Fate hangs on faith in ‘The Lady’
A political killing in Myanmar has farreaching implications, writes Bruce Munro.
NEW Zealanders who can see Myanmar’s potential will be dismayed by recent events in that country.
Things seemed to be going so well. And then Ko Ni was shot dead.
The Southeast Asian nation, which is just emerging from 50 years of political and economic isolation, is a potential shining light of democracy and an economic powerhouse in the waiting. But simmering tensions have violently broken through the rosy surface, raising questions about Aung San Suu Kyi’s ability to deliver on the skyhigh hopes pinned on her by most of the country’s 55plus million citizens.
Myanmar is regularly described as the newborn brother of Asian growth-spurt king Vietnam. Vietnam has averaged 7% to 8% annual GDP growth for the past 20 years. And it is believed Myanmar, with its abundant natural resources, could match that record. Indeed, Myanmar is expected to have 7.8% growth for the 12 months to mid2017. Seeing the positive signs, New Zealand’s former prime minister,
John Key, said during a visit to Myanmar that he expected there would be good opportunities coming up for New Zealand businesses in that country.
Politically, Myanmar has been viewed as a triumph of democracy over dictatorship. The landslide election win by Ms Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy (NLD) in the late2015 general elections set the former political prisoner’s star high in the pantheon of Myanmar’s laudable leaders. But then, a little over a month ago, prominent Myanmar lawyer Ko Ni was killed while waiting for a taxi at Yangon International Airport.
At first glance, his death, while tragic and concerning is just one more unfortunate killing. But Mr Ni was much more than simply a wellknown lawyer.
It was Mr Ni who found the legal loophole that allowed ‘‘The Lady’’ (Suu Kyi) to position herself as State Counsellor, above Myanmar’s presidents, despite the former military rulers’ attempts to use the constitution to bar her from top office.
And it was Mr Ni who was working on legal means to extricate the Government from the ongoing grip of the military which, under the constitution, gets
25% of all seats in the Myanmar Parliament.
His work earned him enemies.
So, too, did his vocal denunciation of the military’s powerful role in the country. And then there was the simple fact that he was a Muslim with the ear of The Lady in a Buddhistmajority country.
The price was his life.
On the evening of January 29, Mr Ni was standing outside the airport’s main arrival lounge, holding his grandson in his arms, when he was shot at close range. Mysteriously, the security camera in that part of the terminal was not working at the time. An onlooker with a smartphone, however, captured images of a man in a pink shirt, shorts and sandals aiming a pistol at the back of Mr Ni’s head.
The man in the pink shirt was an exmilitary gunman, hired by at least two other former military men. At the end of February, Myanmar’s police chief and home affairs minister declared the killers had been motivated by ‘‘extreme patriotism’’.
The killing has served multiple aims for those wanting to destabilise the country. It has brought into question the Government’s ability to maintain law and order; it has sent a clear message to The Lady’s supporters that they could be next; and it has heightened existing ethnic tensions.
Mr Ni was at the airport because he was returning from an official trip to Indonesia. There he had been learning about that country’s experience of ethnic and religious reconciliation.
That is important, because Ms Suu Kyi’s road map to prosperity and wellbeing for Myanmar starts with ethnic reconciliation. This has been prioritised over economic development.
It is believed her reasoning is that significant economic progress is not possible until the military is removed from the machinery of government, but that that will not happen until ethnic conflict has been resolved to the point where the military can no longer argue it needs to hold political power to maintain order.
And the word is that it is Ms Suu
Kyi’s way or the highway. Inexperienced underlings appear to be reluctant to make decisions without her express sayso. This is causing bottlenecks and a lack of progress on various fronts.
Now, with Mr Ni dead and ethnic tension higher, The Lady has one fewer wise heads around her, bottlenecks are likely to cause more frustrations among the general population and ethnic reconciliation looks as distant as ever.
How it plays out will depend in large measure on how the people in the street respond.
On that front, Mr Ni’s murder gives some hope.
His killers might have got away with it. Inexplicably, there were no police or military around when he was shot. But some bystanders gave chase. A taxi driver was shot dead during the pursuit. Another member of the public knocked the shooter off his feet with a wellaimed brick, and so he was captured.
A joke is doing the the rounds of Yangon teahouses that if you are in trouble, don’t look for the help of the police, all you need is a taxi driver with a brick.
It looks like the future of Myanmar does lie to a large extent in the hands of the people of Myanmar. Whether they hold faith with The Lady over the next couple of years will be crucial to the country’s success or demise.