Myanmar's fifty-year authoritarian trap.

AuthorTurnell, Sean
PositionInside the Authoritarian State

Myanmar has been under military rule in various guises for nearly fifty years. The most durable and unyielding of the authoritarian regimes in Southeast Asia, Myanmar's military rulers have expertly exploited circumstances and methods that prolong their rule, even as they have failed to deliver genuine economic growth and development. Their methods include ruthlessly suppressing dissent, inciting ethnic divisions and fears of external threats and making implicit bargains with neighboring states and domestic elites over the spoils available to a rentier state. Myanmar's emergence in recent years as a significant regional supplier of natural gas has dramatically increased the country's distributable economic rents, thus exacerbating the country's political stasis. This article examines the ways in which Myanmar's military regime has maintained its rule through the exploitation of these methods, but with a particular focus on the impacts of the country's exploitable energy and resource wealth and its implications for Myanmar's economic development and political transition.

**********

In March 1962 a military coup in Myanmar installed a regime that, in various guises, has continued to rule ever since. In April 2011 a nominally civilian government, complete with an executive presidency and a parliament, was installed despite widespread perceptions that the previous year's election was flawed. The new government has yet to do anything to suggest it is more than a facade for ongoing military control.

The longevity of military rule in Myanmar is a function of a number of circumstances, including most notably that the country is ruled by a regime prepared to use lethal force against its opponents. The same regime has been almost as assiduous in rewarding its supporters. It uses its tight control over the economy to grant military and other elites concessions against its own labyrinthine restrictions and rules on economic activity. Myanmar's emergence as a rentier state in recent years through the regional export of natural gas has only increased its ability to pursue both aspects of this dual strategy of repression and patronage, further inhibiting genuine change after fifty long years of authoritarian rule. (1)

REPRESSION

The most obvious way in which Myanmar's military regime has remained in place is its readiness to swiftly and brutally suppress dissent. The coup that installed the military in 1962 was a relatively bloodless affair, but in the intervening years, the regime has been quick to put down challenges to its rule with violence. Such suppression has existed as a routine part of everyday life, manifested in an all-pervasive surveillance apparatus, bans against more than five people assembling without a permit, the harassment and imprisonment of political opponents and numerous other policies and institutions of political domination. (2) As of April 2011, there were over 2,000 political prisoners in Myanmar; most of them have been incarcerated and given lengthy sentences under biased legal proceedings and are frequently subjected to torture. (3) Outside of its prisons, the people of Myanmar face limits to their freedom of movement both domestically and internationally, and forced relocation is commonplace. Meanwhile, the flow of information in Myanmar is greatly restricted. The press is subject to tight censorship, the Internet is strictly controlled and the country's perfunctory education system is little more than a vehicle of indoctrination for the military's interpretation of Myanmar's history and its central role in this history. Myanmar's universities were broken up long ago and their faculties geographically dispersed to prevent student concentration and activism. (4) Similarly, state spending on education, at little more than 0.57 percent of GDP in 2000, was the lowest in the world. (5)

Of course, on a number of occasions the suppression of dissent in Myanmar has been revealed in episodes of state-sponsored military violence against more widespread uprisings. These include the events of 1988, when many thousands of demonstrators were killed or imprisoned or fled the country. But the events of 1988 also led to the emergence of Aung San Suu Kyi, democracy icon and winner of the 1991 Nobel Peace Prize, as a political force, as well as the unification and formalization of much of the opposition movement in Myanmar into the National League for Democracy. The opposition party later won the 1990 elections, which Myanmar's military leaders unexpectedly allowed in an apparent effort to alleviate the enveloping chaos, almost certainly because they assumed that their own National Unity Party would win. Less unexpected was the refusal of these military leaders to accept the election results. They instead used the State Law and Order Restoration Council, or SLORC--a formal but select body of military officers that effectively functioned as the country's cabinet--to prevent parliament from being called into session. (6) This failed election marked the point when military rule in Myanmar took on a more overt form. (7)

The most recent mass uprisings--the so-called Saffron Revolution in 2007-brought Myanmar's Buddhist monks out into the streets. Traditionally, Myanmar's military leaders have touted their piety, but in this case nothing stayed the hand of the regime, including the attention of the international media, aided and abetted by locals equipped with video cameras. The monasteries were raided and closed; monks were killed, beaten and arrested; and up to one hundred civilians were killed in the crackdown. (8) Many more civilians were imprisoned when they rallied around the monks to protect from the military with their sheer numbers. (9)

Throughout its rule, Myanmar's military regime has carefully watched unrest in other authoritarian states and learned lessons accordingly. One of the most recent examples is the regime's continued muzzling of the Internet, mobile telephony and the types of social media that were important communication channels during the so-called Arab Spring. This technological repression is achieved through surveillance, censorship and other heavy-handed practices, buttressed by regulation of the marketplace. For instance, the mobile phone network in Myanmar is controlled by the Ministry of Post and Telecommunications, which sets the price of a SIM card at the equivalent of about $500. (10) Not surprisingly, this price is a substantial barrier to mobile phone usage in a country where per capita GDP at market exchange rates was around $700 per annum as of 2010. (11)

NATIONALISM AND THE ABSENCE OF AN AUTONOMOUS CIVIL SOCIETY

The single, most important claim to legitimacy for Myanmar's ruling military has been that the regime is the sole guarantor of the unity of the nation. Myanmar was a country of multiple ethnic and communist insurgencies at the outset of independence from Britain in 1948, but the diminishing threat from these groups in recent times has done little to lower the temperature of the leadership's nationalist rhetoric or to relax the atmosphere it has created of a country on a semi-permanent war footing. (12) The latter is perhaps best summarized in a declaration of the "People's Desire," which appears daily in the pages of Myanmar's newspapers and on billboards throughout the country:

Oppose those relying on external elements, acting as stooges, holding negative views; oppose those trying to jeopardize stability of the State and progress of the nation; oppose foreign nations interfering in internal affairs of the State; and crush all internal and external destructive elements as the common enemy. (13) As is often the case with authoritarian regimes, nationalism in Myanmar also manifests itself in the form of mass-mobilization organizations that, while often portrayed as the spontaneous, grassroots creations, are very much creatures of the state apparatus. In the case of Myanmar, this manifestation has most prominently taken the form of the Union Solidarity and Development Association, which at its peak claimed nearly twenty-five million members, or about two-thirds of Myanmar's adult population. (14) The association functioned as a paramilitary organization, as a provider of educational programs, as a military support network and above all as an organization that delivers material benefit to its members. The association...

To continue reading

Request your trial

VLEX uses login cookies to provide you with a better browsing experience. If you click on 'Accept' or continue browsing this site we consider that you accept our cookie policy. ACCEPT