How big a success is the Democratic revolution in Burma? And how much credit should the Obama administration and Hillary Clinton get for making it happen?

AuthorKurlantzick, Joshua
PositionThe Rebel of Rangoon: A Tale of Defiance and Deliverance in Burma, Blood, Dreams and Gold: The Changing Face of Burma and Hard Choices - Book review

The Rebel of Rangoon: A Tale of Defiance and Deliverance in Burma by Delphine Schrank, Nation Books, 352 pp.

Blood, Dreams and Gold: The Changing Face of Burma by Richard Cockett, Yale University Press, 296 pp.

Hard Choices by Hillary Rodham Clinton, Simon & Schuster, 560 pp.

Last November, Myanmar held its first truly fair national elections in twenty-five years. The National League for Democracy (NLD), the party of the Nobel laureate and longtime dissident Aung San Suu Kyi, routed the Union Solidarity and Development Party (USDP), the political arm of the military. For the first time in over half a century, a freely elected parliament was seated in Myanmar.

In the tense months leading up to the vote, members of the NLD, foreign diplomats, and many voters worried that, no matter who actually received the most votes, the results would be invalidated. It had happened before. In 1990, Suu Kyi and the NLD similarly dominated a national election, winning 392 of the 492 contested parliamentary seats. But the army refused to recognize the result, and ran the country for another two decades. Indeed, in the run-up to November's vote, the government had brought to bear all its powers--state media, funding for local projects, arrests and detentions of opposition political activists--to help the USDP win control of parliament and the provincial parliaments across Myanmar.

The military, which had ruled Myanmar since 1962, when it first took power in a coup, began to give ground only in 2010 and 2011, when it handed power to a civilian government led by the former general Them Sein. (Myanmar's president is not directly elected, but instead chosen by members of parliament.) The constitution that the junta left behind also reserved 25 percent of the seats in the lower house of parliament for military officers--so last November, the USDP only needed to win 25.1 percent of seats for the army and its allies to have de facto control. (The constitution also decrees that no one having a foreign spouse or children can become president--a provision designed to keep Suu Kyi, who was married to a Briton and whose children hold British passports, from the post.)

To his credit, Them Sein made many moves toward normalcy, opening the country to foreign investment, restoring closer relations with leading democracies, loosening restrictions on the local media, and freeing hundreds of political prisoners. Even so, in a speech before the 2015 election, he issued a veiled warning that if voters did not choose the USDP, Myanmar's reforms could easily be endangered. Surely, most USDP officials felt, the public, appreciative of Thein Sein's reforms and scared of voting against the military, would support the USDP.

It didn't happen. On election day, the NLD swept both national and provincial legislatures. The party won 86 percent of the seats contested in the national parliament, winning a majority in the lower house, despite the military's guaranteed 25 percent. The NLD's majority will allow its parliamentarians to choose Myanmar's next president. The NLD also won a majority of Myanmar's provincial legislatures. Many of the USDP's most powerful politicians, who had been sitting in the lower house since the handover to civilian rule, were ousted. Suu Kyi immediately met with the army leadership, and the army chief pledged that the military would not intervene in the transition to an NLD-led government. Top leaders of the USDP echoed the army's call for a calm transition, with the USDP's acting chairman, U Htay Oo, telling reporters, "USDP has lost to the NLD. We will accept this result."

As the returns trickled in from Myanmar's election commission, the citizens of Yangon (formerly Rangoon), Myanmar's biggest city, held a raucous, nearly non stop party in front of the NLD's headquarters. The foreign reaction to Myanmar's election was, in some ways, even more euphoric. Obama administration officials I met with in the weeks after the election seemed almost giddy that the Southeast Asian nation, so long a byword for thuggish army rule, could actually now be led by the NLD. Myanmar's election was even more remarkable given that in the countries surrounding it, like Thailand, Bangladesh, and Malaysia, democracy seems to be going into reverse.

Foreign media outlets, too, celebrated the election as a massive...

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