, linguistically and culturally, to the Burmans. But despite this, or perhaps because of it, they are among the groups most vociferously assertive of their differences and autonomist aspirations. Rakhine nationalists often say that they are sandwiched between the Burmese government and the Rohingya, whom they and many others in Burma often call ‘Bengalis’, indicating their purported foreign origins. The resentment against one feeds the resentment against the other, in what is in reality a triangular conflict pitting three groups against the other: Rakhine, Burman and Rohingya.
The Rohingya Muslims, who had been stripped of citizenship by the military junta, were allowed to vote in 2010. There were even two Rohingya parties, the National Democratic Party for Development (NDPD) and the National Development and Peace Party (NDPP), the latter widely assumed to be a proxy of the military. These parties campaigned mostly in the Rohingya-majority townships of Northern Arakan, along the border with Bangladesh. There were reports that the NDPD had come under pressure from state officials to prevent it from campaigning, and even that villagers were threatened with eviction if they voted for it.9 Eventually, two Rohingya would sit in parliament – both members of the USDP. Paradoxically, during the subsequent period, in which the Rohingya community would suffer a rapid process of complete disenfranchisement, they also had representation in parliament for the first time in decades, and one of their MPs, Shwe Maung, would be a vocal critic of the government. It was widely assumed that the Rohingya were being allowed to vote in 2010 in order to prevent the Rakhine nationalists from attaining too much power; but it is also true that the Rohingya had been allowed to vote in every election or referendum held in Burma since independence. In any case, Rakhine nationalists resented that the Rohingya had a political voice at a crucial moment of transition in which the future of the country was at stake, and this may partly explain the role that Rakhine nationalists would play in the intercommunal riots two years later.
By late 2010, there remained little doubt that the new political order was scarcely conducive to fulfilling either the autonomist goals of the ethnic minorities or the democratic aspirations of the Burman majority. Nobody expected much from the new president, Thein Sein, a quiet man of the old regime who had been prime minister (a mostly ceremonial position) under the military junta. But in fact his government would introduce far-reaching political and economic reforms. During this period, the country changed at breakneck speed: hundreds of political prisoners were released; the opposition was allowed to conduct its activities more or less freely; freedom of speech was relatively respected, as the government relaxed restrictions on the media; mobile phones and access to the internet, both virtually nonexistent before 2012, spread throughout the country. Most crucially, the parliament turned out to be more open and assertive than had been thought possible. Burma, a pariah country shunned by the Western democracies for more than two decades, was now welcomed into the ‘international community’ with open arms. The United States and the European Union gradually lifted the sanctions they had imposed, and foreign investors began to flock to the country.
The transition came as a surprise that elicited much speculation over the motivations of the military. Some argued that it was due to geopolitical considerations, as Burma had come to rely too much on China as a consequence of Western sanctions and isolation.10 Pro-democracy activists abroad claimed that the sanctions had pushed the generals to introduce reforms. Thein Sein has said that the move was necessary to lift the country from its economic backwardness.11 The Burmese military is notoriously opaque, and the real causes of this period of rapid political change are difficult to know. There were probably many reasons to launch the reforms, but one thing is certain: the generals loosened their grip and allowed the transition to take place not from a position of weakness, but
