Las Vegas Review-Journal (Sunday)
Once a hope for democracy, Myanmar is now a study in how it fails
YANGON, Myanmar — Nearly a decade into Myanmar’s transition out of military rule, the country’s once-celebrated transition toward democracy is hardening into something very different from what activists and world leaders had hoped for.
Citizens select their leaders, but without the robust institutions or norms like pluralism, universal rights or tolerance necessary for democracy to function.
They express, in surveys and social media, desire for a strongman-style leader and raw majority rule. Democracy, many say, should be guided by religious strictures and nationalism.
The military’s ethnic cleansing campaign against the Rohingya, a Muslim ethnic group, is popular, as are social controls against journalists and minorities.
The civilian state, led by Aung San Suu Kyi, is rapidly centralizing power as checks and balances erode. It is growing oppressive in some areas and weak in others, ceding public space to extremists. Meanwhile, the military still controls important government functions and a perpetual quota of Parliament seats.
The country appears to be converging on a democratic-authoritarian hybrid, formally known as illiberal democracy, which often resembles mob rule. It is a version of majority rule that excludes minorities, curtails freedoms and governs arbitrarily.
“Myanmar’s biggest threat is not the return of dictatorship but an illiberal democracy,” said Thant Myint-U, a historian and former U.N. official.
The country, only a few years into its democracy, is at the outset of a second transition that could be just as consequential.
Risk factors
Myanmar appears to follow a pattern that Jack Snyder, a Columbia University political scientist, first articulated in the 1990s to explain why a rash of new democracies had collapsed into war or dictatorships.
Conventional wisdom dismissed those societies as unready for democracy. But Snyder found a more complex explanation.
Rapid shifting to democracy can scramble the relationships that bond citizens and leaders. A successful transition will create new relationships that include everyone. But certain risk factors seem especially likely to derail the process.
When institutions are weak and leaders see the old elite as a threat, those leaders often hollow out their own governments for fear of a coup, setting the state up to implode.
When rapid social change and deep ethnic divisions coincide, society and politics can fracture, setting ethnic groups on a battle for control, as happened in Rwanda and Bosnia.
And when public demands rise but governance is weak, both citizens and leaders can adopt views that are authoritarian in all but name, as they did in 1990s Russia.
Virtually all those warning signs are present in Myanmar. The canaries in the coal mine of democracy — minorities, journalists, activists — are falling.
A hollow democracy
Nyo Nyo Thin, a Japanese-educated lawyer and former lawmaker, was once a poster child for Myanmar’s new democracy.
Brash and technocratic, she cultivated grass-roots support, whereas the party handed most lawmakers their positions. When she joined the National League for Democracy, Suu Kyi’s party, it looked like democracy taking root.
But shortly before Myanmar’s first fully democratic elections, in 2015, the party dropped her from the ticket. Running independently, she lost.
It was a microcosm of politics under Suu Kyi, who has steamrollered those with independent support or reputations for speaking out.
“The previous government cared about people like me — student leaders, opposition leaders, politicians — because it needed them,” Nyo Nyo Thin said. “But this government, they don’t care.”
Suu Kyi has doled out jobs to loyalists, though many lack qualifications or training. She has consolidated power so tightly that analysts say the government effectively shuts down when she travels.
She appears driven by a combination of expediency — her popularity has seemingly allowed her to skip democratic niceties like coalition-building — and fear.
“They believe they will face a military coup if they face too much criticism,” Nyo Nyo Thin said of party leaders. “Any critics, any opposing views, should be silent.”
Democratization often starts with a pact between the old and new leaders. In South Africa, F.W. de Klerk, the last apartheid-era president, and his successor, Nelson Mandela, cooperated to hold society and institutions together.
“There was no de Klerk-Mandela partnership here,” said Aaron Connelly, an analyst with the Lowy Institute, based in Sydney. Suu Kyi largely spurned the reformist general who led before her.
Instead, he said, “she has an almost Trump-like characteristic” of distrusting institutions she suspects of loyalty to the previous leader.
She removed many officials from the Myanmar Peace Center, for instance, which leads negotiations with the country’s ethnic insurgencies. Soon after, truces collapsed and fighting resurged.
A small circle of insiders effectively runs the country, sidestepping formal institutions. The party and the government it runs have been hollowed out.
Nationalists fill the vacuum
One day this summer, students at an Islamic school compound in Yangon heard shouting from outside the gates. A few dozen Buddhist nationalists were threatening to storm the buildings.
They had arrived the day before to demand that local officials close the schools, which were rumored to operate secretly as mosques. If officials did not comply, they said, they would destroy the buildings.
Now gathered outside, their threat seemed imminent. The police arrived but refused to intervene, witnesses said, and the students evacuated the building
Rather than attacking, the mob barred and locked the front gate. The schools have remained closed since, with Muslim families afraid that returning would lead to violence.
U Wai Phyo Aung, the local lawmaker, said the authorities feared that intervention could turn deadly, as religious tensions in his district had risen to dangerous levels.
It was a tacit admission of a nationwide phenomenon: Buddhist extremists hold growing sway over society, at times bending even the state to their will.
The state has long derived its authority from Buddhism. So while it can restrict fringe groups, it cannot take on the clergy more broadly. Instead, it has pursued what Soe Myint Aung called “an experiment in negative control,” tolerating nationalists as long as they target minorities and activists rather than the state.
“If the government is facing a crisis, they use this religion issue,” said Zaw Win Latt, a senior officer of the Myanmar Islamic Council. “We are a scapegoat.”
Authoritarian values
In 2015, the Asian Barometer Survey of 13 Asian countries yielded two striking findings from Myanmar.
Its citizens expressed some of Asia’s highest support for democracy but among the lowest support for “the liberal political values that undergird democratic processes,” the political scientists Bridget Welsh, Kai-Ping Huang and Yun-han Chu wrote.
More than 80 percent said religious authorities should have a say in lawmaking and that citizenship should be tied to religion. Nearly two-thirds opposed checks on the executive branch. Social controls were seen as necessary and pluralism as dangerous. Nearly all expressed distrust of fellow citizens.
“Democracies plagued by low social trust are prone to conflict,” the scholars wrote, and are “vulnerable to fragmentation.”
“Myanmar was never a liberal society,” said Thant Myint-U, the historian. Decades of army rule, civil war and isolation, he added, “have only deepened illiberal sentiments.”
Seven in 10 of those surveyed said students should not question teachers, considered an important metric of authoritarian values.
“People think Aung San Suu Kyi is a god, she can do anything she wants,” said Nyo Nyo Thin, the former lawmaker. “This is our education, that we should follow the leader.”
Polarization has even bolstered the once-despised generals. Senior Gen. Min Aung Hlaing, the military chief, runs a Facebook page filled with adoring messages from among his 1.3 million listed followers.
Oppression returns
It looked like a last gasp of the old system when, in 2013, the transitional authorities passed a rule allowing fines or prison terms for journalists who criticize the government. The rule, known as 66(d), was invoked seven times under that government. Five led to charges.
Rights groups, though alarmed, believed full democracy would end this. Instead, Suu Kyi’s government has invoked the rule 89 times, according to the Myanmar Journalism Institute. Thirteen journalists have faced punishment and 20 others await charges. Ten are accused of defaming Suu Kyi.
“We are on the way to be like Cambodia” — which has closed media outlets and regressed into authoritarianism — “or even worse,” said Sein Win, who teaches journalism at the institute.
The greatest threat, said Sein Win, is not prosecution but self-censorship. “They are like bamboo, bending with the wind,” he said of reporters.
Several, he said, told him they had played down atrocities against the Rohingya and played up reports of Rohingya militancy, believing it was in the nation’s best interests.
Other oppressive laws remain in use, like Section 505(b), which criminalizes speech or assembly deemed a threat to “public tranquility.” It has been used to arrest activists and student leaders.
Democracy ‘from the sky’
Thet Swe Win, an idealistic and bohemian 31-year-old activist, was once the sort of person thought to define the new Myanmar.
Now, he worries that his fellow citizens pose an even greater threat than the state.
“We thought democracy would fall from the sky, that it would just come,” he said. “We didn’t know that this is a process that all people have to be involved in.”
He leads the Center for Youth and Social Harmony, one of the few remaining groups promoting religious tolerance.
Buddhist groups have stormed his office, accusing him of backing the Rohingya. Rumors spread that the spa he runs with his wife was secretly operated by Muslims, and business dried up. He received threatening phone calls and, for a time, hired guards for his family when he traveled.
“I don’t want my kids to live in a society that is divided and hateful,” he said. But he sees little hope. “We are moving two, three steps back already,” he said.