The Fatal Flaws of Burma’s Opposition
Pro-democracy writer Bo Nyein argues that the opposition against the military government in Burma may be courageous and PR-savvy, but they are unprofessional and disorganized.
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The brutal crackdown is underway and the brave souls who played a part in the resistance in Burma are now paying for their courage with beatings, interrogation and torture.
Many in the West will go back to their rhetoric, denouncing the Burmese military junta, making statements and asking the generals for a peaceful transition to democracy. The media and political elite will doubtlessly rush forward again, blaming the generals and asking for more sanctions. But who dares dig deep down, face the truth and ask: why did the uprising fail?
The current uprising has revealed an ugly truth: there is a near total disconnect between people inside Burma and activists’ movements outside the country. They are two disjointed parallel worlds. Inside Burma, people are struggling to face the brutal suppression without much help, while outside most of the exile leaders are focusing on lobbying and public relations.
The most hurtful consequence of this duality was that when the uprising was gaining momentum and young leaders were begging for help on strategy asking what the next move, they were left rudderless. When young leaders were begging for guidance from the experienced leaders of previous uprisings, there were very few who bothered to return their calls. Why? Many were too busy competing for airtime on talkshows to respond to these cries for help from the inside.
Burmese military leaders have systematically crushed the opposition internally. The exiled leaders still have no clue of what is needed to face these military dictators. The result is that there is no political infrastructure to mobilize the masses, and, most importantly, there is a total generation gap in the leadership.
Nor is the problem confined to the Burmese opposition. Western democracies are totally focused on bringing the generals to the negotiation table with Daw Aung Suu Kyi (DASSK) by imposing sanctions on the Burmese government — a strategy they have pursued without success for the last 18 years.
It may have been feasible in early 1990s when the military junta was emerging from a total government breakdown following the earlier national uprising and their foreign reserves were down to less than 30 millions dollars. They were vulnerable then. But the street-smart generals soon addressed their weaknesses: they made peace with drug lords and survived on profits made from money laundering. Then the SPDC, the State Peace and Development Council, which is the official name for the military junta — systematically implemented a triangulation foreign policy of building a relationship with China, ASEAN and India to neutralize Western sanctions. The Burmese generals understood full well that Burma sat between ASEAN and South Indian nations and played the geopolitical card. Worse yet, they found gas; now the generals have even befriended the Russians and Koreans in addition to their Thai, Chinese, Indians and the French pals by using the global energy shortage to their advantage. Thus strengthened, the canny generals can not only secure the Russian and Chinese vetoes at the United National Security Council to cover their brutality, they could even neutralize the South African vote.
While the generals were working hard, and going from strength to strength, the exile leaders led by NCGUB –the government-in-exile– were squandering their opportunities. They spent nearly two decades begging for funds, yet failed to build the necessary political infrastructure both inside and outside Burma. When crunch time came, as it did recently, there was no infrastructure and leadership in place to lead the uprising. The result is the terrible suppression that follows defeat, whose horrors we can only barely glimpse. Both the Bush administration and leaders from the Congress have made the mistake of putting all eggs in one basket of blindly supporting NCGUB in the belief that their leader, who was the cousin of DASSK, was a preferred leader in exile. As in Iraq, where the Bush administration was fooled by Chalabi, the Americans naively supported the incompetent NCGUB instead of studying the existing Burmese organizations, the Burmese way of thinking, and understanding the dynamics among the leaders to carefully groom younger generation leaders for future uprisings, both inside and outside the country.
After 18 years, the Burmese generals have amassed enough cash to expand the army and build an oppressive intelligence machine to systematically crush any opposition while National League for Democracy (NLD) -DASSK’s party- is close to collapse after severe oppression and isolation. SPDC is carefully using time and space to wear the resistance down. The generals are cunningly keeping the Western focus only on Daw Suu (DASSK) and NLD, the better to make them reinforce failure rather than look about for new avenues to success. When Daw Suu was detained, when all hopes were being destroyed, and while her party was brutally crushed and opposition became weaker daily, DASSK naturally became the sole beacon of hope. Despairing people came to believe that only she could walk the last mile to lead the people closer to victory. But great as she is, she alone cannot create miracles, and Burmese people over world must realize that it take people, organization and a political infrastructure to face these military dictators.
The failure of the uprising was at heart a systemic failure which the Burmese –both with the country and in the outside world– must acknowledge before they can face the challenge of setting things straight. Otherwise, there will be another uprising someday, but it will end in the same tragic way: starting with hope, only to be dashed by another crackdown, to be predictably followed by yet more futile Western efforts that fail to bring freedom and democracy in Burma.
DASSK is now in her 60s and her time is nearing an end; in contrast, SPDC has trained the next generation of military leaders to take the place of Than Shwe and Mg Aye, the two ruling senior generals. Time is not on our side. Now is the time to reevaluate the situation, make hard decisions and change tack to face reality.
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3 Comments
Smarty:THEY NEED GUNS.
More of the world’s suffering can be solved with guns than by any other means. This kind of thing has happened all over the world, and it can happen anywhere. This just highlights the right to keep arms as an individual right.
Oct 16, 2007 - 10:47 am DemocracyRules:THE HEART IS A LONELY JUNTA
BURMA is an albatross around the neck of Socialists and the drive-by media. They cannot get rid of it, so they re-define it as a ‘necklace’, and try to ignore it. The foolish allied democracies let IndoChina, Burma included, sink into a sea of bestial communism, grinding poverty, and unspeakable suffering from which it has yet to emerge. Burma is constantly riven by internal infighting, separation movements, insurgencies, counterinsurgencies and Warlordism. For a while, the ‘Burmese triangle’ was the main worldwide supplier for heroin, ruled by remnants of the Chinese Kuomintang Army. Millions died and more are dying, while Communist China still glowers over the border.
If Socialists and the MSM must discuss Burma, quick fixes are proposed, as in Vietnam. The knee-jerk solution is to ‘get-rid-of- the-right-wing-junta’, as if they were South American fascists. They are not fascists, and Burma has had a succession of Communist/Socialist governments since 1962. They were one of the first ‘dominoes’, and painfully, their suffering continues because, ahem, Communism does not work.
People forget that the pro-democracy movement and it’s leaders, Suu Kyi among them, have strong roots in the Burmese Communist Party. This means that if the ‘pretty lady’ were to win, it is not clear that she could or would deliver true democracy. Her fellow-travelers have been in power before, and mostly they delivered subjugation and misery.
No wonder the White House and State Department are confused about who to back. Suu Kyi and her party won a landslide electoral victory in 1990, but the Islamists in Algeria did the same, and also were blocked from taking power.
The seductive solution is to back the ‘pretty lady’ and hope for the best, but this must include hard conditions that she and her party commit solidly and undeviatingly to true democracy and true economic liberalization. No more ethnic cleansing, tribal genocide, or undeclared wars with Thailand. No more state control of the means of production, yes to the rule of law, to foreign investment, to a proper banking system, and yes to gas development open to foreign bidders. With those commitments, Suu Kyi would be worth backing. She could gain much more international support if she did that. She must be offered few guarantees of military support, because we all must realize that if China were to invade, we could do little to help her. Enough of making commitments we cannot keep.
Suu Kyi also wears an albatross around her neck. It is the dead bird of Communism.
Oct 16, 2007 - 7:13 pm Robert Mayer:Thanks for this article, Bo Nyein. It pairs absolutely wonderfully with my own regarding the strengths of the military regime itself. The combination of a strong regime and demolished opposition means that the optimism in some circles is really misplaced.
Some point to the velvet and colored revolutions of Europe and elsewhere in Southeast Asia. Yet in all these places, not only were the regimes fractured, but the opposition was both organized and joined by certain parts of the elite. Training? Money? Safe havens and logistical support? NGOs and the U.S. government were able to help greatly in these cases, but not so much in Burma. It’s a total breakdown in planning and resourcefulness.
Oct 19, 2007 - 2:37 am