Geopolitics

Prospects for Democratization in Myanmar: Impact on India
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Issue Vol 24.4 Oct-Dec2009 | Date : 27 Nov , 2010

The policy implications of these attitudes, which predate military rule, are that Burma/ Myanmar has and will continue to be guided by a strong sense of nationalism that is too little appreciated abroad. Attempts at external pressure, calls for “regime change,” characterization as an “outpost of tyranny” or a “rogue” or “pariah” state, introduction and strengthening of various forms of sanctions (four US tranches from 1988 to 2008), all are denigrated as efforts by imperialists or neo-imperialists and their lackeys and minions as demeaning to national sovereignty.2

Under the Burmese concept of the discipline-flourishing democracy, the tatmadaw will retain effective power through two forces: legislatures at both the national and at all local levels that will have 25 percent active-duty military personnel appointed by the Minister of Defense, plus an unknown but likely to be significant number of pro-military civilian or retired military who will win elections under the auspices of either the military-mandated Union Solidarity and Development Association (some 24.6 million members) or one or more of the parties it will foster.

The Burmese authorities will maintain that a representative, multi-party political system is in force, as it promised years ago, and thus that government should be considered both as legitimate by the Burmese peoples, but also by the international community. They are likely to cite the lack of opposition parties in internationally accepted regimes such as China, Vietnam, Laos, and Brunei, and claim unfair discrimination by the industrialized world.

On The Foreign Equation

As the military fear for the unity and vitality of the country under civilian control, they also fear foreign interventions. Although history may not repeat itself, past patterns affect present attitudes, often profoundly if inaccurately. Various Burmese regimes in past years have been justified in fearing their neighbors and the major powers. Yet the present junta is caught in a time warp; they do not recognize that relations have changed in half a century, and no state wants the balkanization of Burma/Myanmar.

Both India and China will continue to view Myanmar as an important, although not pivotal, factor in eachs strategic equation.

All of Burma/Myanmar’s neighbors have directly or indirectly supported rebellions or insurrections and have called for either the overthrow of the national government or autonomy for peripheral regions. Some, such as India and Thailand, have shielded dissidents and refugees of various ethnicities. If the People’s Republic of China supported the Burma Communist Party (Deng Xiao Ping claiming that relations among states were different from relations among political parties) as well as some northern minorities and trained rebels, the United States supported the Kuomintang (Chinese Nationalist) troops that fled into Burma following the establishment of the Communist state, and has supplied assistance to dissident groups on the Thai side of the border.

The unarticulated Thai policy until 1988 was to create buffer zones by supporting rebellious groups along the border between the conservative regime in Bangkok and what was viewed as radical governments in Rangoon. Bangladesh (and before it, East Pakistan) harboured Muslim rebels. The multi-ethnic tribal societies that straddle the Burma/Myanmar-Indian border in India’s Northeast and Manipur have protected rebels and refugees from Myanmar. They have moved back and forth and created sanctuaries in the uncontrolled areas on both sides of the border. Burman isolation was further exacerbated by minority Christian and Muslim external contacts with co-religionist organizations.

However misguided and incongruous, there is a real fear of a US invasion, dramatically illustrated in the response to Cyclone Nargis in May 2008 by preventing the US Navy from delivering supplies directly to the stricken area. These fears are ever present. All these factors have reinforced the garrison state concept – the tatmadaw claiming that only it can protect the state from its predatory neighbors and the imperialist powers.

China has supplied some US$3 billion in arms and equipment, has or is building 30 hydro-electric dams, has provided major economic assistanc, “¦Yet Myanmar is not a Chinese client state”¦

This sense of nationalism is reinforced by the isolation of the socialist period (1962-1988), and policy level officials have maintained that they can withstand the isolation imposed by sanctions, which are, in any case, incomplete because of the wealth of Burma/Myanmar’s natural resources, which are coveted by many states and not only those within the region.

Nationalism is not only the driving force of Burmese international relations, it is the basis of internal policy and even administrative structure – the two are wedded with the primacy of internal control taking precedence over external relations. The tatmadaw may justify its expanded size (approximately 186,000 in 1988 to perhaps 400,000 in 2009) and power because of foreign threats, noting regime claims of occasional Thai incursions and provocations and the palpable but misguided fear of a US invasion, but its real requirement is because of its need for internal control of potential strife, and its ideology and image of its central role in the society.

But external relations have been important, and so the move towards China. There has been a mutuality of interests. Chinese access to the Bay of Bengal has been one motivation, but there are others. Myanmar’s natural resources (especially gas and hydro-electric power), a potential market of over 50 million people especially for businesses in southwest China that cannot compete with east coast Chinese firms in Western markets. It is a means to ensure a strategic advantage over India (and part of the China-India border in the Northeast remains unresolved), and mitigating Chinese dependence on transporting energy through the Straits of Malacca. All these contributed to Chinese penetration of Myanmar, beginning in 1988, but which older PRC, Nationalist, and even imperial maps regarded as either Chinese territory or within China’s hegemonic influence.

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