Out of the General’s Shadow
The spirit of democracy is in the air in Myanmar. India missed its symbolism and its historic significance.
The spirit of democracy is in the air in Myanmar. India missed its symbolism and its historic significance.
The half hour meeting between Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and the iconic Myanmarese leader Aung San Suu Kyi took place in a drab conference hall of Hotel Sedona in Yangon on May 29. The conference hall had been hastily partitioned into two, one section for the meeting of the two leaders and the other for the attending press. The noise from the press area continuously filtered through the thin partition. Protocol had to repeatedly request silence. Pin- drop silence finally descended on the press corps once the two leaders walked in to address the gathering.
The two leaders made only two short statements of about three minutes each and took no questions. The local journalists were amazed at how quickly it had all ended. “Daw ( Aunty) Suu Kyi spoke for half an hour when David Cameron visited in April,” said one journalist. There was a crucial difference between the two visits. The British prime minister had called on Suu Kyi in the house in which she spent most of the last two decades under house arrest. For that reason alone, Cameron’s visit was steeped in symbolism and atmospherics.
On the Indian side, a series of mid- level mistakes escalated into a hillsize blunder, thanks to the obduracy of the bureaucracy and the unwillingness of the Prime Minister to show the flexibility essential in unusual circumstances. Protocol scored a petty point. India lost a major opportunity. India’s foreign policy mandarins chose to invoke protocol instead of political sensibility— as a mere member of Parliament, Suu Kyi would have to call on the Prime Minister at his hotel.
According to some officials, the Government of India did not want to “offend” the Myanmar government by breaking protocol for their bitter political opponent. Suu Kyi is no longer the sworn enemy of the ruling party, having entered Parliament in May 2012. Soon after Manmohan departed for Delhi, Suu Kyi showed her faith in her country’s government by travelling abroad, to Bangkok, Thailand, for the first time in 22 years. The Prime Minister should have overruled his bureaucrats. After all, how would the
INDIA LOST A MAJOR OPPORTUNITY BY ASKING SUU KYI TO CALL ON MANMOHAN INSTEAD OFTHE OTHER WAY AROUND.
Congress like Mahatma Gandhi to be described— as just a Congress leader, who never became an MP?
The extent of democratic change in Myanmar is obvious when you talk to the local media. U. Min Zaw, 58, is the local correspondent for The Tokyo Shimbun, a Japanese newspaper, in Yangon, Myanmar’s former capital and largest city. During the popular unrest of 2007 he was detained in solitary confinement in prison for six days. He has been detained on at least five other occasions in his 16 working years with Japanese media groups. Why? “They never ever offered an explanation,” he says. Last week, however, U. Min Zaw has spent his time reporting spontaneous mass protests against acute electricity shortages in cities like Yangon. “No one stopped me from taking photographs or writing what I wanted. I was not even questioned,” he says.
The press corps of Myanmar is energised by the spirit of change. “People are no longer afraid of turning out on the streets with candles to express their disapproval of the Government,” says U. Min Zaw. Zaw Win Than, 30, a senior reporter with Myanmar Times, a local weekly, says that for the first time, journalism is no longer a risky profession. “The Government has announced that press censorship is going to be com-
pletely abolished at the end of June,” he says. Myanmar has not yet completed a transition to free and fair general elections— that may happen in 2015— but freedom of press, a key pillar of democracy, is set to arrive in 2012, exactly 50 years after army generals took over the country in a coup in 1962. The press and people of Myanmar no longer fear the incumbent government but India’s Ministry of External Affairs does.
The man presiding over Myanmar’s transition from hardline military rule to a semblance of democracy is Thein Sein, 67, who was elected as the country’s first civilian president in 49 years in March 2011. A former army general, he was prime minister between 2007 and 2011 under the brutal regime of General Than Shwe. Thein Sein quit the army in 2010 to form a civilian political party, the Union Solidarity and Development Party, which won a rigged election— in which Suu Kyi’s National League of Democracy ( NLD) did not participate— in 2011.
Despite his military background Thein Sein is seen as a moderate, committed to reform. He permitted free and fair by- elections to 46 parliamentary seats in April 2012— NLD won 44 of those seats. His efforts at democratisation have won the support of the global community. The US and EU have lifted crippling sanctions.
Manmohan held talks with Thein in Nay Pyi Taw on May 28. The two countries signed a number of agreements. Cynics fear India is simply interested in Myanmar’s natural resources, just like China. Manmohan could have dispelled such fears by going the extra mile to express solidarity with Suu Kyi. He chose to stay in his hotel.
It is, of course, easy to be cynical about change in Nay Pyi Taw, Myanmar’s new capital since 2005. The new city, built from scratch, with considerable financial assistance from China, in what was once a teak forest, was the mastermind of Khin Nyunt, then chief of intelligence and later prime minister. Yangon had long been a stronghold of Suu Kyi and with six million people, the threat of a mass protest on the streets was an ever- present reality check for the government. Khin Nyunt thought of the Arab Spring much before it happened and shifted the government to a sprawling city whose scattered residents are almost entirely employees of the military and the government. Government offices and military establishments are hidden away from the main roads in heavily forested areas. Nay Pyi Taw is the ultimate symbol of a paranoid regime. However, even in Nay Pyi Taw, Suu Kyi’s NLD won all the four seats up for by- elections in April 2012. In a secret ballot, the government’s faithful soldiers and bureaucrats voted for her.
In the end, economics, more than politics, may topple all remnants of the old regime. The acute shortage of power is just one symbol of a country whose economy has for long been stagnant. Inflation is running close to double digits. Economic growth is under 5 per cent a year. The locals don’t trust the wildly fluctuating domestic
MYANMAR HAS NOT YET COMPLETED A TRANSITION TO FREE ELECTIONS BUT FREEDOM OF PRESS IS SET TO ARRIVE IN 2012.
currency, the kyat ( approximately 800 to 1 US dollar), preferring to deal in dollars. Mobile phone connectivity is abysmal. That is because it’s very expensive. A mobile SIM card which lasts longer than three months costs $ 250 ( Rs 12,500). Myanmar’s socialist generals have discouraged entrepreneurs. The cars that ply on Yangon’s roads are cheap secondhand imports from mostly Japan, Malaysia and Australia. Even matchboxes and matches are manufactured by the Ministry of Industry.
Says Zeya Thu, 35, deputy chief editor of The Voice, a weekly, “The youth want an economic transformation to accompany political transformation. There is entrepreneurship waiting to be unleashed in people between the ages of 25 and 40.”
The incumbent regime wants to put a lid on expectations. An editorial in the government- run English daily, The New Light of Myanmar, on May 28 had the amusing headline of ‘ Be happy and satisfied with what you have’. It said, “There will always be some people who are richer, more successful, better looking, have a bigger house or a nicer car. But that doesn’t matter.” Zeya Thu and the youth of Myanmar would beg to disagree. Myanmar’s generals will soon realise that the genie of freedom is difficult to control once uncorked.
It is a pity that India’s civilian Government failed to read the mind of the ordinary Myanmarese, choosing instead to focus on the fading paranoia of Myanmar’s generals.