Is There a Way Forward Now for Myanmar?

Global Asia

To win the battle but lose the war and to be on the wrong side of history are two oft-used — and misused — clichés to describe a situation where an increasingly anachronistic institution seems to succeed only to fail in pursuing a larger, more overarching goal. But they are wholly apt to describe the situation in Myanmar today. Military commander-in-chief Senior General Min Aung Hlaing quickly succeeded in overthrowing Myanmar’s democratically elected government on Feb. 1 and putting in place a new cabinet while initiating purges of officials down to the local administration level across the country. But, as a popular slogan goes in the country: “The military have messed with the wrong generation.” Myanmar’s inner circle of military hardliners had not expected that the whole nation, with young people at the forefront, would rise up against the coup.

Led by Myanmar’s own Generation Z, “digital natives” known for their savvy use of social media, protests have been held from Putao in the far north, where demonstrators marched through a mountainous landscape carrying anti-coup placards, to massive street demonstrations in Kawthaung on the country’s southern tip, and every major city and town in between. Strikes by government employees, dock workers and miners have brought much of Myanmar to a standstill, raising the question of whether the coup government will ever be capable of running the country. Made up of serving and former soldiers and civilians who held various positions in the Union Development and Solidarity Party (USDP) administration of ex-general Thein Sein, Myanmar’s president from 2011 to 2016, they seem stunned by the new reality.

The USDP lost badly in the only two free elections that Myanmar has seen in recent decades, in 2015 and 2020, while the National League for Democracy (NLD) scored landslides. President Win Myint and state counselor Aung San Suu Kyi, who headed the ousted government, were picked up by the secret services in the early hours of Feb. 1. At the time of this writing, their whereabouts are unknown (although Suu Kyi appeared on a live videolink for a court hearing on March 1), while scores of politicians, workers, activists and even entertainers who joined anti-coup protests have been arrested. More than 300 people have been shot dead by armed police and the military since the protests began shortly after the coup.

The new military-run administration has 23 ministers and eight deputies; a 16-member junta, the State Administration Council, is further assisted by a seven-person advisory board. The sheer size of this government clearly shows that the coup was not, as some foreign observers have suggested, a knee-jerk reaction to Suu Kyi’s refusal to accept the terms set in a letter sent by the military a few days before the coup. Stein Tønnesson of the Norwegian think tank Peace Research Institute Oslo told the daily Aftenposten on Feb. 4 that the coup happened because Suu Kyi had refused to comply with the military’s demand to look into alleged voter fraud in the 2020 election. At a panel discussion at the Foreign Correspondents Club of Thailand after the coup, club president Gwen Robinson quoted one of her USDP contacts as saying that the coup was “Plan B,” and something the military didn’t want to do but was forced into because of Suu Kyi’s alleged refusal. Anthony Davis, an analyst for Jane’s Information Group, suggested at the same event that the military is the only institution that keeps the country together and, without it being in power, Myanmar would make Afghanistan “look tame.”

It seems far-fetched to believe that shooting civilians in the streets would have anything to do with keeping the country together. The coup was also carefully planned, and one has to go back to what happened in the months following the November 2020 election to find answers. The NLD had scored a landslide victory, securing 396 of the 476 seats that could be contested in the bicameral parliament (the military commander-in-chief appoints 25 percent of all seats in order to prevent any changes to the military-drafted 2008 constitution, which can only be changed with a vote of more than 75 percent of members of parliament.) The USDP won a mere 33 of the contested seats.

Myanmar insiders consider it likely that the military had grown tired of supporting its own parties, which always failed to make any headway in elections. In 1990, the military-sponsored National Unity Party was roundly defeated by the NLD, which caused the military to decide not to convene the elected assembly. An election in 2010, which brought Thein Sein and the USDP to power, was boycotted by the NLD — and that election was rigged, according to international Myanmar watchers.

It is likely that the military initially tried to reach out to the NLD, not with the aim of establishing an equal partnership but to tame the party and perhaps, in the end, even control it. It is hardly surprising, given the elected politicians’ fear of being manipulated as well as the magnitude of the NLD’s victory at the polls, that those discreet overtures were unsuccessful. According to sources with access to inside information, plans for a military takeover began in early January as suitable candidates for posts in a new government were sought out and vetted. Then, to the astonishment of many, military spokesman major-General Zaw Min Tun held a press conference in the capital Naypyitaw on Jan. 26, claiming that the November 2020 election was marred by irregularities and outright fraud.

No evidence was produced and his assertions ran contrary to the findings of international election observers, including the Carter Center, the Asian Network for Free Elections and the European Union’s Election Observation Mission, all of which declared the elections a success. The EU’s preliminary statement noted that 95 percent of observers had rated the process “good” or “very good.”

Three days later, a demonstration was held in Yangon against “the fraudulent election.” At the time, most observers dismissed it as a “rent-a-crowd” event and few took the warning signals seriously. In fact, Zaw Min Tun during the press conference had refused to rule out a coup when asked about the intentions of the military. What the military had not expected were massive, nationwide protests against their coup. “They are at a loss how to handle the situation,” says one Yangon-based analyst.

When a nationwide general strike was held on Feb. 22 — named the “five twos revolution” after the date 22.2.2021 in numerology-friendly Myanmar — that led to the closure of workplaces, stores and markets. Min Aung Hlaing went on the air assuring people that everything remained open. In a speech on Feb. 25, as protests were sweeping the country, he chose to talk about the importance of consuming less cooking oil. Those surreal throwbacks to the years when the ruling military could say and do whatever it wanted are gone. And while this is not the first time the public has risen up against a military dictatorship, it is vastly different from what happened in 1988, when soldiers suppressed a pro-democracy uprising by spraying automatic rifle fire into crowds of unarmed demonstrators, or from the 2007 Buddhist monk-led Saffron Revolution, which was also quelled by brute force.

The current uprising is not only about Suu Kyi and the NLD. Since the country opened up to the outside world in 2011-2012, people of all ages have become used to an unprecedented level of free expression. They simply don’t want to return to military rule. In its latest move to quell dissent, the junta wants to introduce a new, draconian cyber-security law that would re-introduce censorship and force social media platforms to share private information about their users when requested by authorities.

So far, however, Generation Z and other activists using different sets of SIM cards, mobile roaming services and VPNs have managed to get around the military’s feeble attempts at closing down some social networks and limiting access to others. Police who have opened fire on demonstrators have been named and shamed with photos on social media platforms. Arrests of activists, even at night, have been recorded and when a crowd of hired thugs armed with iron rods climbed out of a truck to confront protesters, they were filmed through the windscreen of a car. Footage of people with loudspeakers and placards in wooden boats plying Inlay Lake in Shan State went viral on social media, as did a caravan of motorcycles in the northern town of Namkham on the Chinese border, and video of police joining demonstrations in Loikaw, Kayah State and Magwe in central Myanmar.

The coup is also bound to put an end to the outdated notion that the military is the only force that can hold the country together. This myth has been perpetuated by military propaganda and further spread by some Western academics and think-tankers who have claimed that because the military has been fighting against various insurgents for 70 years this battle-hardened force won’t let go of power. The reality is more complex than that, with many twists and turns along the way before the military became the state-within-a-state it is now.

The notion that the military prevents Myanmar from falling apart was initially challenged by Chao Tzang Yawnghwe, the son of the country’s first president, Sao Shwe Thaik. An ethnic Shan and erstwhile resistance fighter who settled in Canada and became an academic, Chao Tzang Yawnghwe wrote papers and articles as far back as the 1990s in which he argued that the military, which first seized power in 1962 from a shaky but still functioning democratically-elected government, has always relied on “the use of terror to maintain power.” Repression breeds resistance and that is what happened after the 1962 coup. Contrary to the propaganda, the country didn’t become more united.

Ethnic and political insurgencies broke out shortly after independence in 1948 but by the mid-1950s had been more or less contained. They flared anew after the 1962 coup, especially in Shan and Kachin states. Bamar-dominated central Myanmar went into a cycle of uprisings followed by massacres carried out by the military, the first at Yangon University in July 1962, when scores of protesting students were killed. This was followed by a brutally suppressed student-led uprising that included labor strikes in the mid-1970s. Finally, there were the mass killings of pro-democracy protesters in 1988.

Htwe Htwe Thein, a Myanmar-Australian associate professor at Curtin University, argues that the military’s desire to hang on to power has less to do with patriotism than protecting its economic interests. For decades, she argues, “the military has amassed wealth by controlling the bureaucracy and establishing near-monopolies in key sectors.” She also argues that the reform agenda of the civilian-led NLD government threatened to weaken, albeit gradually over time, what she calls “a lucrative system of crony capitalism.”

The main question remains: How will change come about in Myanmar? Sanctions and boycotts imposed by the United States, Canada and the European Union are mostly symbolic because Myanmar’s main trade is with countries such as China, Singapore and Thailand. On the other side of the diplomatic spectrum, former Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd suggested in a BBC interview on Feb. 13 that the way forward is a dialogue with the coup makers under the guidance of the 10-member Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN). But ASEAN’s two guiding principles — non-interference and consensus — make it highly ineffective as a bloc. ASEAN never made its position clear on the freedom struggle in East Timor because it was considered an “internal affair” of Indonesia, and it failed to address numerous border disputes between member nations. It has also been unable to articulate a common policy on the South China Sea disputes.

As for “engagement,” Western pundits have always underestimated the manipulative skills of the Myanmar military; the generals don’t listen to advice from foreigners but use interactions with them in their own propaganda. This was clearly demonstrated when Vice-Admiral David Johnston, vice chief of the Australian military, rang senior general Soe Win, number two in the State Administration Council, to press for the release of Sean Turnell, an Australian economic adviser to Suu Kyi’s government who was detained after the coup. He also said he urged the military not to use force against the protesters. But in military-controlled media in Myanmar, the talk was described as a friendly discussion between two equals, thus appearing to be an endorsement of the coup. When the European Union’s military chief of staff, Vice-Admiral Hervé Bléjean, called on Soe Win on March 9 to urge the Myanmar military to stop all violence and release the country’s democratically-elected leaders, the official media reported that they had discussed the State Administration Council’s efforts to establish community peace and the rule of law.

The possibility of splits within the military is usually dismissed by most foreign observers due to the remarkable cohesion among officers that exists mainly because of the privileges they enjoy under the current dispensation. But, as Australian Myanmar expert Andrew Selth pointed out in a Feb. 19 article for the Lowy Institute, a Sydney-based think tank, the highly unpopular coup will test the loyalty of military and police officers. “Times have changed and the latest generation of men in the security forces has grown up in a different environment than its predecessors … it would be a mistake to assume that they are just a mindless mass prepared to do whatever they are told,” he wrote.

Khin Zaw Win, director of the Tampadipa Institute, a Myanmar think tank, argues that Min Aung Hlaing “doesn’t have the political stature of General Ne Win,” the military dictator from 1962 to 1988, or “the military manpower of Than Shwe,” who ruled the country from 1992 to 2011, “or the wiliness of both.” Min Aung Hlaing is described by others as lacking both charisma and leadership qualities.

Even so, a scenario like that in the Philippines in 1986, when the military split and turned against then President Ferdinand Marcos and joined the pro-democracy movement, appears unlikely in Myanmar. The country’s armed forces are more disciplined than in the Philippines, where there was also the US factor and pressure from Washington was instrumental in forcing Marcos to leave the country and pave the way for a democratic transition.

Indonesia’s remarkable transition to democracy in the late 1990s was not caused by a similar mutiny. Instead, the old strongman Suharto saw the writing on the wall when massive demonstrations were held against his rule in the midst of a crippling financial crisis. With no desire on the part of the Indonesian military to use overwhelming violence against unarmed pro-democracy protesters, the fall of the old regime led to a period of instability and fears that multi-ethnic Indonesia was becoming “a Southeast Asian Yugoslavia” and would fall apart. But Indonesia rode out the storm and became a functioning democracy with a vibrant economy. Meanwhile, the political power of the military has been much reduced.

While those two scenarios appear far-fetched in the context of Myanmar, there is the constant fear of a smaller group of officers taking things into their own hands. Just over a year after the 1962 coup, an Anglo-Burman captain named Kyaw Swa Myint — known as Johnny Liars in English — tried to assassinate Ne Win, whose military dictatorship he believed had ruined the economy. The attempt failed and Kyaw Swa Myint fled to Thailand from where he made his way to Australia. His wife, mother and sisters, who remained in Myanmar, were jailed and tortured while the armed forces were purged of Anglo-Bamars. Another failed attempt on Ne Win’s life came by a young captain in the mid-1970s. The captain, Ohn Kyaw Myint, was hanged in 1977 and a dozen of his co-conspirators were purged from the military.

Then there is the China factor. It is not in Beijing’s interest to see instability in a strategically important neighbor. China is also the only foreign country that has any leverage in Myanmar, built up over years of trade and investment, arms sales and diplomatic support. China and Russia, permanent members of the UN Security Council with veto power, have consistently blocked attempts by other members to take action against repression and human rights abuses in Myanmar. But if any outside power is going to influence Min Aung Hlaing and his generals to seek a way out of the current crisis, possibly a compromise, it would be China rather than the West or ASEAN.

Whatever happens, there is no doubt that change would have to come from within the military, but it is uncertain what shape and form that may take. The question is not whether the generals are keeping the country together, but how much more damage military rule will inflict on Myanmar society — politically, socially, economically and ethnically.