Prayers and an iron fist
Sadly they won’t save Myanmar. Junta chief Min aung Hlaing is looking a tad vulnerable as his nation hurtles into uncharted territory.
FIFTY years ago this week, New York’s Madison Square Garden hosted two benefit shows dubbed Concert for Bangladesh, featuring iconic names in music such as Bob Dylan, Eric Clapton, Billy Preston and, of course, the organisers George Harrison and sitarist Ravi Shankar.
The shows were meant to raise money for, and bring attention to, the ugly events unfolding in what was then East Pakistan, where the Punjabi-dominated Pakistan Army had unleashed extraordinary violence and hardship on its Bengalispeaking brethren in the eastern half of the land.
Eventually, after much bloodshed and rape, the East Pakistanis succeeded in breaking free from the jackboots and being reborn as Bangladesh, now a thriving nation with some of the best social indicators in South Asia and a per capita income exceeding that of its former twin, Pakistan.
Watching the events unfolding in Myanmar, which shares a 270km border with Bangladesh, is to feel a sense of deja vu. There are the jackboots, now all over the key towns, striking peaceful protesters with gun butts, bunging people into jails by the thousands, and tricking anti-regime medical workers into captivity.
There is an uncontrolled third wave of the Covid-19 pandemic that’s left thousands gasping for breath. Some reports suggest that within some garrisons, even soldiers – that most pampered bunch wherever a military rules – are not getting medical help, unless their condition is deemed perilous.
The economy has collapsed and is expected to contract by a fifth this year, by some forecasts. Unemployment is rocketing upwards, and by the estimates of the International Labour Organisation, 1.2 million jobs were lost between April and the end of June. Many businesses are doomed, including in construction. With the garment industry suffering likewise, hundreds of thousands of women are bearing the brunt. Families short of food and medicine are hanging yellow and white ribbons outside their homes in a desperate cry for help.
On top of it all sits Senior General Min Aung Hlaing, a military dictator so removed from the ground and its sentiments that it is almost surreal.
As General Yahya Khan did in 1971, when he ignored the popular mandate won by Awami League leader Sheikh Mujibur Rahman – current Bangladesh Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina Wazed’s late father – the Myanmar general has not only ignored the results of last November’s election, deemed to have been conducted fairly by the national election commission and international observers, his junta has recently even annulled those results.
Six months into the coup, nearly a thousand have been killed at the hands of the military. And Covid-19 has taken more than 10 times that number. Among them, U Nyan Win, the long-time personal lawyer of Aung San Suu Kyi, Myanmar’s deposed leader now in detention.
You could say that U Nyan Win, one of the earliest members of the National League for Democracy and a bitter critic of the military-drafted 2008 Constitution, did not have long to live. After all, at 79, his best years were behind him.
South-east Asia’s heart of darkness
But he was equally a victim of the regime because he fell ill in Insein Prison, where he was held on sedition charges, and was reportedly taken to Yangon General Hospital only after his condition worsened precipitously.
In a podcast in June, I referred to Myanmar as the heart of Southeast Asia’s darkness. Since then, things have only worsened. Aside from the military-inflicted deaths, Covid-19 has ravaged the land in a frightening way. If northern India’s second wave earlier this year was a global high and caused indescribable suffering, the situation in Myanmar, relative to its population of 54 million, is five times worse.
More than 90 townships are under stay-at-home restrictions. Amid all this, there are hundreds of arrest warrants out on health professionals, including doctors and support staff. Not surprisingly, fewer than two million of its people have been fully vaccinated. From having a weak health system previously, it appears the country today has no health system to speak of. The death numbers for last month, said to be vastly under-reported because many people are dying in their homes, are significantly more than twice the number recorded last November, at the peak of the country’s second Covid-19 wave, when about 1,050 people died.
This, as United Nations special rapporteur for Myanmar Tom Andrews – who isn’t allowed to enter the country – put it recently, is catastrophe upon catastrophe.
Pitiably, the regime seems to have run out of ideas.
It recently called on the Myanmar people to chant the Ratana Sutta, Buddhist prayers to ward off famine, death and disease. Perhaps the generals, eager to highlight their majoritarian Bamar Buddhist background to the restive populace, were unaware of the irony of that call and what it implied – the Buddha gave the Ratana Sutta to save the ancient city of Vaishali which, in his time, suffered a disease outbreak so massive that there were not enough people to remove bodies, and animals had started eating the dead.
The only difference between the soon-to-be Bangladesh of 1971 and the Myanmar of today is that the repression in Myanmar is not from a culturally alien force but one deep within itself – the majority Bamar, or Burman, community that populates the Irrawaddy Delta, for that is mostly where the army recruits its soldiers.
Cracks on both sides
To the outside world, Gen Min Aung Hlaing is invulnerable, presiding over a monolithic structure, the opposition too fragmented and weakened by disease and discord within. Some of the ethnic armed organisations that once stood with it are not collaborating fully with the outlawed National Unity Government (NUG), partly because of distrust of the Bamar.
The Karen and the Kachin once led the militant anti-government charge, but that seems to be fizzling out. The senior leadership of the Karen, who used to be stoutly opposed to the military, now seem less sure of where to stand. One reason is discomfort over the NUG’S overwhelming emphasis, at the behest of Ms Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy, on a return to democratic rule while overlooking other issues of interest to the ethnic groups.
But cracks are possibly showing in Gen Min Aung Hlaing’s edifice too. Sunday’s speech, in which he appeared as “prime minister” to reiterate a pledge to hold elections – but only by 2023 – suggests he is aware that he has severely miscalculated the situation and is buying time.
The Myanmar military is generally regarded as a solid edifice, but it is possible that Gen Min Aung Hlaing, who gave himself a service extension in 2016, is under pressure to yield the army chief’s title.
In Pakistan, General Pervez Musharraf, who had seized power in 1999 after toppling the government of then Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, had executed a similar manoeuvre by labelling himself “chief executive”, before becoming president.
Indeed, Gen Min Aung Hlaing may have tarnished the image of the military in permanent ways; no uniformed force can afford to be so alienated from the general populace for too long without serious risk of losing its legitimacy, and other senior officers must surely worry about this.
So, he is stuck. His regime has played the Buddhist card, and it hasn’t worked – the separatist Arakan Army is Buddhist, after all. It has played the majoritarian Bamar card – but the heartland is cold to it. Myanmar’s people have tasted freedom, and like it. The curbs on the Internet cannot be forever, even if they are used as a temporary balm to calm unrest. The democracy movement, stilled by disease, is real.
This genie cannot be returned to its bottle, and even if that were possible, the military should know that Gen Min Aung Hlaing is not the man who can get it done. What’s to be done?
Now, it has almost no card to play except one – to walk back some of its actions.
Continued strongman rule is the recipe for the weakening and potential unravelling of the Myanmar state, especially as many civilians have received some sort of arms training, and that could bring untold consequences not just for itself but also the Indochina region.
The question is, what can Asean, which cherishes its so-called centrality, do about it?
Monday’s difficult discussions at the Asean Ministerial Meeting were proof that the regime, which reluctantly agreed in the late April special summit to accept an Asean special envoy in a mediatory capacity, will now try to bend the chair’s nominee – Brunei Second Foreign Minister Erywan Yusof – to its will.
Even as they reluctantly accepted Yusof, junta officials had been warning Asean counterparts that they do not relish him making contact with “terrorists” – as they call the NUG people. Perhaps Yusof will need to sweeten his welcome in Myanmar by taking along the Thai diplomat the Myanmar junta had wanted as special envoy. The Asean Coordinating Centre for Humanitarian Assistance on Disaster Management, soon to get a dynamic new head, is standing by to move in as soon as it gets the envoy’s call.
Given the nature of the junta, Asean would be advised to keep its expectations of the special envoy modest. Perhaps it even needs to prepare a Plan B in parallel – one that might need the Asean chair to step up and, for starters, convene a meeting of Myanmar’s key neighbours China, Thailand, Bangladesh and India.
All four are directly affected by what happens in the country, whether it is uncontrolled narcotics or new waves of the contagious Covid-19 brought along by refugees. Thus, China not only supplies vaccines to the junta but has also been distributing vaccines directly in the northernmost Kachin state, a restive area abutting Yunnan province. There are suggestions that Thailand should do likewise to create a “buffer zone” with the Karen minority group. Meanwhile, the chief minister of India’s north-eastern state of Mizoram has ignored directives from New Delhi to deport Myanmar refugees, saying many are kinsfolk of Mizos.
If such a chair-called meeting makes progress on agreed ways to put pressure on the junta, the format could be widened to include Japan, the United States and Russia. After all, the United Nations has steadfastly declined to accept the junta-nominated ambassador, instead continuing to recognise Kyaw Moe Tun who was appointed by the ousted administration. This is not a time for geopolitical considerations to stay anyone’s hand.
In the end, though, a real resolution can possibly come only if the special envoy and back channels can persuade both the general and The Lady, as Suu Kyi is called, to agree to walk away and make space for fresh political arrangements. Their mutual antipathy is too vast to be meaningfully bridged.
If that is the price that has to be paid for the sake of Myanmar, Suu Kyi must be persuaded to pay it, never mind how entitled she feels to retake power. Nelson Mandela did that without being told, opting to serve a single term as president of South Africa despite his enormously harder struggle against the apartheid regime. — The Straits Times/ann